If everything is the result of the I, the obvious question is, “Why am I not always aware of creating the world?” To address this question, Julius Evola makes the distinction between spontaneity and Will, which he first brought up in the discussion of the three stages. By spontaneity, he means an immediate movement from the possible to the actual, while by Will, there is a “space” where many possibilities arise prior to one of them becoming actual. So when he says the world is “my” representation, it is in the sense of spontaneity — that is, the world arises in my consciousness, though I do not choose it with full awareness.

That this is necessary follows from the argument thus far.

1. The Spirit has priority over the Soul, which has priority over the Body.
2. The Will is the unifying principle, bringing the activity of the Spirit into manifestation.

Therefore, from point (1), The representation of the world in the Soul is created by the mind, whereas the common opinion is that the world creates the representations in the mind. So, from (2), this representation necessarily emanates from the Will. How does this relate to spontaneity?

As Guenon points out, Man is the mediator between Providence and the World. As Spirit, Man shares in Providence which is total Freedom. Yet as Body, Man is subject to the Destiny of the World Process. As Schopenhauer demonstrates, at that level Will is unfree, determinate, and blind. Tradition teaches that, over time, the World Process moves further and further from principial Unity; the material analog of this is the thesis that “the entropy of the universe is increasing.”

Karl Marx wrote that the purpose of philosophy is to change the world. However, he did not mean change in the light of higher ideas, but rather in the sense of hurrying along the World Process in the direction away from Principle. Tradition, on the other hand, brings about change in conformity to the Will of God, or Providence”. Note that this is an actionless action, spontaneous but in a conscious sense. Julius Evola elaborates on this point:

Here it is necessary to make a fundamental point and that is to understand the essential difference between spontaneity and will. There is spontaneity where the possible is identical to the real or to put it better, where that which is could only have been that, the act has the form of an inconvertible compulsion, of a brute happening and outburst, and it is passive, impotent in respect to itself. In the will, instead, there is an excess of the possible over the real, that is, one does not pass from the possible to the real immediately, but a point of autonomy, of “potestas“, controls the act as the final unconditioned reason for its being or not being, of its being this way or its being otherwise, as an act that is only one of the possibilities, or rather, compossibilities. It is important to note that spontaneity, as well as will, can be said to be free: however, while in spontaneity it is a question of a completely negative freedom, that is, of a freedom that simply means: “not determined from something external”. In the will there is a positive freedom, that is, a freedoms that means absolute absence of conditions, whether they be internal or external, and therefore the contingency or, if one prefers, the arbitrariness of the act.

Once this distinction is understood, it is not so much based on concepts and intellectual subtleties, but rather on an immediate given of consciousness, on internal evidence that one either does or does not have; when the absolute idealist, in the face of the system of reality, asserts he was the “I” who posited it, it is evident that he is referring not to will, but to spontaneity. He is referring in fact to that activity whereby things are perceived and made interior to our I, to that fundamental “assent” so we become aware of them — an assent that if it is a necessary condition for every reality, insofar as the reality experienced by the I (and we cannot coherently speak about other reality), it is still quite far from being a sufficient condition. In fact, in representing the real is not controlled by the possible, the I is passive in respect to its own act — not as it asserts things but rather it is as if things were asserting themselves in it. As passion and emotion, the representation is something of mine, something that I pull from my own interiority (and at this point the legitimacy of the need for idealism arrives, the rest is satisfied until Leibniz), but it is not me, since I cannot give it freely to myself, since I don’t stand in relationship of master to its determinations, so that the spectacle of reality is unfolding before me, that is, this reality, not the reality that I will. Consequently: to the extent that the idealist can say he was the I who “posited” nature, he reduces the I to nature, that is, in as much as that I, which is freedom, knows nothing, or, better said, acts as if it knows nothing, and, with an obvious paralogism, borrows the concept of the I from that of the principle of spontaneity. I can say it was I who posited nature, but in so far as I am spontaneity, not as I am properly an “I”, that is, freedom and control.