Happiness Is A Scam, Santosh Jha [bill gates books recommendations txt] 📗

Compassion. The difference between love and compassion is not only linguistic and vocabularical; it is in the ‘feel’ and maneuverability of the expression. Love and compassion are different landscapes. Similarly; happiness should ideally also be unlearnt and dumped and instead, the term, idea and perception of Contentment should replace Happiness. Overall, we need to dump the old and dominant perceptions of all Emotions and instead imbibe the very scientific, objective and superordinate idea and perception of Intentionality.

It is important that there are conscious changes in the entire neural mapping of reality, as we are now having and are used to. As we change the analogies and metaphors and consciously accept novel and alternative perceptions, we change our neural landscape-milieus and journey a new feel. In that enterprise, we also need to unlearn the metaphors of ‘Reward’ feelings. We need to weigh and calculate not happiness but contentment and not in terms of Reward feelings but the feel of Willfulness. This willfulness is the power and endowment of thoughtful conscious judgment of truthfulness and sanity to our own self. If we are willfully making all choices and more importantly very consciously saying ‘No’, instead of unconscious ‘Yes’, after settled process of thoughtfulness, we are being truly rewarded. The benchmark of reward is not the metaphor of attainments but the ‘empowerment’ to be a willful owner of truthfulness.

Similarly, we need to unlearn ‘success’ and instead learn the idea and metaphors of optimality of impact of processes. Even if we fail in attaining what we wished, if we have consciously and willfully done all those behavior and actions, which were necessary to create honesty, compassion, amiability and equanimity; we have truly succeeded. Also, success is for contentment of individuality; not the endorsement of collectivity. Societal-cultural success benchmarks must be unlearnt as it often kills contentment and willfulness. In that chain of unlearning, there is this urgent need to reorient our perception of popular sense of Maturity and Logicality. We have already talked about them earlier.

The simple reason for this change is the proposition; a hypothesis that Happiness, Reward, Success, Love etc are all contextual realities, perceived largely by the benchmarks of the Collective domain of societal-cultural landscapes, which we all know have become depraved and decayed. On the other hand, Compassion, Contentment, Willfulness and Processes are all very Individualistic and Personal, where collective element is not even required. The later aspects are also more in the aware and conscious domain. This makes an individual free and de-scammed. We all know how an individual is so unfavorably placed in the deeply unequal and distrustful milieus of society-culture-politics-economics. Happiness, Success, Reward and Love is so scarce and usurped only by a handful of people that an average person cannot get them easily and enough. That is why there is this need to empower individuality and personal universe and find those endowments, which are already there within three layers of consciousness. We just need to optimize them with our conscious choices and reorientation of attitudes and cognition towards realities that truly and really matter to us.

The above-mentioned aspect is crucial background, which is required to de-scam happiness and begin a novel and alternative journey of life-living. We now list up point-wise, what we may embark upon to have a more meaningful, empowered and fulfilled life-living; which truly optimizes our personal potentials and leads to better, deeper and true-real wellness. Here we go –

First and foremost is the need to understand the idea of Consciousness, unlearning old, archaic and obsolete metaphors to identify it. It is crucial because your Consciousness is the sole ‘media’ of all perceptions and all feelings of realities. We need to understand that the ‘self’ or ‘I’ is in three layers of unconscious, subconscious and conscious and all three are in continuum; not segregated or compartmentalized. Consciousness, our sense of self or ‘I’ is not one entity but, it is an emergent holism of three different parts, interacting and cooperating with each other. We, as ‘I’, do almost 98 percent of actions and behaviors not ‘owned’ by conscious self as it is not registered, unless very aware. But conscious is affected and shaped up by unconscious and subconscious. Ideally, we need to expand the domain of conscious from the current two percent to 98 percent. This may be impossible but we have to keep expanding the conscious domain by doing simple things. What? We know; conscious choices or what we popularly call as Free Will, happens when we do ‘deliberate’ actions to first, retrieve or create a clear mental image of reality by using the energy of skepticism; secondly, we initiate inner talks or what we call self-dialogue, introspection or self-evaluation; thirdly, we recall long-term memories and assess a situation on the basis of experiences of objective knowledge we have stored. Naturally, this needs time. Science tells us that ‘executive decisions’ by cortex parts of the brain may take days and weeks to process information and arrive at a decision. The subconscious handled by limbic system is however quick and reactionary. Therefore, we need to stop being reactionary and initiate the habit of leisurely thoughtfulness. We need to reorient our perception about loneliness and leisurely life-living. They are not bad, as most of us think; rather, they are need of the hour. Conscious self or aware ‘I’ happens when we face conflict situations, where there is this call to take decisions between different options and choices. This elevates brain wave frequency and neural plexus strength. Intentionality is at its Optimum and most fruitful when we are conscious, aware and receptive and not reactive. We have discussed how perceptions are automatically engendered by subconscious using ‘filters’ of emotions and short-term memories. This is to be unlearnt. Only a conscious and aware person can be in optimal position to have sanity and system of poised and sound judgment of normal, appropriate and right. This is the situation where happiness must always be processed – consciously and in receptive, thoughtful and willful mode. However, one needs to keep upgrading one’s knowledge inventory to ensure that conscious choices have better probability of being true and right.

