0 steps to happiness
I came across the following quote on facebook recently.
“Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions.” ~ Dalai Lama
And whilst that resonated with a lot of people, because they really get that happiness has a relationship with how we act in life and towards people there’s a fundamental error in the quote which is this…
The quote presupposes that happiness is caused by taking the right actions, doing the right things and in taking them somehow getting happiness and whilst that’s sounds like a good idea on how to get to Happiness it’s completely backwards.
From NLP we learn that whatever action you take re-enforces what you have now. So if you feel lacking happiness, and you take action to get happiness, the result is reenforcing the lack of happiness and kicking happiness one step further away with each step you take. Which is why the “Think happy thoughts to be happy” strategy (aka positive thinking, aka more action to take) rarely works, because the ‘fully-aliveness’ isn’t there to support the strategy.
Under pinning all of experience, 100% of the time, the actions that we take are the result of the feelings and/or emotions we’re experiencing moment to moment. And those feelings and/or emotions are a direct result of what we’re thinking moment to moment. A natural expression of being alive in a human body is always accompanied with feelings of Love, Wellbeing, Happiness, Joy, Fun & Connection. And what tends to happen, and why people don’t experience that is because when we’re growing up, most of us, we’re conditioned not to feel fully alive, that it’s bad and that in some way we have to reduce the fullness of ourselves so that we can fit in and/or feel safe with the people around us, and/or make the people around less uncomfortable in our presence and a whole host of other reasons and because at a young age our physiology is hard-wired to keep us safe, and living in the fullest of the expression of ourselves often got us told off, we stopped doing it.
And having said that there’s nothing we have to practice to experience Happiness because it’s a natural expression of being human and when we let go of all the conditioned thinking we’ve been brought up with Happiness emanates from our very being-ness and that “frown turns upside down”… on it’s own, without having to do anything.
Impersonal Mind
The formless energy behind life, the source of love, joy, wellbeing, happiness and innate health.
Personal Mind
The mind we use to create our experience of reality. The formless gift to create any thought and have it look and feel real. We can create happy thoughts or sad thoughts, we create 100% of our experience using our Personal Mind.
Consciousness
Our innate ability to be aware and conscious and to have an experience.
Human Brain
The physical interface between the formless and the form. The physical device that consciousness perceives through. The CPU that runs the software of the personal mind using the formless energy of the impersonal mind to power it.
Identity
On the surface, moment to moment, I am a buoyant ball bobbing up and down on the sea, of whatever context sensitive experience I’m in, whether it’s happiness, sadness, love, anger, upset, joy, bliss, all an expression of that moment worts and all.
And underpinning all of that, who I am 100% of the time, is the sea that supports the floating ball and the tide that flows below the surface. The creator and creation. The flowing tide of the universe, the formless energy that creates atoms, molecules, cells and bodies moment to moment.
Detection
Whenever I’m unhappy, it’s because I’m running some mind software that’s creating an experience that’s lacking “the fullness of life”. It’s a lie, a myth, a superstition because “the fullness of life” is what I’m made of. Every cell in my body is powered by the formless energy of the Impersonal Mind, and the only reason my experience is other than that is because I have personal thinking that says otherwise.
Resolution
There’s nothing to do, ever.
Simply noticing that a mind virus is running, that there’s some thinking that’s been going on under the radar until now is enough to shift it because once a person has a deep understanding that they’re made of the fabric of space and time, and that their happiness comes from that all lies that say otherwise simply fall away.
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Becky York
Mentor & Coach
Psych-K® Advanced Facilitator
Institute For Conscious Living 
Thanks for the explanation!
Thanks for that Eckhart video. The woman interviewing him has put forth a very interesting question: “what would have happened if everyone had surrendered, would we have electricity?” It does seem that whatever progress we made was possible because people worked hard to change their circumstances. On a broad societal level, wouldn’t we have stagnated if we were in a bliss to start with? Most of the civilizations that lived in harmony, and contentment with their circumstances became extinct or got subjugated by other aggressive peoples. I am not sure if it is alright to say that the subjugation/extinction is also a mere interpretation.
