Promise of Perfection

Promise of Perfection

The following is a small story about a dream of perfection and reasoning about why it’s hard to recognize “wanting” as a bad thing.

When that magical ‘something’ happens, when suddenly the car is not just a car but “the car I want,” or when the individual is not just whoever they are but “the person I want.” In that moment and in all the moments that follow, a very significant part of what it is that we’re experiencing is the power of our own desire to create the illusion of perfection.

You see, when you want that car, when you really want that car but don’t yet have it and can only stand in front of the window and look at it, it’s not just a nice car — there’s something about that car that is magnetic. And in that magnetism is a promise — a promise of perfection. And it’s exactly the same kind of experience when the object of our wanting is another human being.

In the promise of perfection, when the wanting of that perfection is directed outward — to things, to people, to objects outside of our own selves — there is titillation, a thrill. This thrill is a psychophysical experience. It involves the mind and the senses. That’s part of what the fun is, part of the thrill of falling in love, part of the thrill of buying that car. That’s what is so exciting about it.

There is literally a psychophysical experience in the wanting itself. And this is why it’s almost impossible for the ego and personality to recognize the experience of wanting as a bad thing — because the experience of wanting in and of itself is so thrilling.

But our moments of greatest joy, our moments of deepest peace and happiness, were those when we actually wanted nothing, nothing at all, absolutely nothing from anyone or anything.

So if we want to be truly happy and we recognize that real happiness is found only in those times when we want absolutely nothing, then we must begin to question what our relationship to our own experience actually is.

-Andrew Cohen