You Can't Always Get What you Want
A personal reflection on dangling carrots, getting what we need, and escaping the body.
We plan and God laughs. I’m starting to get that now.
So often in life I head out one way, with a strong notion of where I’m travelling to and why, only to find that by the time I’ve reached that self-prophesised point in the future, the world is unthinkably different and I’m not the same person I once believed myself to be. My imagined purpose of travel loses its hold and the real reason propelling me forward reveals itself.
It happens so invariably that it cannot possibly be a fluke. A goal beckons, prompts us to take action, and in time exposes itself as nothing more than a carrot dangling on a stick. This is one of the secret mechanisms of the universe, plotting behind the scenes and stirring beneath all of our actions. It is the Divine Hand that guides and uses whatever bait necessary to get us to where we need to be.
Such a Hand is like the gentle push – or, just as often, the firm shove – of the parent who knows better than we, always encouraging us in certain directions despite our protests or ideas to the contrary. Or, it is like the well-seasoned scriptwriter who understands the importance, when constructing any story worth telling, of giving the characters not what they want but what they need.
The want is the mistaken objective and the need the magnetising force behind it.
It’s not always that the need is concealed. But it’s only with tremendous sensitivity and self-awareness can we peer behind the hiding place and recognise the unfulfilled need generating our desires.
A Carrot on a Stick
At an earlier crossroads in my life I decided that I’d been drifting along without any solid plan for far too long. Allowing myself to be swept up with life’s currents was fun while it lasted but it was time to grow up and get serious. Ambitions old and new, acquired and native, grew out of me like a pair of horns, ready to spar with life and exact my claim.
I escaped Italy – suddenly fearing that I’d overstayed my destiny; I could already see my roots taking too firm a hold – and pulled myself out before further commitments could tie me down. My mission was simple enough: return to the home-soil and write a novel. I’d live in my parent’s house, scrape by on the few hundred quid I’d saved, and in a couple of months’ time I’d finish the novel.
Obviously enough, the novel would turn out to be a bestseller – maybe even a classic before its time – and finally my dream-life could begin proper, in a moment that would mark the erasure of all my problems, the silencing of all existential dread and the remainder of life as an unending summer of peace and contentment.
How I’m sure the Gods did laugh.
Fairly quickly, I discovered that I hadn’t yet earned the skill or discipline required to pull off my dream; the sheer scope of my ambitions only magnified my limitations and shortcomings. The blissful arrogance I’d enjoyed in the season of youth was coming to its end. Saturn, the devout disciplinarian, had come back around, demanding I put an end to childish things and meet myself where I really stood.
The novel was abandoned to an unspecified date in the future and I retreated into poetry.
Poetry was necessary.
Poetry was sanity.
Poetry was the rope that stopped me from going under.
You see, I’d grossly underestimated the strength of a psychological breakdown that followed my flight from Italy. That flight, I realise now, was actually my soul delivering me to a place it knew that I would be safe, where my body and mind could weather the approaching storm.
That moment was the onset of a death that is still very much underway; and contained within the sustained throes of this greater death are a thousand tiny deaths, one to mark each day. If I’d have known back then that I was returning home for my identity to fall apart, would I have willingly returned?
Who knows.
But the Universe was crafty.
It knew the perfect dream with which to bait me, and I, like a wandering child lost in the woods, was enticed by the trail of its sweet scent.
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Whether or not I realised it back then, the disintegration of my identity gifted me with an opening into a spiritual dimension of my life which had hitherto been undernourished. All of a sudden, spirituality became the most important focal point and, in the absence of understanding who I was anymore, I sought answers wherever I could find them.
I binged on spiritual teachings and practises until I found something that clicked. And what ‘clicked’ happened to be Vipasana meditation.
Over an uninterrupted stretch of ten days, I spent ten hours each day in meditation, silence and stillness. This intensely inward journey would shift my perception of reality forever. Crucially, it created the conditions to dive into the typically-invisible workings of my body-mind structure and understand the inextricable link between my inner and outer reality.
This was exciting, life-changing, world-altering.
It was the first time I recall having an actual-embodied experience of what all the books were talking about. I wasn’t in the realm of theories and concepts any more. I was in the actual world and seeing it for myself. By placing my mind’s eye on my bodily sensations and observing them as a detached witness I saw how each sensation had its own ingrained reaction, thought-pattern or emotional consequence.
I remember watching with disbelief as the lingering pain in my leg, which persisted for five days straight, eventually dissolved into a mass of pleasurable tingling; and all of this only because I’d consented to observe all sensations, whether of pain or of pleasure, as an equanimous observer, without revolting or reacting, without attempting to deny the veracity of my felt reality whatsoever.
