Both will and desire are absolute creators, forming the man himself and his surroundings. But will creates intelligently—desire blindly and unconsciously. The man, therefore, makes himself in the image of his desires, unless he creates himself in the likeness of the Divine, through his will, the child of the light.

His task is twofold: to awaken the will, to strengthen it by use and conquest, to make it absolute ruler within his body; and, parallel with this, to purify desire.

Knowledge and will are the tools for the accomplishment of this purification.

—Lucifer, October 1887

We speak of Will as a creative force. Everything that exists, is the result of the Will of the Spirit in action. Just as every element and characteristic of the whole ocean is contained in every single drop that composes it, so the Will that has produced all is reflected in man. It is the offspring of the Divine, the God in man.

Intellectual understanding of this idea, as of any other, is one thing and practical application another. It is not lack of knowledge from which we suffer most; we suffer chiefly from weakness of will and of determination to apply what we already know. How are we to make the creative aspect of will work in the performance of daily duties?

Creation does not mean making something out of nothing. Every sort of making implies material from which it is made. With canvas and paints, or from a lump of clay or a block of stone, the artist creates; he transforms whatever material he uses into a beautiful work of art. We, too, are called upon to be artists in life; to use our will to change the colour of our acts and make them beautiful.

True it is that the artist is bound by what his medium can or cannot be made to produce—the laws that govern it and the possibilities inherent in it. "You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear," as the saying goes. But this fact does not make the artist less of a creator. The genius, the truly creative worker, is the one who takes the old material as he finds it and fashions it into something new. By the use of his godlike faculty he forms, as Browning puts it, "of three notes, not a fourth, but a star." The same old notes that bore us when we hear them as a finger exercise, hold us spellbound in certain combinations devised by the master-musician. The same old words that sound dull and banal in one connection are inspiring in another. That "tincture" ("for Thy sake") of which the 17th-century George Herbert wrote—

A servant with this clause
Makes drudgerie divine:
Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws,
Makes that and th'action fine.

—refers to the really creative element in action. This can be applied in the little acts and events that go to make the sum-total of a man's life.

Each of us is doing something every moment: we are reading a newspaper or studying The Secret Doctrine; we are engaged in work or in recreation; we are sitting or walking, eating or talking. We have to learn to be attentive to each of these functions. In all our activities there is an objective, outer process and a subjective, inner process. The drab, the prosaic, the unromantic aspect of daily life changes when we learn that the deeds we perform are not done by the body but are done by the Soul in and through the body.

Metaphysically speaking, every type of action, including our routine, prosaic and worldly duties, proceeds from and is rooted in an archetype. Every day and as often as we can we should try to recall what action of the Supreme our own functions represent. Whatever our walk in life, whether we be clerks or professional men, manual workers or creative thinkers and writers, we should learn to look for the inner meaning, the spiritual reality, the invisible glory, behind all our visible, mundane and often irksome duties. This is what makes the prosaic poetic, makes the worldly romantic and holy. Our power of Will, Imagination, Thought, Aspiration or Higher Feeling helps us in endowing our works with sacramental value. This is the real meaning of dedicating all our actions to the Krishna within us:

Whatever thou doest, O son of Kunti, whatever thou eatest, whatever thou sacrificest, whatever thou givest, whatever mortification thou performest, commit each unto me. (Bhagavad-Gita, IX, 27)

The routine of hourly existence is not merely our own personal concern; it affects for good or ill our family, friends, co-students. To stem the rising tide of passion, to cut off at the root the sapling of irritation ere it grows into the tree of anger, to check the small greeds lest they develop into veritable giants of possessiveness, to take care of minutes lest hours be misspent—this is what we owe not only to ourselves but also to our fellow beings. In these small efforts we can attain great results.

Students of Theosophy need to aim not only at becoming more efficient as speakers and writers, but also more efficient in doing every task, whether personal duties or the routine work of the Movement. In such performance of plain duties—using our will to transform the mundane into the divine—the world is served and saved and through that performance the student of Theosophy is able to purify himself, to develop the inner spiritual will, and to raise his mind to the level where the Light of Wisdom can shine into it.

Man is the microcosm in the strictest sense of the word. He is the summary of all existence. There is no creature that is not recapitulated in man. There is nothing in the universe lower than body or higher than soul.

—Johannes Scotus Erigena