Ask yourself if it is True?

Happiness is the absence of unhappiness, caused by the misrepresentation and misunderstanding of reality.

We’ve all heard that money can’t buy you happiness, though many people are still driven to pursue financial success as their primary goal. It’s no wonder, then, that they find themselves unhappy even when they appear to have everything. But what can be done about it?

Let’s start by trying to understand what happiness is. Look at the semi-permanent joy of small children and toddlers and you could see that it is, in fact, our default state. Sure, it’s not all roses, but as long as they aren’t hungry or in pain, kids are generally happy. You could say that happiness is merely a lack of unhappiness.

But where does unhappiness come from?

“Your happiness is equal to or greater than your perception of events minus your expectations of life”

This means that when you regard life’s events as the same or better than your expectations, then you’ll be happy because the twists and turns of life don’t frustrate you. But if your expectations are greater than the reality, they’ll subtract from your capacity for happiness.

Naturally, it’s not as clear-cut as this. You’re much more complicated than just happy or sad! Depending on the thoughts you allow to determine your expectations, your state of mind can range from total confusion to negativity and suffering, to positivity and happiness, all the way to absolute joy. The goal is to make that journey from the bottom to the top.

To prevent yourself from becoming confused and unhappy due to the gap between your expectations and reality, you’ll first need to discard the illusions that leave you misinformed.

You are not the voice in your head, but the observer of your life.

In the 1999 sci-fi film The Matrix, the main character, Neo, suddenly breaks through the illusion of the world around him and sees it as it really is – long green columns of ones and zeros – and is able to take control of himself and his environment. Like Neo, if you can see past the illusions, then you too can take control of yourself and your happiness.

Start by shattering the first illusion which is that the voice in your head – the one that questions your actions and intentions – is the real you. In the 1930s, a Russian psychologist named Lev Vygotsky noted small muscular movements in the larynx accompanying inner thought, and suggested that the internal narrator was actually just the internalization of speech – a hypothesis confirmed by neuroscientists in the 1990s, when they found that parts of the brain active while talking are also active during inner thought. So the voice in your head is actually your brain talking to you as it tries to understand the world around you and make the best possible decisions. But it isn’t you.

So when listening to your negative thoughts, remember that rather than being what you feel, they’re just the brain throwing out possibilities as it tries to understand the world. And here’s the thing – you don’t have to listen. Instead, try to minimize the chatter in your head. If you spend more time recognizing when it’s there, you can start to push back – swapping your negative thoughts for positive ones!

So if the voice in your head isn’t you, then who are you? People spend their lives building physical identities and egos, trying to answer this question, and this is the second illusion. But because these masks aren’t real, they can bring about unhappiness due to unrealistic expectations; as with our happiness formula. These can also shift and change over time, yet the fundamental “you” remains. So who is that?

To find out, you should mentally strip away all the things that change over time. This includes everything you can observe; your possessions, your family and even your body! What’s left at the very bottom? The real you is the observer of the world, who sees life but can’t be seen.

Instead of trying to fabricate an identity to affirm your place in the world, accept your position as the observer and focus on that as your identity. If you expect nothing more from yourself than this, you’ll soon be surrounded by people who love you for who you are, and you won’t even need to pretend to be something else

It’s important to understand that you really know nothing, and that time is, in fact, a human invention.

In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton laid out his laws of motion and completely changed the way people saw the world. After much debate, they were eventually proven and accepted to be true – held up as indisputable and forming the basis of much scientific thought for centuries. However, since the nineteenth century, a string of discoveries have shown that Newton wasn’t right about everything after all.

We tend to think that we reached a definitive and final conclusion about something, but this is the third illusion, and in reality, there are probably many things we don’t know yet. In fact, it might be safer to presume that you know nothing! Your idea of the world could very easily be incomplete, and that’s something you need to be ready for. If you accept your ignorance, then you’ll always be searching for, and open to, the truth.

One idea of Newton’s that has since been disproved was his definition of time. Newton believed that it existed independently of any observation and was an unshakable part of reality, but this is actually the fourth illusion. Not only has Einstein shown that Newton’s idea of time was incorrect, we also have a greater understanding today of time as a human invention that has been gradually refined throughout history. From observing the position of the sun in the sky, to measuring the time of day, to the “leap second” that’s needed every four years to keep clocks in sync, the concept of time has grown more and more sophisticated.

But if time is just a human invention, maybe we’d be better off without it? The thoughts and emotions that cause suffering tend to have an attachment to the past or the future, such as grief and shame over the past or anxiety and pessimism for the future, while thoughts in the present tend to be positive, such as amusement or relaxation. Time, and its sequence of events, is the root cause of the drama in our perceptions and therefore suffering, while the present moment simply is what it is. Imagine being unhappy because all the potential partners you meet turn out to be unsuited and worrying you might end up alone in life. The actual worry is based on a fear about the future rather than anything actually happening right now.

Instead of being a slave to time, you should strive to ignore the past and future and focus yourself on the present moment instead.

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