How To Live A Good Life

In the Winter Edition, we have discussed a few principles of “How To Live A Good Life.” Today, it is my pleasure to continue with further principles that you’ll find easy to understand. But, I’d also like to emphasize: “To know and not to do is not to know.” To really master all of these principles will usually take a lifetime. It’s like smoking:

You may know you should quit, but you don’t. To really know means living your knowledge. In this case, you quit. Otherwise, it’s nothing more than an intellectual gimmick. So, let’s continue:

Take Responsibility for Your Inner Growth

You are responsible for any and every feeling or behaviour you have. Either it is your conscious choice or an automatism unconsciously generated by your Inner Map of Reality (MAP). As a reminder, Your MAP is anything and everything you have learnt and experienced in your past. It is the software that navigates you through life. The MAP is not the territory. It’s not meant to be. It’s just a representation of reality—not reality itself.

This is not to say that you are to be criticized for your feelings or behaviours (“blame yourself”). Taking personal responsibility is not guilt but a matter of personality and developing “Knowingness.”

If someone or something OUTSIDE OF YOU is the cause of your feelings or behaviour, you feel powerless - you feel like a victim. You are at effect. But if you realise that YOU are the cause, you can choose to create the feelings and behaviours you want and serve you. Then, you are at the cause. People or events can be a stimulus or trigger, but you either react unconsciously by default or respond consciously by exerting your optional choice. If we respond, we take response-ability.

Ultimately, the choice is yours. If you make negative experiences again and again you may want to ask yourself: Did I react or did I respond?

The Principle of Conscious Change

It is impossible to create something negative for yourself and create it consciously at the same time. However, you can easily keep creating dysfunctional feelings, behaviours, and outcomes as long as you do it unconsciously (without continuous awareness). Again, if you observe the creation of emotions, behaviours, or outcomes with awareness, those that do not serve you will gradually fall away. Awareness creates choice. And if

you have a choice, what do you choose?

Taking personal responsibility is not an acknowledgment of guilt but a matter of personal stability. Learn to observe your feelings, thoughts, and behaviours with curiosity and awareness.

The trick is to stay with awareness. It is downright insidious how many ways we have to stay without awareness and not even begin to notice. They are: Overworking, overeating, drugs and alcohol, projection, blaming, obsessive thinking and analysing, obsessions, compulsive detachment, and countless others.

To become conscious, you need to identify your favourite ways of becoming unconscious. Be alert to recognize these inner strategies. Instead, learn to observe your dysfunctional feelings, thoughts, and behaviours with curiosity and awareness, making them redundant.

Thinking exercises from what you may call Dr. Jan’s

Mental Toolbox increase your ability to stay aware and be a curious observer of what is happening. As you develop this skill, dysfunctional feelings, behaviours, and approaches to life automatically fall away and are replaced by those that bring happiness, peace, and success into your life. For example, you don’t need/shouldn’t fight against something you don’t want, but simply witnessing it automatically removes it.

To bring it to the next level, the better you know what you want, the better you define what you want instead.

Witnessing Is Key

When faced with uncomfortable feelings (i.e., the inability of not letting “what is” be okay), the best course of action is to step aside mentally and, with great curiosity, watch yourself have the feeling or behaviour. You might say to yourself: “There I am, doing ___” or “There I am feeling ____. How interesting!”

The act of stepping aside to watch helps create conscious awareness because it keeps you from becoming lost in the feelings or behaviours or your mental analysis of them. It makes it much more difficult to continue suffering. However, this watching needs to be done without any attachment to the outcome. In other words, you must objectively and curiously watch what is happening—not to change anything, but just to notice what is happening. The ability to step aside and watch yourself as you feel and act is an acquired skill that takes time and practice to develop, but it will totally change your life.

Meditation naturally develops your ability to become the witness. ...watching needs to be done...without attachment to the outcome.

Generalisations, Good and Bad Ones

Based on your early life interactions with your primary caregivers, you have developed generalizations about who you are, how the world “is,” and your relationship with the rest of the world. These generalisations (part of your MAP) divide different aspects of yourself and the world into two main categories: “good” or acceptable, and “bad” or unacceptable. Both categories, obviously, include many variations in quality and intensity.

In order to keep yourself from experiencing shame or other uncomfortable feelings regarding the “bad” things, you either 1) repressed them into your subconscious mind or 2) projected them onto others (creating extreme emotional reactions to others who exhibit characteristics you believe are “bad” or unacceptable in yourself). Both of these reactions are examples of ways how we become unconscious. They are far away from the knowingness of responsibility for anything you encounter.

In many ways, emotional healing involves “unlearning” these old generalizations and making new, healthier ones. In reality, there is nothing about any of us that is innately good or bad. A far better differentiation is: Is something resourceful for me or dysfunctional? These generalizations seem so real and true to you that the idea that they are not true may seem ridiculous. All generalisations, however, are creations of your mind and are not innate in the people or things you apply them to.

The Universe Has No Intrinsic Meaning

Everything in the universe is neutral. The old saying (Shakespeare), “Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” is true. We assign meaning to everything we come in contact with. This assigning of meaning then becomes part of our MAP. Because we assign these meanings unconsciously, we “forget” that nothing has any intrinsic meaning and that we either assign these qualities and meanings to the people and things in our lives or were assigned to us when we were too little to know any better.

This is why people can assign completely different meanings to the same thing. Because you assign all meaning to everything (even though you may be doing it unconsciously), you can create whatever world you want through the meanings you choose to assign to people and things in your life. Make everything good, and the world is good; make everything bad, and the world is bad.

In most cases, you did not consciously choose how you assign meanings. Rather, they were chosen for you by our primary caregivers and other cultural influences when you were too small to know any better. You can, however, realize that these assignments of meaning are arbitrary and change them in any way you choose.

Example: Six weeks of cloudless, hot summer may appear fantastic (“good”) for somebody who is on vacation and wants to spend all day long on the beach. However, for a farmer, the owner of a garden, or somebody in charge of supplying enough drinking water, it may be a disaster (“bad”). There is nothing about us or any event/ circumstance that is innately bad.

A wise man once said, “It’s okay to play Hamlet, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking you are Hamlet.” If you think you are Hamlet, your life is a tragedy because everyone dies by the end of the play. If you know you are just playing, you can have fun with it.

Similarly, if you know everything is innately neutral and that you have assigned all the meaning to everything in life, you are playing, and you can, therefore, be the creator of your own experience. If, however, you forget— and think that people and things do innately have the meanings taught to you when you were too small to question them—you lose your creative power and will, to some degree, create suffering for yourself. Again, meditation, learning, and practicing exercises like those included in Dr. Jan’s Mental Tool Box gradually create the expanded awareness that allows you to step back and see that nothing in the universe has any intrinsic meaning.

Does this mean you can do anything you want since there is no intrinsic right or wrong? No, it does not. All actions have consequences. The conscious person sees the consequences of each feeling, each thought, and each action and acts accordingly, taking full responsibility for what is created. And all the consequences.

Remember and Know: Nothing in the universe has any intrinsic meaning. When you are in distress, check to see if you are violating any of these principles, summarised in my column in the winter edition of the EBM. Viewing the situation through the filter of these principles creates a shift for you. Whatever you do, make your life one of mastery of these principles, and you will create increasing happiness, success, and inner peace.