“But life can’t just be about doing what you want!” they’ll protest.
Why not? When there’s No Time Left to entertain any less beautiful alternatives. It’s worth a shot, eh?
And, what if those signals, yearnings, pulls at the center of us, are there for a reason? Are an extension of Living’s praxis… an organic, self-refining, self-arising Myth better than any other we’ve ever been fed by our masters or gods?
What if AT LEAST a better life could be had by believing so. Having faith. Relaxing into one’s existence. Releasing resistance to one’s being. And letting oneself be guided.
Acting on deep desires. Not fleeting ones, and NOT fears. On purpose.
I’ve lived my life by doing what I want. Or, more accurately, by living in a way that brings greater harmony. I am constantly refining the how, or the “how-as-to-what.” And taking responsibility. I listen to my body. I study the impulses and voices in my “head.” I listen to our world. I am constantly adjusting course subtly. I accept that I am change, subject to and wielding of it.
And I turned out happy and realized. With an appropriately modest environmental footprint, and a big impact on the people around me. I turned out all right!
And in the last few years, have realized how my “wants” (dualistically assessed from a conception of myself as a separate being), if I acted on them, create subtle dissonance… yet acting on what I “must” do, making it my want (aligning my own growth, health and wealth with the holistic need in the environment): there is diminishing dissonance. Living wholesomely reduces dissonance. These are whole-making acts, acts OF consonance, acts in the direction AWAY from dissonance. Like how “right action” in the Buddhist worldview leaves no residue, no karma, in the world.
Think of this: elders tend not to be aggressive. Because aggression is excessive, it wastes energy–and elders tend to have less energy to spare.
We as a whole society have to become more like elders in our consciousness and conduct–mature enactment, mature embodiment, of the Human pattern. When a desire or need isn’t met, we must work collaboratively with our environments, creatively with our communities, to get them met. We must become masters of subtle use of our energy–conversation, negotiation, magic, problem-solving. “Smiling at our difficulties.” Starting from empathy.
If aggression emerges, we all have failed, and in the waste that will result from aggression, we are all failed. Right?
See, I suspect we can reasonably weed (parse) some patterns out of our gardens strictly on a regenerative-efficiency basis. Elegant measures, meta shapes for “what don’t fit.” This simply must never become dogmatic. Our praxis is subject to evolution. Each being represents a diverse world. Each being’s choices of what to weed out and what to cultivate will produce results, will bear fruits, will feed back, and the individual and their community can study that feedback for evidence of what to do next.
Deemphasizing some conditioned or imprinted potentials in us. Amplifying/emphasizing some whole-making potentials in us.
Within us : without us
::
our best becomes us.