Avoiding the endless desire trap.

How do you know what you really need in life?

How do you know what’s important and absolutely essential?

How do you know what you want?

Well, the personal mind will tell you, obviously.

But how does it know all these things?

How can it be so damn smart and in tune with life that it knows EXACTLY where you have to go, what you have to obtain, and what will make life fulfilling and perfect and ideal?

It can’t.

It doesn’t.

It just guesses and sells the outcome with a lot of drama and conviction.

And by doing that, it makes us feel fucked up, left out, and incomplete, like we’re very much in the wrong place.

‘I need life to give me this!’ the mind makes us believe.

‘I need my future to be exactly there, with exactly that, feeling exactly this way!’

‘And if I don’t get this, if this doesn’t happen, if they don’t call me back, accept my offer, graduate me, pay me, appreciate me, and love me, I’ll be lost forever!’

‘I NEED THIS TO HAPPEN!’

It’s within us most of the time, pushing us, creating the fear of not having enough time to make it happen, freaking us out, and generally pretending to be utterly important.

Weird, really.

It is.

Because the evidence against the deeply flawed predictive powers of the mind is overwhelming.

I don’t know about you (well, I actually do but this sounds a little more humble), but almost everything I once desperately wanted in my life, whether in form or formless, turned out to be nothing but a temporary band-aid, a euphoric flash at best, and mostly truly disappointing.

And on the other hand: hardly any of the things that profoundly changed and enriched my life, the things I still talk about, were ever on my wish list, not even close.

So it’s really obvious: the mind is full of shit.

But what do we do with conclusions like that?

How do we use these important learnings and live a more liberated life?

We don’t.

We can’t (or so it seems).

The mind simply doesn’t allow us the time and the space to stop and doubt its usefulness and importance.

We are almost constantly captured in wanting and desiring and missing and worrying, and there’s always something different and new that we supposedly REALLY need, to keep us busy and going.

So why do we keep falling for this trick, even if we start to see that it’s mostly nonsense anyway?

This is where the mind very skillfully tricks us.

It always exaggerates and always overpromises, and that’s how it captures our attention over and over again.

It creates a lack or a craving or a position in the future that seems better than the present, and then kindly promises to help us out.

It makes us feel insecure and helpless and longing for safety, and then sells us the solution in the form of a thought.

And because we feel like shit, it seems to be valuable and true, and here we go again.

Because we don’t like the mess we seem to be in at that moment (which is purely a creation of the mind), we go for the perceived solution, the promise, the new thing, person, or situation.

We simply hate the idea of not being in the right place doing the right thing, and that huge blind spot is thankfully exploited by the mind.

The way to deal with this?

Like always it starts with the realization that this is actually happening, and that you don’t need to believe it and be used and consumed by it.

It starts with seeing that our mind, the intellect, is just making up things all the time, wildly guessing and projecting, even if it knows nothing about the future.

The feeling of missing out, of not doing what you’re supposed to do, of not being on the track to success and safety, of not getting what you need or deserve, is a mentally produced experience.

It’s not tomorrow or next year providing you with a glimpse of what’s coming.

It’s a creation in the moment, a storyline.

It’s imagination.

Nothing more.

Automatically obeying the mind is the problem, because it’s not only wrong almost all the time, but it’s also insatiable, so it will never be satisfied.

Give it your attention and it will only want more.

So just start doing the opposite.

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(Photo by @obionyeador, for Unsplash)