Mass Density

A woman was doing some research on Happiness for a school project and had a few questions for me. I typed up the answers to her questions on happiness and thought I would post them here.

What is your definition of happiness?

Happiness is a state of emotion. Happiness can be experienced in many different variations such as euphoric laughter, the spiritual bliss of overwhelming love, or just a calm quiet peace. One indicator of happiness is how little chatter there is in your internal dialog. In the happiest moments of your life, you are not thinking. You might have been keenly aware of what was going on with your self, or fully engaged in the situation around you, but your mind was probably very quiet.

What are some important factors in achieving happiness? Why?

The most important factor in achieving happiness is the expression of your love coming out of you. It is expressing the emotion of love that creates the various forms of happiness. That’s a very simple answer, and very natural to do as a child, but as one grows older it becomes more difficult. As people grow older they acquire many fear based beliefs in their mind.

If you are not happy, and you want to be, then the important thing is to identify and dissolve the fear based beliefs in your mind. This is not a one step process. It will require that you develop and practice skills of identifying false beliefs in your mind, and detaching from them. Once you detach from your fears it will be easier to express your love. One of the skills you will need to do this is the control over your attention. Some people learn this from meditation, but there are many other ways.

Do you believe that money can buy happiness? Why or why not?

Money can buy a very basic level of happiness. In this society money is the means for your basic physical needs, such as food and shelter. It is very difficult to be happy, peaceful, and calm when your body is hungry, and without shelter. It is possible but very difficult. There is usually too much primal and instinctual survival fear to overcome in order to be happy.

Once you have enough money to address your basic needs, then money has very little impact on your happiness. That is why many people are still unhappy even though they have everything they need. There are many wealthy and even successful people who are depressed, some even to the point of being suicidal.

After supplying you with basic survival, money doesn’t dissolve any of the fear based beliefs in the mind that interfere with expressing love.

If you were given $500,000 dollars to spend on ANYTHING to make you happy, what would be the most effective choice to use the money on? Why?

The love coming out of me is independent of the activity of trading cash for material things. I’m already happy. Spending money wouldn’t do anything for my happiness. I’d much rather invest it. I have everything that I need. If I invest it wisely I will have what I need for a rainy day as well.

How would you spend the $500,000 if it were entirely up to you? (Regardless of how your happiness would benefit?) Why?

Again, I would invest the money. If you told me that I had to spend it, I would buy stocks or real estate.

If it does, what role does religion (having faith in a God) play in achieving happiness?

If you perceive yourself as one single human in the world and look out at the immensity and the apparent chaos of the world, you can easily feel overwhelmed and powerless. There’s a comfort in believing that there’s a force out there orchestrating it all in a sensible way. This is just one way.

What does having a religion benefit in terms of self happiness? What does it take away?

Religion or spiritual groups can be very supportive for people when they are in need. A community of people is our human nature and we are generally happier interacting with a community. Churches and religions can provide this community that much of society is without.

Religion also impacts people in other ways. One of the dynamics of the mind is that it asks a lot of questions. The mind wants to know an answer all the esoteric questions that it generates, such as, Why are we here? or What happens when the body dies? Religions provide people answers to the many questions that the mind asks. When the mind has an answer its’ “need to know” is satisfied. This satisfaction of the mind can help a person to feel better. However the part of the mind that has a “need to know”, doesn’t care if the answer is the truth or not. Because of this many people accept answers and walk around with religious beliefs that are false.

For instance one of the beliefs that people can have is that God might punish them in Hell after their body dies. This is a lie. If people believe this lie, then they live in fear and unhappiness their whole life for something that will never happen. In spite of this fear, their mind feels secure that it knows what will happen. The real comfort from all of this is the Truth and Love. Truth and Love transcend that mind’s need to have an answer.

Do you believe religious people are generally happier (or unhappier) than non-religious people? Why or why not?

Studies have shown that people who participate in a religious organization are statistically happier than those who don’t have any spiritual affiliation. One of the reasons for this is that it creates an environment where they can express their love in numerous ways. It is the expression of love that creates happiness for a person, not the religion. A person without religion can take a walk in nature and love all the beauty in nature. Just by walking in nature they can achieve happiness with no beliefs at all.

If it does, what role does having healthy relationships (friends, family, coworkers) play in achieving happiness?

The more people you have around you that you can express your love to the happier you are. Your friends and your family won’t make you happy, but expressing your love for them will. If you are an judgmental and angry person then having more people around will give you more opportunities to be judgmental and angry. It’s really not about the people around you, but how you express your self with them.

