Sunday, April 8, 2018

Happiness As A Default State?


Recently, I read a Facebook post quoting Will Smith, the celebrity, sharing his opinion about happiness. He said, no one is responsible for our happiness. He said he told his beloved wife that he is “retired from making her happy.” He said they both had a good laugh over that. They were able to laugh is because they were secure in knowing that they had each other’s love and devotion. Do you think his wife would be laughing if he told her he is in love with another woman? Would he be laughing if his wife told him she is leaving him for another man? It’s easy for people with everything going for them to say, “We are responsible for our own happiness.”

Some people dislike the Law of Attraction because it says we attract what we are. Successful people like the LoA because they like the idea that they are "driving their kar-ma." People who see themselves as losers in the game of life might not like what the LoA is saying to them—that they are responsible for not being good enough, whatever "good enough" means to them. In my opinion, if we say we are responsible for our own happiness and if we are not in a happy place, it just serves to make us feel more desperately out of control. Like, what is wrong with us? As if we need to feel worse than we already do. I understand that if we blame others for our situations in life, we are giving our personal power away. I understand we have to reclaim our power and that we achieve this by assuming full responsibility for ourselves and for our lives.

Yet, it seems to me, our safety and well being depend on the actions of other people we come into contact with. A lot of our happiness depends on our environment. On the larger scale, we get depressed knowing what drives the politics and corporatocracy in our world. We feel desperate at times knowing that vaccines are not safe for humans and animals. That doctors who speak out against the conventional treatments “commit suicide” by the hundreds. Then, there are the victims of narcissism on the spectrum. How can children be responsible for their own happiness when one or both parents are narcissistic? The parents have so much power over their lives and happiness for the first twenty years at the least. Even when they get to leave their narcissistic childhood behind, they carry a lot of that baggage into their adulthood.

Such victims usually (if not all of them) attract spouses/partners/others who are also narcissistic on the spectrum and maybe NPDs or NSPs. (Narcissistic Personality Disorder or Narcissists, Sociopaths, Psychopaths.) My research yielded that some children inherit narcissistic traits from their experiences growing up in such traumatic environments. In my opinion, only the empaths are spared this inheritance. Barely. Even empaths are known to become nasty co-dependents as they struggle to cope and deal with their reality. Not every narc victim/empath ends up being a life coach. That is to say, not every victim is able to turn the disadvantages around and make them work productively for them instead. Most victims end up in a sorrowful way. Even those who have succeeded to be life coaches continue to struggle with their backstory narc issues on a regular basis. It becomes a lifelong challenge to be happy.

Some of the “baggage” humans carry can even be traced back to past lives experiences and the energy imprints we all bring to the present life. Not all “baggage” has to do with our experiences in this present lifetime. Though, in my opinion, souls will have more conscious intent to exercise the energy signatures in a given lifetime rather than from past lifetimes. Some people say, souls that are to take more than to give, are likely to be born males because our society encourages and allows more such expression of intent by the males. Females are generally raised/conditioned to be more nurturing and giving. There are exceptions of course. In both genders, the personality is heavily influenced by the events in the course of a life.

A narcissist, sociopath, or psychopath’s intent will be different from that of an empath’s. An empath’s baggage will not be the same as the narcopath's. (Narcopath is a catch-all term that includes all the cluster B personality disorders— narcissists/sociopaths/psychopaths on the spectrum.) An empath’s baggage is likely to do with the fact that he/she has a history of not listening to their intuition. They were trained by the NPD’s/NSP’s in their lives to ignore the signs and signals and to dismiss their inherent powers of discernment. This can develop into a pattern which is why they say winning and losing becomes a habit.

Even the former victims of narc abuse who have succeeded to uplevel with quantum tools and who have managed to become coaches, teachers, and guides, carry a lifetime of baggage even as they keep on moving forward with their evolution of consciousness. I understand that happiness can be a default state of mind just as misery can be a default state. When happiness is the default state, we as the Chinese say, “use the sky as a blanket if it should fall on us.” People with happiness as a default state find ways to focus on what works. Regardless of what is happening in their lives, they are able to distance themselves from it all and be on the outside looking in. The opposite would be the miserable default state where the people keep complaining about their lot even though they may enjoy more abundance and good fortune than the average person.

