Hard Problem of Happiness: How to work around it with your mind
You don’t feel bad because you have problems, you feel bad because you think so.
The biggest and possibly only real obstacle to happiness is your mind, or the way you apply it — your way of thinking, learned and ingrained repetitive patterns precisely. This is all mental, so the work should be done mostly in the mental realm.
You would need to work with your thoughts on your thoughts, with your head in your head which will require a degree of mental gymnastics. The first step to conceptualise your way out of this conundrum is to realise you have options. If one is capable of that realization, than one is capable of turning the situation around.
Mentally one has options in choice of thoughts. See, the mind acts like a computer that creates, perpetrates and perpetuates thoughts that support the mental activity momentum. Whatever you’re gonna feed your mind will create a tremendous feedback which just like ripples spread and create the powerful energy of emotions. So for the brain it is irrelevant what thoughts to think, it will think all and any it can, it is you that will bear the consequences, you who will experience it and suffer, it matters to you!
If the thought of you and your “thinking” brain being separate is shocking first, good, you’re making real progress in understanding yourself. Calm down and carefully observe the workings of your mind, your thinking process. See how there’s a space between your observing consciousness and the thought process which it observes.
The more time you spend in the observation state, the more calm you will become, and vice-versa. Soon you’ll see that there are more layers beneath the surface of the usual noise state of the ordinary mind, and so are the layers of your ability to go deeper in the state of relaxation, calm. Now essentially you begin with yoga, this will be your practice.
Next step is to learn to mend and shape and form and direct your minds’ thinking process which is the key. The sooner you see that the mind has a momentum in all its activity which is followed by powerful emotions that feed back to the brain again, the sooner you may want to start choosing your thoughts — literally start thinking what you’re really thinking.
Just catch yourself on a negative pattern, and gently with love and care substitute it with a better feeling thought, more positive thought. Don’t fool yourself thinking that it’s all silly activity, a fake notion, instead see that what you’re doing is actualising your freedom of choice, your options in thoughts selection. What you’re really doing is exercising your God given free will in finally becoming the master of your fate.
Yeah, sure you say, but what about my problems? It’s not about your problems going away, it’s about not experiencing pain and suffering because of mental activity of your mind.
Now welcome to this new reality of you becoming the puppet-master of yourself, not the mindless mind-machine of yours.
