Multi-tracking with Happiness

When we have achieved a certain stage in the pursuit of happiness we identify as “I am Happy” rather than “I am unhappy”

We can be “I am happy but I'm feeling sad about such and such a situation” The reverse is also true of course. Even when we are identifying as being unhappy we still feel happy about certain things.

It is only natural to be affected by the trials and injustices of life, especially as we tend to become more sensitive to those trials and injustices as we progress along the path. When we identify with happiness, these trials become external to our “default” setting of happiness. We can deal with the situation in a more empowered way because we are able to stand back and look more clearly at the whys and wherefores of the situation. We become immune to the desire to lash out in revenge or hatred for some impact. We refrain from beating ourselves up over these situations. In fact many situations that would have previously elicited a negative response, are allowed to “pass through to the keeper” as being unworthy of any response.
The pursuit of happiness helps anchor our consciousness in the higher mind. The one who watches, and stands back to assess.

It's not about cutting off feelings, it's about TAKING CONTROL of the emotions and the body/mind.

The Awakening

We live at an amazing time, for we are living through the awakening of the planetary mind.
The Internet and the mobile phone have allowed instant real time flow of information to a growing proportion of the planets population.
Individuals are akin to brain cells. The Internet provides the function of memory (data storage) and connections between the cells. Social media sites such as twitter facilitate real time interaction between the cells.
Previously the flow of information has been limited by both slow flow and limited bandwidth.

The interesting outcome of this is the way that random individuals can work in concert to process information in a relatively consistent fashion due to our tendency to think alike.
This leads us to contemplate the redundancy of Government in the face of peoples ability to now decide for themselves how their collective will can be exercised.
Our present forms of governance are sorely lacking in true representation and are prone to corruption. Most of our "Democracies" are 2 party dictatorships. Even those that have a more diverse representation are distorted by the lobbying of the rich and powerful.
It is now a possibility to evolve a direct form of democracy.
The resultant outcomes for governance are extremely interesting from our human point of view. The overthrow of tyrants in the Arab world is but the start of the adjustments that will flow from this new dynamic.

What will be the effect of an awakened planetary consciousness? Hard to say. Do your individual cells see the whole of your life and intent?
I would imagine that there could be a greater push to control the damage we are causing to the biosphere. This may involve a reduction in population. We will have to see how it develops. It is early days.

As this process expands and becomes more integrated, we will find that there are outcomes that we can not yet conceive. How exciting.

Fear

Fear is a useful reaction to threat.It stimulates a series of actions in the body and brain. It prepares one for fight or flight.It is a primary defence mechanism.

However, fear becomes toxic when there is no clear and present danger. Those fears that play in the mind distort our perception of reality and therefore our actions.
Fear is the great delusion.
If not controlled,it can rule ones life and turn it into a hell on earth.
If one overcomes the imagined fears, life opens up into a wondrous playground.

We are constantly bombarded by information, either designed to induce fear or that produces fear through identification.
An example of intentionally induced fear is all the hysteria whipped up around the threat of terrorism. These sort of fears are promoted through our societies for both political and social and religious control.
The fears induced by identification are those we take on when we see something bad happen and think "That could happen to me" and then dwell on the fear.

These fears become another "infection" in the belief system. They are promoted and/or used by the "Parasitic Viral" infections (religion,politics) previously written about,as integral elements of their constructs.

An aide in the clearing of the belief system of fears, and therefore reducing the impact of the more complex infections, is;
Get comfortable, close your eyes and relax. Start to list the various fears that you are able to identify as an irritation.As they arise, study them for what they are,and you may realise that they are really just hypothetical, figments of the imagination fed by distorted information.
Then let them go. Imagine them being expelled from your body.
Repeat this process for all the fears you are able to bring to mind.
This is a good exercise to do when going to sleep. One tends to slip into sleep without noticing.

This process is also useful for facing another group of fears that are reality based, but nothing much can be done about them. These are the fears directly related to our mortality. These are the core fears that spawn all the others.

Lets face the facts. We all die. If we live in fear, then we only live a shadow of a life. If we put aside fear, we live life to the full. We taste the sweetness of existence.

This is an essential step in the pursuit of Happiness.

Near Death Experience

I've just been to see the new Clint Eastwood film Hereafter. It set me thinking.

