One specific characteristic of the personal Being is that it includes in its coemergence the logos dimension. This dimension of creative dynamism gives our experience of personal Being the sense that it personally acts and responds. Being is what creates and sustains everything, through its logos dimension. It is what makes anything happen, what moves and transforms all manifest forms. It is the only doer. However, since it is now personalized we experience it as personal doing. In other words, personal Being acts in a personal manner, where this action is nothing but the creative display of the logos, now integrated with the personal quality of essence. In the self-realization of personal Being, we experience ourselves as the wholeness of Reality, so we do not only feel personal but realize we are a dynamic and active cosmic presence. We can actually experience ourselves, as this cosmic dynamic presence, moving the winds and the stars. We feel that all that happens in the universe happens through our personal will and intelligence. This is not the will and intelligence of the individual soul, but of the cosmic Being, the personal boundless and infinite Being. Such cosmic personal functioning has a sense of being integrated and organized. In other words, it has a sense of self-organization that makes us feel that all the cosmic action is integrated into an interconnected coherent whole. This is due to the integration of the personal essence into the wholeness of Being. 

This then confronts us with the thorny theological problem of free will and divine will, and the possibility of conflicts between them. It is easy to see from the perspective of dynamic presence that there is only one will, and only one doer, always and eternally. The question of free personal will arises only when our realization of true nature is limited and we do not see the unity of being and its holy will. (See Facets of Unity for a fuller discussion of holy will and its relation to personal will and choice.) More precisely, the problem of personal will versus predestination arises only when we are aware of a universal will but still experience a personal will due to our limited understanding. We do not know yet that it is our understanding and realization that is limited, and hence experience a conflict between two wills. We cannot resolve this dilemma from this limited perspective, for it is the result of this limitation, but we can make a practical resolution that may lead to a fuller realization and understanding of true nature. The usual resolution taught by these traditions is that we need to recognize the free will that God gave us, and use it to follow His will, instead of going against it. In this way we harmonize our personal will with the divine will, and union with God’s presence. This is a valid practical solution, for by denying our free will we deny the truth of the situation, which is that we have a limited understanding, the necessary result of which is the experience of having a free will and personal choice. In other words, we need to start from the state we find ourselves in and move from there, otherwise we will be merely parroting mental ideas. Irrespective of the fact that our state is due to not recognizing the limitations of our understanding, we must start from a place we understand if we are going to move deeper into the truth.

In recognizing the soul we recognize the real self that we intuitively know is at the center of all experience, and the agent of all functioning. Our intuition transforms into a direct perception of what we have sensed to be not only the site of all inner experiences and perceptions, but also the agent of all experience, perception, and action. The soul is the experiencer, the perceiver, the observer, the doer, the thinker, the chooser, the responder, the enjoyer, the sufferer, and the inner site of all of these. We arrive here at the classical notion that each of us is subject, and that when we experience this subject individually it is the soul. The innerness of experience is the soul. Since the soul is the site and agency of experience then everything that arises in the soul can be seen as part of the soul. Thoughts, images, emotions, feelings, sensations, perceptions, insights, knowledge, and states of consciousness are all the soul. They all arise in the soul as waves in a field, as particular manifestations within it. At this point in our discussion this might not be an easy jump, but it will become clearer as we study the basic properties of the soul. The point is that the content of experience does not only occur in the soul, but that it arises in her as her manifestations. Thoughts do not come from outside; neither do feelings or images. They come from the soul and go back to the soul, always within the soul. Even our perceptions of external objects and events are part of the soul, for our perception is an internal event even though the object of perception is external. So all these are the soul, or more specifically its manifestations. To sum up, the soul is the locus, the agent, and all the varied content of experience. 

In other words, there is only one doer, one mover, and that is true nature. Furthermore, the universal doer has only one act: the act of continuous creation. This doer does not take individual or specific actions, for it is not an entity in the space-time of manifestation. It is the force that in one unified act manifests the totality of existence. What we call action, doing, behavior, and functioning are actually imaginary things. In reality, there are no such things. More precisely, we may experience the unity of Being moving our hand, or circling the earth around the sun. It is accurate to think it is the action of the one doer, and not any particular individual being. This subtle and rare perception is still not completely accurate, for we are not seeing the unity of all actions, all movement, all changes. When we see the unity of action, as in the dimension of dynamic presence, we recognize that it is not a doing, but simply the manifesting or creation of all Reality as one unified fabric. This unified fabric is always unfolding, and unfolding in a pattern. We discern some of the dynamic elements of this pattern and call them action, behavior, and so on. In reality, there is no such thing as one person moving her arm, nor even God moving the person’s arm. The expression “movement of the arm” is simply a convention that abstracts out a particular subpattern from the universal dynamic pattern and reifies it as such movement. In other words, individual action is a reification of a subprocess of the overall unfolding of the universe, inseparable from this overall unfolding.