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Re: .0
I never read the "Handbook to Higher Consciousness", but experienced
everything this passage describes about three years ago. It brings back
both painful and fond memories. The "here and now" is very important
to me and I learned that if I didn't take care of myself, no one
would - so I *had* to accept responsibility for myself.
I also learned how to share myself with others, especially the ones
that I love the most, without baring my soul completely. I had
to keep *something* for myself. :-)
And I learned that just because I put myself first with me, that
that didn't make me a bad person or even necessarily selfish. It's
hard to love someone who doesn't love him/herself.
Most of all, I learned that there really are people who understand
what I went through, others who were going through the same thing,
others who had already been there.
Thank you for sharing this. :-)
***Carol***
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The Theory Of Happiness
1. The Problem. Most people are trapped in patterns of consciousness
that results in widespread unhappiness, alienation, fears, continuous conflict,
etc. Instead of realizing the "horn of plenty" that life offers us, our
programming creates lives characterized by tension and a low level of enjoyment.
The way we currently process, interpret, percieve and act upon incoming stimuli
is responsible for our inability to be happy 100% of the time. We are all
beautiful beings, but our lower consciousness levels; security, sensation and
power programming cause *us* to make ourselves unhappy.
2. Basic Principle. Happiness varies inversely with one's addictions.
Addictions are nothing more than programmed expectations, demands, "absolutes",
desires or models of how the world should be. These automatically trigger
negative emotions such as anger, fear, jealousy, anxiety, irratation,
resentment, grief, hate, etc. Every addiction makes one vulnerable to suffering.
When one understands how the experience of happiness and unhappiness are
generated, it becomes evident that all unhappiness is due to addictive models
that determine our perception and motivation. Even physical pain does not
produce unhappiness unless one has an addiction to being free from pain! It
is the addiction, not the pain, that generates the suffering.
3. The predicament of life. The changing stream of life in which
we live satisfies some addicitions and leaves others unsatisfied. In other
words, we seem to win some and lose some. Even when we win, we then unwittingly
create another addictive demand that must be lived out in an automatic manner.
We usually attempt to change our win/loss odds through more money, knowledge,
prestige or power. These lines of endevor never make *enough* change in the
win/lose pattern to produce a high level enjoyment of life. Our expectations
and demands continue to dominate our consciousness and create an unsatisfactory
experience of life as long as we have any addictive programming.
4. A Dilemma. Unsatisfied addicitions dominate our consciousness, make
us unable to love unconditionally, keep our rational mind churning, lead our
consciousness into "futuring and pasting" instead of enjoying the here and now,
and make us trigger negative emotions in an attempt to manipulate the people
in the world around us. These unfulfilled addictive demands produce the
experience of suffering and unhappiness. The addicitions we satisfy give us
only brief pleasure. That which satisfies an addiction soon tends to form a new
addicition that our nervous system indiscriminately protects and enhances.
Regardless of whether or not we get what we want, we are still vulnerable to
fear, grief or anger that can generate the experience of unhappiness.
5. The Unworkable Solution. Over 99% of the people in the world today
are stuck with programming that usually operates by blaming the outside world
for any problems they experience. We organize our perceptions and energies into
trying to make our lives work by a programming that is ultra efficient at
comparing the outside world with our inner addictive models - thus triggering
"emergency alarms" of anger, fear, grief, frustration, or jealousy when they
do not correspond. When we operate from lower consciousness levels, we trigger
emotions that generate forceful actions in an attempt to change outside world
conditions so that they do correspond with our security, sensation and power
addictions. The result is an oscillation between pleasure and pain while we
meanwhile maintain a social veneer of politeness, diplomacy and a shallow
degree of warmth and love. Conscious people *always* have a choice of whether
to try to modify the actions of people around them or to change their responses
to incoming stimuli.
6. The way to Happiness. The practical solution to the problem of
continuously enjoying our lives is to re-train our highly programmed
biocomputers so that the first response to a life situation is to harmonize
ourselves with the outside world instead of trying to force the outside world
to fit our inner patterns of belief. Unconditionally loving communication will
usually permit adjustments to occur that we need for this harmonization. Every
addiction leaves us vulnerable, upleveling them to "preferances" enable us to
continually enjoy life. When our minds operate from preferential programming,
our happiness is not affected - regardless of whether the outside world fits
our preferences or not. This permits us to remain centered at all times, to
love unconditionally, to avoid subject-object manipulation, to feel secure
and invulnerable, to increase our insight and perceptiveness and to feel at
home anywhere in the world.
When our minds are retrained to interact with the outside world in
these ways, we find that life gives us the optimum in security, sensations,
power and love. This does far more than enable a person to "passively adjust"
to the here and now of their life; it can be a dynamic system for retraining
one's consciousness to live an effective life that is continously enjoyable.
(rewritten from "Handbook to Higher Consciousness" By Ken Keyes, Jr)
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