The basic and original situation in created reality was (and is) one of harmony and power - it is our destiny (the gift of God - if we choose to accept it) to become participants in this harmony and power.
Against this; false, superficial 'personality' and its 'will power' strive to attain worldly, selfish, short-termist and materialistic goals...
These cherished worldly goals that we consciously strive-for (status, fame, wealth, influence, sex, indolence, pleasures, distractions...) are continually being-sabotaged-by the divine tendency in multiple ways that we perceive as 'bad luck', illness, failure, misery, boredom, demotivation...
Our worldly-goals - even if we do get them - always turn-out to be infrequent, transient, unsatisfying.
Nobody pursuing worldly goals ever gets his hands on real power - primary power - the power of creation: including never getting the power to attain genuine, lasting, pervasive gratification, fulfilment, meaning and purpose - of being at home in reality.
(Satan, an unincarnated spirit, has no such power; but is a tormented soul who can only work by corruption of existent creation - to destroy that which is, and is good.)
This is a safety feature - since we (as we are) would certainly abuse real, primary power if we could grasp it - we would destroy the divine harmony between free agent beings; so creation was set-up so that is impossible - power comes only with Love: the two are attained together or not at all.
In sum: we cannot access primary power except by working from our true (divine) selves with motivation of Love; but if,or when, or insofar as this pre-requisite is attained then we may indeed work with the primary power of ultimate creation.
Real power exists for us in proportion to how aligned we are with divine purpose and its harmony. The true nature of our Will is not in 'forcing' reality to conform to our worldly appetites but in knowing and (voluntarily, with Love) aligning ourselves with the divine harmony and hopes.
This is what lies behind such phenomena as synchronicity (the alignment of multiple complex strands of reality, over time, to create positive situations for our potential personal benefit); also by what seems like luck, patterns, cycles, and stories as they apply to our lives.
This mortal life is for our education - we are to be educated by experiences; and the main thing we are intended to be educated in is the qualities of Life - which we know imperfectly as both positive and negative phenomena such as love, fear, hope, despair, affection, hatred and so forth - all these must, eventually, be understood; and to understand them requires experience.
But how do we understand?
There is an inner and outer communication. The main inner communication is by imagination. We can consider imagination to be a full, inner grasping of reality: to know something we must imaginatively-inhabit it. Imagination (properly understaood) is indeed the primary and ultimate experience of knowing.
But sometimes a purely inner stimulus does not suffice, and we need to have the lesson impressed upon us by the physical outer world; sometimes we need to know something as an objective experience (perceptible to others as well as to ourselves). These lessons from the physical world are slow to emerge, and simple in their nature - but these 'harsh lessons' (as they feel to us) may be compelling in a way that, in practice, is necessary to improve the possibility of our learning from them.
(Of course we can always resist learning! No matter how many lessons, or how harsh the lessons may be - people can, and do, choose not to learn them. Nonetheless, God does not give-up on us; but gives us chance after chance to learn what is vital to our eternal progression - so long as we allow him.)
Thus, primary divine power works to reproduce in our surroundings a real life picture of our situation - of the situation of our mortal life on earth. The drama of each of our lives is a way we can perceive and learn what we most need.
Our real-true-divine Will is therefore always spontaneously working-away - often against our superficial, selfish, worldly will - to enact in our environment the drama of our own being, and its requirements; typically in a slow, simple, heavy-handed and linear fashion.
On the other hand, we can in principle learn these necessary lessons much more rapidly, simultaneously, and less painfully if we can learn-to-learn-from imagination - in the spiritual realm.
(The above is a paraphrase of an argument in the chapter The Will in William Arkle's book A Geography of Consciousness, 1974 - esepcially page 212.)
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