There are lots of self-help gurus who exhort you to have a positive mindset and assure you that you can be whatever you dream of and get whatever you want.
Many sell expensive programs that purport to show you exactly how you go about doing this. They teach you how to visualize success and use The Law of Attraction.
Possibly you have been burnt by some particularly persuasive vendor of such nostrums.
Here is the good news.
You can become whatever you dream of and you can get whatever you want.
You just can’t do it at Level One. You will have to go deeper.
A young man once told me, with great passion, that he wanted to become the Wimbledon singles champion.
Splendid, I said. Let us look at that closely – because you can have everything you want, but not, I promise you, at Level One.
Level One is the thing itself: to lift the trophy on Centre Court. And at Level One, I had to tell him gently, he was almost certainly not going to get it. There is exactly one Wimbledon champion a year, drawn from among the finest players on earth, nearly all of whom have given their whole lives to the game. If your happiness is staked on that, at Level One, you have staked it on a near-impossibility.
But we did not stop there. Why, I asked him, do you want to win Wimbledon? He thought about it. The fame, he said – to be recognized, admired, known.
Good; that is Level Two.
And why do you want the fame? A longer pause. Because, it emerged, he wanted to prove something – to his father, as it turned out, who had never believed he would amount to much. That is Level Three.
And why does it matter what your father thinks? And now we were somewhere real. Now we were down to a boy who wanted, more than he had ever wanted any trophy, to feel that he was worthy – to be at peace with himself.
Here is the remarkable thing. At Level One – the trophy – he had almost no chance. But at Level Three, at Level Four, where the real want lived, he could have everything he was after. He could find worth and peace and self-respect by a hundred different roads, and not one of them required him to defeat the best tennis players in the world. The impossible want at the surface concealed an entirely attainable want beneath it. He had simply never dug down far enough to find it.
Most people live their whole lives at level one. They fix upon the specific outcome – this job, this house, this person, this prize – and when it does not come they are devastated, never once suspecting that the thing they truly wanted lay three levels down and was available to them all along.
There is a deeper form of this question, which the sage Ramana Maharshi taught. A man came to him complaining bitterly about his tyrannical boss. Ramana did not ask a single question about the boss. He asked instead: who is it that has this problem? Does the one who has the problem truly exist? That is Level One dissolving into something far deeper – past the boss, past the complaint, all the way down to the questioner himself.
The Lesson. Whatever you desperately want, it is almost never the thing itself you are after – it is something deeper that the thing is meant to deliver. Ask why you want it, then why that matters, then why that. Three or four levels down you will find the real want. And at those depths, unlike at the surface, you can have everything you want.
Think about this and tell me if it helps resolve dilemmas you are grappling with.
Peace!
