s
other shapes.

So is the wheel of law in the three lower kingdoms. But with man it is
not so. In man I'shvara sets himself to produce an image of Himself,
which is not the case in the lower kingdoms. As life has evolved, one
force after another has come out, and in man there begins to come out
the central life, for the time has arrived for the evolution of the
sovereign power of will, the self-initiated motion which is part of the
life of the Supreme. Do not misunderstand me--for the subject is a
subtle one; there is only one will in the universe, the will of
I'shvara, and all must conform itself to that will, all is conditioned
by that will, all must move according to that will, and that will marks
out the straight line of evolution. There may be swerving neither to the
right hand nor to the left. There is one will only which in its aspect
to us is free, but inasmuch as our life is the life of I'shvara Himself,
inasmuch as there is but one Self and that Self is yours and mine as
much as His--for He has given us His very Self to be our Self and our
life--there must evolve at one stage of this wondrous evolution that
royal power of will which is seen in Him. And from the A'tma within us,
which is Himself in us, there flows forth the sovereign will into the
sheaths in which the A'tma is as it were held. Now what happens is this:
force goes out through the sheaths and gives them some of its own
nature, and each sheath begins to set up a reflection of the will on its
own account, and you get the "I" of the body which wants to go this way,
and the "I" of passion or emotion which wants to go that way, and the
"I" of the mind which wants to go a third way, and none of these ways
is the way of the A'tma, the Supreme. These are the illusory wills of
man, and there is one way in which you may distinguish them from the
true will. Each of them is determined in its direction by external
attraction; the man's body wants to move in a particular way because
something attracts it, or something else repels it: it moves to what it
likes, to what is congenial to it, it moves away from that which it
dislikes, from that from which it feels itself repelled. But that motion
of the body is but motion determined by the I'shvara outside, as it
were, rather than by the I'shvara within, by the kosmos around and not
by the Self within, which has not yet achieved its mastery of the
kosmos. So with the emotions or passions: they are drawn this way o