Thursday, April 1, 2010

The normal condition of life should be happiness.

The normal condition of your life should be happiness and joy. This does not mean that suffering will never come, but it should be rare, and it should be considered only when it happens. When you accept that suffering is the unnatural you can meet bad things that may confront you and fight through the problem. If you live your life expecting bad things to happen, and expecting most of life to be suffering, then you will live in a state of constant suffering. This is not some cosmic karma or divine retribution. It is simply logic. If you live in fear of the future you are putting yourself under stress. As you wait for the suffering, you are suffering. If you live your life expecting things to get better, you are under no stress at all when things are going well. It is no different than catching a cold, when you are already ill from something else, the cold is worse. When you get a cold after you have been in the peak of health for months or years, the cold is easier to handle. You know it won’t last forever and you’ll return to good health.

You ancestors have lived for thousands of years and yet you are afraid. They lived without medicine, transportation and all of the other technologies you take for granted every day. You can surely survive with them. No matter how bad things get in life, you will have an easier time of surviving than even your ancestors two hundred years ago. If you are reading this book you have enough curiosity to desire a better life, and enough intellect to read and process the information in the book. One hundred and fifty years ago, most of the people on the planet could not have even read this book, and yet they survived. What are you so afraid of? You may lose your job, your home, your life savings, but do you really think you cannot even survive? Of course you can, the only thing getting in your way is your perception that you must provide for everyone else on the planet. Those who wish you to live your life entirely for others usually have a motive that is not in your best interest. The trick they employ is to put in to your mind the belief that you exist separately from the rest of the world. That you must be the producer and everyone else is to be the consumer. This is not only illogical, it is fairly demeaning to everyone but you.

When you put yourself at the center of your life, and make your own well being, happiness and comfort your ultimate goal you make the world better.
To accomplish your happiness you must logically create something that has value. By creating something of value, you create value within yourself that can be traded with things that other people create. You may not be the inventor, you may not even be involved in the physical process that creates the product or service, but your work must be focused on the making the thing, or the process that makes the thing, better and more efficient.

When you accept that the value you create is of the utmost importance to your life, happiness and well being you will be forced to define what it is you wish to create. This gives your life purpose and direction. It completely changes the nature of your work, and thus increases your value exponentially. If you think this through logically you will find there is no escape, the conclusion is as sound as any mathematical formula. No religion, societal pressure, or forced guilt can change this logic. If you work at creating something with value you increase your own value, and you increase the value, and thus wealth of the entire world. Things are either being created or destroyed, there is no middle ground. If you float through life and do not create, you are by omission destroying. If you live something unattended the natural course is for the object to decay. It doesn’t matter if it is made by man of metal, by man of his mind, or by nature. A plant that is not watered dies. A piece of equipment left to the elements rusts.

What you create is up to you, but you must create in order to find happiness on earth. You may create a happy family life by working forty hours a week in a job you hate. You may create a new motor, software application, or business that offers lawn care service. You may create fantastic paintings, music, or sculptures. But you must create something, and that must be your primary motive in life.
When you embrace this self centered philosophy for exactly what it is, then you will make the world a better place. If you reject this philosophy and hold as your virtue that you must be the man who takes from a productive person and gives something to a non-productive person you will become a tool of those who seek not good, but power over other human beings. At some point in your life something encoded in your DNA or born with you in your soul will expose that you have spent your life without creating anything. And then you will be miserable.
If you doubt me for even one second I asked you to perform the only exercise in this book. Read the question below, and then put the book aside for five or ten minutes. In the early years of the twenty first century many find it hard to concentrate. You must this one time really think about your own happiness. Reject what others tell you made you happy. Consider your own mind only. Go beyond happy if you must and come to the point where you were overjoyed. I’ll give you one small bit of help, you will probably have been very proud.

What were the specific moments in your life when you were happiest?


Did you find that the times in your life when you were truly happy were the times when you had accomplished something? More specifically did you find that many of these times were when you had created something?

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