You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You get what you need
Just like you, I sang those lyrics on more than one drunken (and sober) evening. They are compelling and seem to reflect almost everyone’s experience. You can’t always get what you want.
But is that true? On more than one occasion, I’ve run across a spiritual teacher or guru saying something completely opposite to this bit of Rolling Stone wisdom. Something along these lines:
“Everything that happens to you is exactly what you want. But only in retrospect, after one has experienced some sense of awakening, do you actually see that this is true.”
In a certain sense, I had suspected on some level that it is true. But last night, for the first time, I knew it to be true. When it hit me, I was floored. “I’ll be damned,” I said. I won’t go into the details, but it was something that I swore I wanted, something I thought I knew that I wanted, without any question. And when I finally saw the truth, when clarity dawned, I knew that the reason that this thing was NOT in my life was because I didn’t want it. I was shocked, but I knew it was true.
And then I saw it: yep, everything in my life is exactly as I want it to be. If you could dissect the entire energetic pattern of Tom Stine, probing through every piece of mental and emotional “stuff,” you would find that the sum total of my life is a 100% direct reflection of that mental and emotional stuff. Amazing, really.
Now, I know for certain that many, if not most of you, will object to this assertion. You are already forming counter arguments about concentration camp victims, earthquakes and other natural disasters, child abuse, etc. The mind immediately wants to protest and lash out and say, “No way, impossible!” Well, I don’t blame it, because to see the truth of this is kind of devastating to the mind and its arguments. I wish I could give it something comforting, and some good answers, but I can’t.
I’ll leave you, though, with something to consider before you get too bent out of shape. And it is this: if it is true that your life is an exact reflection of your desires, and everything is exactly what you want, then investigate the following questions:
1. Who is it that is doing the desiring?
2. What gave rise to the desires in the first place? From whence did they come?
Find the answers to these 2 questions, and you will laugh the next time you hear the Stones singing, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
Namaste.
