Knowing What You Want Is Not The Same as Wanting, Where Would You Even Get a Ridiculous Idea Like That

on staying in-stream

I tried to do an exercise recently involving a cushion—this came from a book on energy work whose name I can’t tell you, it’s a secret. The exercise was to put the cushion in front of me and imagine that something I truly desired was resting on it. I was supposed to let myself reach for this thing, and bring it closer. The author said that in a workshop she had led, most of the participants had been unable to complete the exercise. They were too afraid of the intensity of sensation it evoked, and too afraid of what would happen if they let themselves reach out.

(Okay, the book is Julie Henderson’s The Lover Within. But don’t judge it by its title, or its subtitle, or its cover. These unfortunate marketing choices are all camouflaging a highly intelligent, practical, and surprisingly non-woo primer on psychophysical energy.)

I had some success—I brought the object to my heart, and it felt kinda intense—but I knew that I hadn’t really done it, because I hadn’t managed to visualize anything specific. This is kind of a different problem (maybe?), that I seem to have poorly developed visualization abilities, but mainly I felt blocked about the truly wanting part. I felt, on one level, already content. Maybe I didn’t want anything? But surely that was a cop-out. The real feeling was that I wasn’t sure where to even look.

I had taken to thinking of wanting as something that happened in my gut. Sometimes I found that if I included that region in my awareness, images would arise, or I would locate a pull toward something in my environment. That wasn’t working now. It was a bit like in a dream when you wish something won’t happen, and so it does, or you wish it will, so it doesn’t. I was hoping to look into my mind and find a nice clean stage across which I’d watch my desires parade with perfect clarity—and I would call to them from the audience, saying “Come closer! No, not you, the other one! Now sit on this pillow!”

But looking brought me nothing, no images at all—only a gnawing sense of inadequacy, a sense that somehow I was doing it wrong.

I was visiting my parents in Georgia when this happened, and the next day I described the exercise to my parents as we were sitting on the porch watching birds. My mom didn’t know what I meant about having poor visualization skills. In trying to describe it I was reminded of a part of the book Impro: Improvisation & The Theatre (which I wrote about here) where Johnstone writes about playing visualization games with his students, part of his method for teaching them to trust the underground stream of effortless generativity that’s running in all our heads all the time. So I invited my mom to close her eyes and I started asking her questions along those lines. “You’re in the library. You take a book down from the shelf. What’s the first word of the title?”

My mom frowned.

“I don’t see anything,” she said. “I just see dark red, the color of my eyelids.”

My mom is a lifelong visual artist. She’s someone who, when she wants to describe what the woman in the checkout line looked like, will draw her effortlessly on a napkin. I was pretty sure she could visualize things.

“Maybe you’re looking in the wrong place,” I said. “It won’t happen in your visual field. It’ll happen… somewhere else. The place where you imagine things.”

She paused, then shook her head. “I just don’t see anything.”

We went back and forth like this for a while. Eventually I found myself saying, “You know what a book is, though, right?”

“Yeah…”

“Like, something happens in your mind when you think of a book.”

“Yeah, but I don’t see it.”

“But that is the seeing. It’s just the idea of a book. Imagine you open the idea of a book and you put the idea of your finger at a random place on the idea of the page. What word do you see?”

She hesitated. “I don’t know.”

“Some word just popped into your head,” I said. “What was it?”

“The,” she said. “But that’s so boring.”

“It doesn’t need to be interesting. Okay, the word is ‘the.’ What’s the word after that?”

“Freakish.”

“And the word before?”

“A.”

It didn’t matter that the sequence didn’t make sense. It was obvious that now she was seeing into the mysterious underground channel.

This was eerily like the exchanges Johnstone describes in the book. My mom had added a rule, and the rule had kept her from seeing what was in her mind. (As Johnstone also describes, these rejections happen at the scale of milliseconds: they’re very hard to notice unless someone cues you to look again immediately.) In the same way, the rule that visualization had to happen in the visual field had kept her from seeing that she was already imagining things somewhere else.

She turned the questions back on me, and I found I was able to visualize better than I thought too. The images were murky and low-resolution, more like gestures than vivid outlines, but finding them was easy if I just spoke what I saw faster than I could think about it. So maybe I didn’t have a visualization problem after all?

The conversation moved on, and I didn’t connect any of this back to my trouble visualizing desires.

