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Let’s assume you have all the survival needs covered. You have shelter, food, …well, that’s basically it.
Now, what do you want?
Everything you want from here on out is not because you need it. Through an intricate mechanism of countless factors, a desire has arisen in you.
Suddenly you desire a pile of cash, an amazing lover, a 9-bedroom mansion, a flourishing career, a business, fame, power, beauty, to leave your mark, to be someone special, to invade another country, to destroy your enemies, to be the first on another planet, or whatever the success indicator is for you.
Usually, it’s a patchwork of the above (+ -).
All of the above has something else in common, none of it is what anyone really wants.
Yes, we believe those things are what we want (there is nothing wrong with wanting or having them), and some are even willing to sacrifice their lives to attain them.
If you are currently in a death clinch with a desire, the following might be a little awkward.
The Essence of What You Want
What anyone really wants is not the thing itself but how it makes you feel. We don’t want a thing; we want a feeling.
The thing is an avenue to the feeling.
We want money (beyond a survival amount) because for most it represents freedom and security. We want to feel free and secure. For some, it might represent power and control. That person is in it to feel powerful and in control.
We want fun, meaningful work to feel useful, fulfilled, joyful, etc.
We want a partner on our side because a partner represents love. We want to feel love. We want to give and receive it because we like how it feels.
And this is the whole key to getting what you want right now.
Connect with the feeling you have projected onto the person, the thing, the experience right now.
The feeling you’re looking for is available right now. Get clear on what the essence of your desire is in feeling form. Use your focus to home in on it.
Spend time getting used to the feeling so that you more and more feel like you already have what you desire.
Feelings/emotions are the glue that keeps things together, that makes things real for us. An emotionally-empowered event is more likely to remain in memory. The beliefs that have the most emotional backing are the ones that make up our worldview.
Someone might still resist what I say here. You might say you don’t give a damn about any feeling; you just want your money in the bank.
I get it. Money in the bank is dandy. We all like it.
I’m not trying to talk you out of obtaining wealth. I’m trying to talk you into opening the door to allowing your good to happen now and not in some uncertain future dependent on the right circumstances.
You Don’t Give a Hoot About the Money
I never said it’s easy to accept. But when you do accept it your whole life flips on its head.
Here, imagine some omnipotent being waltzed up to you and said, “You want money? There you go. $100 Million.” You’re about to summersault from joy, when the being punchlines you, “You’ll get the money, but for the rest of your life, you’ll be absolutely miserable. As long as you live, you won’t have a happy day anymore.”
Would you still take the money?
Of course not! Only a fool would.
This little story reveals that we want the money (again, beyond a survival amount) because we believe it makes us feel good.
This example applies to everything else we want, not just money.
Sure, money can make us feel good and solve money problems — having more of it than not enough is certainly more desirable. But money doesn’t solve the metaphysical distress we experience from imagined separation and incompleteness.
Besides, there is a part inside you that couldn’t care less about money or any of the tokens of human value and success.
That part wants to play and enjoy and have fun. That part doesn’t respect the little human worries we like to blow out of proportion. That part laughs at the artificiality of, well, everything. That part is willing to burn it all to see what doesn’t burn.
Can you still hear this part or have you smothered it with all the emotional junk traversing your internal landscape?
You and Your Environment Are One
Here is the tongue-firmly-held-in-cheek benefit, which is the benefit you most likely came for.
If you feel happy, you’ll have experiences and things you associate with feeling happy. You might have noticed this, your life experiences align with your predominant feeling state.
In the normal, or bottom-up paradigm, the experience makes you happy. In the top-down paradigm, your happiness makes the experience.
That doesn’t mean you’ll no longer have unwanted experiences. It means you’ll no longer use experiences as the sole avenue to feelings. You’ll learn to choose your feeling-states instead of letting the world choose your feeling-states for you.
Then the world will respond to you instead of you responding to the world.
In other words, when you change your internal world, your external world will reflect that.
And even if your outer world doesn’t change, changing your inner world will change how you relate to the outer world and therefore improve it.
It must. There is no way around it.
This works because there is no difference between internal and external. Every bit of the “external world” you’re experiencing is inside your awareness.
Nothing you can experience is external, meaning outside of your awareness.
And if you think there is something external, then you are experiencing a thought inside your awareness saying, “There is something external.”
Even if there was something external, we can never access it because the moment we have access to it it’s no longer external. So it’s a non-issue.
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If you have resistance to the above and you’re about to brand it as some New Age bogus, there are two things I want to say:
1. There is no need to turn this esoteric. Think about it. Isn’t it perfectly reasonable that a happy person will have more happy things, people, and experiences in their life than an unhappy one?
2. Have you tried it? I mean really tried it. Have you used the power of your attention and made how you feel on a moment-to-moment basis the most important thing in your life? Are you spending most of your life focusing on what you want instead of what you don’t want? If not, why? What do you have to lose? An unhappy life?
