Finding yourself, finding God

You spend so much time working, so much time spending.

What is it that you want, what you really, really want?

“Knowing what you want is the ultimate life skill. It is worth more than talent or hard work. It is almost worth as much as luck. Have it, and disappointment is still probable, but on your own terms. Lack it, and you will be done to and acted upon.” — Financial Times writer Janan Ganesh

I once told my spiritual director Mark that I was troubled by my desire. If I could only be free from desire (mostly my longing for a partner), my life would be so much better.

Without desire, what problems would I have? Without attachment, the Buddha said, we are free from suffering aka dissatisfactoriness.1

Without desire, I would be so content.

When I told Mark this, he paused. Then said, “You know, the Franciscans believe that if you follow your desires all the way, at the very end, you will find yourself. And there you will also find God.”

In my own sessions, I would do an exercise called, “What is your deepest longing?” I’d ask directees “What is your deepest longing?” and they sit, contemplate, and answer. I’d ask them the same question, and they would sit, contemplate, and answer. Eventually the answers would get deeper and deeper, from “I want a promotion/bigger house” to “I want to be seen and acknowledged” to “I just wanted to be loved” to finally some version of “I just want to feel OK/be at peace.”

At the end, you will find yourself. There you will also find God.

What makes Mullah Nusruddin fables so remarkable is the deep wisdom disguised as simple humor. They work for all ages:

A man was walking home late one night when he saw Mullah Nasruddin on his and knees, searching under a street light for something on the ground.

“Mullah, what have you lost?” he asked.

“The key to my house,” Nasruddin said.

“I’ll help you look,” the man said.

Soon, both men were down on their knees, looking for the key.

After some time, the man asked: “Where exactly did you drop it?”

Nasruddin waved his arm back towards the darkness. “Over there, in my house.”

The man jumped up. “Then why are you looking for it here?”

“Because there is more light here than inside my house.”

Here’s the lesson of this story: we look for things where it’s easy and comfortable to look, not where it is ‘dark.’ The house is a metaphor for the self, and the key is to our happiness or inner peace. We look for key ‘out there,’ because it’s easier to look out there, and in an pathoadolencent society, that’s where we’re taught to look. We look for the key in being (seen as) productive, helpful, smart, powerful, moral, accomplished, and importantly, a little more so than others.3

Best-selling author David Brooks talked about his own fruitless search for ‘fulfillment,’ despite so much ‘success:’

“The thirst for admiration is like the thirst for money—it’s never-ending. You never get to the point where you say, I’ve had enough.”

Similarly, in his famous essay about cruise ships, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” David Foster Wallace writes:

“The great lie of the [ocean-liner] cruise is that enough pleasure and enough pampering will quiet this discontented part of you. When in fact, all it does is up the requirement… I can remember being twenty-four years old and having my, you know, smiling mug in The New York Times Book Review, and it feeling really good for exactly like ten seconds.

And then you’re hungry for more. So that, clearly, I mean if you’re not stupid, you figure out that the real problem is the discontented self. That all this stuff that you think will work for a second, but then all it does is set up a hunger for more and better.

And… that general pattern and syndrome seems to me to get repeated, at least in our culture, for our kind of plush middle-class part of the culture, over and over and over again in a million different arenas. And that we don’t seem to get it…

It may be that those ambitions are what get you to do the work, to get the exposure, to realize that the original ambitions were misguided. Right? So that it’s a weird paradoxical link. If you didn’t have the ambitions, you’d never find out that they were sort of deluded.”

Wallace observed that life on a pleasure cruise is organized around two desires: self-enjoyment and self-improvement. He describes our fantasy of life on the boat (and more importantly, off it) is feeling pleasure and getting ‘better.’

Again and again in the essay, Wallace asks, “Is this enough?”

Father Richard Rohr says you have to get it wrong first in order to get it right. You, like the Buddha, have to chase the wrong things in order to understand the right things. St. Augustine called it “disordered desire,” as good a metaphor as any for addiction and looking for love all the wrong places.

"I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer." — Jim Carrey

We’ve kept on doing these things because our entire lives we’ve implicitly believed (because we’ve been taught) that we have to to ‘achieve’ love. So we keep substituting our primary satisfactions for secondary ones.

Looking on the ground under the streetlight while the key is inside, as good a metaphor as any for suffering.

I’ll preface this (again) by saying I’m not a Christian. But in his seminal work The World’s Religions, religious scholar Huston Smith wrote that Jesus’s major contribution to the world was the idea that God loves us. Never before had anyone made the extraordinary claim that God/the gods/the Tao/the universe loves each of us individually:4

His teachings focused on the two most important facts about life: God’s overwhelming love of humanity, and the need for people to accept that love and let it flow through them to others.

Jesus tried to convey God’s absolute love for every single human being.5 To perceive this love and to let it penetrate one’s very marrow was to respond in the only way that was possible — in profound and total gratitude for the wonders of God’s grace.— The World’s Religions

Jesus taught that God’s love preceded conditions; we were chosen before we knew we needed to be chosen. And Christianity extended chosenness from the Jews to all of humanity. But in our ignorance,6 we’ve confused chosenness with worthiness. Hence all our efforts to prove our worthiness by looking good, working hard, pleasing others.

But as Father Richard Rohr says:

“[C]hosenness has nothing to do with worthiness, which is so hard for our tit-for-tat minds to understand. God’s choice has to do with God alone, not with us being worthy or ready. No one is ever ready! In fact, the readiness comes from experiencing and surrendering to the chosenness. That’s a subtle point, but it’s absolutely foundational. The biblical tradition goes to great lengths to show that God always chooses the unworthy, the weak, the sinful, and the broken.

Paul also says that chosenness is for the sake of experiencing mercy… not so they can feel superior and saved, which is where immature religion always stops. Rather, Paul says very clearly that we experience chosenness so that we can know what it feels like to be God’s beloved and experience God’s mercy. Only then can we communicate that chosenness to everybody else. Now we are a fit instrument to describe what it feels like to be beloved, to be elect, to be significant, to be validated, to be gazed at with the gaze of God, and to be mirrored by the ultimate mirror.”

Knowing what you want is the ultimate life skill. If you found out you were beloved beyond condition, what would you need to prove? What if you found out you were significant before you needed to be special? Seen before you even knew you needed to be acknowledged? What, if anything, would you need to do then?

How much money would you need to spend, endlessly spinning on the outer rim of samsara? How much more would you need to achieve before finally resting?

And if you knew that everyone else was loved beyond condition too, how would you treat others? Who would you need to feel superior to?7

Grace is radically hard to accept, and grace for everyone harder still. I still haven’t accepted it, but I’m trying.8 We keep searching on the ground, under a street light. We keep trying prove ourselves worthy of love by becoming better (than others), trying to look better (than others). We keep spend more money, we keep working harder. But somehow, we still experience dukkha.

The discontented self is never satisfied.

Do you know what you want, what you really, really want? It’s life’s greatest skill. Lack it, and you will be done to and acted upon.

What is your deepest longing?

If you follow it all the way to the end, you’ll find yourself. And God.

What if what you’ve been searching for your entire life was already inside the house?