Wanting Leads to the Wrong Life
Our default state is wanting.
Most of our activity can be summarized as:
- We want something.
- We figure out how to get it.
- We take action.
- We attain a result that either changes what we want, makes us think more about how to get it, or forces us to take a different course of action.
This quadratic hell is what I call the wrong life — the quintessential, out-of-Alignment exsitence.
Why?
For the very reason that wanting is not necessary. It is not as if you will become an inert object when wanting stops. If anything, you will move about freely as a unified being.
We are free when our actions emanate from our total personality, when they express it, when they resemble it in the indefinable way a work of art sometimes does the artist. – Henri Bergson
When living in Alignment, life is a mere unfolding. There is simply circumstance, your action, and the necessary result. There is no real doership, no effort, no failure or success. You simply are a process — one that is fundamentally complete. Therefore, there is nothing to actually want.
The Source of Suffering
When one lives out of Alignment, life becomes an endless and futile endeavor to fulfill desire-as-lack. We bring suffering to ourselves, to our loved ones, and to the world at large as a result. Some spiritual traditions have identified this very mechanism as the root of suffering.
When in Alignment, there can be pain, sorrow, anger, frustration, and despair within— but not suffering. There can be poverty, sickness, violence, and deterioration in the world— but not suffering.
Suffering requires wanting something other than what is.
A Psychoanalytic Critique
“If one did not want something other than what is, then he would not do anything. He is not alive. He is an object. Subjectivity comes from desire and the resulting conflict.”
No.
What you describe is living in an augmented reality constructed by thought-parasites — what you call signifiers.
What you call subjectivity is a pseudo-subjectivity: the Big Other playing you as an RPG character, living out its fantasy, which you mistake for your life.
In fact, it’s not even one Big Other, but many— playing different games with you at different times, sometimes undoing one another, sometimes overwriting each other’s progress. From your perspective, it looks like your attempt to “balance” your highly complex life. But the overwriting upon overwriting creates errors in the files, and so life bugs out from time to time — or, as you say, the repressed returns.
Give Up Wanting
When you are in Alignment, you are living fully, and so wanting has no space to exist. By extension, there will be no space for falsity, fear, or suffering. You will be impervious to the manipulations of the world, nearly all of which seek to enslave you and harvest your vitality for material ends. You will not only be impervious to temptations aiming at your baser instincts, but also immune to moralizing agents who compel you to “virtue.”
Do not fall into the trap of wanting to give up wanting. You must understand that Alignment doesn’t reward you, nor is it a reward you attain through doing something. Alignment is impossible to want– it either is the case or it is not, and if it is, there is no wanting.
