WILL POWER AND ENERGY – words by Swami Kriyananda

Let us suppose to begin with that you have had a party. The guests remained late, so you decided to
put off washing the dishes until the next day. But in the morning you had to leave early for work. It
was an unusually bad day at the office. Unreasonable demands were made of you by your employer.
Your phone went out of order in the middle of an important call. There were delays,
misunderstandings, frustrations. By the time you got home that evening you were exceptionally
tired.

Bad enough? Not quite! You had forgotten about that large stack of dishes in the sink. The moment
you stepped into the kitchen and saw them, your fatigue increased to exhaustion. “No dishwashing
tonight!” you vowed, as you collapsed limply on the couch.

And then it was that the phone rang. An old and good friend of yours, whom you hadn’t seen in
years, had just arrived in town, and wanted to invite you that very evening to a concert you had
been very much wanting to attend, but hadn’t been able to afford.

Where did all that sudden energy come from? Five minutes ago you hadn’t had enough strength left
to sit up. Now you felt eager not only to go out again, but even to stay up half the night!

Obviously, your degree of energy depends not only on the amount of food you have eaten, but upon
your measure of will power. People have, in fact, been known to work energetically for long periods
of time without either food or rest. The only thing sustaining them was their determination to keep
going.

When I was new in the Self-Realization Fellowship monastery, Master, to give some of us an excuse
to be with him while he worked on his writings at Twenty-Nine Palms, had us construct a swimming
pool. (I think he used it all of once!) To save money, we mixed and poured the concrete ourselves. To
avoid seams (though, it turned out, leakage was no problem; water wouldn’t even seep out through
the drain), we poured the whole pool in one day. It meant working almost non-stop for 23 hours. But
to work willingly for God is a joy. Far from complaining at the long hours, we took them as a chance
to show Him what a blessing it was to be serving Him. Every shovelful of sand or gravel went into the
cement mixer to the accompaniment of joyous mantras.

One monk, however, after three or four hours sat down, grumbling, “I didn’t come here to
pour cement!” The rest of that day he tried to talk us out of being such “fanatics.”

At the end of the day all of us felt full of divine energy and joy – all of us, that is, but one. The
reluctant “devotee,” though having done nothing all day but complain, was exhausted!

Doctors have often noted that patients who want desperately to live may pull through even
medically hopeless diseases, while others, no longer wishing to live, may die even though there
seems no medical reason for them to do so.

A friend of mine worked as a physiotherapist in a polio clinic. He told me he had noticed that poor
patients, unable to afford a long convalescence, often got well quickly, while rich patients more
often accepted their paralysis long enough for it to become a permanent habit. I once met a woman,
tall, strong, very active, but poor, who had had polio and had been told by her doctor that she would
never walk again. By sheer will power and dogged perseverance, dragging herself on the floor by her
hands when her legs refused to obey her, she had been able to overcome her paralysis completely.
I myself had an experience where sheer necessity, born of poverty, hastened my recovery. It was in a
hospital in Mexico City, when I was nineteen years old. I had streptococcus, tonsillitis, and dysentery,
and had been told by the doctor that I would be bedridden for at least two weeks. My parents, to
whom I could have appealed for financial assistance, were in Romania. Discreet inquiries convinced
me that a two-week stay there was almost two weeks more than I could afford. In my desperation to
get well quickly, I was out of that hospital, cured, in two days.

I read statistics some years ago to the effect that people who are habitually cheerful, who devote
themselves to helping others, and who generally keep themselves constructively busy, are less likely
to become ill than gloomy, selfish, and lazy people. Mothers, for example, who must stay on their
feet to nurse their sick children through an epidemic, are far less likely to become ill themselves.
They simply haven’t the time to indulge themselves.

Energy, endurance, health – even our actual physical strength – depend on the amount of will power
we can bring to bear on any situation. I remember once reading of a woman whose house caught
fire. In the desperation of the moment she picked up the piano and ran out of doors with it. (Talk
about attachment!) Doctors attribute such displays of strength to a sudden flow of adrenalin, but I
have seen cases where no emergency was present, only an extraordinary will to succeed, and in
these cases, too, the strength was phenomenal. My guru demonstrated such strength sometimes
publicly. Once in Symphony Hall in Boston, though he was short by American standards, he toppled
six burly policemen from the stage into the orchestra pit, simply by arching his back as they tried to
press him against a wall. These men had come on the stage in answer to his invitation to anyone to
test the strength he claimed yoga practice made possible. When the audience saw six such brawny
men stride up to meet his challenge, they thought that this time he faced certain defeat, but his
victory was apparently effortless. Yogis claim that such feats of strength depend not so much on a
flow of adrenalin as on harnessing the natural energy of the body and of the surrounding universe.

“There is enough energy in one gram of flesh,” Master used to tell us, “to keep the city of Chicago
supplied with electricity for a week.” In a recent experiment at some Western university (I think it
was Stanford), one human cell was converted into energy. The resulting flash of light was reported
to have been many times brighter than the sun.

Yet we complain that we are too tired to do the supper dishes!

The amount of energy flow, as well as the simple fact of its flow, depends on the exertion of will. If
you go to pick up what you think is an empty bucket, the energy you exert will not be enough to lift
it if in fact it is full. In this case, you must exert more will, and send more energy; you will then be
able to lift the bucket easily. To put it simply, the greater the will, the greater the flow of
energy. There is, literally, no limit to the degree of will, and therefore to the measure of energy, that
one can summon in any undertaking, simply because a strong will is not limited by the actual energy
potential of the body; rightly applied, it draws directly on the energy of the universe. I say rightly
applied, for to many people an exertion of will power suggests a grim, tense kind of determination,
an exaggerated awareness of obstacles and difficulties that implies a “no” vote from the
subconsciousness even while the conscious mind is affirming “yes.” Willingness, then, might better
suggest the kind of will power intended here. In this sense, the axiom is as true for man’s
relationship to the cosmic energy as to the energy of his own body: The greater the will, the greater
the flow of energy. Remember it. Emblazon it in your mind. Repeat it to yourself several times a day.
This single truth can revolutionize your life.