Is Will Power required to renounce sense pleasures? Is there will power &amp; endurance required in order to renounce worldy pleasures? I am particularly speaking of those people who did not experience (profound) meditative bliss à la sukha or various jhanic states yet.

Regards
In Pali Canon, Buddha gives the following image of Will Power:


  Gladly would I let the flesh &amp; blood in my body dry up, leaving just the skin, tendons, &amp; bones, but if I have not attained what can be reached through human firmness, human persistence, human striving, there will be no relaxing my persistence.


According to my teacher, if you look at Will Power closely, you will see that it's actually made out of multiple distinct factors:

Inspiration - first, we're inspired by an example of the teacher or the beauty of a tradition.

Objective - because we're inspired by an image of happiness, freedom, perfection etc., we want to attain it, we want to be like the Buddha or like our teacher.

Commitment - then we make a firm decision. In case of renouncing worldly pleasures it's a firm decision to not enage in worldly pleasures. In case of abandoning negative thinking, it's a firm decision to not cultivate the negative thinking. In case of cultivation of suchness, it's a firm decision to not think that you lack any further achievements etc.

Cultivation - now that we have made the decision, we must stick to it despite all sorts of obstacles and distractions, including the ones that disrupt our Commitment by distracting us into other frames of reference in which the original Objective does not make sense. So we repeatedly engage our attention with stimuli that help sustain and generate the right kind of Inspiration and we avoid the stimuli that mess with our Commitment.

Forbearance - as we do the above, we keep running into situations that result in psychological pain because of the conflict between our commitment and the distracting stimuli pulling us in other directions. This type of pain is inevitable side-effect of practice and we must learn to endure it.

Taken together, these factors constitute Will Power. It is important to understand the exact mechanics of how the will power works, rather than naively assuming we can achieve success by applying brute force.

The first two factors happen automatically, without our control. We get inspired by an idea and we want to be like that, too. The other three factors depend on us. We must make a firm determination or commitment to stick to a specific frame of reference. We must guard our minds from distractions and demotivators. We must seek inspiration again and again, by turning our attention to and going over the inspiring ideas, in order to keep our motivation high. We must be prepared to face the conflict-generating aspect of commitment and the pain it creates. Without putting effort in these three factors, our original inspiration will die out very fast.

So while Will Power matters, what's important in Buddhism is developing skilful means for working with (mental) causes and their effects.