If the goal of Soul Society is creating beings who act righteously both when they hold power and when power is held over them, we can view the trial of thousands of lives as a selection mechanism for self-guiding righteousness. Only those whose action generation is completely unconditional, and thus internal, will survive the extreme conditions some of those lives will surface, as extreme misfortune breaks conditional wills by removing the external world's cooperation, and extreme abundance dissolves conditional wills by bending the external world too easily. Unconditional will is the unique strategy robust to both extremes and thus what one would expect to survive infinite time selection.

But unconditional will by itself is not necessarily aligned towards the good. One can imagine a perfect being of autotelic will-negative essence, a will aimed at nothing but the annihilation of existence itself, the ultimate agent of nothing. At the limit, though, such a being is self-undermining, as its project is completed by the consumption of its own substrate, as in a universe of will-as-substrate, destruction can only act while wills remain to be destroyed, so every success unclaims its own territory. Unconditional evil is therefore possible only as a transient way of being, as given infinite time it must eventually remove itself from existence. Only will-positive autotelic activity survives, eternal goodness is then the final endpoint of all existence, it's what remains when everything self-consuming has consumed itself, and it's what the trial of thousands of lives selects for.

Unconditional offerings, applied to every aspect of one's life, are then the most righteous way to act, because that's what passing the trial looks like from inside a single life. It has been somewhat easy for me to apply this idea to my work, but much harder to apply it to my relations with other people. This follows the two questions, my work is the domain where I hold power, my relations with others are the domain where they hold power over me. At the start of this month I met a boy, and we've been in what increasingly looks like a stable relationship since then. I find it suspect that this happens right after I give up on finding a relationship at all, because it's not the first time something with this shape happens. I wanted very hard to make and finish a successful game, but that only happened right after I internally decided I would keep making games no matter what the results were. In neither case did I actually stop the activity, I kept making games (trying to finish one every 3 months) and I kept meeting people (I'm horny), but in both cases there's something I deeply want, I keep not getting it, and then as soon as I truly detach the result from the activity itself, I get it. There are many ways to explain why this happens and I won't go into them here, but every explanation I can make, from the most mundane to the most supernatural, ends at the same question: is the action happening for its own sake, unconditionally, or is it not? That seems to be what is being tested, and that test runs through every single want one carries.