Wake the F*** Up

Stop Pretending You Don’t Know What You Want.

Does this thought loop sound familiar?

• “I want something,”
• “Then I agonize over whether I really want it because I have been conditioned to do so.”
• “I want something else instead as an attempt to negate my conditioning,”
• “And end up realizing I still have no idea what I actually want.”

If so, all that you are REAL-izing, are real lies. That’s right. And I’m not just talking about your endless criticisms of the desire that you started with — you are lying, right down to the fact that you don’t know what you want.

Here, please let me explain. I know this started off a little bumpy. You might even feel accused, or like I think I know more than I do. But you’ll find it is quite the contrary. One of the key reasons that I know what I want, and spend less time in these fruitless loops, is because I know that I can’t truly know anything. Not if I am being totally honest, and I really go into my knowledge — what it’s based on and where it comes from. This isn’t as helpful of a perspective if I’m trying to build a tower or a bridge. But at its foundation, even the hard science of math is intuitive at its core. So where does that leave me? Powerless, you might think. But in my reality, this admittance of unknowing is the key to the Lamborghini. Or rather, the key to my future regenerative bio-sympathetic compound fitted with a wrestling gym and music venue. Don’t get me wrong… I am not too cool or “woke” to admit that I would love to experience driving a Lamborghini. But to own one? Not my thing. For a number of reasons that will go unmentioned... Those reasons can be poked, reflected and refracted an infinite number of ways. You can challenge my emotions or beliefs that bring me to say, “I don’t want to own a Lamborghini.” You can throw out scenarios in which I might want to own a Lamborghini. We could really have a field day interrogating the ecosystem of me and the products it produces in the form of decisions and actions. But that is precisely what I hope to help you, and myself to continue to avoid doing. If it supports you to name this thing we do — let’s call it Overthinking What One Wants.

The issue of O.W.O.W. (Overthinking What One Wants) shows up for me in many different ways (more context here). But the times it influences me the most is when it comes to my measures of quality as a person. “What should I do? What would I do if I was being a ‘good’ person? How can I help the world? How do I not be selfish? Why do I want to do things that seem selfish? Does that make me bad? Is this just my conditioning? Where is my heart? What would someone who knew everything about me think of me?” This absolutely saps my energy, and I usually wind up at the conclusion that I am both helpless and hopeless.

The real and helpful questions in play here are:

• “What do I want?”
• “What does the Universe want?”
• “How do I use that information to make decisions?”

Now that you have some personal context, I want to zoom out and hit this from a slightly more “spiritual” perspective. I’d like to take a short detour to highlight what I see as majority sources of the problem. Not at all to preach about any one ideology, but to use metaphor, to try to communicate something to you that is very simple to understand, yet inspiringly difficult to share with someone else. Before that, I would like to pose a simple solution. A way of thinking about your own thinking, that can illuminate the way out of this cycle. If I have your consent, let’s begin.

The trick is simple as this: Be willing to try and fail.

Know that you can’t know anything with absolute certainty. And with that being the case, do not allow any of your well-reasoned criteria to rule the roost of your heart or the tools of your hands. The only way to find anything out, is to press a damn button. ANY button!

There are so many elements of spiritual practice and maybe even more ideas about “ethical” living that ultimately tell us that “I” is wrong. That that dastardly fellow we call “the ego” is wrong. But this leads me to ask the question: Whether God gave it to us, or Evolution just ran its course, life has produced the phenomena of an “I”. Of an “ego”. So exactly why do we have it???

From the Buddhist point of view, this way of thinking falls into the trap of T.I.O.S., or The Illusion of Separation. The tricky part about that perspective, is that T.I.O.S. usually highlights our ego, or “the way we think about ourselves” as the key issue in the whole matter of alienation from life (which is the source of O.W.O.W.). This is a very useful perspective. It can help one to find and strengthen the sense that they are part of something bigger. When we recognize the impossibility of our existing without everything else around us also existing, our patterns of narrow-minded self-idolatry can be disrupted, and we gain the freedom to weigh the fruits of our actions objectively. The danger in this perspective comes from taking it too far. So far, that we try to see our “egoic” desires as separate from ourselves. First, we try to wash our hands of the more unsavory sounding desires. Then, we find out after many years of trying to lead a “monastic” life, that this is impossible. Eventually, we come to rebuke ourselves for all of the things we do, whether in our best interest or not. One might ask, “Well, if the ego is how we think about ourselves, then… isn’t the problem thinking about ourselves at all? Isn’t thinking about the ego putting one directly in the way of oneself? And isn’t desiring not to desire, a desire in and of itself?” To that I would say, “Good question.”

