We have seen the connections between commitment, determination, and steadfastness and the sense of inner support and confidence. These are all expressions of the same latifa: the Will aspect. It is clear that the quality of Will is very different from the quality of Strength. The Strength Essence is a fiery presence of excitement and energy, while the Will is more down to earth, more steady and solid. You feel more settled. Thus it can bring more depth and subtlety to your inquiry. Will indicates perseverance: You find yourself staying with elements in your experience longer, and you are more patient. As a result, you can see more depth, more discrimination, more subtlety, and more profundity in whatever you are exploring. When our will is fully engaged, our spacecruiser can go very far—all the way to the most distant reaches of the experiential universe. With the Red Essence alone, you might begin with excitement and energy, but you probably won’t get very far because your energy will fluctuate and your ship’s engine will run unevenly. You’ll find yourself stopping and starting many times. The hard work in inquiry begins after you’ve been on the journey for a while. So the White Essence is what gives you the steadiness and the staying power needed to stay focused and open as you traverse the long distances in plumbing the depths of your experience. It provides you with maturity and a sense of responsibility that supports you in pursuing an issue fully instead of jumping from one thing to another.

True will displays an intelligent responsiveness to the truth of our situation, including our limitations in dealing with what arises in our experience. Because human beings have inherent limitations, the revelation of human potential is an ongoing process. And as such, it requires patience and steadfastness. This steadfastness, however, is an intelligent expression of the White Essence. How solid, how soft, how hard, or how flexible this expression is depends on the particular situation. Sometimes you may need to pay intense attention for many hours in order to explore your experience. That could include talking with people, reading books, investigating your own history, perspectives, and patterns of behavior—doing everything you can to inquire into your current situation. But after all this activity, the process may require that you relax and let your mind settle. This doesn’t necessarily mean disengaging the inquiry; resting or taking a break for a while is just another part of the process. You have been committed to finding out whatever you can, and for the moment, you know all that you can know. Now it’s time to be quiet, to watch and see what arises in your experience. That is frequently when new insights arise.

However, because we’re still identified with the falsehood of the ego, our openness is limited. And so are our courage and our curiosity. At this point, Being may manifest another quality, one that is needed for this particular situation—it is the aspect that makes it possible for us to persevere and not give up. This new quality appears in our experience as a sense of determination: an unwavering dedication to continue with the inquiry and stay the course, a determination to keep opening to our experience as it is. Our journey of inquiry needs this quality in order to keep going, to persist overtime, to ripen and bear fruit—for the path is long and full of difficulties. To see what is there in our experience, to recognize the truth fully and precisely, takes time, energy, and a strong commitment to our own process. What we need for this is the essential quality of Will. And, if we have some trust in Being’s intelligence, this quality will manifest in our openness. As we will see in this chapter, the White Essence arises as a presence in our soul that can be recognized through many interrelated capacities. The first we will consider is commitment.