Kitabı oku: «Wishes»

WISHES AS THE ENGINE OF LIFE

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

William Shakespeare

Wishes are our actual strength throughout our life.

Since birth, we come into this world as hollow creatures who are not self-aware and who do not have any conscience about the surrounding reality.

Like any other life form on Earth, the very first part of our existence is completely dominated by our instinct of survival.

This goes also for minerals.

Despite their lack of what from a biological point of view we would call “life”, they struggle continuously to earn their place in the universe and in our existence.

Even among our cells and atoms there is a sort of unconscious instinct of preservation, despite their being part of anindivisibile entirety.

The newborn unconsciously cares about his own survival, the lowest step of the pyramid that Abraham Maslow thought of to represent the hierarchy of human needs in the quest for individual self-fulfilment.

These steps represent the phases of self-fulfilment and in order to reach the top – that is, the maximum degree of an individual’s realization – one must go through the first, most basic and essential stop up until the last one.

At the base of the pyramid are physiological needs such as hunger, thirst, and sleep.

Then, the needs for security and protection; on the third level stays the need for belonging, affection, family.

On the fourth, the need for respect, prestige and success, while the last step deals about one’s self-realization.

Each need, in order to be fulfilled, requires a particular kind of energy, that we call “wish” or “desire”.

The man will never reach self-fulfilment nor will he cover a prominent role in absence of desire.

If one does not wish for it, he will not even be able to have a family, be surrounded by love or rather feel safe.

As a matter of fact, as far as survival is concerned, desires are automatic and unconscious so that every individual can firmly wish to live before anything else.

Think of sexuality.

Nature made sure that sex could provide everyone with emotion and pleasure of such intensity that it is somehow difficult to renounce it.

All of this comes in the wider picture of the preservation of the species.

Let us go back to our newborn baby.

There will be a moment in the overwhelming tide of information he gets – and that inevitably contribute to mold his own representation of the outside world and of himself – when his personality will begin to take shape.

Personality is the peculiarity that gives uniqueness to that person.

What emerges then through personality, game, through the baby trying the express himself in the context he’s put into?

How does he deal with his whole existence?

Through desire.

Desires originate as the engine of individual existence.

They are born as intentions and they simultaneously develop through intension.

Thus, each of my wishes or desiresis an intention and throughout my whole existence I constantly long for something.

This may sound weird but it actually reflects reality.

We tend to think of desires as something big and imposing, something almost unfeasible or rather unreachable, something we must struggle to get.

Actually, our entire life is based on and is studded with a variety of desires: the wish to appear in a certain way, the wish to be, the wish to act, try or seek; the wish to believe, to create, to know, to possess, and so forth.

This is easily reflected in the way children play, the moment when desires are eager to emerge continuously.

On the other hand, adults tend to conceal their “world of desires” despite their tendency to long for something is far from disappeared.

They manifest only what they judge convenient or suitable for the situation and the people around them in that particular moment.

We can define desire as the engine that drives our being towards directions we choose for ourselves, based upon what we long for.

Wishes pushes people to act.

It determines behaviour and so does the counterpart of desire, that is, what we wish not to happen.

That is a wish as well, and its defined as a negative one as it is something we do not want to come true.

Moreover, it pushes us towards certain situations in order to achieve fulfilment.

Even though this may sound weird, that is exactly what happens quite often.

The fact of thinking about things we don’t want to happen and constantly examining them makes our subconscious take us seriously.

This is because it just acts upon our orders, without judging them: if you remember the crew metaphor, the crew does not argue.

It just acts upon the captain’s orders without questioning.

Hence the importance of giving the right orders, a topic we will deal with later.

Each of our actions is always pushed by desire.

If desire wasn’t there, we would simply not act at all.

It is clear then that we are not pushed by ANY desire, but only by that or those of greater intensity.

When it comes to the issue of the intensity of desire, the questions we should ask ourselves are whether life is continuously permeated by desire or not and what contributes to make our wishes – from the simplest to the most difficult one – to become reality, or better said, OUR reality.

We might say there are three steps that desires must go through in order to become reality.

The first one is the intensity of desire.

The second one is the confident patience for the wish to come true.