A long time ago, more than half my life, I went through an experience that shocked my soul to the core.
In the ventilator ward, the only conscious patient amongst the crash victims and the guy with tetanus, laid out almost totally paralysed, yet fully conscious, being kept alive by the air pumped into my lungs via the tube cut into my trachea.
I'd been having physio. As was common, I had bad pneumonia, so the physiotherapist used to come around every day and beat my chest with cupped hands. I grew to like the percussive rhythm and the contact.
While she beat away with her rhythm, another nurse would disconnect me from the ventilator and "bag me" manually with a balloon type gizmo attached to the tracheotomy tube. Every so often she would disconnect the bag and insert a suction catheter down into my trachea while the physio pushed down on my chest to simulate a cough. They'd suck all the crap out, attach the bag and do some more percussion.
While this was going on, the ventilator technician would service the machine.
This time when they hooked me back up to the machine, something, I don't know what, went wrong. I wasn't getting any air. Every cell in my body started screaming for oxygen, the physical panic was a tidal wave that ripped through me. As the panic wracked me, sight faded, body sense faded, sound faded and then came the calm.
I found myself disembodied, floating above a crystal clear lake. It was only small, the water shallow with smoothed stones about the size of a spread hand. Lush green foliage with small shiny leaves overhung the water. I was as conscious and able to think as I am here now writing this. Yet I was suffused with the "peace that passes all understanding". This was something of a revelation to me and I didn't want to go back to the horrors of the HDU.
All to soon though, sound started to infiltrate the peace and it faded. I was left with the imprint in my psyche,"death is easy, it's the living that is hard, but necessary for the learning"
Body sense and sight slowly returned. I was left stunned and with a terrible head ache. But the fear had gone. It never came back through the rest of a long illness and recovery, and to this day, I am able to tap a certain fearlessness when it is needed.

Mia Culpa

The way I see it, current political failings are our fault as much as the fault of the elite.
While we seek leaders and are unwilling or uncaring enough to watch them closely, we will always have corrupt behaviour. Although we spout democracy, we behave mostly as if we lived in Monarchies. We love the "strong" leader. We love the pomp and ceremony, the celebrity. We believe we are still the chattels of the ruler appointed by God. We are still the primate picking the fleas out of the fur of the dominant male or female.

How many people voted in Bush (GW)? If I recall correctly, it was 25% of people of voting age, or thereabouts.When most people are faced with the need to improve the situation, they are mostly happy to let someone else do the work, so long as they can complain about how it was done. With that sort of apathy in the population, I'd imagine that the elite think they can do what they like with little interference. And that is mostly how it goes. It is only when conditions get tough that the "average" person works up enough caring to do anything.

It is up to those who see and care to take a stand against the failings of Government. It is also up to those who see and care, to attempt to bring the apathetic along for the ride, for without their support, we have no democratic legitimacy and we become another lot of elitists imposing their view upon the population.

Belief, Filter of the Senses.

We experience the world in our minds. The information, that is used to assemble that world, comes through the channel of our senses. Our beliefs influence the information we receive and the way we process it.

This then leads us, if we wish to see the world in as clear and objective way as possible, to the necessity of clearing out the belief system of any inaccuracies.

What is the belief system and what is it for?

The belief system is in place as a shortcut in processing information. It's the TV dinner of cognition. Just heat and serve, all the hard work has already been done.It is akin to reflex and instinct. It is there to speed up the processing of data and adds some consistency to output. The belief system provides a whole series of preconceived scenarios that can be utilized, when deemed applicable, instead of processing the data on it's merits. There is also the function of aligning ones thought processes with the group one is associated with.
We can see from this that it is a useful adjunct to normal cognition, however, it's nature of circumventing true cognition is where the dangers lie.
If the belief system is constantly adjusted to the perceived circumstances of reality, then it is a useful tool, but frequently it is used as a lazy abrogation of the need to actually think about the true nature of reality and the interplay of the varying elements.
The willing acceptance of authority's pronouncements into our belief system, lends itself to manipulation and abuse by those authorities.
As previously analysed in "The Pathology of the Belief System" there are numerous internally consistent (mostly) constructs of belief "infecting" the population. The most powerful, in their ability to warp perception, are the religions. These take the natural wonder of reality and our relation to it, and, to varying degrees, subvert it to thought control for the benefit of the hierarchy of the religion. The isms of political thought are of a similar nature, and are often co infective with the religious.