The hypothesis of conscious choices also means that you need to consciously intervene in subconscious cognition of Happiness. As we have talked earlier, there is subconscious domain where happiness may be processed but we fail to register them. We need be very aware and consciously bring out those hitherto ‘unregistered’ and unrecognized happiness into domain of conscious registry. This happens when you stop being reactive and reactionary. You cultivate receptive mode thoughtfulness; think long-term and indulge in self-dialogue. We have to rethink how we journey. Usually, we look at buildings and specific structures, when we travel. We need to change this and journey into the feel of landscapes. Happiness is also about journeying landscapes, not buildings. To facilitate understanding of this process, we may consider a process, about which we are not always aware, even if it happens with all the time. As we have talked earlier, scientists have been able to predict what a person shall do, seconds before he or she actually does it. This we can feel. Our brain states decide an action or behavior and we, as a subject or self, simply ‘own’ it. Remember, when you sing or recite poetry; if you sit calmly and try to feel it, there is a sort of ‘prompt’, which comes in your mind, leading your singing or recital ahead. It is very much like your shadow, simultaneously lingering inches ahead of you as you walk past a lighted source. This ‘prompt’ or neural finality of action is so automatically aligned to our consciousness that we ‘own’ it without being aware that we are being ‘led’. We have already talked as how unconscious, subconscious and conscious are all in continuum and synced to be in singular holism, even when they are different entities. If we are aware; if we practice this art of being aware and very conscious of the ‘prompt’ or ‘lead’ of subconscious mind states, we can intervene and even alter this ‘leading’ voice inside. This is the way to be the master of the intentionality, rather than being a slave of it. If we could do it, we de-scam happiness as more and more subconscious choices and registry of happiness would be available for conscious and willful thoughtfulness. The usual emotional or memory filters, which decide subconscious happiness, then come to be replaced by the filter of willful and thoughtful logicality. As we have repeatedly talked; we all need to test and refine the Intentionality, which ‘leads’ us through a continuum of unconscious-subconscious and conscious. It happens when we become aware, receptive and leisurely to consciously check and re-check the subconscious-intentionality into conscious one.

As we have talked earlier, the innate intelligence of nature has clearly listed the Homeostasis as the true and real Happiness of body and mind. It is difficult to describe and even imagine what the blissful contentment of being in optimal homeostatic poise means. In contemporary human world, almost hundred percent men and women are in some sort of homeostatic imbalance. Human body-mind is a hugely complex system and there are number of sub systems, which in totality and holism ensure homeostatic wellness. There simply cannot be a true and real happiness or even contentment if a person is in bad homeostasis. This is not the space to detail about the realities of homeostasis but it is some knowledge everyone must have. Our body and mind are the sole media of all realities. Consciousness, as the media of all perceptions is also in optimal sanity when our body-mind has holistic wellness and poise. If homeostatic poise is disturbed, a person’s perceptions as well as sense of ‘I’ also get affected. Homeostatic imbalances bring about not only diseases; they also affect the consciousness and intentionality. A troubled homeostasis may very well be a subconscious invite to criminality and depravity of Intentionality. Homeostatic troubles disarray the unconscious and subconscious layers of brain states and as we have discussed before; as conscious is in continuum of unconscious and subconscious, it also gets affected by a bad homeostasis. For every one of us, the primary and lasting happiness condition is homeostatic wellness as it keeps the landscape of body-mind true and rightfully real. It needs to be understood that like consciousness, happiness is like a Field, a milieu, a landscape. Happiness is not a building; it is a landscape. Homeostasis of the body-mind is the idealism of this macrocosmic landscape, within which the microcosmic landscape of happiness emerges as milieu. That is why primary happiness is homeostatic wellness and sanity.

Probably, the simplest and optimal idea leading to true and real Happiness or contentment is the reality that Individuality is your start and Individuality is your end. We begin as pure and singular individual and we leave the world as individual. However, in between, the entire journey of the middle-reality, we keep losing and emaciating our individuality, gradually ‘evolving and maturing’ to be better slaves of the collective milieus of society-culture-polity-economy. In this journey, we subconsciously deprave, conflate and criminalize our consciousness. This vitiates our macro milieu, which in turn infests and infects happiness with malice and maladies. We need to redeem our individuality and re-track our life-living journey to the road of individuality. We need to ‘unlearn’ and dump so many subconscious and unconscious ‘collective contexts’, which scam our individuality and thrust upon us such benchmarks of normality and appropriates, which scam our perceptions. Un-aligning our individuality from collective compulsions shall also save us from loads of criminal and corrupted insinuations, which the collective spaces are filled with. However, it is very important to understand the domain and nature of individuality. Individuality does not mean unfettered and un-thoughtful action-behavior of one’s ‘unreasonable’ choices. As we have discussed earlier, individuality means conscious, willful and logical thoughtfulness in retrospective and receptive mode of life-living, based on objective-scientific knowledge. Individuality means not automatically subscribing to populist and dominant cultural benchmarks, without subjecting