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There’s this thing I’ve often done in my life, that I’m becoming aware from a fresh angle lately, where I try to step outside the stream of caring and wanting, in order to figure out what’s worth caring about, what’s worth wanting. Even after I started intentionally dropping attempts to find outside justifications for emotional experiences like desire (a view that came largely from reading and working with Ngakpa Chogyam Rinpoche and Khandro Dechen’s Spectrum of Ecstasy), I still hung on to a version of this meta-desire, to know and to get really clear about what I really care about or really want. The basic idea has been that failing to clarify these things results in uncoordinated and slapdash action, and if I can just clarify my desires then life will be simpler and less uncertain.

On good days, which is most days these days, I forget to worry about not knowing what I want, and things just flow. I have more interests and projects and events than I should have time for, but somehow they all just sort of work out. I find myself happy without reason, host to random pockets of intense and irrational delight, like turbulence in an airplane.

On “bad” days, days when I feel disconnected from the world, I’ve had a tendency to try to fix this by troubleshooting, typically in long journal entries that are painful to go back and read. Clearly, this theory tends to go, if I’m disconnected, I must have missed doing some pivotal thing (that other people knew to do), and the lack of this thing is the thing I should focus on. The way this presents is usually some form of “haven’t done enough.” Haven’t written enough, haven’t had a meaningful enough career, haven’t made enough money, haven’t read enough books, haven’t meditated enough, haven’t watched enough prestige TV (which would supposedly make it easier to talk to people), haven’t written enough songs, and other such piddling nonsense.

Intellectually, I don’t put much stock in these kinds of stories anymore. But up until last week, I still believed in the existence of a meta-problem that made them hard to entirely dismiss, this problem that I still hadn’t figured out what I really wanted in life, like, some kind of calling. This made it hard to dismiss the haven’t-done-enoughs, because it seemed reasonable that if I’d gotten clearer about my life’s calling sooner, I’d have done more of these things, and I’d be better off. Meanwhile, priceless hedons were dribbling down the drain. I could tell when this theory was cycling because I would feel extremely rushed, like I’d fallen behind time itself and was supposed to struggle to catch up and didn’t even have time to closely examine where the rush was coming from.

Last Wednesday I was feeling particularly contracted in this way, and I was journaling about it, and I found myself writing that the inner tangle felt infinite. Too many threads, all intertwined. A feeling-tone of, I’m fucked, how did this even happen, where would I even start.

When I read back over what I’d written, I paused on that word. Infinite tangles? Really? That seemed… testable.

So I started writing a list, giving names to the knots. I decided I would only write about what actually tugged at me, what was actually creating tension somewhere in my body. Each time I found one, I pantomimed picking it up and placing it on the shelf above the radiator next to my desk. I visualized a growing pile, like a pile of books I could take down and give my attention to later.

I learned this practice a few months ago from Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing—he calls it “clearing the space”—but I’d immediately forgotten how powerful it can be, and I’d never tried applying it in such a thorough way. Each time I moved one of my problems out of the experiential space of my head and onto the shelf, I was surprised to feel a physical lightening, as if these were real objects living inside me. And by the time I finished, I felt a level of peace and perceptual clarity that the words “peace and perceptual clarity” fail to touch. The process just made it starkly obvious that my tangles weren’t these dark existential problems; they were more like projects. They were optional. From the perspective of being uninvolved with them, it was easy to feel grateful that I had so many, that they interested me so much.

And I didn’t have infinite problems. I had thirty-eight. A few of them dissolved or resolved before I could even get them to the shelf.

One of the last tangles I found before I could find no more was: “A deep fear that I can’t and don’t ever know what I really want.”

I felt extremely clear-headed after the exercise, and it felt natural to pick up one of the more philosophical tangles and look at it, so I reached for this one.

The problem already felt easier to look at, now that it was optional. And in retrospect, I think this was the key. Just seeing that it was possible to leave this problem on the shelf; seeing that, without having solved the problem, I was still able to make a choice, to want one thing and not another—this already held the seed.

It took less than ten minutes, this problem that’s been bothering me for years.

It would be tedious to go through the whole inquiry, anyway I didn’t write it all down. But I did write down the important takeaways, and I will see now if there’s a way to make them coherent. As usual, I don’t know if my insights will make sense unless you happen to be muddled in the same way I was.

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Wanting is not the same as knowing what I want

To separate wanting from the whole of activity is a conceptual exercise. When I say “knowing what I want,” what I really mean is taking a gushing torrent of sensation and trying to reduce it to a few representations, little thought-tokens I can rearrange on a conceptual game board. The deep channel of wanting can move me to take a portion of itself as an object, but, once taken as an object, that’s something else.

