WHAT DO YOU REALLY WANT?
Chapter One
The UNwanted....The Wanted....The REALLY Wanted
Regarding the Choice to Focus on What is REALLY Wanted
Have you ever encountered a person whose conversation is dominated by what they don't like, what they don't want, and what they hope won't happen? Perhaps you are, yourself, such a person, or a person who "has days like that." When it comes to generating the things people truly do want in life, these litanies of the unwanted are, at best, unproductive. A person who hangs out with the unwanted is about as likely to produce what they want as a medieval alchemist was likely to produce gold by tinkering with the chemistry of lead. It's much worse than that, though. By contrast to alchemy, which was relatively benign, putting one's focus on the unwanted tends to be deadly, engaging a toxicity which can subtly permeate a person's life, sapping energies which might have gone toward generating the realities people profoundly hope for.
Eventually, people can become so preoccupied with the unwanted that it almost seems they live in a bizarre Land of Life Isn't Working. In such a domicile, one sees the unwanted just about everywhere, and life tends to be about the unwanted! This usually means that little time or attention is left over for pursuits such as the aspirations which are born of people's hopes and dreams. In a way, aspirations become almost irrelevant to life as it is lived by a huge number of people. In a MINUS-dominated existence, "relevance" is often a function of managing what you don't want, instead of creating what you do want!
It seems obvious that, if we are to have the lives we truly want, we must somehow participate in the creation of our desired realities. The first aspect of participation is being conscious of what is wanted or, perhaps more accurately, being conscious of what is really wanted. Many people use a huge percentage of their consciousness in focusing on things they don't want. This not only tends to bring forward the unwanted realities, but leaves an inadequate percentage of their beings available to energize, to breathe life into, what they do want. The effect is a bit like filling up a computer's storage space with unwanted information and games, and then wondering why there is insufficient capacity for running the programs which actually are wanted.
We start, then, with an act of will, THE CHOICE TO FOCUS ON THE WANTED. I am thinking of a particular friend who had developed a lengthy list of things he "wanted" as part of the property settlement during his divorce. Somehow, when he showed me his list, I could only feel sad for him. Getting that "stuff" didn't seem to have anything to do with arriving at joy, nor did the items on the list even seem to particularly enhance the possibility "survival." Given his mind-set at the time, about the most a person could suggest would have been something along the lines of, "well, maybe if you did 'take it with you' on your demise, you could use it to attempt to convince someone in the afterlife that you hadn't wasted the opportunity we call 'life.'" But even for that purpose, it seemed apparent he ought to come up with something more substantial.
So I asked him what he really wanted. He kept repeating "the things on the list." I kept asking, telling him that I just didn't "get" it, that I suspected he wanted more than that. A long time passed before he was even able to get in touch with what I was talking about. Suddenly, his face looked like that of a little child. I think I remember that look so distinctly because, up until that moment, he appeared haggard, much older than his years and, if anything, he seemed to be deteriorating right in front of me as he continued to advocate his earlier choices. Then he said something remarkable. He said, "I'd really like to be thanked for having done THE MOST I COULD DO!" He said that from a place somewhere deep inside him, present since he was very young, but obscure to him at his current age. It was almost as though he was reverting to his native language, which he had spoken in some distant childhood, before he had emigrated to a new country in which a "foreign" language became his adopted tongue.
My friend is hardly an exception to the rule in this regard. There is a point in life, usually at a very young age, when people - children - stop saying what they really want. Scripture [note: In this book, "Scripture" or "Bible" refers to the Old or New Testaments, except where otherwise noted; all quotations from Scripture are from the Amplified Bible, unless otherwise noted.] talks about the easy access children have to the Kingdom of Heaven. When we talk about a "loss of innocence," we are making reference to the point in any person's life when those things which are wanted the most deeply suddenly come to seem, for whatever reason, "unavailable." After that, life is lived in a manner consistent with the premise of unavailability rather the more "childlike" premise that, when it comes down to it, anything is possible. A person can, of course, make this transition at any age, but this almost always occurs before "adulthood."
Hopes, once vivid, fade into pale counterfeits which can be "achieved," at most. As seeds go, they are the lesser hybrids of childseeds. A child calls participation with childseeds "play." As children dance with their chosen symbols of unfettered hope, they have access, moment by moment, to deep levels of joy and satisfaction. They do not talk about their "achievements;" there is no need to. Life Games are a function of childseeds, of unencumbered hopes and aspirations, the sorts which can be spoken without "adult" embarrassment, written in bold letters in the guileless manner of children. Life Games are intrinsically worth living or, if you will, "playing."
After my friend discerned and communicated what he really wanted, what participation would truly live in him as a Life Game, the two of us sat in silence for a while. Each of us took a few moments to simply feel how that profound "want" really felt. Then I asked him what he could do about his property settlement which would constitute "doing the most he could do." At first, the thought was so new to him that he had no idea. When he did see something which would, from his point of view, symbolically represent the most he could do, his choice was ... well, "inspiring" is the word which comes to mind. Without reporting the entire story, suffice it to say that his choice opened the door to a happier existence than he had been experiencing while he was trying to "manage" his life in the Domain of the Unwanted. Given the nature of the Domain of the Unwanted, after all, the choices which present themselves range from "less than fully life-enhancing" (toxic in a subtle way) to worse than that. Fortunately for my friend, he stepped out of that limited universe long enough to notice that, in life, there really are alternatives to Death Games.