From the Judeo-Christian point of view, when we are overthinking, we are not “trusting God.” We are leaning too much on our own understanding, and are addled with doubt. I find this to be a strikingly similar lesson to that of T.I.O.S., which is — your understanding will always be limited. Do not give way to ideas of ill fate and thus remove yourself from Grace. Trust that you are part of something bigger than You or I. In this statement, the antidote to alienation is obviously present. We are part of something bigger. A part, which was apparently gifted with the freedom of will. One might ask, “Why is that, exactly? If it is our will that is selfish, why did an all-powerful God give it to us, and why does it seem to be so damn important to the Guy that we have it?” My response would be, “Good question.”

So we find ourselves in the same place — exactly why do we have it? This might be one of the unanswerable mysteries of life. And from some points of view, it is. I can’t truly know anything. But that is where the freedom of will arises. I’ve got some ideas to pose in the following paragraphs, but I suggest you stop for a moment. See if you can answer this question for yourself. Exactly why do we have it? The freedom of will.

Really go into it.

…

There are an infinite number of tales we can tell like “original sin” (which can be swapped out for any other fabrication of a fatal flaw — ego, desire, the mind, Kingu) that regardless of the intent, have effectively damned humans to be worse than imperfect. I wonder why fatal makes a flaw the worst kind… but that’s a topic for another adventure.

This is because the elusive and highly sought-after sense of _________, the yang to the yin of O.W.O.W. cannot be fabricated by the mind. Trying to do so is like trying to spark fire by splashing about in a pool of water. The experience of _________ and the path to it goes beyond words. We can use words to describe the state, but they only work when the experiential understanding of the thing is in place. If you don’t already know, enlightenment can become the most awful burden to bear if we are always chasing the idea of it. Trying to take its measurements and fit ourselves to an unnatural and ill-informed model. You might swap out the word enlightenment for “grace” if you were brought up like I was. But the question is ultimately the same. How do we get there? If one is under the influence of the idea that “desire is the root of all suffering”, it would seem that the path forward is to get rid of all one’s desires. But we already discovered that this idea is made of desire in and of itself. So…

How can my will that is ultimately selfish be transformed?

-Alan Watts

In other words — how do we access divine grace (the peace of mind that allows us to move) if we are corrupt at the core? How can I accept grace with a will that is ultimately helpless? The answer sounds scarily simple: We throw ourselves from the cliff edge of the mind… directly… into… action.

This is all well and good. We must act and so on… but every action feels so wrong. And if all my actions are guided by a worse than imperfect will, I am only going to create more hardship for myself and others by acting. This is one of the roots of suicidal ideations. Self-loathing that bleeds into the outer world.

The reason we end up here is because we twist real wisdom from the past into a Gordian Knot of guilty philosophy. But if we are being truly honest, and not picking and choosing what we read from the stories that underly our culture, there is some information that contradicts this guilty way of viewing ourselves. The most potent, being the idea of an omniscient and omnipotent God, or an all-powerful Supreme Being. If I consider that as true, then I end up with the following questions:

• If God is all-knowing, wasn’t original sin kind of… planned?
• If God is omniscient… wouldn’t he know that telling humans to eat from any tree but one would all but assure they will eat from the one tree?
• Was it not he that he allowed the snake into the garden and gave it its voice?
• How could he not have known what would happen?

If we are really being honest with ourselves, and not deferring to our guilty conditioning, it is so plainly obvious that even a 5 year old could see the contradiction. Sadly, it’s often around this age that such questions are first asked… and promptly squashed out by others who are addled with guilt themselves. The classic response (whenever I was so brash as to try to really get to know the Big Guy) was, “There are some things we just can’t understand. God is everything… but… evil didn’t come from God. And that’s that. We can say with certainty that you are in need of saving from damnation, but anything beyond that is a mystery for only God to know.”

To avoid sidetracking too much and diluting the value of what I am trying to share, I’m making the decision to tie off this religious knot I’ve spun. It is good for me to talk through and share from the emotions of a traumatic ideological upbringing. But that was never the point of this article. I want to talk about my solution to the O.W.O.W. entanglement. I want to talk about I. I want to share answers to, “Why I?”

