A good way to access peace of mind, power, and resilience, is to stop and make a choice or take a vow: “I will never again do anything I don’t want to do.” At the very least, this stops us from habituated patterns and responses of extraneous and unnecessary behaviors. At best, it has us owning the choices of our own lives. There is simply no way to fall into victim consciousness, including entitlement, if we’ve agreed to not do anything we don’t want to do. What we are then faced with is a secondary issue.
Most of us have already overtaxed nervous systems so there are few things we want to do. There’s very little space in the impacted system for organic and dynamic desire to arise. We are reduced to pleasure-based biological activities such as eating, sex, and napping, or high-reward activities that include intoxication of some form.
If we continue on this path, we discover those forms are not something we actually want. They’re the lowest-priced relief we can get. And because we’re so taxed, we can’t afford more valuable desires. What we discover then, is that what we actually want requires a great deal of us. But more interestingly, what we want is not the result, but the process of being used in pursuit of something great.
It’s often here that we’ll have to stop, because the tumescent mind is a robbing mind. And it will attempt to rob us of any energy we’ve created by making the things we enjoy into an obligation. We will be reduced and feel prisoner to the things we need to do in order to survive: production-based activities.
To escape the clamp of obligation, we can look at how desire generates activity, and thus how we have never fully left desire in the first place. Our deeper desires are always pulling us in some way. And at the least, we see that we desire activity itself, and thus desire generates itself in our activity.
More importantly, we can tune into and focus on our deeper desires. These desires tend to lay in who we are, not on what we have or do. Finding the desires in our activities begins to bring us back to ourselves, free of obligation.
For example, most of us want to be talented, creative, or brilliant. The more real desire underneath that though, is to live in a mindset of growth. This we can have anywhere and everywhere. We can have every moment, everything we do, be an opportunity to craft excellence in this life. From how we greet people to how well we negotiate walking in the street.
We can be a living practice in growing our relationship with life. When we take this approach, we discover that in fact, we want whatever activity that comes. But until we get to this point, we simply make the agreement that we will not do anything we don’t want to do.
We take the pressure off the people in our lives and off our friends. We even agree to not do anything when we don’t want to do anything. The only reason we would choose to not want to do whatever arises is because it would put us in a position of living in continuous consciousness, rather than the immediately rewarding but self-perpetuating cycle of climax consciousness, where we construct through obligation, have a burst of behavior, and then come down and reject. Continuous consciousness gives us the opportunity to be alive our whole lives.