What is the ideal background/environment to grow up in to being a happier person in the future?

The ideal environment is to grow up in an environment where your parents are happy, unconditionally loving, and accepting. Even then, they will still have to give you boundaries and teach you about punishment and reward. Very few people have this experience. Even if you have this from one parent it is very rare. I haven’t met anyone who has had that perfect childhood. The truth is that at a certain point you realize it doesn’t really matter how you grew up. What matters is right now, and what you will do about being happy in your life now. At a certain point everyone leaves behind the guidance of parents and has to take responsibility for their own emotions.

What is your view on married couples being happier than people who are single? In a general sense, do you believe it is true or false? Why?

The studies have proven that married people are statistically happier than single people. However this is a general statistic and marriage is no guarantee. The Dalai Llama is a single man, and he is a master of happiness. There are also married couples who then get divorced, and that break up can be very painful.

In intimate relationships you have an opportunity to express your love in so many ways. It is the expression of your love for your partner that will make you happy. A single person might not have as many opportunities during a regular day, so a married person that you love and see often is a big advantage to being happy.

However a person can also use their relationship as an opportunity to be selfish. They will attempt to get their partner to satisfy their emotional needs and needs for attention. If you are with a partner like this then you might be happier being single.

Clarification - The Happiness of Children

The point here is that there is no magic formula for happiness. These questions about marriage, money, religion, and God assume a relationship between your emotions and something other than your self. The questions assume that happiness is associated with something external to you. It’s not that complicated. Emotions are something that you create. It only looks like your emotions are determined by external things because of the habits of emotional reactions you have learned to external things and people.

Children don’t know about God, religion, money, or marriage, however children are naturally happy. They are happy because their mind is not filled with fear based beliefs. They have little or no judgments, they don’t believe they are right, they don’t blame others, and their mind isn’t filled with worries of what others will think of them. They have very few or no habits based on these beliefs. Because their mind has very little fear they are free to express their love in whatever they are doing. For them it is easy to be happy. They don’t need money, but they do need their physical needs met. They don’t need marriage, or a religious group, but they do need someone to express their love to.

Wisdom and Awareness for Lasting Happiness

As an adult, if you really want to be happy, you will have to dissolve the fears, and fear based beliefs in your mind. As adults you do not have the choice to be innocent like children, but you can be free of fear. To do this you will have to control the opinions and knowledge in your mind instead of letting it control you. To free your self from fear, you will have to become wise. It is through this wisdom, or what I call awareness, that you can live in a vast, unfathomable world, and be happy.

What got you interested in studying happiness and your journey? What made you want to share your knowledge?

Being happy became my number one priority in 1994. I had just broken up with my girlfriend and was miserable. I had also just left my career where I had been overworked and was burned out. My career and relationship had left me disillusioned. I realized that I had made my happiness dependent on these two external sources. I let both of these sources be driven by other people, and they drove them into misery.

I decided that I wanted to be happy no matter what. It became my number one priority. I decided that I would figure out what was in my unconscious decision making process led me to be unhappy and I’d change it no matter what. Two weeks later I met my mentor, don Miguel Ruiz. He taught me how to find and dissolve false beliefs and the fear in my mind. He taught me to open my heart and love with no conditions.

Several years later, I took time to thank him for all he had done for me. I asked if there was anything I could do for him in return. He smiled, shrugged his shoulders, and said “No, I’m already happy.” Then after a pause he said, “But if you want to, you can go and share what you have learned with other people so that they can be happy too. If you want to of course, it’s just a choice.”

Overcoming Addictions and Changing Habits

People attempt to change a habit or addiction by going cold turkey. This often raises the expectation too high and can set a person up for failure if they don’t yet have a lot of personal power or discipline. The result is failing and self judgment. That can lead to more emotional suffering. The alternative is to perceive your addiction or habit as comprising many small habits and then to systematically change those small habits.

Overcoming Addictions and Changing habits Free mp3 audio (15 MB - 38min)

Each action we take that is negative or self destructive is based in a false belief. That belief is only powerful because you put your faith in that idea. The conceptual idea could be the idea that we are not worthy, lovable, or that we are smarter than someone else. We then act, on that belief in a way of action, or inaction. These actions or inactions often become habits because we maintain the same beliefs. When those habits are self destructive, and we have difficulty changing them we call them addictions.