Fundamental Well-Being
So, turns out all we ever want is to feel good. We want to be happy. Everything else is either a synonym or a footnote to happiness.
Here is the truth about happiness: It’s either now or never.
Saying happiness is now or never might be a cliché at this point but understanding it, and I mean truly understanding it, is one hell of a thing.
If you can’t get happiness now, you can’t get it ever.
But you can get it now.
This might not happen to everyone right away but it might happen to you: You realize that the only thing you truly want is to feel good (by whatever name).
Always feeling good sounds like wishful thinking. And from one perspective it is. But that is because we have defined feeling good as positive emotions.
Feeling good (at least how I define it) is not good feelings. Feeling good is the underlying well-being behind all emotions. It is a fundamental sense that everything is alright.
So you can be sad but be deeply alright because you’re in touch with the fundamental well-being.
That fundamental well-being is nothing else but our true nature. It is the undeniable, nonconceptual ground of being.
It is whole, complete, fulfilled, content, and ever-present.
Catch a glimpse of that unconditional peace, ease, fulfillment at the center of your being. And then keep glimpsing it over and over again.
Fall in love with it.
For this to be as effective as possible feeling good right now must be the most important thing for you.
I don’t mean you need to force positive emotions. What I mean is to enjoy and appreciate each moment of being alive.
Deeply contemplate this statement: “This moment of being alive is the only moment I’ll ever have.”
This is a key.
When you do this, two things will happen:
1. Suppressed and repressed emotional material will be swept up to be resolved.
2. You will see that most events that bully you emotionally are not worth inhibiting your enjoyment of the only moment you’ll ever have.
If you’ve been happy in the past that’s great, but that doesn’t matter one bit if you’re unhappy now. If you can imagine being happy in the future, awesome, but why not reschedule that future rendevouz to a closer date, like right here and now?
I’m not arguing for suppressing emotions or saying how you feel is not okay. That would be violence toward yourself.
You’re not suppressing emotions; you’re releasing them and you do that by ceasing the resistance toward them. When you cease the fight against all the unwanted and keep your attention on what you want your life will change.
That is assured.
All We Ever Wanted
Whenever you fulfill a desire and in that moment you don’t need a thing, you’re fulfilled. You don’t need to add anything to anything. That’s happiness.
It’s a calm state of contentment and well-being. It’s freedom from seeking.
We’ve all temporarily experienced this but because we associate it with the fulfillment of desires we’ve fallen into the trap of pleasure-chasing. It’s impossible not to fall into that trap because it’s all we’ve ever known.
You don’t need to stop fulfilling your desires. Fulfilling desires is wonderful. Pleasure is wonderful.
But as long as you believe in a causal relationship between an object and happiness, happiness will forever tease you.
Most of us have this story running in our minds: “If I only get this thing then I’ll be happy and then I won’t need anything anymore and I can finally enjoy my life.”
It’s the biggest lie ever told and we’re both the liars and the ones being lied to.
If you’re happy with the lie then there is nothing here for you (should’ve said that at the beginning, my bad).
Many of us are happy with the lie. We’re happy to chase and seek and yearn, and never arrive. It keeps us busy and entertained. It lets us retain our hope and fantasy.
But if you’re tired of being on the endless treadmill, perhaps you’re willing to entertain the thoughts here.
Nothing you can achieve will lead to a lasting sense of fulfillment.
I should qualify that.
Nothing you can achieve will ever lead to a lasting sense of fulfillment.
That’s not because you shouldn’t achieve things or you can’t be fulfilled but because fulfillment is not achievement-based.
Initially, this might not be a fun realization. It lends itself to hopelessness. Hopelessness is easily interpreted as a bad sign, but losing hope leads to more freedom.
What is hope but the cousin of fear?
We cling to hope because we’re afraid things might not change and we might not get what we want.
Hope can keep us floundering in the shoreless pitch-black sea. Hope allows us to project our fulfillment onto never-ending desires. Hope cradles us comfortably in our imagination. Hope is a protective wall between us and reality.
Hope postpones happiness.
I’m not saying you need to become hopeless. That’s just the other end of the spectrum. You don’t need hope or hopelessness.
All this talk about giving up hope might seem depressive at first but this is only the case from the viewpoint of the separate individual.
The individual cannot but want to keep adding on to itself. It wants to add fulfillment and happiness to itself. It is in a dramatic clinch with the world. This is the whole problem.
The solution is to cease identifying with this pseudo-entity.
See that you are not what you believe yourself to be. The more you see what you are not, the more you are what you are, have always been, and will always be.
In moments of desirelessness, it’s evident. It’s smiling at you, through you, and from you.
It is you. It is happiness. It is fulfillment. It is peace. It is consciousness. It is every name you could give it and yet no name could ever do it justice.
Nothing you can do and achieve leads to it because you are it right now. It is this boundless singular moment without an opposite.
And that recognition is all we ever truly wanted.
Luka
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