One way you can get a glimpse of how the will manifests as thought alteration is to engage in prolonged fasting episodes. If you use your mind’s will to overpower the body’s will—where the raw will of nature resides—the will of nature will attempt to adapt to your resolve by creating rationalizations that appear as emotionally agreeable relief propositions. After going through the first few days of not eating, the body will quiet down and stop trying to get you to eat via projecting images and memories of good times with food into the mind (the symbolic vocabulary of the survival drive attempting persuasion). After about a week, the body will then introduce thoughts that propose invalidating the entire operation. It will suggest that perhaps the entire quadrant of the space in which you have created this motivation is meaningless.
I caught my body doing this and realized it was adapting to my mental resolve. Another thing I learned—the reason ascetics and some mystics advocated for “fasting” in order to tame the body—is because it is an effective way to nullify sexual desire. If you eat one meal a day, exercise, and regularly practice longer fasts, the entire sexual desire drive shuts down. This is why it was said, “This kind [of demon] goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.” The will of nature does this. The drives inside the body are connected through a network of neurons that themselves “bring thoughts and plans” upward into the mind as visuals, movie reels of how to act in order to obtain, and rationalizations.
Fasting is one way to become acquainted with—and to “see”—the will. From here, you can then learn how to intercept the commands, as well as see how the source will adapt to your interception and remodulate itself. We are negotiating between two layers of “self.” For others, trauma or exceptional early-life losses that force one to rebuild their worldview and sense of self from “first principles” is the way they first learn of this process. Having experienced this, seeing the “inner world” was already familiar to me early in life.
Once you have undergone the shift in awareness from being the subject of the narratives created by the upper layer of consciousness—which are interpretations of impulses from the lower layer—you can no longer relate to the surface persona game of life and will feel isolated in your consciousness. There are not many people who reside in this space, and as such, your life becomes the process of coming to understand that it was a shift in your awareness that isolated you—bringing you out of the ritual that unconsciously binds collectives into a shared experience.
There is another deep message to be found for those who felt their primary caregivers could not validate them. It is this: your direct awareness of firsthand will—and expressing it—was causing them to defend the continuity of their own self. As a result, they “could not love you as you were,” because your clarity caused them fear. From here, one then has relationships that mirror this dynamic—“trying to wake someone so they can love you as you are.” This is a drama that emerges from the isolation that awareness produces. The mismatch in awareness is not a moral failing on either side(can be, but not necessarily)—it’s a structural asymmetry in the developmental operating systems of two nervous systems. One is still running the pre-reflective, continuity-preserving OS (the caregiver/significant other). The other has been force-upgraded by rupture or clarity into a meta-reflective OS (the child/you). “If I can just make them see the code, they’ll love the real me.” But they can’t. Not because they’re necessarily evil—because their OS hasn’t been cracked open. They’re still running the factory settings.
This situation creates the basis for the so-called “Narcissist/Co-Dependent” narrative often discussed in online media. The narcissist functions like a factory-setting operating system—rapidly deflecting and defending itself against anything that threatens the continuity of “self” as they perceive it. The co-dependent, in contrast, is the one “trying to wake the other” in hopes of being “loved as they are.”
The dyad isn’t truly a “villain versus victim” scenario. It’s two operating systems locked in a death spiral because one cannot compile the other’s code. The Evangelist (the co-dependent) has the superpower of seeing the matrix. Their trap is believing that love requires the matrix to recognize them in return. Love, in theory, is finding someone who already runs your compiler—not converting those still trapped in the simulation.
If you are on a mission to wake someone from the simulation so they can “love you back,” you will rely on tools—logic, lesson-dictating, rhetoric, pleading—that cannot produce the desired result. These attempts will be deflected automatically, possibly driving you insane if you do not stop trying.