The third one is the persistent and constant will directed towards the desire itself.

At the base of any desire stays its intensity, and the more difficult it is to become true, the more intensity grows together with our longing for it to become reality.

The intensity of desire is the fire that lights the fuse that will make our capabilities ignite, a fundamental element without which our potential bomb could not be triggered at all.

Such intensity will determine the degree to which we will be able to yearn for that desire.

This happens because wishes that come about as temporary whims and just fade away to leave place to other whims won’t ever become reality and will always lack the right amount intensity to translate into reality.

The intensity of desires is what pushes us to fight in order to make them become true, as this is precisely the way we should think about that intensity: as a struggle aimed at conquering what we long for.

However, this strength alone is not enough, as it inexorably wanes if you make mistakes on the second step of realization, that is, the wait for our wish to become true sooner or later, the determination not to give up upon the first hit or the first fall to the ground.

The wait is a mandatory and fundamental step.

Think about the plan to build a house, something that is born out of the desire to have a house with a particular structure.

Once I settle this, the house does not automatically become reality.

It actually needs time to be built and unexpected events might occur during the construction process, something that would affect the initial plan and lengthen the wait.

However, the builder with a steady goal in his mind will not give up against those issues and will eventually get what he longs for.

Whatever the desire is, be it something that implies being in a particular way or getting something from the outside world, the right attitude is believing that the wish will become true sooner or later precisely because we will keep wanting it to.

In other words, I won’t ever get anything if I don’t even expect I will be able to get something and if I don’t lead my inner world towards a particular destination, through desire.

All of this can easily be misunderstood because, as one might argue: “I want to be rich” – but an old proverb says “He who lives hoping…”. [1]

We’re not referring here to simple hope but rather to confident wait.

I know I will get that particular thing because my desire is strong and my will is constantly directed at the achievement of my objective.

To rephrase, a desire is forcefully originated in the realm of thoughts and such desire becomes a confident wait in my feelings which, combined with my will, push towards the direction of its realization.

This is not mere mental conjecture: If we looked at anything that has been invented or to any achieved result, and so forth we would realize that it has all gone through this way.

Everything that exists couldn’t have existed at all without the presence of a desire for it to be, first of all on a mental level.

Any idea is born out of desire.

Even Archimedes in his bath tub, when he was hit by the intuition that made him utter “Eureka!”, had the wish to discover that thing, otherwise the idea would’ve simply waned and disappeared in absence of fertile soil and a mind suited to understand and put things in practice.

Self-confidence is the best quality we can master, it’s the fundamental ingredient in order to achieve success in addition to hope (in the sense of optimism), and both must go through rationality.

Without optimism, confidence or hope our energies just die out, we stop fighting and we throw in the towel.

We’re now arrived at the third necessary step, that of the will constantly directed towards achievement.

Will is an exceptional strength at our disposal and it literally enables us to turn the world upside down.

Will is powerful and unlimited in terms of availability and capability.

This means that if we want something – hence we wish for it in the first place – and if we turn steadily towards what we want we will eventually get it (here’s the concept of confident wait) exactly because we went through all these necessary steps.

However, will needs something to trigger it and that is nothing but the burning desire.

Here’s how the circle closes and opens all over again.

There’s no escape from this law: if one applies it, the goal will always be achieved, even if – as we said before – things were the other way around.

If we didn’t wish for a certain thing (which still makes it a wish), that constant thought turned into confident wait and we also acted through our force of will by wishing that particular thing not to happen at all.

Will is acting concretely in order to turn our wish into reality and it is also what turns the mechanism on.

Most of the people who think they cannot make their wishes come true think so because they long for something passively, just dreaming or imagining it.

They lack the fundamental confidence to believe that wish to be feasible and, as a consequence, they cannot draw from their will in order to act towards the wish itself.

We just need to know this and put it in practice.

If we don’t manage to do it, that is because of the presence of elements that frustrate our efforts. We’ll deal with these in the following pages.

We’ll then see what mechanisms trigger within us and sabotage one or all of the steps, preventing us to reach our goals.

[1] The complete translation of the Italian proverb would be “He who lives hoping will die shitting”