Nondual traditions sometimes speak of “knowing,” an indivisible unfolding of mind that cannot be taken as an object, similar to how an eye can’t look at itself. Then there’s “knowledge,” a finite representation of some sliver of knowing. Knowing includes knowledge in the sense that knowledge is always accessed or encountered within and via knowing; but knowledge itself can only refer or point to knowing, somewhat like an index at the back of a book.

Wanting is akin to this direct knowing. Knowing what I want is a form of knowledge.

Any ideas I have about wanting, any mental images, any words, any mnemonic devices, and certainly any systems for telling me what I should want, are not the full breadth of wanting. They’re various kinds of knowledge, but they aren’t knowing, though they can appear in knowing.

The basic mistake I seem to have been making was trying to use knowledge of desire as a stand-in for desire. I was looking for propositional knowledge about what I wanted. This was fine in itself, and maybe could have been useful. But I also thought that if I couldn’t find that propositional knowledge, it was bad and meant I was confused and dysfunctional.

In reality, every time I did this I was trying to drive a wedge, a separation, between “me” and “wanting.” I was cutting myself off from wanting, forming a self that did not include wanting, in order to get a better look at “it.” Since that was the move’s premise, its eye (and its “I”), it was also the hardest part of the picture to see.

It was like one of those scenes where the jealous lover demands proof of his partner’s faithfulness. You can’t prove faithfulness: faithfulness is opening, whereas proving is a closing, so you only end up closing an opening. As the audience, you know that the lover’s questions are founded on distrust and will lead to more of the same.

There’s no need to take wanting as an object at all

Basically, I think I had a concept of desire that I was holding rigidly without seeing. This concept said something like, “I’ll know I’m wanting when I can see my wants clearly in mental space.”

I don’t know where this started, but it reminds me of when I was in elementary school and adults started asking me what I wanted to do when I grew up. I remember feeling freaked out by this question, because it implied that there was somehow a career already inside of me, and if I couldn’t see it, this was a problem. (Otherwise what did they want me to do—make it up?) The blankness that confronted me when I looked for this expected and important thing frightened me, and as I grew up I did everything I could to avoid that experience, to put off looking in the blank space where my future was supposed to be and wasn’t. I worked hard at everything to create a convincing facade of having my own thing, but this tended to feel like what it was, an exhausting run around the problem of having a broken and defective thing-presenter.

It was like my mom and visualizing. She had a model of how and where visualizations would appear, and this model was causing her to unsee that they were already happening. The visualizations were murkier and weirder and more nebulous than she was imagining, but they were there. It’s significant that the confusion only arose when she was put into a situation (me questioning her) where she became self-conscious of what was otherwise a natural and unquestioned capacity.

I had a model of how and where wanting would appear, and it was causing me to unsee that I was already wanting. Wanting was murkier and weirder and more nebulous than I was imagining, but it was there. The confusion only arose when I was put into situations (feeling disconnected) where I became self-conscious of what was otherwise a natural and unquestioned capacity.

Put another way: I kept trying to take wanting as an object so that I could find out what was impeding it and remove that thing. But in the end, the move that “worked” was to take my model of wanting as the object: to look not at my wanting (which again, isn’t entirely possible), but at my belief that there was a “thing” called “wanting” that was prone to malfunctioning. This belief in the thingness and the brokenness of wanting was really what kept the whole investigative process cycling.

This sounds pretty absurd when I put it into words. It’s like I thought that I couldn’t drive my car without watching a specific part of the engine work, and so I kept getting out and opening the hood and standing there staring at it, wondering what it would take to drive somewhere.

But I suspect it’s a common mistake, a loop the human mind is prone to. Reams of self-help literature purvey the idea that if we want to flourish, we need to first “clarify what we want.” And one only needs to engage slightly with the influencer economy to see that “knowing what one wants” is a fetishized commodity.¹ Could it be because armies of people are making this same mistake and are convinced of a deep problem that the world’s most confident and unreflective consumers seem to have solved?

(This tweet thread by Vasco actually explains what seems like the same mistake I was making in a really clear way, by reference to Heidegger’s distinction between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand.)

(And this one by Visa, which I came across after writing all this, seems to be talking about the same thing too.)

I want to note that I don’t mean it’s never useful to look at wanting or to develop theories about wanting or clarify one’s desires—only that there’s something crucial about seeing all of that as a non-necessity. I might really like learning how my car works, and reading repair manuals, and maybe I spend a weekend taking it apart and putting it back together for fun, and maybe that knowledge even allows me to make some changes that make it more fuel-efficient or something.

