What You Want

People often talk about whether or not it is just to “get what you want”. The answer to this is not a simple one, I think, mainly because it depends on your definition of want . . . and your definition of you. There are so many different parts of a human being, and they all may want different things. Your ego may want to brag while your superego wants to be polite. Your mind may want to think about something painful while your soul wants peace. Your heart may want to love someone while your brain wants not to. It can be difficult to make these choices, especially in the moment, when you don’t know which choice is the healthy one, the ethical one, the wise one.

​In these moments, I’ve often found myself wondering what sort of person I wish I were, whether I would rather be the sort of person to blindly follow my heart or the sort to coldly calculate with my brain. I’ve considered the difference between the path my mind has offered and that of my soul. 

And I’ve weighed the respective benefits of my superego’s and ego’s choices. In these moments, I often find that, while I may not know what I want, I do know what the person I wish that I were would want . . . and I think that answers my question. I think that, for me, what I want to want is equivalent to—or maybe even better than—what I simply want.

​​You would be hard-pressed to find a spiritual teacher with nothing to say on the subject of desire. Don Miguel Ruiz writes in The Four Agreements that we really want to be ourselves, and in order to do so we have to stop trying to appease others by wanting what they want for us. We have collected all this wanting into the mitote in our minds, a bustling marketplace of conflicting agreements we have made with other people. This mitote obscures for us our true desires.

​Osho argues that "the ego always desires more", and that our attempts to combat these desires—say, by resolving to do less of something when we truly crave doing more of it—inevitably results in inner conflict (From Sex to Superconsciousness). Opposition to wanting only strengthens it, and thus is not a true escape. Fighting your desires leaves you even less equipped to change them, and certainly more confused than before.

Eckhart Tolle teaches that fearing and wanting are the two "primary motivating forces of the ego" (A New Earth). That is to say, when we find ourselves wrapped up in suffering or superficiality, identification with our desires and fears is the most likely culprit. In this view, worrying about getting what you want is simply a stall tactic to avoid facing the real issue: the wanting itself. When we want for anything, we are implying that the current moment, just as it is, does not suit us perfectly. We resign ourselves to feeling unsatisfied, lacking, or unfulfilled.

We could, of course, choose otherwise. We could choose to see the moment as perfect, always, by definition. We could choose to want for nothing, to be completely content with where we are. This, of course, is a battle of trust. To accept our lives as they are, we just trust that life is going to give us exactly what we need. We must let go of thinking we know best and surrender to the wisdom of whatever higher power we acknowledge (God, the universe, the collective consciousness, et ceteræ). Then, when we do notice in ourselves a desire for something, a push toward performing an action or making a choice, we can be sure that it comes from a greater intelligence than our own.