Happiness!

The common denominator that links us!

Every human experience: love, money, health — they all lead to the singularity of happiness. Every person on this planet just wants to BE HAPPY!

We wanted to land on the moon and we did!

We want to colonize planets and we are going to Mars!

Is there anything humankind cannot do? Yet, I am puzzled that society hasn’t figured out the formula to the most desirable thing in life —happiness!

Strange, don’t you think?

There’s a reason why happiness escapes most people and you need to know…

There is a conspiracy in our society, controlled by powerful industry groups who don’t want you to find out the truth about happiness.

Why?

Money.

Trillions of dollars are at stake. These industry groups have turned our desire for personal happiness into the biggest commodity business opportunity on our planet.

These powerful groups have created a matrix of societal conditioning programs and lies. These incorrect conceptions are programmed into our brains through a defective learning process during our early cognitive development years. Sadly, those programs are the ones that rule our lives.

Societal’s programs on happiness:

1. Happiness is obtained externally.
2. Entitlement to the pursuit of happiness
3. Happiness is the absence of struggle, sorrow and suffering.

The conspiracy is that we are constantly fed, each day with subliminal messages, telling us that the road to happiness is through consumption and acquisition. “If you buy X, you will be happy. If you have Y then you’ll be even happier,” and the cycle goes on because God forbid if we don’t feel the happium effect at all times.

We’ve been programmed to believe that there is something wrong with us if we aren’t constantly feeling the highs of happiness and we must get/do something immediately to fix it. Society has become happichondriacs!!

We are conditioned to never look internally for solutions. We’re programmed to think that our happiness is someone else’s job. Our conditioning has sent us on a wild-goose-chase. We are looking for the happy-pill at the end of every cash-register.  Is there any wonder why we’ve become a depressed, hyper-competitive, materially indulgent, spiritually absent, physically unfit and angry species?

The more I think of this, the more I think that the sci-fi film The Matrix, 1999 is an actual documentary of the truth rather than fiction. We are like the main character Neo, living life in the illusion controlled by the programs we’ve been given and believing that everything we have ever seen, heard and experienced is real.

What if it isn’t? Perhaps it’s time for us also to take the red pill (metaphor) for knowledge and experience the world for what it truly is.

We have the choice to wake up to a different reality, to a new change in perspective other than the programs we’ve been given. I believe that our subconscious mind is always informing us and alerting us about the things we must remember.

There is more behind the veil than we perceive — all we need to do is have the desire and the courage to lift it.  We can take the red pill and awaken or we can continue to wear the blinders of illusion.

Today I’d like to encourage you to override those programs you’ve been given and see what the social matrix doesn’t want you to figure out. Why? Because it is more fun that way. The societal matrix likes to keep power and control over us. It is easier and financially more lucrative to keep us programmed, forever enslaved inside a running wheel, like mice, who think that if they run fast or long enough will get the cheese they desire.

Think about it for a second, waking up to the true source of happiness would suddenly destroy the trillion-dollar industry whose only goal is to provide a temporary shot of happiness.

We’ve become a society enslaved in consumerism and instant gratification. I love the way the author John Updlike said it, “There is a vast conspiracy in America to make you artificially happy through any means —gulp something, pay later!”  Indeed, the matrix has programmed us with an endless, thirst-less need for more. We are conditioned that each time we don’t feel the happy effect, we can bail ourselves out with consuming more illusions — to which of course, these industries are too happy to provide.

The incentives are infinite: clothing, cars, toys, sex, alcohol, drugs, romantic relations, diet products, food indulgences and when all that fails and the effects wear off, the pharmaceutical industry is too happy to bail us out some more through pills and addictive medications. Sadly, this gives us temporary relief for our depression and anxiety due to the failure of not reaching happiness as prescribed by our societal programs.

Ready for the red pill?

Overriding the matrix program #1:

If you keep believing the programs you’ve been given and look for happiness in external sources, you will never find it. Happiness is found within. It cannot be produced or created.  You can’t buy your way to it and neither medicate yourself to it.

You must awaken and realize that you are happiness — exactly as you are. Right now.  Happiness is inside of you all the time and is part of your hardware. You can connect and ignite happiness on demand by thought alone. This awakening exposes the industries’ conspiracy and kills their golden-egg-laying-goose. You can now become a more conscious consumer who is aware that the end goal isn’t to find or feel happiness.

