The key to happiness - eliminate all negativity!

OK this is for sure now. Our mood and satisfaction with life is completely separate from our circumstances. The former is a choice (with long training) and the latter is a fact.

The problem with this statement is that we under-estimate the amount of training.

Normally our moods come and go and we have no control over them. We find that a particular food makes us feel happy. We seek that food because we want happiness. Then we find it no longer works and we are seeking something else. Boredom becomes our arch enemy because when we become bored with the old tricks we lose the possibility of happiness.

Actually it is about unhappiness and the cause of this is negativity. Master negativity and we never need to feel unhappy.

Negativity is all those dark thoughts which enter our minds when faced with certain situations. I am single, I have no job and I have no-where to live. All these because (1) they are too much effort and (2) because I've come to doubt the logic which says we need them. However this sets me up for a lot of nagative thoughts. I feel lonely, I feel sad, I feel worthless, I feel depressed, I feel bored. What then is worse is seeing people with the things I want: nice houses, attractive partners, lots of friends, even just happy. Then the real negativity starts as I criticise, pick faults, and feel angry in defence of what inside is pain caused apparently by not having these things.

Looking deeply and over a long period of time with patients it becomes clear that really it is our negativity to these situations that causes the pain. This means that the struggle to obtain these desirable situations is actually just a running from our negativity which we cannot control.

It is a plain fact that I realised on holiday this week - in fact as I cycled in the dark a 50mile return journey from holiday, tired, cold and knowing that I had nothing to return to and thinking of friends who had all these comforts - that master my negativity and I do not need these things for happiness. And this is exactly what I did there and then and it worked. I was truely happy in the dark, cold and tired with no where to go.

The first stage is to learn to ride out the storm of desires that flare up when we think or see things that we deeply want. Mastering that is the hardest and longest part.

Once we can sit out a desire that starts and let it go (not easy) then we can begin to get our mind back and analyse the situation. Often it is a happiness that someone else has apparently on gaining something we want - for example an attractive partner. What could be better than the comfort and bliss of being with her we think. Our friend is happy we note, it must be because of her. Therefore I should be unhappy because I don't have her and for that I am envious and now I can't be positive for them and I am negative toward them... or I force myself to be positive because it would spoil the friendship and everyone would think me a bad person. But inside I hurt and I must lie that I'm ok.

What is happening is simply that we can't control our negativity. Then we feel unhappy because we are negative. Then we think that the other people are happy because they don't have the negativity and we think that having what they have is a cure for negativity. Then we desire what they have got which we don't have and we get more negative. We end up in a cycle of negativity and desire.

If someone told you that actually what they have got hasn't made them happy, if they are happy it is because they found the happiness inside themselves. And, if that happiness coincided with an event like marriage or the birth of a child, that event is simply enabling them to clear their negativity for a while then actually the whole process of negativity inside us is extinguished.

There is thus no need to crave for anything outside us in the long run. In the short run we may still continue our habits like knowing that sex gives us a fix during which time we feel less negativity. But the route to happiness is not the fixes, it is the mastery of our negativity.

Once we can shake off the negative minds and accept other peoples happiness as easily as our own then we are free from all cravings and needings and life is simple and easy.

What is extraordinary is that this is well written in the books so I have good guides. And, I've had an incling it is true for a long time from happy experiences in miserable conditions down caves and up mountains. But we live in a world where you could be forgiven for not understanding because all political, economic and common talk says that possession and consumption of things is the way to happiness. Yet categorically I can say from personal experience now (and backed by a wealth of ancient and modern religious literature) that this is simply a life being busy in building unhappiness. How insane is that!

An advert on TV at the moment pictures our white lives and culture against the lives and cultures of others coloured people (well you know who I'm talking about!!) and asks for money to improve the situation of these children. Yet it is so blatantly ignorance on the behalf of the charity workers thinking that because they wouldn't bring their kids up like this neither should anyone else. In UK I'm sure that intervention would be illegal - but in the white-designated "3rd" world apparently we can do what we want. Kids will come to whoever gives them sweets and presents so the aid workers are very popular - but that doesn't mean that they are doing anything worthwhile. If at anytime they teach these kids that actually they are not poor and they have an equal chance of happiness to any of the kids in "rich" countries then they will have done the service. Anything else will lead these kids onto the treadmill of personal unhappiness and environmental degredation (given that effort to provide for oneself damages the environment).