The Power of Thought
You demonstrate success or failure according to your habitual trend of thought. In you which is stronger? – Success thoughts or failure thoughts? If your mind is ordinarily in a negative state, an occasional positive thought is not sufficient to attract success. But if you think rightly, you will find your goal even though you seemed enveloped in darkness.
You alone are responsible for yourself. No one else may answer for your deeds when the final reckoning comes. Your work in the world – in the sphere where you and your own past activity, has placed you – can be performed only by one person – yourself. And your work can be called a success only when in some way it serves your fellow man.
Don’t mentally review any problem constantly. Let it rest at times and it may work itself out; but see that you do not rest so long that your discrimination is lost. Rather use these rest periods to go deep within the calm region of your own inner self. Attuned with your soul, you will be able to think correctly regarding everything you do; and if your thoughts and actions have gone astray they can be re-aligned. This power of divine attunement can be achieved by practice and effort.
Mindset
We go through life reacting to situations around us. Our fast paced world dictates that. WE have so many distractions to not allow us to focus on the “ME” in our lives. WE always focus on everything else around us. Our external world is very overwhelming. How do we focus on ourselves without feeling selfish or guilty? We have to change our mindset. We have to focus on our strengths and eliminate weaknesses; sort out what is causing us a rift between our happiness. All of this is an opinion of mine based on my experience and what I study and observe. You can process my information anyway that makes you comfortable. You can twist it for something that it is not. I have no gain by convincing you to believe either way from left to right. I have only a mission in life is to help you change your perceptions of Happiness.
The mindset I am talking about is a very simple process that takes a lot of hard work. First step is to accept the things you cannot change. How is that done? Well….. If you have no control over the situation or problem then you have no reason to worry about it. All you can do is change your perception towards how you are going to feel about it. Once you decide to accept what cannot be changed in your life, you will need to find out how to quiet your mind. These two steps can be done together.
Sit in a room with no distractions whatsoever and observe what comes to your thoughts. Sort out the thoughts that you cannot change or control at that present moment. Review your thoughts one by one. Eliminate one by one by what you cannot control. If there is a situation that is serious but you cannot handle at the moment your sitting there… don’t think of it. Move on to the next thought or emotion. What you will find out is that everything in life has a priority list. Some situations can be resolved with some work, with the assistance of someone else; some things will be resolved over a long and short period of time.
For the sake of the exercise you are focusing on that specific moment alone in your space, all you can control at the moment in time is quieting your mind. You are there alone in your thoughts and worrying about this or that is not important at the present moment. You will find that sitting and eliminating the thought, for a temporary moment is affordable and possible. The problem will still exist after you are done focusing. All you are doing is removing it from your thought process temporarily. (eventually permanently)
After you have removed 99.9% of what you think is important for your thought processes, you are left with an empty mindset. Fill it up with one thought or memory in your life that made you feel good. In fact think of a moment that made you feel overwhelmingly excited. So excited that you could scream and yell just remembering it. Hold on to that emotion or feeling from that moment and continue to hold it for a couple of minutes. Let it go after a five minutes. Now think of a horrible time or memory, experience in your life where it was so tragic or heartbreaking that thinking about it makes you cry. Hold on to that for five minutes and then let it go.
Now reflect on the two emotions and compare. Which one was easiest to remember? Which one was easier to re-create the emotion or feeling? Most people can remember the negative. For most it takes less time to remember the bad than the good. It takes work to remember a great moment than a negative experience. Once you remember the good moment it is easy to enjoy it. When you capture the negative moment it is hard to maintain the painful emotions you easily remembered.
At the beginning of this post I stated, “The mindset I am talking about is a very simple process that takes a lot of hard work.” This mindset is happiness. It takes work to achieve happiness but once you are there it is effortless. The hard work isn’t at maintaining happiness; the hard work is applied towards how to eliminate the distractions that block our happiness.
I hope my thoughts that I have shared will give you a little help if you are struggling with something. I love all of you and hope you will continue reading. It is all about our mindset.
God Bless.
The Surprising Science of Happiness by Dan Gilbert
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Be happy with what you have and are, be generous with both, and you won’t have to hunt for happiness. ~ William E. Gladstone, British Prime Minister, 1892 – 1894
What is real happiness? Is happiness that we make up true happiness?
According to social psychologist, Dan Gilbert, there are 2 kinds of happiness. One is natural happiness which we experience when we get what we want and the other is synthetic happiness which we manufacture when we don’t get what we want.
Here’s a question for you: Is one better than the other?
Let’s find out.
In denial or truly happy?
I am sure you have heard about people who after experiencing a bad event or a disappointing setback tells others and themselves that they are better off despite not getting what they want and that they wouldn’t change that for anything in the world.
Well, it turns out that these people aren’t overt-optimists who are in denial about their misfortune. It turns out that their “synthetic” happiness did make them happy. For real.
In his Ted Talk, social psychologist Dan Gilbert talks about people fabricating happiness after not getting what they want or experiencing a real nasty experience such as being wrongly convicted and served decades worth of a jail sentence for something he has not done.