The pain – which I had felt so absolutely as to be the undeniable definition of my experience – didn’t last. It shifted into the entirely opposite sensory experience. Stupefied, I wondered if pleasure could really be contained within the pain. Or did the perception of pain or pleasure depend on the perceiver?
Anyway, I learned a few things that day.
The world of sensation is impermanent and in constant flux.
But we have conditioned responses to the stimulation of our senses. These responses, in turn, have corresponding effects on our mood, behaviour and perception of reality.
It isn’t the outside world alone which can stimulate a response. A thought, memory or fantasy has corresponding effects on the body-mind too. Though, honestly, it’s not always clear whether the thought precedes the sensation or the other way around. Or if there’s even any real separation between them at all. Or if it even matters.
Many of these responses are so deeply ingrained in us that they fire super-quick. Most of us, especially in our daily lives, aren’t still enough to notice them. Never mind changing them.
That being said, these responses are changeable. That’s not to say it’s easy. Recalibration is possible only through continuous practise over a long period of time. Especially for those more ancient habit-patterns. Still, the noticing is enough. By noticing and not reacting, by continuing to observe with equanimity, we can walk the path of un-learning and come closer to our true selves.
The entire notion of myself, already conflicted, was totally upended in that process. The ‘who’ I was seemed little more than a map of interconnected sensations onto which I’d unconsciously grafted certain habits of thought, perception and narrative.
It was both disconcerting and liberating. I realised that my true nature was beyond the body’s endless metamorphosis of sensations and the mind’s endless churning of thought. What’s more, I had the power to manufacture a different reality by going under the hood, so to speak, of this body-mind vehicle and gradually training my reaction to non-reaction; by shifting things on the micro I could alter the macro.
I had no illusions that it would be easy. It would take considerable effort, patience and constant practise over the course of a lifetime. Maybe even several lifetimes. But something clicked that day.
It felt for the first time that I had caught a glimpse into what Enlightenment could be: our true state of being, unaffected by the running back and forth between desirable and undesirable sensations that the common lot of humanity were enslaved to.
The Next Carrot
Vipasana helps the practitioner to see the interrelation between sensation, perception and the mental & emotional consequence. It helps us recognise our underlying tendencies – and those of most human beings – which is to be averse to unpleasant sensations and to crave the pleasant.
This equates to our running away from worldly experiences which frighten or discomfort us and/or chasing experiences we imagine will bring us joy, pleasure or relief, however temporarily. We are never settled. We constantly fling ourselves from one station to the next. Such is the root of our suffering.
I looked back on my life and saw how I’d been over-indulging in the sensory world as a means to solve the symptoms of existential distress, as they appeared, without ever really venturing toward the root cause.
I was like a firefighter running circles around the vent of a volcano. I was damping down the flames but failing to take stock of the larger predicament at hand.
Such absurdity couldn’t continue. No longer would I attempt to numb or intoxicate myself when those terrible, intolerable-though-tolerated feelings arose. No longer would I be a slave to pleasure or any of those euphoric sensations the body-mind structure so routinely deceived me with.
All I had to do was learn how to disidentify. But, as it turned out, the line between disidentifying and disassociating was treacherously thin.
At least for me.
As somebody who, for his entire life, had been practising the rejection of anything displeasing or pain-inducing and seeking out pleasure for the sake of silencing the unpleasant, there was a well-trained reflex in me to deny the reality of my experience, to shut off and sever the connection.
The problem, which I didn’t see at the time, was that I was framing the body as something to be overcome rather than listened to with a greater sensitivity. Somewhere along the way, without really noticing, I had slipped into an extreme point of view, which proclaimed:
The body is a lie not to be fallen for.
&The worldly reality is, by the same logic, a trick not to be duped by.
Can you spot the underlying ego-trip in all of this?
The experience of my first retreat had been so profound that it felt like I’d touched on an indwelling superpowered potential that could be increasingly assimilated into my being the more I touched it. I’d fallen for the romance of Enlightenment, of acquiring that ‘Higher State of Being’ permanently. Even where I’d heard so many masters say the same thing, something along the lines of –
“It’s not about gaining something you don’t already possess.
It’s about waking up to realise what you are and always have been.”
But I wasn’t really listening. I was desperate to ‘do’ the seeker and head out on a quest.
And so I did.
I headed out to India, nursing a quiet conviction that my identity-collapse was a blessing, for it meant I could throw out all of my old costumes and begin life anew.
Surely, if anywhere on the globe could mother me into that new being, it was India. Once there I could start basking in my true nakedness, finally transcend the body-mind structure and dissolve into Oneness.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was still involved in the same old game that I’d always been playing. This push to disidentify was just another continuation of the escape attempt I’d been making my entire life.
