Elias and Schopenauer on the Will.

I've been noting the similarities between the Elias material and German Romanticism, in particular, Arthur Schopenhauer. Like Schopenhauer, Elias asserts the primacy of the Will. According to Elias (and in contradiction to various other New Age and New Thought writers), thought alone does not create reality. The primal source of all phenomenal manifestation Elias ascribes io the faculty of "attention", "doing" and "choosing" -- in other words, Will. As in Schopenhauer's schema, the Will manifests phenomenal reality via perception (Schopenhauer's Anschauung), organized in accordance with the Ten Primary Belief Systems (roughly comparable to Schopenhauer's Fourfold Principle of Sufficient Reason, encompassing time, space, matter, causation, logic and the like).

It is interesting that Elias rarely uses the word "Will" itself; he refers to this function almost always in terms of action: "choosing",. Perhaps through his use of verbs he wishes to avoid reifying the Will, making it into a concrete "thing", just as he rejects Seth's "All-That-Is" in favor of the less concrete but more verbally cumbersome "Creating Universal One and Whole". Also, Elias frequently exhorts his listeners to consciously identify; in my terms, "Say 'I' to the Will." He repeatedly says, "You are attention." If you are attention, how can you pay attention? You are the doing. By substituting verbal forms for nouns, Elias encourages the hearer to verb herself, to identify self as process. This de-reification of the self is similar to that found in Postmodernism, Zen, and Taoism, but without the anti-individualistic bias of these philosophies.To be fluid process is not to be less self, less individual, but even more so -- the river which never flows the same twice.

There seems, to my perception, to be an interconnection between Elias, Schopenhauer, and the other German Romantics. Perhaps the connection is through Beethoven, a Romantic Era composer and one of Elias' foci. There is certainly a strong resonance with my own way of thinking, including the aspect of me that resonates to the 19th c.Germanic Zeitgeist,