Letting Go of Wants

Let go of Wants

Happiness comes when wants are starved of energy

Our uncontrolled thoughts are full of wants. Wanting something different that what this moment provides. Thus, throughout your life you see yourself as a wanting person. If this is true then logically it should be impossible for anyone to be happy even for a moment. How can you discover a moment of joy when so many wants are present, constituting your thoughts? Unless you clear the table of those wants, how can you gain relief and be happy? To be happy and to have a sense of want centered on thought is a contradiction.

Only when the wanting disappears totally can you experience joy. Logically, then, you can never discover a moment of joy because you never free all your desires at any time. However, you do gain moments of happiness in spite of yourself. These moments may be few and far between, but the potential is always there. Suppose you hear a joke and laugh; what want did you fulfill? Most moments of joy are like that; you catch them without fulfilling any want. Suddenly and without working at it, you see something amusing and laugh, or you see something and admire it. These moments of joy occur when a distraction takes place. You change to focus of your mental energy from the want to the object of distraction.

If you can be happy, you must be able to shed the wanting without having to fulfill all your wants. In a moment of joy you cannot say the world has caused you happiness through the fulfillment of a desire. Happiness never comes from the object; if it did, the same object should always make you happy. Thus, the fulfillment of a want does not constitute happiness. In fact you do not have to fulfill any desire at all to be happy. Merely by looking at the stars you may become happy, or enjoying some sensory experience you may become happy; or someone says, “I love you,” and you see truth in it and become happy.

The world is not absent in a moment of joy. You are looking at something that pleases you, and you are happy; the world is present. Nor do you transcend the mind in a happy experience. The very same mind is present, the world is present, the senses are present—and there is joy. Nothing has come; only the wanting has gone away for the time being. When the wanting is there, you want a change to take place on the part of some object or person. You become a seeker, wanting some change so that you can be happy. There is a seeker-sought duality, a division between you and the world that makes you unhappy. But when the present momentary object in front of you is able to please and absorb the mind for the time being, you give up the seeker-sought division. You suspend all the wants, you forget the wanting person you have taken yourself to be.

That is why when there is real love between two persons, the seeker-sought, wanting-wanted division is resolved; and there is joy which is not caused by anybody or anything. It is an experiential expression of the fullness, the limitlessness that you are. The self becomes manifest in a happy moment when the situation is able to completely absorb the mind so that the sense of want is suspended temporarily. Then you find “I am full, I am all.” I am limitless, Free and complete in myself.

A thought is not a matter of control; it is a matter of understanding understand that thoughts simply come and go in awareness; they have no reality of their own. If this is the truth about yourself and the world, what self-judgement can you make to become sad? There is never any cause for sorrow.

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