"What do I really want, right now?"

That's a deceptively easy question I'm trying to tackle. Not in the sense of what I want in five years time (that's easy), but what the psyche actually wants at any given moment.

"That's stupid, of course I know what I want from what I feel," you say. To which I say what you think you want are most probably memetic, in that you've picked them up from somebody else. No idea you can possess is actually original.

What you truly want is buried deep inside. If you've got direct random read/write access to that, I'd like to learn it from you.

To that end I'm establishing some relationship with the Jungian idea of the inner child. The idea being that the inner child is the one that knows what you truly want.

Conceptually I think of the inner child as a direct mapping to Lover in King Warrior Magician Lover.

Having a conversation with the inner child isn't as straightforward as a socratic discussion with yourself. I thought I could conjure him via active-imagination, simply ask him what he want and he'll just tell me. That may work for shadow-work but not here. The inner child doesn't have the language to express it.

Even if he does, there's the danger of rationality getting in the way. Desires do not confine themselves to logic, therefore the language of logic is ill-equipped to carry the message. Like Niels Bohr said: "You're not thinking, you're just being logical."

Honest answers from inner child can only be acquired through the body. In that body heat, heart rate, depth of breath, itch, etc. are all signals used by the inner child to form his expressions.

For instance when my fingers get fidgetty it tends to want to scratch if even I'm not itchy. The inner child is calling out for something but I can't figure what that is. I'm not surprised if I learn one day that he really just want to eat, or something unrelated to fingers altogether.

Reading body signals is easier said than done, especially when I've learned to tune them out too much over decades. Price one pays for some grit.

I have no reliable way to mapping body signals to the right answer other than trial and error. It feels like learning a whole new language that's known by only one person.