There is a clear and simple way to tell whether or not you or others are acting in a manner consistent with what is really wanted, the genuinely hoped-for. Action consistent with the things people truly hope for is always INSPIRING. Our actions may be more inspiring or less inspiring, depending upon their degree of commitment, boldness or other indices, but they are always inspiring.
It has been a number of years since I have spoken with this particular friend. Perhaps, from his own point of view, he has lived the rest of his life badly, and will continue to do so. I've always thought, though, that a person who does an inspiring thing just once has a fighting chance of attempting it again. It isn't just a matter of the rewards which can attend such moments in life, such as being honored by oneself (and, on occasion, others). It is that such a venture creates life itself as a valuable place, a territory in which it is possible to make a difference. Plants and animals, along with humans, have needs for the stuff of mere survival: nutrients, air, water, and whatever other things do not come to my mind as I write this. The greatest need which is specifically human, though, is singular and specific: to make a difference. People who do not experience making a difference (including those who are genuinely making a difference, but are not in touch with the fact that they are doing so) simply do not thrive. If I were a betting person, I would wager that, each time since that he has gone for the inspiring, the very least which has occurred has been that my friend's youth has again been renewed and, more than likely, he has found his own needs being fully and liberally met.
But are we taught from birth that our level of happiness and effectiveness in life is likely to be a function of inspiration; that we should seek to guide our actions by that which might inspire rather than that which is "the most reasonable?" Of course, a person committed to "the reasonable" in life has more than a small measure of difficulty with such an idea, for the simple reason that inspiration is not measurable in the traditional scientific ways. How do you measure the resonance of our actions with the best parts of the human spirit? Inspiration is often more of a "gut" or "heart" thing than a "head" thing, which can be uncomfortable from the "head" point of view.
This is not to say that our thought processes cannot be "enrolled" into supporting the inspiring, just as they can be enrolled into supporting the reasonable. It can be powerful and exciting to watch what happens when the human spirit, which always reaches toward the most inspiring edges of the hoped-for, is given the steering wheel, instead of being relegated to the status of back-seat passenger for the duration of a trip nobody was too excited about taking in the first place! To give our minds the primary responsibility for our aspirations is asking that the work of a very mature adult be performed by a very young and inexperienced child. There is nothing wrong with allowing our minds to do what they can do, which is to function in support of the creative spirit. To allow the spirit to be dominated by the mind ... well, it makes a person shudder just to think about it! Many people, though, truly think that who they ARE is their thought process. Said slightly differently, they think they are "the voice in their head." One wonders who it is they think is listening to that voice! Once a human spirit has set a course to be followed, an "aspiration" in the best sense of the word, the human mind can make a wonderful contribution toward fulfillment of that aspiration. It is true that "a mind is a terrible thing to waste." It is even worse to waste the human spirit and, in the process, live out our lives in significantly less than is available.
As limited as the idea "self-fulfilling prophecy" is, it does give a hint of what is likely at the moment someone injects MINUS into something as life-determining as ASPIRATIONS! Another meaning of "aspiration" is, after all, "breath!" Of course people so often say they just can't breathe during life's difficult times. They haven't set in place the foundation which would allow such things as easy breathing, happiness and effectiveness.
One of the most interesting things about my friend's story is the fact that he truly had thought that his original list was "what he really wanted!" Of course, he had not thought through the distinction between what he wanted or thought he wanted and what he really wanted. There is often a gaping chasm between the two. I wish that he was an exception, and that most of us had by now developed a finely-tuned sense of what we really want in our lives. Of course, most of us can come up with a statement of "what we want" in the presence of most of the circumstances we encounter in life, including such possibilities as "planning for the future." It has been my observation, though, that most people are profoundly unconscious of what they really want. This is true for society, as well as for people as individuals.
It might be useful for people to think in terms of a continuum, a line running from the UNwanted (which we might label "MINUS") toward the wanted ("PLUS"), and then beyond, toward the REALLY wanted (which we might call PURE PLUS):
<---MINUS-------------------PLUS--->--------------PURE PLUS----->
"the UNwanted" "the wanted" "the REALLY wanted"
While it is true that the choice to focus on the wanted is a precondition to generating the realities we truly want in our lives, that choice only opens the door into The Domain of the Wanted. I suspect that it is always available for us to see a deeper level of "what's wanted" than we have yet encountered, even if we have become pretty experienced in these matters. The issue might be stated along the following lines: how deeply can we reach into the Pure Plus end of The Spectrum of Life's Possibilities, even in the presence of difficult circumstances?
When considering the question "what is really wanted?" in any moment of life, perhaps it might be said that God's is the voice which speaks to us from Pure Plus. Phrases such as "God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven" imply things going "pretty well" on earth, as opposed to the "hell on earth" which many people experience (create) from time to time. In this sense, when we address the question "what do we really want here?" we are reaching toward the word "miraculous," despite the difficulty so many people have with that word.
One place where we have traditionally addressed the issue of what is truly wanted in life has been under the heading "theology," and particularly in the process of our various religious considerations and participations. This is not to say that we have always been effective in our religious interactions, perhaps because here, too, we spend so much time dealing with the Minus side of the spectrum instead of consciously and deliberately creating from the Pure Plus side. It has long been a matter of fascination to me, for example, that people "in conflict," even those who consider themselves deeply religious and who are inclined to say things like "God is everywhere," live their lives in a manner more consistent with the idea "but God is not in you when we are in conflict!" Later, perhaps "after the conflict," the same people will often make the case that God was working in their lives during the events they labeled "conflict;" but such thoughts are extremely rare at the time of the interactions.