One could say that decisions are taken every moment, that we almost have a continuum of decision taking; one could also say that the will does not manifest itself as a will at the level of these decisions, and neither at the level of the neuronic device that is taking these decisions. In a major sense, the will is a more general framework for decision taking via the aforementioned mechanism, since the will lies in human reason and spirit.
A pure will, in the philosophical sense, can not exist since the will supposed some action, while the action implies socialness, practicality. From beingness no will can spring and that explains why no animal has triggered a will. The will can be triggered only from the consciousness, from action and knowledge, and hence it becomes a property specifically human and we can not find for it an own and specific existential ingredient.

But what is its elementary genesis considering the pathway beingness Æ to be Æ to know ? I believe that an elementary experiment regarding will cannot succeed. The will is the result of a complexity resulting from a richer experience, being recorded in a "program" around which the attention and partly the psychological organization of the individual is concentrated. Adopting the will-program is the result of a decision at the psychological level,completely different from the decision taken in the reticular formation. The will-program can also be blown in from the outside, via education or social activity. In this case his will is a social will. The human being can also adopt an object-will in order to achieve a purpose, a social duty or an assumed mission.



Fig. 15

If it is also anchored in the beingness through the essential-awareness then it becomes a Will of the largest coverage. But it can also be manifested in a conscious manner as a limited will, a will directed only in a certain direction; we shall call this sub-will.
But it is one thing that a Will determines its own sub-wills (which can succeed each other in time), and another thing when a sub-will is determined from outside. Any sub-will can become the instrument of a more enclosing will. In the limit at which sub-wills are rubbed out, the man will have no will of his own, although still possessing an internal decision taking system and doing so via his reticular formation in the brain.

The problem of will can be correlated with the problem of the leadership of society and of its social fields, but also with the problems of creativity and deepening the scientific knowledge. The essential-awareness is no doubt an individual act, a top spiritual act, although unfruitful if is not followed by a will, to which any man has a right just because he is a man.
The society must favorize the individual production of the essential-awareness, and to bring closer to it every way of spiritual life and of knowledge. From this point of view society must be not only a system but also a civilization.

The danger exists that the system-society will turn men into automata, robots, near-men. They will have a consciousness (since consciousness has a social character, having at its foundation a learned self-consciousness, itself social in character) but will not have essential-awareness (nor even anything close to it via high spiritual life). Only those that will find or will be taught the way to break the circle of the social system within themselves might still have it. Some of them will be able to trigger a Will, manifested either in management (even within the given system) or in thinking, in spiritual life, or in science. But if they do not reach the essential-awareness they will have only sub-wills, they will not have that openness enabling them to contribute to the society being not only a system but also a civilization. An incomplete Will is limited to acting as a sub-will only in the direction of the social system or in that of spiritual or scientific path. Such sub-wills will accept that the other people are near-people, considering that in this way the social system will function better, or that science will progress anyhow. But man is not a near-man, he is not an automaton, he can be reduced only temporary to such a state. The livingness in which beingness is included might light up in him at any moment, triggering new behavior, as resulting from a high philosophical potential, and then acting upon the social system in order to transform it in a system and civilization. The man cannot be only a machine, a social automaton, he also lives, with all that this implies in his spiritual life; and society can be a mere system only to the degree in which people are reduced to near-people. This does not mean not to give priority to the system, to the economics and socialness. But the social system allowing the individual a spiritual life, for them to freely express their talents, minds and spirit will become a civilization.

The Awareness Experiment 56