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Tuesday, 15 April 2003
What you want, wants you ::
Yesterday the phrase, “what you want, wants you” popped into my head. Where did it come from? I flipped through the pages of The Holographic Universe looking for it; it’s not there. Google to the rescue; it’s the title of a book. Amazon must have shown it to me when I was looking up book references the night before.
I pondered the phrase. How could it be true that if I wanted all the gold in Fort Knox, it would want me? Or if I wanted a relationship with someone who didn’t want one with me, how could it be that what I want wants me?
But the phrase’s truth is more subtle. I thought about a friend from high school; a common friend remarked, “D doesn’t smoke pot, pot smokes D.” We laughed not just because it was silly, but because something about the statement rang more profoundly true than the idea of D’s brain cells being altered by THC. There’s the common admonition about being careful what one wishes for, because one will get it. We vastly underestimate our own power to shape our experience, set subtle chains of events into motion, with our attitudes and beliefs. Traditional Western thought remains deeply rooted in a subject/object dichotomy, that we are subjects, separate from an external world of objects that are there for our manipulation, despite quantum physics having proven that this is not the nature of reality, certainly not at the subatomic level, and very arguably not at any level. In absence of a subject/object distinction, then it’s true that by definition what we want, wants us. There are also sayings that we become what we love, and what we hate.
So, indeed, I wish to be careful of what I want! If I love that gold in Fort Knox, I will be like King Midas (just read a passage of The Holographic Universe that mentions him), and turn myself and everything around me into shiny, dense, lifeless hunks of metal! Perhaps not literally, but perhaps it would be an immediately recognizable metaphor for my behavior. So I choose to want peace, harmony, beauty, and truth in the world.
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