The Will and Energy

Q: What is the will?

The energy which dictates the action or prevents a wrong action is the Will.

Q: By energy is meant the life-force. If energy is the will, why do we sometimes find the will without any power or energy?

Energy is energy, it is not the life-force. I have not said that “energy is the Will”. There is a whole qualifying clause there which you treat as if it were meaningless nonsense. The will is a part of the consciousness and ought to be in human beings the chief agent in controlling the activities of the nature. Will is will whether it is calm or restless, whether it acts in a yogic or unyogic way, for a yogic or an unyogic object. Do you think Napoleon and Caesar had no will or that they were Yogis? You have strange ideas about things. You might just as well say that memory is memory only when it remembers the Divine and it is not memory when it remembers other things.

– Sri Aurobindo