Imagine for a second if we had been programmed differently and we didn’t look at outside sources for our state of contentment, what would happen? Suddenly the trillions of dollars generated by the matrix’s industries would suffer! We would not have the same inclination or desire to constantly consume.

Once you realize that happiness is not tied to anything or anyone external, you will act and make different choices. You and you alone are responsible for your own joy and the people and things you consume and acquire should be there to simply augment the joy and happiness you already have!  This gives you the power to write your own program to a more real and sustainable form of happiness.

How do you connect to happiness instantly?

GRATITUDE!

The means to alter the old program is simple because it is already within you —it is in the act of changing your old perspective for one of gratitude for what you already have. Not for the things or people you think you need to be happy, but by being grateful for what is already in your life.

Overriding the matrix program #2:

The second program we need to override is the erroneous notion that we are entitled to the pursuit of happiness.  How do you pursue something that is already buried inside of you? No wonder you can’t find it by looking for it outside.

I was always looking for happiness in all the wrong places. I felt entitled to it and lived frustrated for not finding it. It was not until I understood that I was absolutely entitled to nothing in my life, that I actually found it. Why? Because I realized that all I have is a blessing, not an entitlement. I became grateful for everything I actually had and that was my greatest source for happiness.

Everything is a blessing given to you! When we lose the entitlement to things, we lose the need to have them. We lose the emotional charge that enslaves us to a hurtful pursuit for happiness that is fleeting at best.

It is the program of entitlement that drives us to overindulge, to over purchase things we really don’t need, to spend more than we can afford, to overeat more than we should, to drink and consume drugs that give a temporary high and to over medicate ourselves so we can numb the pain we feel from not reaching societal’s version of happiness.

I believe it’s our Entitlement Program that has us seek partners for the wrong reasons. We look to other people to make us feel the highs that come from love and when we think we find it, we hold our partners responsible for our own happiness.  When they can’t satisfy our thirst, it leads to painful breakups, betrayals and bitter divorces. All of which results in us feeling emptier and even more determined to keep looking for that same happiness in the same places we think we lost it.

Overriding the matrix program # 3:

The last program we need to override is the one that has us believe that happiness is experienced in the absence of struggle, sorrow and suffering. That is the craziest thing I’ve come to understand. The absence of struggle and pain isn’t a prerequisite to happiness.

Struggle and suffering are just as essential as happiness and are inexorable parts of the human existence. To me, they hold the same vital place. One cannot experience one without the other. A happy and meaningful existence depends on our ability to feel emotions other than happiness, even those that may compete with happiness.

However, the societal matrix has given us a “judgment conditioning” that has you categorize everything as good, bad, sad, happy, etc.

Imagine if we could erase that program from our brains and we didn’t attach a meaning to things being good or bad and we accepted that things just are.  Would that make us less unhappy? Yes.

I am not saying we need to rejoice when something hurts us or when we feel sadness or loss. But the, “I am sad or stressed, therefore I am unhappy,” in my opinion needs to shift. Happiness doesn’t shut down, it doesn’t leave us just because we are crying or undergoing a moment of grief or struggle — it is still in there.

Your happiness is permanent as it could be the case for the other emotions. Perhaps it is the meaning you attached to the things that happen to you that has you choose which emotion prevails more in your life — food for thought!

In my opinion, it is when we label, judge and attach to the program that makes us feel disconnected from our higher self who knows that there is always something to feel happy and grateful for in each moment regardless of the circumstance.

We must begin to write a new program about true happiness that our children and future generations can learn. A new program that goes beyond our personal satisfaction. Our new program for happiness should engulf so much more into its meaning: our connection to the people around us, our respect for nature, the wellbeing of our community and the sustainability of our planet.

We must stop the unrealistic measure we have about happiness. Happiness cannot be defined by only moments of “highs.”  The true value of happiness must include peace, compassion, and love, responsibility for life, respect, inclusion and empathy for our fellow human beings. As the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche points out, “Paradoxically, happiness is closer when we kneel than when we soar.”

I believe there is a deeper purpose to our being on this planet that goes beyond the programs of work-eat-chase-acquire-sleep cycle we’ve come to accept and the only way we can discover it, is by having the courage to lift the veil.

Take the red pill!

With gratitude,