In this episode of “5 Minutes,” Dr. Robert Svoboda explores how personal will can come into alignment with the greater will of reality.

“Thy will be done” is a philosophy that many great souls, including my mentor, the Aghori Vimalananda, endorsed. He always said it’s good to live with reality because if you don’t, reality will come to live with you. That means always saying, “Thy will be done,” while at the same time acknowledging that there are certain things that I may feel really need to be done. So how can one bring into alignment the question of what is thy will, meaning the will of providence, nature, God, or whatever you want to call that reality of the universe that is co-creating our individual realities with us? We are the microcosm, and that is the macrocosm. The macrocosm is thy will. The microcosm is my will. How can we bring these two into good alignment?

In my experience, it’s useful to think about the four levels of speech that are described in the Tantric literature. The first is Vaikhari, which is what I am speaking in right now. That’s exterior, verbalized speech. It’s very easy to use and very practical, especially for talking about the details of the physical world, but it can’t really transmit deeper wisdom because it is very superficial. It’s also easy to transmit things that are false because it is simply a manipulation of words. A deeper version of reality is experienced by the speech known as Madhyama, which is spoken from the heart instead of at the throat. It represents how you are describing to yourself what you might want to say externally. Madhyama is closer to reality than Vaikhari, closer to an expression of what you really mean. The heart is the center of emotional reality, though, and often our emotions distort this level of speech and make our expression of reality less accurate. Even more accurate than Madhyama is Pashyanti, which is spoken from the navel. Para, or telepathic speech, is something we can’t talk about so much because it is something that simply happens. Pashyanti, though, we can talk about. It comes from a Sanskrit root that means “to see.” Pashyanti means visual speech. It means that when you see the reality of something, you get a vision of what that something looks like.

Personally, I find that the way I like to work with the universe is to sit quietly, allow my mind to become silent, and request the universe to send me an image of the reality of whatever subject I happen to be thinking about at that moment. Then I can look at that reality and ask myself how closely that reality aligns with the way I would like for it to be. If I am trying to communicate with the universe, instead of trying to use words or even emotions, I can try to see a reality that expresses both the reality that the universe is projecting toward me and the reality that I would like to see the universe projecting toward me. Then I try to find some sort of alignment that will allow at least some movement in the direction of what I honestly feel things should be, in the context of what the universe is telling me that things really are going to be.

If it’s something very important, I find that I need to do this repeatedly, on a daily basis for many days at a time, so that I can discover whether I should be trying at all to change the reality that the universe is projecting, or whether the universe is offering me an opening into which I can, to some degree, project my desire and intention in a way that the universe will cooperate with it. So this is not a simple thing. It’s not so simple as just making a verbal affirmation: “I would like things to be like this.” It’s a visual affirmation, but one that is always attentive to what the universe is saying is potentially possible in a particular context. Then we try to co-create whatever can actually be co-created in a judicious way that is appropriate for both sides, and hopefully we can all move together in an agreeable fashion.