Thank you for your comment, as with all things we expand through experience and learning. And those that have expired have done so without embracing the new opportunities in front of them. As for those that have surrendered, to be completely surrendered is not complacency as it may be interpreted instead it is a blissful state of unlimited potential of creativity. We cannot compare the past to the future as the energies and consciousness that exist now did not exist as prevalently as they did then. As with all things in this world, there is a time and place for everything, and what has past has led us to where we are now. The human race is on the brink of a expansion into unified creative potential, it’s just a matter of time. and there maybe some upset between now and then, however looking around at the leaders of communities (and I’m not talking politics) the change is inevitable and any additional chaos is going to be met with a strong desire for freedom and harmony.
I think I understand what you are saying here. However I am not sure if I completely agree with your position that there is nothing ever to be done. While it is true that deep rooted happiness comes from within, aren’t there some situations that are more amenable to making someone happy, compared to some other not so pleasant ones? Don’t you agree that it is more easy for someone to be happy when one is doing something that she loves, than being stuck doing something she hates? In such situations, isn’t it desirable for one to change what one is doing?
Like/dislike is a judgement created by thought. I’ve been software developing since I was 15 years, and in 2009 I found out about consciousness, personal development, coaching etc and my mind decided that it wanted to jump on the bandwagon, change career and start coaching people. In that moment it made a decision that software development was bad, that I no longer liked it because coaching was going to be my new career and that was where I was going to put all my energy. And, through that decision I became very very upset at the universe for keeping me in my software job when I knew that I could be an amazing coach and teaching people really neat things about consciousness and how to use it. That unhappiness persisted until march 2010 until someone had the courage to call me on being miserable all the time – and then I deeply saw that I’d made it all up, that I’d been creating thought to make my circumstances look awful and then had been feeling awful as a result; and when I saw that’s I’d been doing that with my thinking it shifted and now I’m doing the same job with as much peace and happiness as I can physically handle. Now if someone is being repeatedly beaten or other bad circumstances, it might seem that the thing to do is to get out of the circumstances – but have you ever talked to someone in those circumstances; excuses, backed up by reasons, backed up by judgements. And until they deeply see that it’s their thinking that’s keeping them in the circumstances, or the pain becomes to great to rationalise away, whichever is first, they’ll stick around. And what I’m pointing to is, once someone deeply sees that it’s their thinking that’s causing their unhappiness with awareness that they can think anything at all their mind shifts and new action is an automatic response to the new thinking. The only ‘thing to do’ is get an understanding how the inside-out nature of experience is generated, what it’s made of and what you are – once you feel that in your experience everything else shifts effortlessly.
Just after I posted my reply, a friend directed me to this video by Eckhart in which he essentially says the same thing differently.
https://www.youtube.com/v/HPBfwUImeHc?version=3
Thanks for a detailed answer, and your own personal story. It does add a lot of perspective when one speaks from one’s own experience. Was your transformation instantaneous?
From my own little experience, it seems, it is possible to get into that state that says “all the circumstances are extraneous, and hence don’t affect one’s internal happiness”. But stepping into that place is a conscious decision; it does take effort. How does one learn to stay in that heightened state of awareness continuously?
The heightened state of awareness comes when the universal energy having the human experience though consciousness and thought remembers what it is.
From the perspective of the personal mind, the thought created identity created from rules, boundaries, ideas, beliefs, etc – attention is “mine” to be directed where I want.
And what’s forgotten in that is that attention belongs to the formless energy that conscious awareness and thought are created from. And in it remembering itself, having been lost in thought for so long, it is able to put it’s attention elsewhere, in the body, in the sound of bird song, on the shade of green that is grass, on the feeling of silk against the skin and in these moments when it remembers a life without thinking it can spontaneously turn it’s attention on itself and remember the fullness of life.
And when I say it, I really mean you; the purest you that exists before conscious experience of thought. The you that exists before you’re altered, modified and forgotten by thought. And in remembrance of yourself and the realisation that awareness and attention belong to you, not the mind it takes no effort at all to drop out of the illusion of mental identity, and through experience of that creates stability.
For me it has been a gradual unfolding and remembering of me, as universal mind through conscious thought created experience and what helps it to deepen when attention falls into the personal mind again, is an understanding of how experience is created, where it comes from, what it’s made of and who it belongs to. For others, the transformation is instantaneous and irreversible.
I’ve made a visual representation of the difference between the personal mind experience and the impersonal mind experience.