Real Wishes and Their Governing Laws

“I make wishes; therefore, my wishes exist!”

Do our simple wishes have the qualities necessary to make this happen? To find out the answer, we need to look closely into our wishes and desires. All living human beings have wishes or desires. There is no one on earth who can claim she has no desire, beloved thing, or wish. From the lowest level of our existence, which is sense, to the highest level, which is the human heart, each level has its own particular wish or desire. Although things like food, beauty, ambition for position, gaining knowledge, and eternal life all belong to a different dimension of our being, all of them are wishes which share some similarities.

Desires and wishes are concepts that have been ingrained in us since we were born, but we simply take them for granted without paying attention to their essence. Five laws are drawn from our wish or desire for anything. In other words, when we desire something, five conditions for this desire have necessarily been met. In this article, we will explain the first requirement and feature of a desire.

 We Love Existence

Earlier we came to the conclusion that non-existence does not exist. That is, non-existence is only a linguistic convention, so we cannot desire it. Now, bearing this in mind, we will express the first feature of a desire:

• Seeking the absolute non-existent is impossible.

What does not exist cannot be our desire. Or in simple words, we cannot want something that does not exist because it has never existed to be desired.

For example, think about the long-held wish to fly, which has occupied human thought for ages, and the manifestation of this desire is evident in myths and stories. If the earth’s atmosphere was essentially such that no creature could fly in it, and we had not seen any bird or insect fly, we would not be able to desire it. So we cannot desire something that does not and cannot exist because the non-existent basically lacks meaning and perfection. Whatever we desire must have an existential effect or quality. So the first law of wishes says:

Desiring something is secondary to the existence of that thing.

Desiring something is real and meaningful. But if the desired thing does not exist, then desiring does not make sense. That is, if we have no knowledge of the existence of something or that thing does not exist at all, we will not have the desire to want it. We only love and desire things that exist. Based on logical reasoning, it is impossible to desire and wish for something that does not actually exist because non-existence does not exist to be desired.

Desiring, a Sign of Existence

Have you ever imagined a winged horse and dreamed of flying on this magical animal?

Where do such dreams come from?

According to what we stated, does such a desire imply the existence of a winged horse?

Or, for instance, do the talking tree, the mermaid, the sea monster, and thousands of other imaginary creatures, which are the creations of our thoughts, exist in the real world?

The answer to this question depends on knowing one characteristic of the mind. Our mind has the ability to combine. It means that we are able to put together different phenomena that we have seen and are familiar with and create a new phenomenon.

For example, the wings of birds are combined with the body of an animal like a horse, and a new creature is made in the form of a winged horse. Although the winged horse does not exist in the real world, both the horse and the bird are quite familiar to us.

The important thing to note about these imaginary wishes is that our ability to create such combinations only relies on the existence of the individual components. That is, we cannot imagine a being which does not exist at all or is not a combination of existing parts.

Desiring, a Confirmation of the Possibility of Existence

As we mentioned, according to the first law of wishes, the first requirement for wanting something is its existence. In the past, when a person would become tired of doing his daily chores, she wished for a device that could do all the work for her. She dreamed of something that could do the dishes, sweep the house, do the laundry, and so on. Now, all these real wishes have come true with the help of different machines.

Or when people in the past would grow tired of the slow movement of their animal-powered transportation or frequent rest stops during their journeys, they would wish for an animal that could run as fast as the fastest horses without getting tired at all. That is exactly what a four-wheeled vehicle, called an automobile, does for us today.

Perhaps two centuries ago, hearing the voice of a loved one from a distance was more like a dream. A dream that eventually came true with the invention of the telephone. People would wait for months to receive a picture of their loved ones, but now it is even possible to see the live images of them from every corner of the world.

Having these wishes proved that inventing such devices was possible. For example, the long-standing dream of flying in the sky confirmed the possibility of the existence of lightweight metal and suitable fuel to make this wish come true.

In this article, we explained that every desire and wish has some preconditions, and the first law of wishes says that our desired thing exists. We went on to state how people made up imaginary creatures, and we went through several examples of long-held human wishes that eventually came true.

Now that we have become familiar with the first law of wishes, we would better read about the second law of wishes in the article, “The Harmony between Human Beings and Their Wishes.”