The Myth of Getting What You Want (Or Wanting What You Get)

Real You, Genuine Now

There’s a great myth of contemporary life: fulfillment is getting what you want. Or its flipside, wanting what you get. Neither is true, and both are really the same thing. How can that be?

Big Meaning is What You Give

What is fulfillment, anyways? It’s just being filled full of meaning, purpose, a sense that your life has mattered incandescently.

Heres the problem. What’s common to both “getting what you want” and “wanting what you get”? You.

Little meaning is about you. It’s egocentric. Let me illustrate with a little story. I have a friend whose pride and joy is a bona fide Picasso masterpiece. Now he looks at this painting and it used to give him a profound sense of little meaning: I’ve arrived, I’ve made it, look what I’ve earned.

Used to. He doesn’t look much at it anymore. Why not? He’s too busy wondering why his life feels empty, stunted, small – no matter how much he acquires.

What’s missing? Big meaning. Big meaning isn’t about you get, win, earn, have. It’s about what you give the world. My friend got a Picasso. But he didn’t really give the world anything life affirming, life changing, life giving to get it.

And now the painting is just a reminder of exactly that, too painful to look at much.

It doesn’t matter what you give the world. Fashion, art, literature, songs, ideas. What does matter is that you do give beyond what’s reasonable, expected, appropriate, normal, rational. Why?

Only The Broken Heart Reveals the True Self

When you give that way, your heart begins to break a little. You see the great ocean of suffering that is human existence. And then and there, as your heart is shattering into a million pieces, a tiny miracle happens.

The breaking of your heart reveals your true self. The true self isn’t the superficial thing we’ve made it out to be recently. I’m this or that “identity”. That’s just social construction.

So what is this mysterious “true self”?

The Universe is In You

The true self is the universe in you. Not in a poetic way, but in a literal one. It is the universal experience of being human, aware, alive. We all suffer, hope, stumble, cling, need, fall. Usually, we’re so enmeshed in ego that we think we are the only ones who do, and therefore only our pain matters, counts, resonates. Can we earn any meaning, purpose, happiness this way?

Discovering the universe in you is experiencing, with your deepest heart, the profound truth of the human condition. Each and every one of us suffer in precisely the same way. We may suffer over different things. But those are just objects, right? My friend the Picasso guy is richer than sin. But he suffers just the same devastating loneliness and crushing alienation that maybe you do, and I have.

I have to give in an unreasonable way for this experience to begin to happen. What happens when it does?

Fulfillment is Unconditionally Giving Your Gift to the Universe

Now you can start to be a little fulfilled. The whole universe is in you. Again, not in a metaphorical sense. In a real one. The entirety of human experience resides in each and every one of us.

To recognise that is to really leave the ego behind. Now you see ego for what it is. A little evolutionary illusion. It’s easy to say, but no one really knows what it means. Do you have to meditate against a wall for a decade to go beyond ego? Nope. You just need to have the epiphany that the universe is in you, in me, in them.

If the universe is in me, just as it is in you, who am I really hurting when I hurt you? When I try to get from you, instead of give to you? I’m only hurting me, right? After all, it’s the same universe.

This is the great law of karma. The western mind thinks it’s a mystical invocation of divine vengeance. Wrong. It is perhaps the greatest of all psychosocial and existential truths. If the universe is in each of us, our actions only reflect back upon us. I might think that I won’t experience your hurt, but that’s my mind thinking, not my true self experiencing.

My true self experiences whatever I create in this world, life, existence, whether it is good or bad, painful or beautiful, just or cruel. At the very instant that I create it. Just examine it in your own life. Was there ever a moment you hurt someone that a deep part of you didn’t recoil, shrink, cry out? That’s your true self. And the problem is you are not embodying it, being it.

So there is but one way to act. To give your gift. Without any conditions, ultimatums, demands. Just to give it. The act is the way.

Each and every one of us has a gift that is uniquely ours. And yet the universe in us is the same. When we share that gift with the universe, we are really giving it to ourselves, aren’t we?

That is what fulfillment is. It has nothing to do with getting what you want or wanting what you get. Because it has nothing to do with “you”, “getting”, or “wanting” at all.

Does it sound complicated? Probably you’re overthinking it. It’s the simplest thing in all the world. That’s also why it is the hardest. It requires that we see genuine reality, instead of what we want to believe. To stop thinking with our minds, and start seeing with our true selves.

The whole universe is in you. Give it your gift. When you give yourself to the universe, and in return, the universe gives itself to you.

Umair

Philadelphia

September 2016