It’s just that being in this fixing mode is incompatible with driving. The belief that there is something fundamentally wrong with the mechanism that it’s necessary to fix before driving—that’s the part that kept me stepping out of the car over and over again.

Or maybe, wanting isn’t a tool

Now let me complicate the car analogy, because this also seems important.

When I reflected on it I found I was working from some idea that I had to “use” wanting “well.” The portion of my experience where I took desire to be available, or wanted it to be, seemed to be ideally a tool, whose purpose was to help my organism get things. Or experiences, but these experiences were still considered as a kind of object.

Why should wanting be about anything so singular?

It’s easy to take a strong pattern as a rigid telos and build a whole view around it. When young males learn about evolutionary psychology they often start thinking that the point of life is to be promiscuous and eat raw bacon. Or look at how animal behavior researchers, steeped in evolutionary theory, are always trying to explain away the fact that animals love to play, a whole embarrassing range of behaviors that have no clear connection with fitness. David Graeber wrote a beautiful essay about this, “What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?”, where he points out how weird and historically specific it is that we think animal play needs explanation. What if animals just… like playing, the same way we do, for no clearly definable reason? What if play is just as significant a force in life’s development as evolution? The degree to which that idea is startling is a measure of our entrancement by a way of looking.

Maybe wanting has no single or intrinsic function. Maybe sometimes it helps me “get things,” and sometimes it doesn’t. Maybe sometimes it saves my life, and sometimes it lands me in a mental hospital. Maybe, as the Girardians hold, it’s fundamentally mimetic and leads mainly to rivalry and violence. Maybe it’s no more “on my side” than the tides. Maybe wanting is a Madison Avenue ad man who secretly invented this whole “getting things” slogan to move products. Or maybe it’s the oracle, the inner genius, the divine engine, the wellspring. How would I know?

I don’t, obviously. But opening the view of what wanting can be, and how I can think of it, opens the possibility of playing with wanting, instead of being played by it. I can merge with that channel or separate from it, surrender to it or be controlled by it, try to know it or leave it alone. I can enjoy the experience of wanting, without needing it to end and without collapsing the space it inhabits, or I can cut it off if that’s the thing to do. None of this will constitute “misuse” if desire isn’t fundamentally or inescapably a tool I have to use do some particular thing. (Is non-procreative sex a “misuse” of genitalia? For that matter, is celibacy a misuse of genitalia?)

I’m out on a cliff here, gesturing beyond my understanding. But I notice that as I let go of the idea of a single function, it starts to become more questionable that I’m talking about a real thing, as opposed to one way of seeing.

Finally, I seem to have had the subtle idea that the point of wanting was to become happier. Again a separation: wanting and happiness. But now it seems more like…

I don’t always want anything

If wanting doesn’t have any fixed purpose, then there’s no particular need to be doing it all the time. If it doesn’t necessarily help me move toward greater and greater flourishing, then it also isn’t a problem if I’m totally content and not wanting anything. (Note that I’m not equating not-wanting with happiness, any more than I’m equating wanting with happiness. Happiness in this view includes both.)

I sort of had this model of wanting as always happening—so if I couldn’t label it then it seemed like I must be repressing an aspect of experience. At the same time, I was afraid of looking for what I really wanted, because what if there was nothing there, and I truly didn’t want anything? That seemed like it would be very very bad, like finding out that I was catatonically depressed, or secretly dead.

On reflection I don’t see any reason to think that wanting should be continuous. Maybe in some abstract, existential, my-heart-keeps-beating sense. But sometimes I’m sitting on the couch and looking at the blue sky above my house, and it doesn’t seem like I want anything at all—not even to be there, sitting, looking. I’m starting to realize that seeing this as a problem would only cause me to repeatedly disturb a period of rest.

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I like wanting. I think that, at this moment in my life, I want even more of it, even if that means inviting more pain. One reason this investigation thrilled me so much is it showed me a way I’ve been troubleshooting wanting, assuming it was the cause of whatever disconnection arose, when it was more like, disconnection was leaving me with nothing much to want. As my friend and teacher Charlie Awbery recently put it in a conversation, caring about things emerges from engaging with contexts. Caring is often a result of interaction, not a preexisting force that, if only I can find it, will point me toward the perfect place to interact—which seems like a way I’ve often treated it. (Our moment in history seems uniquely invested in making this basic relational insight incredibly easy to avoid.)

So this is the question I’m contemplating this week: What would it be like, to begin taking the absence of desire instead as an invitation to move into anything, to connect anywhere?

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