That default state aside, how can victims be wholly responsible for their own happiness? The rape victim, for example, is usually traumatized for a lifetime. I say if society at large is responsible for causing such distress to the souls involved, society has to come to the rescue of the victims. Who is this “society?” Each and every one of us is responsible for someone’s happiness or misery regardless of the default state. Everyone has to be kinder, gentler, more thoughtful and more helpful.  I understand that we get to take charge of ourselves at some point in our lives. We get to say “that’s enough, I’m too conscious to let this toxicity or madness continue.” Yet, just because we get conscious and want to stop the toxicity or madness, it doesn’t mean others around us will cooperate. We only get to create our own reality if we are the only ones in it. If the reality involves other people, we need to get them on board. We don’t live in a vacuum. Our actions affect other people and vice versa. To counter Will Smith’s philosophy, how about I share a quote?: If there is something we can do to make someone happy, we should. The world needs more of that. Or how about: If we can’t help someone to be happy, let’s not do anything to contribute to their unhappiness?

Studies have shown that depressed people get a lift when they are helped with something to make their lives easier and more bearable. Sometimes, it’s a job/income stream, other times, housing, friends, pets, anything that adds value to their lives. Every time I leave the safety of my house, I depend on other road users not to endanger my life. Just a case in point: The place where I play my Taiji is now infested with fire ants and I have to find another place to play. An occupant of one of the houses was badly bitten by the fire ants around the fences and she started spraying chemicals to kill them. So the ants were driven further up from where they originally were. I’m not saying this lady was not right to protect herself from the fire ants. I’m saying we are all inter-connected. Our decisions affect other people. Decisions have a “domino” or a “ripple” effect. How can we say everyone creates our own happiness when in reality, each of us is much affected by the actions of our fellow humans? We multiply the happiness in the world when we share our good fortune and abundance and we divide grief and suffering when we have people who are present to share them with us.

Many people in my old neighborhood are unhappy because when they bought their landed properties, they were unaware of the developers’ future plans to build condos literally in their backyards. In this situation, Will Smith and his wife can move away and buy new property where it suits them but most people are stuck with their mortgages. There are many things in our lives that affect our happiness level. People who say they are in full control of their happiness either have so much money that they can literally buy their way out of some unhappiness, pay for the happy experiences or they haven’t suffered the experience of some kind of personal loss and/or tragedy. Like the lady in Penang who lost her four children to the tsunami of 2004. The best she could do to cope and deal in the aftermath was to turn to a life of charity (as receiver and giver) after ten years of depression. I have had to take myself to the fifth dimension via my Taiji explorations and then, stay there for as long as I can and learn to take everything with me to the fifth. I find the 3-4 dimension on the planet depressing. As Einstein said, I paraphrase: I love humanity; it’s humans I don’t like. Add the EFAW to the equation and I need my daily fix of the fifth dimension. Mama mia!

They say, whatever happens, we should not take it personally. The other day, while at the seaside, I was looking at a wedding photo shoot going on to my right and a funeral going on to my left. I was playing Taiji in the middle; what was going on was not personal to me but it was personal to the people on my right and left. It was personal to their individual timeline. When my beloved Sharpei died, I was a wreck. Who knew? I watched the grieving family throw the ashes of their beloved into the sea with white flower petals. The family left soon after but I stayed back to observe the currents and watched as the white flower petals were carried by the waves into the far distance. I thought it was a poetic way to be sent off from one dream to the next. I started to plan to have my own ashes dispersed into the sea when my time came, in front of where I play my Taiji and suddenly, the impersonal became personal. Nowadays, I play my Taiji surrealistically aware that one day, I will most likely be in the sea in front of where I now play my Taiji.

When I’m Taiji-ing and passers-by walk past inches from me, that becomes personal. They are encroaching on my personal space. I can smell their body odor, perfume, cologne, whatever and I can hear their conversations, feel their energy, etc. They affect my happiness level when they do not know how to allow me my personal space. I’m not a celebrity/rich person who can play Taiji on my own private property or swim in my own private pool. The public will affect my happiness depending on how they behave. Unconscious humans with their lack of mindfulness and concern for others will have an effect on the happiness of others on the planet whether they are aware or not, whether they agree with Will Smith or not.