“Some people say the glass is half full. Some people say the glass is half empty. I think the glass is just too damn big!” George Carlin.
As human beings it is considered natural to focus upon working toward getting what we want. In an over populated world, it seems necessary that nearly everyone is doing so, and the competition is often fierce. This is especially true when what we want is in conflict with what someone else wants. On numerous levels this, seemingly intrinsic, aspect of humanity is at the root of much strife and mischief in the world today.
From an antithetical position, a question arises… is getting what we want really that important? Many people seem to obsess over achievement and are willing to take extreme measures for it. A massive drain on our life energy, and often the source of depression and anxiety, this basic wanting is constantly churning away in our minds in multifarious forms.
Stepping deeper into the question… it can be realized that wanting is actually a form of psychological violence projected onto our selves and extending outward into nearly every facet of our society. We are nearly constantly torturing our selves with this unquestioned stance.
Unfortunately, wanting is not satiable. Even when we do get what we want, it is a temporary reprieve, a stay from a self-created prison, and then we are on to the next unfulfilled desire… ad infinitum. The wanting state of mind is a cruel dictator that always wants more and we suffer immeasurably for it.
If we truly delve deeply into this question a blessed resolve occurs when we realize that wanting blinds us to having. Though the mental habit of wanting seems a perpetual cycle that is challenging to address… if the need to address it is even realized… there is another way to live. In every moment we each have access to far more than we realize. We block the awareness of what we have at hand in the act of wanting. The very discovery of this changes everything. It is quite empowering when we come to understand that we are the very source of our misery. It is empowering because in this discovery is included the answer to it. We can end it.
In observing the action of wanting as it arises in our mind, we gain perspective and can step back and ask the simple question… is this really so important? We are miniscule grains of sand in an infinite multiverse that we see, from a very limited perspective, as time and space. Our actions and reactions are of little consequence in the grand scheme of things. And yet, in the profound awareness of this habitual state of mind that we cling to like an infant on its mother’s breast, we are free of it… at least temporarily. The more often the awareness arises the easier it becomes to loose our selves from this self-created tyrant. In this, we make our infinitesimal corner of the multiverse a little more habitable during the brief moment in which we seem to inhabit it. This is not something to want… it is something to do.