Gate 3
Feeling the grounded support of communal spirit and the ability to use your creative life-force as a tool of transformation, you can open to the third gate ~ into the emotional storehouse of your egoic personality. Life’s experiences, and your dualistic interpretations of them, can create reactive response patterns fueled by stories you tell yourself about who you are. These stories often present either self-diminishing or self-aggrandizing views of your true Essence; all conceived to mask insecurities and pain. At the third gate you train to make friends with your emotions and take off masks that no longer serve. You experience your center of will, free of obscurations, as a powerful force of manifesting.
Third Gate Mantra
I am liberated from the wounds and stories that disguise my Essence and diminish who I truly am. When my will aligns with Thy Will, I can move into the world as a conscious co-creator of my life.
We are often taught that showing our feelings gives impressions of weakness, instability or a sense that we are “just too sensitive”. Because we can’t stop feeling, we simply detach from them imagining that our unexpressed feelings can’t harm us. All the while we are losing access to the strength and purity of our incorruptible essence… the Right Use of our Will.
Wisdom teachings of the ancient traditions tell us we have a storehouse of energy inside our solar plexus – energy that can be harnessed, trained and directed. Many refer to this energy as our Center of Will. Within this storehouse will resides as potential waiting for us to shape
However, also stored in our solar plexus is the complexity of our unexpressed emotions, our interpretations of life experiences and psychological wounds that distort our ideas about ourselves and others. When allowed to fester, these untended ideas create elaborations or exaggerated “me-stories” that govern aspects of my personality and how I present myself to the world. From half-truths we craft our masks, almost instantaneously believing that is who we are.
The energy of my will is a double-edged sword—one that I can shape consciously or unconsciously; one that I can use to manifest healing or cause harm. Right Use of Will is an inner edge where I cultivate choice. I can live in clarity, purposefulness and a sense of direction. Or I can live from an insular, smaller version of myself. It is mine to shape. And, in that choice, shape my life.
Like the great spiritual masters, we too can train. We can develop skill and practices that encourage us to turn toward our wounds and misgivings. And, in that turning toward, we transform them and create a stable ground for the opening of our heart centers. We can become spiritual warriors, accessing the Right Use of Will, with no need to manipulate or project our untended emotions or willfulness on another person or circumstance.
In the Nine Gates Mystery School students develop lucidity in the body, experiencing the felt-sense of will in both its underdeveloped and healthy states. Clearing obscurations, students explore the Right Use of Will and learn to stabilize that awareness. In the Nine Gates Esoteric School, initiates extensively train the subtle body in the Right Use of Will. They develop pliancy of the thinking mind – the mind’s ability to abide in stillness and shift perspectives at will – training to meet the fullness of reality.
Developing Right Use of Will is a journey of liberation. Freeing my will from obscurations. Allowing my will to come into heart balance. Courageously uncovering places within myself where I am not free…. We learn to surrender into that will/heart balance so that our truest self becomes available.
As our stable hearts come “online” we learn to manifest more peace, kindness and wakefulness.