When you change the core beliefs behind an action, it becomes easy to change the habit. The steps to changing a habit or addiction are:
Awareness and perception: You can not change what you are not aware of.
Desire: If you have no desire to make change, then you will take no action.
Intent and commitment: Your intent is the channeling of that desire towards a new expression or action that involves change.
New Action: A new action will replace your old habit. Sometimes that action might just be refrain.
Manage Expectations: If you set the bar too high, or have not prepared your self for your actions, you can fail. That will usually lead to self judgment.
Acceptance: What will derail your persistence is self judgment. When you judge your self as a failure, you can put your self into a downward emotional spiral. That emotional spiral starts with self judgment, and is broken when you practice self acceptance.
Persistence: Some habits are bigger than others and will take longer to break and replace. You may fall down many times, but it only matters how many times you stand up. Your ability to persist in breaking your habit or addiction, even after you have fallen, will be depend on your awareness, and desire.

The Self Mastery course offers practical exercises in building self awareness, changing beliefs, and self sabotaging habits and addictions.

Self Judgment for Not Breaking the Pattern of Self Judgment

David had a relationship break up about 5 years ago. In the aftermath he felt miserable. The voices in his head were kicking in with a lot of harsh self judgments, at least harsher than usual. It wasn’t an entirely new dynamic, but the amplified self criticisms of being a loser, “nobody will want to be with me”, “another failed relationship”, and “I’ll forever be alone,” hurt so much that he couldn’t ignore them anymore. He decided to do something about it. David committed to stopping those incessant negative thoughts of self judgment that were wreaking havoc on his emotions.

After a few months of David’s best and most willful effort he concluded that he wasn’t getting anywhere. He had assumed they were just thoughts, small things, and not very powerful. How difficult could these be to change? But after months of trying and failing to stop them his mind concluded that he was less powerful than those little thoughts and voices in his head. What did that say about him if he failed to make even these simple changes? He must not be able to do much of anything. David concluded that he was a hopeless case failure. If he didn’t have what it took to beat these thoughts then he didn’t deserve to be happy and successful.

After his failed attempt for change he felt even worse than before he tried.

Of course that conclusion isn’t surprising since the part of his mind making it was the same judge and victim characters that were creating all the self judgments to begin with. But I digress.

The important part of the story is that somehow David didn’t stop. There was another part of his being, a part of his being with a desire for more love and happiness and it wouldn’t rest. That part kept searching and trying.

5 Years later:

I met David on the phone a couple months ago. We have since talked several times. In a conversation a couple weeks back he shared with me the story above and his concluding beliefs from 5 years ago. He had forgotten about them until that week.

However the agreements he made about himself weren’t forgotten. The faith he had put in those beliefs about being a hopeless failure were still there. He had invested faith in that conclusion about himself and turned it into a belief. His faith from years ago was powerful enough to keep that belief alive in his mind for years. The result of that powerful force of faith was the opinions that still echoed in his head. It was by watching those opinions of his internal dialog that he was able to spot the thread.

As he shared the story he could still feel a connection to the failure self image and the emotions it produced of unworthiness and insecurity. He didn’t know how to detach himself from this sticky failure image. Intellectually he could see it was just the conclusion at the time, but somehow the emotion and feeling didn’t shift. To him the belief was still true even though intellectually he didn’t want it to be. This is dynamic is more understandable when you become aware that faith and beliefs aren’t made and changed by the intellect.

Understanding Expectations of Self Judgment

You can’t change the beliefs if you can’t change the assumptions they are built upon. And you can’t change the assumptions they are build upon if you can’t see them. When it comes to self judgment some of the most common hidden assumptions are expectations. David saw in his flash back the concluding self judgment he believed about himself, but he didn’t yet see the assumptions and interpretations that preceded it. Without changing these preceding elements the beliefs remain stuck. We don’t usually see the assumptions but our faith goes into them and the implied agreements as well as the concluding statement we do see.

I explored this with Dave and it resulted in some surprising discoveries of hidden assumptions. I asked Dave how he went about attempting to change his self judgments. He described basically willing his mind to stop the chatter and miserable emotions. I asked him how effective this approach was. Dave explained that it wasn’t effective at all. I asked him what he did then. Dave said that he tried harder at willing his thoughts and emotions to change. And how did that work I asked. “Not any better”, Dave replied.
I asked Dave if he tried any other approaches. Dave said, “No, that’s all I could come up with.”