I wanted a way out.
And the Golden Pedestal of Enlightenment, this thousand-petalled, fully blossomed lotus-flower that emerged out of the swampy waters, that was the only way.
That the root of the lotus remains firmly planted in the muddy bed of the swamp – as opposed to my headstrong determination to uproot myself - was the one crucial detail I overlooked.
The Body is Not A Lie
Several months after first setting out to India, as the adventure neared its close, I met a wonderful teacher. She was a trauma-informed therapist running a workshop on the importance of deeply listening to our bodies without judgement. As a result of her workshop, my perception did a complete one-eighty.
I realised the necessity of being in the body, of honouring ourselves as spiritual beings having an embodied experience. In truth, I was only half-conscious of my negation of the body at the time. Come to think of it, I often only see that I’ve been operating under one belief when I entertain its opposite.
The body was not a prison but a boundless reservoir of memory. This beautiful vessel – this breathing, sweating, constantly evolving record of my personal history – was incredibly supportive of me. Indeed it was the thing that made my life possible in the first place! And it did so with so little of my conscious intervention and so often without a word of thanks.
This teacher confessed how, when she had first started meditating, she had thought she was doing an incredible job because it was so easy for her to leave the body. Then, she explained how she’d got it all wrong.
Because leaving the body is not meditating.
And this ‘rising above’ or ‘transcending’ is a persistent but damaging myth.
The true purpose of meditating is all about being. ‘Being’ present with what is, exactly as it is, whether agreeable or not. Leaving the body then was a form of denial, of resistance.
Although I was in my body while meditating, aware of the sensations, I could sense that, on some deeper level of my psyche, I’d been answering those senses with a whispered –
“This isn’t me. This isn’t me. This isn’t me.”
And in the same way, I was walking around the world, as if drunk with the secret of only a select few chosen ones, whispering –
“This isn’t real. This isn’t real. This isn’t real.”
But to pretend reality is a flat-out unreality – even if it contains heaps of invisibles and illusory elements – well, that isn’t particularly conducive to the task of living. It’s simply a refusal to participate.
When I took this attitude to the extreme – denying both the personal and the planetary body – it meant that I was increasingly disassociating; the colour was being sucked out of the world, I was becoming distanced in my relationships and separating myself from the warm huddle of humanity.
Whatever the Enlightened state is, it’s not a disavowal of the body.
As I write this now, I’m staying in Bodhi Zendo, a meditation centre in the hills of Perumalmalai in Tamil Nadu. All around me are teachings and stories of the Buddha. One such story is printed and pasted on the wall behind a statue of the Buddha himself, greeting all newcomers in the entranceway.
It is said that before Buddha reached enlightenment, sat underneath the Bodhi tree, the demon Mara sent out his daughter to tempt him. The Buddha, however, remained undisturbed and seated in meditation. Failing to seduce him, Mara then attacked the Buddha with an army of monsters, but still the Buddha did not move.
Mara then exclaimed that the state of Enlightenment belongs to him alone and not to the mortal Buddha. In response, the Buddha reached down with all five fingers of his right hand – the Bhumi Sparsha Mudra – and touched the earth.
At his touch, the earth itself roared, “I bear you witness!”, and so vanquished the demon Mara.
Within this story is the acknowledgement of our enlightened state as being one with the earth, as being here, in the now, in our worldly experience. Our recognition of our non-being, of our non-identity, of our larger Self without boundaries is not, in fact, negated by our being, our identity, or the Limited Self.
As the text on the wall elaborates:
‘The Budda touching the earth with his right hand and the earth witnessing him is symbolic of humans being rooted and grounded in the earth, matter, body and psyche. Our spiritual realisation dawns only when we acknowledge our rootedness and grounding. Earth implies ‘humus’ in Latin, and ‘humus’ is related to humility. We are the children of earth and our liberation is not apart from the earth, body and matter.’
‘We humans are embodied beings and it is in and through our embodied and relational nature that we realize awakening … Awakening is to come here to our father and mother: the boundless, vast empty Heavens (emptiness) and the humble, dark, vulnerable and beautiful Earth (fullness). ’
Of course, in these insights, we arrive to the Buddha’s famed Middle Way: the path between the extremes of sensual indulgence and ascetism/worldly renunciation.
Personally, it seems I’ve had to ping-pong between extremes to arrive, at least a little closer, to that sweet-spot in between.
I’d wager that it’s the same path we’re all walking along.
And at this junction of my journey, embodiment appears to be the next milestone on the road ahead. But can I really tell?
Perhaps it’s just another dangling carrot, goading me forwards, guiding me onwards to where I next need to be.