William Butler Yeats’ Theory of Reincarnation – II
The Four Faculties:
Will is the socially conditioned person who is awakened by the alarm clock and goes to the bathroom and showers and dresses and has breakfast and goes to work etc. etc. every day. It includes the prejudices, mores, and taken-for-granted assumptions of the person’s social group, and it is driven primarily by fear. Will is the robot which is wholly governed by routines and knee-jerk responses; which has given up personal feelings and choices to do what is expected by society and to submit to the daily grind. Will is the Daimon’s level of social conditioning: the good citizen who represses his or her true feelings for the common weal, and who as a result will go to heaven when he or she dies. It’s the level of approval and approbation, of our reflection in the eyes of other people. It’s both our “goodness” or our “phoniness”, depending on how you want to look at it.
Will is the socialized person, the one who has asked no questions but has bought into society’s ready-made solutions willy-nilly. Will manifests through a conviction of rectitude; hence it is completely self-centered and self-important. Decisions made on the level of Will usually do not take into account other people’s viewpoints, or much sense of responsibility for ultimate consequences. They are animated principally by hiding shame (running from the past) and seeking personal glory (striving for an idealized, fantasy future).
Body of Fate is the part of the Daimon which gazes outside the classroom window on a spring day – it’s the person’s wistful longings, ideals, romance, kismet; his or her daydreams and fantasies. It is on a level of Body of Fate that we connect to others: on a level of Will other people are just there to serve or impede the purposes of the lower self. Body of Fate relates to other people in both negative (expectations) and positive (affection and unselfishness) ways. Body of Fate refers to openness to new experience, willingness to take into consideration hunches and intuitive guidance – echoes from other probable realities – and also other people’s points of view. When Body of Fate predominates over Will people are willing to take risks and to fly with their impulses.
Body of Fate is the mood of a particular lifetime in all its probable realities. It’s the level of empowerment in our own right, apart from what other people think about us. The more people let their choices be made for them by other people, the more their Will dominates their Body of Fate. The more they follow their own hearts, the more their Body of Fate – or individual destiny – will dominate Will (the expectations of society and other people).
Note that the Body of Fate is what is shown by the astrological horoscope: the horoscope reveals the Daimon’s highest (and lowest) potentials in a given lifetime. Attempts to use the natal horoscope to describe Will – the precise sequence of thought form decisions which make up our personal history in this present lifetime – often lead to incorrect predictions. The birth horoscope of the Daimon is valid for all of his or her probable realities rather than for any particular one of them. The birth horoscope shows tendencies, propensities, possibilities; but not facts (although sometimes these can be intuited by a psychic astrologer). All probable realities for a particular lifetime start from the same birth moment: they are all variations on a theme begun at the same moment in time. Both Will and Body of Fate begin from this same moment. Mask, by contrast, has no beginning or end.
(continued …)