WANT TO BE HAPPY?
Our default state of being is to be happy. Young children playing are routinely happy - until something makes them unhappy
So, happiness is the absence of unhappiness.
To understand happiness, we must first understand unhappiness, to remove it.
Understand Your Brain.
Don’t listen to everything you think!
Your thoughts are not you
Your brain is a functioning organ, just like your liver cleaning blood, and your heart pumping oxygen around the body. The brain too is an organ - it’s role is to process information and it’s main priority is for your survival.
Your survival! - This is why the brain looks for threats – either incessantly worrying about the future, or regretting past hurts – and rarely focusses on Now.
No question - Bad things happen to everyone - but it is your response to those events, which causes your unhappiness.
Often the brain will incessantly replay the pain of a past event, as a survival mechanism, so we will not repeat the pain – even if replaying that pain makes you unhappy. Similarly, to be anxious about future threats or failures, can dominate your peace and happiness – causing you to be unhappy.
Control your thoughts?
Successful authors try to teach us techniques to control our thoughts to avoid painful incessant negative thoughts. But although there is a universal desire for peace and contentment in our thoughts, and many books are bought with the hope of a solution – in practice, controlling every negative thought, using mental exercises, takes a lot of effort and practice.
Some solutions cultivate a permanent state of ‘non-thinking’, while others encourage us to ask the brain for a different thought please, or else engage with some experiential activity to distract our thoughts, since the brain can only think of one thing at a time. The techniques can be useful, but they are not ideal.
One best-selling author cleverly points out that there is confusion about what makes us happy, and many people look for it in the wrong place.
In particular, there is a big difference between FUN and HAPPINESS, since our brain can only think of one thing at a time, fun distracts our brain from the incessant negative thoughts for a while, whereas happiness and peace is to have no unhappy thoughts to be avoiding.
Fun then, is a temporary escape from unhappiness. This explains the increasing desire of many people, for alcohol, drugs, partying or whatever … which don’t solve the problem of unhappiness, which is simply waiting for the temporary escape of fun to end, for the incessant negative thoughts to return.
However, these authors leave out a fundamental ingredient from their ‘self-help’ methods for finding peace and happiness – the God factor. Even though words like soul, infinity, divinity and demons may be mentioned in passing – they are not joined up in a coherent and effective worldview of how things work.
This is a Spiritual World
Most people recognise that there are spiritual things in the world, and most people believe in some kind of Creator Being, though they don’t know what to do with that insight – which religion is true, what is right and wrong, where are my loved ones who died … etc.
All the main religions agree that there is one God, and although He has given different revelations of Himself to different religions, there is one common thread running through all faiths, and none – the Human Conscience, and the Law of Love by which it operates.
Notice, when you do something unkind to someone, you will feel uneasy about that later in your quiet moments ‘There is no peace for the wicked’. But if you do a kindness for someone, you will often feel a glow of joy and peace in your heart – ‘Peace to men of good will’.
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Detail: Since the voice of God is so close to us in our Conscience, as to interact with our thoughts and decisions, according to our actions each day, (“My sheep hear My voice” says the Word of God, made man – Jesus) … where is that voice, when we are troubled by negative thoughts?
Well if ‘God is Love’, and the Kingdom of God is a Kingdom of Love, then we must be aware that there is another voice, another spiritual power in the world: Satan and other evil spirits called demons, which hate mankind, and try to destroy people with incessant negative thoughts, temptations, compulsions, addictions, and even possessions. This voice is one of the Accuser, of hatred, envy, lust, anger, slander and murder. Dangerous eh!!
Realising that powerful entities have a target on you, and conspire to entrap you in separation from God and His peace (which the world cannot give), also called sin, should enlighten our worldview with truth that can set you free.
Simply bringing God into any situation, brings guidance, wisdom and protection – demons run.
So realising that demons have access to your thoughts, which they influence with temptations and whispers of envy, lust, pride etc… when we see this influence into our painful incessant thoughts, driving us crazy and making us depressed, hopeless, and fearful - we may recognise a pattern, and a culprit?
Since the Youth Generation have thrown out God as an irrelevance for them, while not realising that they are left with no protection from the demonic enemy of Man, many are now trying to find happiness with their selfish animal passions of the 7 deadly sins (pride, greed, anger, envy, lust, gluttony and laziness). These are all destructive and we lose our peace.
It was of course, the satanist Anton Le Vey who coined the phrase: ‘”Do what thou wilt, shall be the whole of the law!”
However, the bible also cautions: “There is no peace for the wicked, says the Lord.”
So, time to wake up then, God has decreed that those who act against His Law of Love, (10 Commandments) will not enjoy peace.
So if you desire to be happy, then have yourself a reality check, and be good – as guided by your conscience, not peer pressure, or media culture.
And if you can’t be good …. Ask God to help you!