Wants
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"Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants."
- Epictetus
Want Of Liberty
Back in 2013, I went on a 9-month journey called Sojourn. It seemed that my life had come to a crossroads, the way forward uncertain. I speculated that I wanted a life of liberty, which I could use to live a life of meaning. Yet what that might look like remained hidden to me. So, I got rid of all possessions save for a bag filled with a few items of clothing, and removed myself from the matrix for the better part of a year.
I found an abundance of liberty during Sojourn. I was able to do whatever I wanted; there was time aplenty, and living on the road was cheap, so finances were no constraint. I could wake up one day, and if I felt like moving on, I did. Yet as I explored this ultimate liberty, this satisfying something that I had wanted for a decade or longer, something interesting happened - more wants emerged. The more I saw and did, the more I wanted.
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Sojourn, want of liberty. |
It was inescapable, such that by the end of the journey it seemed that I had developed more wants than I had at the beginning of the journey. So although I had enhanced my liberty, in some ways I had reduced my freedom, for I had become more ensnared by my own wants and desires. I had liberty, but lacked true freedom.
When Sojourn was over, I worked for a year, and during that year I gradually considered that maybe what I really wanted was not ultimate liberty to do what I wanted, but ultimate mastery over those wants.
Want Of Mastery
This new focus resulted in a second, 10-month journey called Vigil. One of my main hopes and goals out was that by rigorously exercising discipline and control over my wants, maybe I could master them. No longer be ensnared by wants and desires.
To a degree, I did succeed at achieving a fair degree of discipline. Yet like sand running through one's fingers, the wants could not be totally suppressed. They lingered beneath the surface of my conscious efforts to control them, impulses within my subconscious mind, patiently waiting to lay ambush at the most unpredictable moments. In fact, the more I attempted to control the wants, the stronger some of them became.
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Vigil, want of mastery. |
Thus, somewhat paradoxically I ended up in a similar situation to before - by directly attempting to master my wants, I had only made some of them more powerful. So I was still not truly free. Yet all my hard work did not go without some benefit; throughout the journey, I began to hear a calling, some kind of whisper as to what a life of meaning might, at least partly, entail.
Towards the end of Vigil, I realized that regardless of achieving the liberty to do what I wanted, or achieving mastery over those wants, the essential problem remained the same. The crux of the problem was not a lack of liberty or mastery - it was my perspective, the incessant focus on self, on "me."
Want Of Less
The Four Noble Truths form a fundamental aspect of Buddhism, which is not actually a religion as is sometimes claimed or believed - it is a method, one that describes how a person may seek higher levels of awareness.
Put simply, the Four Noble Truths can be stated in the following way (1):
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The Buddha, want of less. |
Put even more simply, suffering in life emerges from a desire for one's life to be other than it is, and by lessening one's desires concerning their own life, one lessens their suffering. I surmise that this was the core issue as to why neither ultimate liberty to pursue my wants, nor mastery over them, had achieved a high level of success in achieving what I really sought, which was a life of meaning. In essence, I had been focusing on wanting to "change one's life" - that is, my life - when maybe I should have been focusing on "listening to life" - all of life, that within reality and the world in general.
By the end of these two journeys, I was finally in a position to redirect my efforts towards listening to the world and its omens, those things that to me appeared to contain a fundamental truth worthy of exploring further, even if I could not fully grasp it at the time. Instead of continuously wanting a life of meaning, I focused on the cessation of wanting, and focused more on listening, allowing that meaning to reveal itself.
It is a long road, and I suspect one without end. Yet the more I try to follow it, the weaker the wants become.
Solace.
References
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths.
