What do you really want?

Psychology

Feb 2

What do you really want? This is arguably one of the most complex questions one can ask due to the virtually infinite elements to consider and the subjective nature of desires and their interpretations.

When asked about their desires, many people might mention money, specific possessions, or fame. As Robert Waldinger mentions in this series, these common answers are based on a popular ongoing multi-decade study on adult development. This study, which Waldinger currently directs, began in 1938 and has continuously collected data from multiple generations. Its goal is to identify the factors that contribute to a "good life," defined as one filled with meaning, happiness, and personal fulfillment.

In fact, according to Michael A. Singer—author of The Surrender Experiment and multiple other books—what you really want, in its most fundamental form, is well-being.

You want to cease the unsatisfactory nature of daily existence inherent within you. The mind can come up with seemingly great examples of material achievements that it thinks will discontinue the constant, disparate, pedantic chatter inside yourself you may usually locate in the head.

Finding out what you truly want is a journey of self-introspection because wants and desires are often the direct or indirect by-products of mimetic desires—fashionable trends that attract your egoic attention because other individuals and groups around you are interested in that same thing.

According to Singer, the way to get what you really want—a sense of total well-being and inner quietness—is through complete and radical openness. Openness to experience the full power of events as they arise and fade away. This is a similar argument to the one made by spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle in his book “The Power of Now”.

The openness to let the flow of life’s events guide your direction, while remaining grounded in gratitude and mindful practice—what Michael A. Singer calls the “Surrender Experiment” (and wrote a full book about his personal story with surrendering to the flow of life’s events).

Openness is surrender. Surrender is the courage to let events arise and see them as they are, fully in touch with reality and not wanting to change them, fight them, love them, attach your whole identity to them, or contemplate them for years to come. Merely letting them arise and disappear in impermanence, an indelible characteristic of everyone’s existence.

When you “look” at your life from above, beyond the universe, you can gain additional perspective to understand how insignificant yet powerful your existence is in the broader history of the world and the human species. If that is the case, why not surrender and let nature do its job, impermanently, as it has always done and always will do?

Practically, surrendering means not manufacturing all the thought-based reactions and responses you have accumulated over the many years of growing up and establishing your identity as a person. The recurring patterns that give birth to most of the suffering you experience. You can recognize them as they arise, immediately after something happens, and let go of them just as immediately.

The process of surrender can present challenges manufactured by the thinking mind. As a novel approach to existence, you may feel unsure about your ability to keep equanimity amid the waves in the ocean of life experience.

In truth, you already know what it feels like to accept the truth as it is and surrender to reality instead of fighting it with constant, distorted thought patterns in the mind. You are not this next thought, as meditation teachers such as Sam Harris may claim in one of their practices.

Identification with thoughts is just another way to resist reality. Surrendering is your utmost natural state of being, which you can tap into by dropping expectations and egoic identification with wanting to be perceived as intelligent, strong, articulate, powerful, etc.

This is the game of life. There is no rehearsal of the game. You are playing the game, right now — and you can define the rules.