Acts of love can only take place in the now.

Cluttered memory and intellect result in problematic patterns of thought and behavior. With debris piled up in these faculties, we start out on the wrong foot and things get worse from there. If you can't perceive a situation clearly, you can't manage it effectively. When the very mechanisms by which you perceive and respond to reality are cluttered with distortion, you can't possibly achieve your dreams. It will be very difficult even to know what your dream is.

The will is crucial to taking control of your situation. You must work. You must act. You must undertake the process of healing, of unlocking your dreams. This happens by engaging in reality. You do that by going where reality lives: the now. The will is the faculty by which you return to the now. From there, and only from there, you can address the clutter in all three parts of your perspective. 

But the will itself can contain impediments to its own effectiveness. Acts of faith and hope meet with resistance when the will itself needs cleaning out. Two examples of clutter relevant to the will are slave mindedness and blaming. Slave mindedness is when you insist you are trapped by your circumstances. Blaming is when you spend too much time trying to identify the source of your obstacles while doing nothing to change them. You always have a choice, and understanding your clutter is just another form of clutter if you do nothing about it. 

More broadly, clutter is anything that hinders communication and full life. If it provides you with a reason to linger in the past or fantasize (in a positive or negative way) about the future, it is clutter and it will have negative effects on your life and your day-to-day experience. Identifying your obstacles is crucial. And understanding their origins can be helpful in devising a strategy for dealing with them. But clearing away the clutter is the important thing and anything that hinders that is the result of a distorted, distracted will.

The accompanying discipline for this is love. 

Acts of love can only take place in the now. The old theological definition of love is "the efficacious desire for the well being of another." That should be expanded to include yourself, but efficacious means you do something about it. A real act of love cannot be mindless. It can't be distracted. As a discipline for adjusting your experience, the act has to occur in the now, without reference to the past or future -- that means you do it for the sake of doing it, not for some purpose of gain. 

As you perpetrate acts of love, real love, you will grow in the habit. That means you will habitually find yourself in the now, because that's where love happens. The clarifying effect this has on your perspective is a happy byproduct. There is an almost chemical effect when you start exercising love. It begins to dispel self doubt. It instills confidence (eventually). It overpowers fear, ascribes purpose, creates balance, and above all enables you to perceive yourself, and others, as you and they really are, but without judgement. Love and judgement cannot coexist in the same perspective. In place of judgement (which is the final justification for all distortion and the destination toward which all distortion tends), love injects compassion and forgiveness, empathy and conscience, which themselves have a vivifying effect on the perspective. 

Fueled by the momentum love generates, faith and hope become more possible, more sensible, more effective. The world becomes a place of possibility as well as of trial. The truth of things, the luster of reality, begins to reveal itself amid the twisted demon faces of fearful experience. The true substrate of reality becomes perceivable and invites the will deeper in. The will meanwhile becomes more and more capable of love, more and more inclined to it, and begins to reverse the cycle of fear-begets-fear to a new cycle of love-begets-love. 

The masters have always taught this. Love is a force of energy, an aspect of reality, a process found in nature every bit as actual as osmosis, gravity, or the fusion at the heart of the sun. Once unleashed, love splinters into myriad benefits each with it's own special effect on the world, on reality, on experience. And it all begins with the will. 

Ever forward.