Confrontation that leads to psychological freedom

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

Unachievable. That sounds a contradictory title for a book about getting whatever we want.

We’ll hear it many times throughout this book. Unachievable Wants are a dead end. A brick wall. These wants prevent the experience of what is wanted from ever being achieved. Unachievable applies to any want that aims to secure or avoid a particular experience of being ourself. These wants are Unachievable because, no matter how much it looks like it, the separate entity that the mind creates is not what we are. It feels awful to be told it. We have spent our whole lives either consciously or subconsciously trying to get those wants met. Only to now be reading a book that says ‘Stop wasting time, effort, attention, money and energy with that’.

The mind may have spent years, decades even locked into this mission. It might have been surrounded by aspirational advertising, programming and stories that say, ‘One day you will be rich, successful, popular, beautiful, productive, fit, healthy, loved and respected enough that you will never again experience stress, isolation or insecurity’. Every experience might have been judged on whether the self-Identity is validated or undermined.

It might have looked like the only purpose of life is to control the experience of being – to be happy, peaceful and free without questioning exactly what that experience is and where it comes from. Finding wholeness from an unexamined conviction of separation is a futile quest. Any attempt to secure the Identity is not just Unachievable but is always hiding the fact that what is being looked for is here already. It can be very confronting to be faced with the truth: there is no possibility of finding wholeness in separation.

Confronting, perhaps. But ultimately freedom