Why do we have lives filled with turmoil, desperation and anxiety? Why are we always pushing ourselves and others? Why do we have only small dribbles of peace, love and happiness? Why is it that human beings are characterized by bickering and turmoil that make animals’ relationships with their own species seem peaceful in comparison? The answer is so simple — but it is sometimes difficult for us to really understand because almost every way we were taught to work toward happiness only reinforces the feelings and activities that make us unhappy.
This is a central point that must be understood. The ways we were taught to be happy can’t possibly work. Unless we see this point clearly, we cannot progress to higher consciousness. Here’s why.
Most of us assume that our desires (backed up by our emotional feelings) are the true guides to doing the things that will make us happy. But no one has yet found happiness by using emotion-backed desires as guides. Flashes of pleasure, yes; happiness, no. Our wants and desires are so seductive… They masquerade as needs that must be satisfied so we can be happy at last. They lead us from one illusion of happiness to another. Some of us tell ourselves, If I can just get to be president of this corporation, I will be happy. But have you ever seen a really happy president? His outside drama may feature beautiful yachts, Cadillacs, Playboy bunnies — but is he really happy inside? Has his ulcer gone away yet?
We constantly tell ourselves such things as, If I could just go Lack to school and acquire more knowledge — perhaps get a Master’s degree — then I will be happy. But are people with Master’s degrees or PhDs any happier than the rest of us? It is beautiful to acquire knowledge but it is misleading to expect it to bring us peace, love and happiness. We tell ourselves, If I could only find the right person to love, then I would be happy. So we search for someone who our addictions tell us is the right person — and we experience some pleasurable moments. But since we don’t know how to love, the relationship gradually deteriorates. Then we decide we didn’t have the right person after all! As we grow into higher consciousness, we discover that it is more important to be the right person than to find the right person.
We must deeply understand why all of our negative emotions are misleading guides to effective action in life situations. Our negative emotions are simply the result of an extensive pattern of scars and wounds that we have experienced. And these emotional wounds lead us to perceive differences that make us uptight instead of similarities that enable us to understand and love. The present programming of our emotions makes us perceive other people (and the conditions of the world around us) as threats — potentially dangerous to our well-being. We then respond with adrenalin, faster heart beat, increased blood sugar and other jungle survival responses that prepare us for fight or flight. We are trapped in our ways of perceiving the world around us.
But no one (or no situation) need be felt as an emotional threat or danger when we see things with the clearer perception of higher consciousness. Think of the most threatening situation you have felt In the last day or two. Are you about to lose your job? Is the person for whom you feel the most love paying more attention to someone else than to you? Do you have unpaid bills that you cannot take care of? Do you have a pain that could be cancer? Now, these problems either have solutions — or they don’t. Either you can do something about them here and now — or you can’t. If you can do something here and now about them, then do it — even if it’s just a first step. It saps your energy to be worried or anxious about a problem. Do what you can do — but don’t be addicted to the results or you will create more worry for yourself. If you can’t do anything about a problem here and now, then why make yourself uncomfortable and drain your energy by worrying about it? It is part of the here and nowness of your life. That’s what is — here and now. Worry, anxiety, or other unpleasant emotions are absolutely unnecessary — and simply lower your insight and the effectiveness of your actions.
You must absolutely convince yourself of the lack of utility of these draining emotions. You must see your unnecessary worrying as depriving you of the flowing effectiveness and joyousness that you should have in your life. As long as you think that these negative emotions have any function whatsoever, you will retard your growth into higher consciousness. If you do not hassle yourself emotionally when the outside world does not conform with your inside programming (your desires, expectations, demands, or models of how the world should treat you) you will have so much energy that you probably will sleep fifty per cent less. You will be joyous and loving and really appreciate each moment of your life — no matter what’s happening in the world of people and situations outside you. Where and how did we get this emotional programming? Almost all of it was acquired in the first few years of life. For example, when we were very young, we had the experience of mother forcefully taking a perfume bottle from our tiny fingers and at the same time sending out bad vibrations based on her desire not to have her perfume bottle broken. We cried. Through being painfully pushed around, dominated, told what to do and controlled when we were babies, we developed our emotionally intense security, sensation and power programs. Many of our emotion-backed programs came from repeated moral directives or statements about how things should be. We developed a self consciousness with robot-like emotional responses to protect the survival of this separate self. So we become emotionally programmed to feel that we must have power to control and manipulate people in order to be happy. We eventually become very finely attuned to the actions or vibrations of any person or situation that even remotely threatens our power addictions — our ability to manipulate and control people and things around us.
As we reach physical maturity and our biocomputer (or brain) is able to function more perceptively, we have all the power we need. But our biocomputer (backed up by the full repertory of our emotions) is still programmed to compensate for the power deficiency we experienced when we were infants and young children. We now need to learn to flow with the people and things around us. But our power addiction keeps us from loving people because we perceive them as objects that may threaten our power, prestige, or pecking order. If we want to love and be loved, we can’t be addicted to power — or to anything else. As conscious beings the only thing we need to find happiness in life is to perceive clearly who we are (we are pure consciousness and not the social rôle s we are acting out) and exactly what are the real conditions, here and now, of our lives. How basically simple is our problem! But to achieve this clear perception of ourselves and the world around us takes constant inner work. And this means developing the habit of emotionally accepting whatever is here and now in our lives. For only an emotionally calm biocomputer can see clearly and wisely and come up with effective ways to interact with people and situations.
Our power addiction is only one example of the happiness-destroying programming that we put into our biocomputers when we were too young to perceive the realities of the world in which we lived. Although we now have the basic capacity for clear perception, the operating instructions we gave our biocomputer anchor us to the lower levels. And so we’re unconsciously trapped. Here and now is the reality in our lives — and it is only from the conditions of the present that our future can be generated. But our present addictions, demands and expectations (the programming of our biocomputer) dominate our consciousness and force us to spend most of the time we are awake (and most of the time we are dreaming) in protesting and pouting about the here and now situation in our lives. This lowers our perceptiveness and keeps us from finding effective solutions to our problems. The Living Love Way to Higher Consciousness shows us how to break through this trap, to bee ourselves and to find our full potential as human beings.
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