What Do You Want?

What do you want? Where do you find it? How do you get it? Wanting is the engine that drives us. That we want is certain. What is not so clear is what we want. When we think we want something, and we get it, we just shift our wanting energy to something else. So, the conclusion that can be derived from that is that we don't have a clue what we want. And most of our time and energy is spent trying to figure that out.

There comes a time in our life, when the possibility occurs that perhaps what we really want is not to be satisfied in the material world. Perhaps what we really want is spiritual. Maybe we have had some religious experience, or maybe we have heard of enlightenment. We have heard of something spiritual, and it occurs to us that maybe that is what I really want.

When that happens, I have to admit that nothing I have managed to gather to myself has really satisfied me, because the wanting still keeps going on. Now it has shifted to something spiritual like enlightenment, salvation, peace, bliss, emptiness or whatever. Of course, it feels like there has been a fundamental change in the direction in which I project this wanting, because it seems that the spiritual world is profoundly different from the material world. But, in fact, what we bring to the spiritual quest is the same strategies and tactics that have served us in the material quest. We try to identify, understand and put a name to what it is I want; maybe it is enlightenment, nirvana, bliss or samadhi states. And we make judgments as to the states that pass through us, as to whether they conform to our idea of what we are looking for spiritually; we hold onto those that seem to and get rid of those that don't. Same as we do in the material world.

There is little difference in spiritual practices and teachings from material practices and teachings. We are given things to do; we are given understandings of what it is we are looking for, and how to go about getting them -- and we pretty much fail. We get states, we meet with teachers who seem to have energetic powers and siddhis, and in their presence we experience emptiness, no-mind and bliss. We meditate and, in these meditation practices, we experience different states of samadhi and spiritual attainment. But just as in the material quest, once we attain a state, it doesn't satisfy. And our attention shifts to something else. We may mourn its loss in a way that is new and spiritual, and wish that it would come back, but that is just another way in which we formulate the object of our desire: it's missing; it was here and now it is gone. And the wanting remains. The feeling of dissatisfaction, of not being through, not being finished, not having gotten what I came here for, is still present.

So what is it we want? We have been around long enough to know that it is not money, wealth, fame and fortune. We may still hold out some hope for these things, if we haven't tasted them, but we know. We have been around in the spiritual realm long enough to know that it is not the states that we have attained through meditation, mantras, or any other practices because, as delicious and pleasurable as they are, they are impermanent. Here today, gone tomorrow. And they leave us with a deep sense of loss and mourning, usually projected upon ourselves -- it is my fault I haven't got it yet; I am not advanced enough yet; I don't have enough merit. And the wanting continues.

The most critical thing to see is what I want. We may hear about self-inquiry, and decide that "I want realization; I want enlightenment; I want peace." We take the offering of self-inquiry and use it in the same way we have used all the other methods and teachings, in order to get what it is that I already know I want, never considering the possibility that we really don't have a clue what we want.

If we don't know what we want, how can we get it? The first step is to discover what it is that is driving me. What do I want? What is this ceaseless, ever-moving river of energy that reaches for and fails to get something? It is not difficult to see what it is we want. It is not difficult to see what is being served by all of that. What we want truly, what has driven every breath we have taken in this life, and every thought that has been thunk, is to know what we are.

Everything we have done has been done in order to form an understandable picture of me. Every relationship, everything we have wanted, or wanted to get rid of, we have done in order that we can form and sharpen a picture of me, of what I am. As part of this effort to create a picture of me that is acceptable and understandable, we have determined what we want and what we don't want. We have projected this energy of desire on things, people, ideas, attainments and so forth, all done for no purpose whatsoever other than defining me. This is what I want; that is what I don't want. I am good because I don't want that; I am bad because I do want this other.

Nothing that I have done in this entire life has fulfilled that desire. And that is not surprising, since where I am looking to discover my nature is in the story of me, in the passing thoughts and what they mean. It is no wonder that we suffer. We are trying to discover what we are in that which we are not -- a story, an ever-unfolding narrative. What am I doing today? What am I today? What do I want today? What will that give me today? What am I? What am I? Everything that I am doing, every word that I speak, every thought that I think is done in order to shape, edit, revise, bring together, comprehend and understand an acceptable version of me. And it doesn't work. It is not surprising that we would continue to be dissatisfied.

The practice of self-inquiry is not new; it is not something that is offered to you as an alternative to something else you have been doing. The practice of self-inquiry is what we have been doing all along. There is nothing more to us than the practice of self-inquiry, and we merely have been doing it wrong. We have been looking in all the wrong places, trying to discover myself to be what I cannot be, because what I am looking at is endlessly shifting changing, morphing, disappearing and reappearing. That is the source of our continuous misery, dissatisfaction and suffering.

Self-inquiry is not something new; it is not some new esoteric and advanced spiritual practice. It is simply an adjustment, a shift of what has always been our activity, to a form that makes it possible for us to really succeed -- here and now. In fact, it makes it impossible for us to fail. Once the actuality of the desire that has driven my entire life is revealed, the work is over. All that is required from then on is merely to absolutely disregard the whole story. See, out of the corner of your eye, this that has never moved -- this that I am, this that makes it impossible to deny that I exist. What is it that makes that impossible? What is the present reality experience that makes it impossible to deny you exist?

This is now. This has nothing whatsoever to do with five seconds ago, five years ago or five life times ago. It has nothing whatsoever to do with this afternoon or tomorrow. In an instant of catching a glimpse, just the subtle sense of this that I am pointing to, it is recognized that that is yourself. And it is recognized to be permanent. It matters not if, in the next second, you are telling the story again. When the mind finds what it has been looking for, it has tasted the water it had been searching all along. And I promise you that it will remember. It will remember and stop again, and come home again. Whenever it occurs to you, just taste yourself one more time. This tasting begins to saturate the mind and things change. Not as you would expect them to. There is no doubt that mind will continue to look in the story for some confirmation that something has really happened. But that doesn't matter, because deeply it knows where to find the water. It has found satisfaction and fulfillment in the only place where it can be found, which is in the undeniable certainty of what it is.

© 2006 John Sherman. All rights reserved.