The sentiment expressed by the man who was wrongly convicted was that it was a “glorious experience”. Really? Surely that is not the right feelings to have after serving time for so long for something you did not do?
Naturally, we think that these people must be lying to themselves, they can’t be truly happy with their experience but we could be wrong….
Using unconscious memory to test happiness
Well, in an experiment Gilbert conducted on patients with anterograde amnesia who cannot form new memories he first asked the patients to rate a lineup of 6 Monet prints from 1 being the least-liked to 6 being the most-liked. Then, he told them that as a gift they would be given either print number 3 or 4 as a gift and most of them picked number 3 over 4 just because of preference. The researchers then left the room and returned (bear in mind that the patients do not remember the research team nor what transpired before) and the patients was asked again to rank the 6 paintings from least-liked to most-liked.
Here’s the interesting bit:
The individuals now rank the number 3 painting at number 2, higher than before and the number 4 painting which was rejected was now ranked even lower than before at number 5. The results indicated that they are happier with the painting they had owned more than before and they liked the rejected painting even less even though they do not have any conscious memory of the paintings.
With this experiment, Gilbert found that individuals make their own synthetic happiness unconsciously. Gilbert also found that this unconscious ability to synthesize happiness happens more often in situations where we do not have control over the situation.
In essence, we are really good at making ourselves feel better about an outcome that occurs from a situation that is out of our hands.
Now, what does this mean for you and why should you pay any attention?
Here are 3 reasons why you should pay attention:
1. Synthetic happiness is not fake. It is not something you make up when you are pissed off about not getting what you want. Synthetic happiness is a natural mechanism we all have in our brains that lets us see a not-so-ideal situation in a different light and learn to like our situation which in turns does let us become happier in time to come.
2. The ability to synthesize happiness is a vital skill to have because we cannot have everything we want all of the time. The truth is we will all face disappointment at some points in our life and we need to be able to manufacture happiness and become adept at seeing the better side of life.
Here’s a point to ponder: clinically-depressed individuals do not have the ability to synthesize happiness in most situations of their lives and that is why they find it harder to see the greener side of life.
3. We often grossly overestimate or underestimate how naturally happy we will feel in any situation. Truth is we will only truly know how happy we will feel and continue to feel when we are actually experiencing thus being able to synthesize happiness helps us cope with the uncertainty of our future outcome.
In Conclusion:
The joyful state that we feel is made up of both synthetic and natural happiness. Neither is better than the other because to lead a balanced life we need both: Natural happiness lets us experience the good stuff and synthetic happiness lets us adapt and appreciate what we do have when the outcome is less than ideal. When you start exercising the ability to synthesize happiness, you may find that some situations are not as terrible as they appear at first.
Can you think of a time when you synthesized happiness? What event caused you to synthesize happiness at the time and did the feeling of happiness continued?
Share your comments below.
The Complexity of Happiness by Praveen Vaidyanathan
The word happy sounds familiar and doesn’t seem especially philosophical. It expresses a concept called happiness that we assume we understand, at least to some degree. Although it seems so easy, articulating the concept isn’t. In fact, for long as philosophers have been discussing happiness, its definition has been debated.
Happiness is plural. People present happiness in various rubrics and experience it differently. Some find happiness in aims, achievements or acquiring things, others purely on experiences. For one it may mean running barefoot through a dewy grass, for another it’s holding a baby in his arms. Sex can make someone happy, as can a new outfit. Some like monks even experience happiness in the absence of all of these. Each of the above is a valid vision of happiness. Happiness isn’t simple, singular or similar for all. It is perhaps the most complex and subjective term in the English language.
Happiness is changing. People have various conceptions of happiness, and they depend on many factors such as age, gender, region, religion and culture. Jennifer Aaker, a Stanford social psychologist, explains that these conceptions also change from time to time, as they move through their lives. What may seem happy today may not be so tomorrow.
Happiness is paradoxical. For instance, many people commonly equate happiness with fun. Hence, in order to be happy, they believe that their lives need to be full of fun. Unfortunately, this expectation of happiness is never usually realized because always having fun is far from possible; and with the modern society becoming used to more choices and less patience, expectations rise. According to Barry Schwartz, a Swarthmore psychologist, our increasing expectations mean that we are always on a search to appease ourselves. Even if we believe we have the key to happiness within ourselves, our pursuit of it seems to be an external one.
Happiness is shapeless. The beauty of the concept of happiness is that is seems to belong to a virgin fairyland, bleached in nuance and vagueness. This is why the terrain of real life, criss-crossed by pain and beauty and monotony and tears and stress and ideas and eroticism, can have its contours reflected by the shapeless notion of happiness.
The complexity of happiness – with its plural, changing, paradoxical and ambiguous notions – makes it creative fodder, offering endless possibilities to the advertising business. Yet, many use it unthinkingly and often superficially. Happiness as a central theme – with its facets and complexities – deserves more documentation, time, understanding and importance than we credit it. No wonder, Don Draper of Mad Men puts it rightly, ‘Advertising is based on one thing, happiness.
See Praveen Vaidyanathan’s blog at the following link The Complexity of Happiness