Whilst we accept belief systems without rigorous analysis and suitable modifications, we are immersed in an illusion and are not able to accurately process available information. We behave in irrational fashions. We may even descend into active hate and violence, a true outward sign of delusion.
Garbage in, garbage out.

Free your mind.

Choose Happiness !!

The Brain and Time.

In the Judaeo-Christian Mythology, humanity was exiled from the garden and prevented from reentering by an angel wielding a flaming two edged sword.We were exiled for partaking of the fruit of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Translation.
The garden is the natural state of being. In that natural state, the organism functions through reflex, instinct and in higher animals, rudimentary cognition.It is a state of innocence in that there is no concept of right and wrong. Action is dictated by reaction, needs and instinct.
At one point, the ancestors of modern man reached a point of development where the concept of right and wrong evolved out of the biological pleasure\pain mechanism.
We are kept from the "natural" state of being by the faculties of the mind. The two edge sword represents the discriminatory function of the mind and the flame represents the inspirational receptivity and output of higher abstract thought.
Once our ancestors developed the faculties represented by the two edged sword, we were no longer able to solely operate in the instinctive way. We now saw the opposites, right and wrong , good and bad, we discovered free choice. We now became unpredictable. A great advantage in the survival stakes.

This was an over simplified explanation of the evolution of consciousness for a time when the knowledge of the workings of the world was limited and the education of the people was minimal.

Let's try again with the benefit of our increase in knowledge.

I suggest that the nervous system and the brain in particular is an organ for the capture and processing of time.In its most rudimentary form,the nervous system is purely capture of information, a function of time, and a preprogrammed reflexive response. Example: a fly lands on a sundew. The plant senses the landing and reflex closes the trap. As far as we know that is about the extent of the sundews mental capabilities.There is minimal processing involved.
So we have Information - capture -processing -action.
As the organism becomes more complex, the sense organs become more developed and the range of inputs increase.The length of time capture also increases, we call this memory. Because of the wider range, and greater length of time/information sensed, greater processing power is needed, to both decode, manipulate, and then activate a more and more complex structure.
I suggest the evolutionary advantage was the ability to overcome reflex, and thus lose predictability and gain flexibility. The higher turn was to do the same with instinct.
Modern Human, with his broad range of sense perception, long and detailed memory and recall, Abstract thinking ability and the ability to not only control a flexible and complex body, but also operate fast and complex machinery as if it was an extension of the body, captures a vast amount of time/information.

The brain uses the flow of time in a similar way to electricity. The longer an impulse can be held in the equipment the more processing is possible.The more complex the brain the longer the segment of time can be held for processing.
The human brain is able to remember a large proportion of what has been experienced.This is captured time. We are able to decouple our awareness from the current flow of time,and recall a segment of time for greater processing. In the coupled awareness of the flow of time, we do not have the speed of thought needed to do much more than experience and act reflexively.
Ones normal time perception is similar to the 25 frames /second of movie film.We sample the actual flow, and process. We switch our awareness back and forth, the rate of switching being dependent on the intensity of the information or the needed depth of processing.
Example; riding a motorcycle, requires rapid sampling and reflex, with little need for higher processing, so the impression is of being in the now.With perhaps the opposite, meditation, being almost all attention focused in the processing, sampling frequency is slow,and the time sense becomes heavily distorted.

With this recalled segment, we are able to replay at various speeds and definition, alter perspective, run alternate projections, compare to similar segments etc etc. The greater our ability to concentrate (focus) on the remembered segment,the more we are able to do with the stored time/information.

The evolutionary impulse that powers this trend line is the ability to predict the future.It is a great advantage that is used by many organisms.The learning of a prey's behaviour, so that one may easily capture it, is a prime and simple example.
For humans it becomes more complex. Look around in society and see where predictive behaviour is. Many high paid positions are reliant on this ability. Finance and the stock market, driving and flying, sport, politics etc.,
There is no future as such, it is purely a potential. However the flow of energy in time is able to be manipulated, and predicted. Both of these are dependant on the organisms ability to capture and process time.

So we see that what we call intelligence has as it's prime function, the ability to both attempt to predict the future, and modify it to a required state.As we do with other aspects of our environment.