“So let me get this straight,” I inquired, “You attempted to will your internal dialog and emotions to change. When that didn’t work, you tried even harder to do the very thing that didn’t work”
“Yes,” Dave answered. “And when that technique didn’t work for the umpteenth time you concluded that you failed?”
“Yes,” Dave answered.

I had a few more questions in this discovery process.

Did you research and find books that had effective strategies for eliminating self judgments? “No.” *
Did you consult with a therapist who had a track record of helping people get rid of their self judgments? “No.”
Did you consult with any professionals who had a track record of helping people get rid of their self judgments? “No.”
Do you even know anyone that has gotten rid of their self judgments that you could talk to about how to do this? “No.”
Do you know anyone that is without self judgments that you could us as a model for behavior and attitude as an example? “No.”
Then I had to ask Dave how long he thought it should take him to stop the self judgment pattern. More specifically, what the critical voice of the inner judge thought it should take to rid the self judgment pattern. Dave said two months.
And just how long has this pattern of self judgment been going on? “Since I was probably about 5 years old I suppose,” said Dave.

“So let me get this straight. You had decided to stop this internal pattern of self judgment that has been going on for about 30 years. You are going to do this with no resources. You have no specific insights or knowledge of how to change the beliefs in your mind, but you are going to figure this out, and be successful at it. You don’t have any input from people who have done this effectively, or have taught others to do this effectively. You don’t know anyone who has done it to model your self after for an effective strategy. So without any of effective plans, strategy, tools, training, or resources you are expecting to succeed in two months?”

Dave was quiet as he considered my question.

Managing Expectations

With the help of some thin slicing Dave could see many of the assumed beliefs that he had unknowingly invested his faith in. The inner judge’s expectation of two months for success seemed rather ridiculous when you stood it up against the complete lack of resources, training, guidance, and support for the task at hand.

As the expectation became clear Dave’s faith started to naturally fall out of the silly expectations without much effort at all. And as his faith in the elements of the expectation drained, so did the believability of the self judgment. Dave’s agreement about being a hopeless failure dissolved as he focused his awareness on the details of his false beliefs. There wasn’t any loud strike of lightening moment. Only a quiet profound realization of “Oh,,, wow. I had no idea.” And that’s one of the ways you change a core belief through awareness.

Dave works in the construction industry so the use of the following story was used to help him put the old story of self judgment in a new context.

I said, “If I don’t give you any tools, and I tell you to build a house in two months, what chances for success do you have? “None,” Dave said. Do you know anybody that can build a house in two months without any tools? “No. No one can do that. Even a skilled builder with training can’t do it without tools.” Dave replied.

I continued, “Now, if no one you know can make a house in two months without tools, does that mean they are all failures?” “No, they are not failures. They just wouldn’t have the resources they need. They are very capable and successful people it’s just that they would be set up for failing no matter how good they are,” Dave replied.

“The same is with you Dave. The same is with you. You took on the task of dismantling the self judgments and core beliefs in your mind without any plans, tools, training, or resources that you would need. That doesn’t make you a failure. That just means you underestimated the task, and didn’t know how to prepare for it. Not knowing what you were getting into with changing your beliefs and emotions you mismanaged the expectations on the project. You can’t take this one experience and conclude what it means about you.”

And with a clearer understanding that didn’t come from his existing belief system, the inner judge, or victim point of view, Dave’s old belief dissolved and the emotion along with it.

Hidden Elements of Judgment and Beliefs

Your mind will attempt to make conclusions about what kind of person you are. It will cast down self judgments and criticisms. Or sometimes it will raise your self importance in order to set you up for a big fall later. If you aren’t aware of the elements like implied agreements, hidden assumptions, and expectations, then your beliefs will take your emotional body for a ride that you don’t control. And usually it is not a fun one at that.

If you want to take action to change your core beliefs and interpretations that drive self judgments and your emotions, you will find a set of plans, tools, and a step by step training approach in the Self Mastery audio course. The Advanced Series focuses several sessions specifically on breaking the patterns of self judgment. If you prefer a more focused approach you can supplement the audio sessions with personal coaching.

And for those that want a jump start boost on the process, you are invited to join me on the Spiritual Intensive to Mexico.

You can’t change the beliefs and assumptions you are not aware of. If you can’t change your beliefs and assumptions, you can’t change your interpretations that drive your emotions. That makes awareness the key to mastering your emotions.

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mp3 audio on Self Judgment