What God Wants
Edited from the Gold Coast Talk 31 July 1993
Irrespective of what you believe in, no bible knows the truth about God or life. Bibles and religions are for the unenlightened. An enlightened being is a very simple being. To be enlightened is to know what God wants, to know now, without reference to anyone or any thing. What does God or life want of you now? Can you apply that in your life? What does God want of you now? You must give up your petty little wants.
What do you want? Peace? The human race is always looking for some ideal peace or happiness. Peace has to be an ideal, doesn’t it? The whole world’s been looking for peace for … How long? There’s more wars on the earth now than ever. An ideal is something you’re trying to find. And you’ll never find an ideal. There is no ideal that is true, ever.
What do you really want? You’ve got to be specific. You’ve got to say what you want in the world, in human experience. You can’t want God. That’s religious nonsense. You can’t want love. It’s impossible to want God or love. You’ve got to get rid of what’s in the way of God or love. The wanting is in the way.
Where I come from, God wants me to be free of unhappiness so that I can enjoy my life. But if I want anything, that want will get in the way of the enjoyment of my life because I will be looking to the future instead of enjoying it now. It is God’s or life’s pleasure to provide everything that I need now.
Can you show me anything in this moment that is not provided now? Everything you want now is already provided. Enough air? Is anybody taking your money, anybody imposing on your love? Everything now is provided. So why do you get unhappy? Because you start to want something.
Your whole life is spent doing what you do. When a want arises, that’s a reflection in your self of an alternative to what you’re doing now. You have to look and see in your experience: ‘Is that what God wants?’
God wants you to be free from unhappiness; for you to enjoy your life. Anything that contributes towards the enjoyment of life as a whole (and not as some temporary excitement that only contributes to the wanting) is what God wants. What you want is to be free of your own wanting.
Put your life into the context of the whole. A spiritual man or woman will always put God or life first in every situation - to be free of unhappiness so that you might enjoy life more and more. You always put that first and if you don’t, you will suffer. You have to want life and love and God and truth and peace enough to die for it; to always put that before every other consideration.
‘What will I die for? What do I truly want?’ Do I want to be free of unhappiness enough? Or do I want some temporary happiness, such as a drug? Do I want to believe in a bible or Christ or to follow and believe in someone else? If you put anything before being free of unhappiness, then you will be unhappy.
You do not want for anything at this moment. But what’s going to happen if you start to get unhappy? You’ll be wanting something, or you’ll think you’re missing out. So when an event presents itself in front of you, bearing in mind that God or life wants you to be free of unhappiness, address it: ‘What does God want of me in this situation?’ Can you address it so that it does not make you unhappy? That’s the question; because that would be God’s pleasure.
If we are having an argument, what are we arguing about? It’s making you unhappy and it is making me unhappy. That can’t be God’s will. We usually want to go into how hurt I am with you and how hurt you are with me. That’s self-consideration: ‘How hurt I am.’ Do not go into that. It’s selfishness to be interested in how hurt I am instead of finding out what the heck am I hurt about! I want something for my self, for my hurt. I am expecting you to save me from my hurt, take it from me - and both of us are doing that - unless we insist on saying, ‘I want to know what we’re arguing about’. And as soon as you find out, you’ll find the awful truth: Somebody wants something that the other doesn’t want.
Nobody really wants to be unhappy, not in the conscious part of us, where we see the trees and the birds. But just down inside our bodies, in the sub-conscious, is the self. And that determines most of our wants. We’ve got to be very careful that the self does not put itself on the situation with our partner, or job, or anything. It’s in the dark down there, in the subconscious, hidden, and we think everything’s fine up here, but down inside everybody is this fluid stuff of self, emotion, and it’s determining what’s going to happen tonight at home - whether you and I are going to argue.
If you want to keep your individual ‘wants’ in your partnership then you’re in conflict. For partnership has to be an action of love, surely? And love is union. If you’re not prepared to come together in union, both wanting the same thing, then you’re doomed to argument and unhappiness.
How can two people want the same thing? Quite simply: 'I want what God or life wants’. For me that is to be free of unhappiness. So in every situation with my partner, that’s what I address. Why am I unhappy with the situation? I address that. Not the fact that I am unhappy but what will I do to find some release? I must find the truth.
I Go Into Me