I is what makes decisions. I is what brings food to our mouths. But I isn’t just for survival. Much more than that, I stands for Interesting. And no wonder subscribers to the cold evolutionary model are left with a despairing and resentful image of humans. “We are a cancer on the planet. We are an invasive species. We are the mistake here. Through no fault of the mountains and trees from which we came, we have somehow sullied the great biological ancestors of this planet. We shall always bite the hand that feeds us. That, is the reality of human nature.”

If life is just the survival of pain ‘til you die, and the only thing you are “good” for is to reproduce and eat sandwiches… it gets dark pretty quickly. Unless, you can find that Interesting somehow. Think about it — how painfully boring would it be if everyone was always seeking direction from the depths of their unconscious, the wisdom of what already is or the heights of the sky. There would be no free will, and no innovation. Only the will to follow orders, like a robot. Except in our case, we don’t actually know what our programming is telling us. “Then I agonize over whether I really want it because I have been conditioned to do so.”

If your stumbling block is that of an all-knowing and judgmental God, I encourage you to remember why he wrote the Story in the first place. God desired companionship. Free will is such a big thing for the Guy, because he got tired of being alone. Imagine a life partner who only bowed to your whims, and could not make a single decision for themselves. Ask yourself:

• Would that be the kind of relationship that you’d like to have?
• Would that be company that could entertain you for eternity?
• If you’re made in God’s image, why on earth would you think he would prefer infinitely obedient robots as companions?

I make art so that others can tell me what they see. Not only so I can share with them what I see.

-Me and probably God

The other problem with only considering what we want, and never taking a leap is that nothing gets done. Not only is this boring, but it’s over before it started. You see, we choose to do or die at our own peril. There is no grey here worth playing in, trying to figure out what with impeccable nonduality. When we choose to play grey here, we become the walking dead. *The popularity of zombie movies suddenly becomes suspect*

What I’ve concluded at this stage of my journey, is that what is best, is what I want. Within some level of reason of course. Ya know like, try not to mess with the free will of others and such. Ya know, don’t fucking kill someone or cut their legs off. But let's not complicate things right now. The nuance of biological underpinnings for a common morality is fun and somewhat necessary to have an understanding of. But only if you complicate it! And as your mind scrambles to object to this bold claim that what “I” wants is the Supreme way forward — stop. Wake the FUCK Up. Stop pretending you don’t know what you want. It’s killing you, me and everyone else. Literally. You know you want to do things “right”, hence your spells of O.W.O.W… So if you’re serious about that, stop trying to think “right”, and just be right. The “right way of being” is in action. Act-I-On. When I act, I am on. When I am on… well, why don’t you tell me how that feels.

As for me, the proof is in the wordplay. Hahah, that’s right. My great supporting evidence for you, is that I is the first letter in the word Interesting. You might think me an idiot, or you might think that is too shallow of a reason for you to build your being on. Mind you, that criticism would be coming from the one who claims they don’t know what they want. The reality is, you don’t know any thing. And if you’re a smart kid, you just might want it to be that way.

Coming back to the land of the practical, it has no doubt taken me a certain amount of discipline to build and maintain such a system of belief. It sounds so… loose and without foundation. I’ve been working hard to build my foundation — carved out by making choices, decisions, and taking action. And I’ve found it to be the most worthwhile work. What it has taken more of than discipline, is courage. The courage to jump from the cliff in my mind. It’s a long time I’ve spent wrestling with myself and others for me to be courageous enough to even write this to you now. But I had to DO this in order to get on with myself. In order to keep building trust in myself. For courage is embodied in doing. In some sense, it isn’t real until it has a body. So at this very moment, I am giving it a body of text, in hopes you might “mindfuck” it, and connect to the courage within you to SAY fuck it.

I invite you — put your Gordian Knots on the shelf, that you might admire them and learn from them, but keep your hands free. Wake the FUCK up. Wake your FUCK up. Desire itself is not evil nor alien. Get in there, and get dirty you little monkey.

…

Whimsical Wordplay References: See if any of these fun breakdowns add context for you. They are purposely elusive as any explanation would be a whole other adventure for us to go on.

knot: know not

action: Act-I-On. When I act, I am on. Ion. Energy. Also see, electron.

interesting: In-Ter-Rest-Ing. In terror and in rest, I go.

grace: God race

I: Also see, Eye, Awareness, Evaluation

Universe: one song

OWOW: what we cry when in doubt

alone: all one

metaphor: precisely what meta is for

judgmental: judge mental

(I’ve read this so many times over, my brain is reading “yhoog-de-men-TAL”)

…

With Love and published without perfecting,

Michael R. Muscatello Ⓒ

❤