Perhaps understanding the requirement for misery and being honest about our lives is, ironically, the only way to unearth happiness? I fell for it all. For decades I adopted countless self-help books’ advice and followed guru’s instructions religiously. I thought positively every morning, downloaded goal setting Apps, wrote diaries, smiled in mirrors, and said out loud, ‘I am really happy today’. I forced the happiness lie at every opportunity and faked the ineffective smile across my reluctant lips.
But why do we say it’s fine when it’s not? Perhaps we were not positive or grateful enough? Perhaps I didn’t recite mantras for sufficient time; is 25 years not enough? Perhaps writing three diaries and my journaling of millions of words and writing more books did not provide the key to unlock my abundance?
As if by magic; think positive, cosmic order it, be grateful, imagine, decide, focus, act, practice mindfulness, land your grades, wake up early, make intentions, stay fit, do that hobby, eat the right stuff, nail the interview, sleep by 10pm, don’t drink and make your bed every morning. It will be fine.
Caught in a trap?
But the more I announced that I was happy and grateful, the more miserable I became. What happened to honesty and realism? Is not the fundamental ingredient to happiness listening to your honesty haunting you from within?
Could it all be a giant con? We must be broken so we buy more self-help books, take more drugs, gold down more false foods to fix what we believe to be malfunctioning. But what if we are not broken at all? What if we are deliberately told we need help all the time (we are mere humans after all) and brainwashed.
Does not self help create the illusion that we constantly need fixing and therefor, for as long as we claim to read and need self-help doctrines, false foods and medicines, we will always need fixing and be caught in the loop? We will never recover from a malady that never existed.
Just for once, we can wake up and see we are not broken at all. Nor is the system.
Yet.
I believe we are in an arena that is working brilliantly and functioning very well, designed to break us, make us feel inactive, drained, broke and miserable. And then we are told to be grateful about it! Well, I found happiness when I stopped being grateful for things that were, I believe, to be ruses to make me think I am happy. But only ever on the surface. That’s a lie. That’s not real.
Happiness, I believe is found in acquiring this knowledge and understanding there is an active, well-rehearsed science in the creation of misery. Freedom is knowing that it was never us that needed fixing. But the world does.
We are born with all the tools to be happy and taught all the tools to be sad. Happiness then, is the process of extraction as opposed to immersion.
And education is the process of unlearning. Wisdom is remembering.
Being realistic, alert and full of expressed, once previously ignored emotions, does work. More than ever before, THE WORLD NEEDS CHANGE, right now, so who’s going to change it ?
And when this change rises, which it will, then I must say; I really will be truly happy.
En