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Live Your Best Life

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dfox63
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Live Your Best Life

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Hello!

This is Deshon Fox, author of The Middle Theory. It has been an amazing few years interacting with readers from around the world. In an effort to interact with more persons, I am happy to begin a discussion on this forum centered on happiness, the goal of our lives. I welcome your comments. If you wish to learn more about The Middle Theory, please visit www.themiddletheory.com.

Truly, every human being alive at this moment and every human being who has ever lived sought or is seeking happiness. Even the drug dealer and the thief is searching for something - some feeling, some material comfort or some relationship - that will bring some measure of fulfillment (i.e. happiness).

So let's explore this moat important topic together (after I receive some feedback, I will continue the discussion with new posts)


What is happiness?

How do we achieve this sought-after condition?

Once achieved, how do we make it last?


These are arguably the three most important questions we can ever ask. Some would argue that they are also the three most difficult questions to answer. What if we really knew the answers to these questions? How might our lives change? The Middle Theory provides a simple answer to the first question:


Happiness is the reward for utilizing the force of love to create peace; there can be no greater reward.


It is possible that you have never thought of happiness as a reward. It is also very likely that you have never before connected happiness with the utilization of the force of love. Love, a force? OK, let's take a closer look at this piece of wisdom. What is really being said?

Happiness, as we all know, is a condition of being. When we are truly happy, we not only feel happy, but we are happy. Feelings are as fickle as the wind. One stubbed toe can cause us to go from feeling swell to feeling angry or frustrated in an instant. When we are happy our being - our motivations, perceptions, emotions....our awareness - achieves a condition of balance. We may not feel happy in every instant, but as long as our outlook is positive and our aspirations motivate us to be consistently honest, caring, and compassionate, we will be happy.

Feeling happy is not the same as being happy, as I just illustrated; however, when we are happy, we usually feel happy as well.

If you don't feel happy at this moment - perhaps you haven't felt truly happy in a while - ask yourself, how am I being at this very moment? Am I utilizing the force of my being (my thoughts and actions) to nurture peace within myself and around me? Are my thoughts positive and uplifting? What about my actions? Are they loving, gentle, and sincere? In answering these questions, we can increase our awareness of our state of being and thereby gain insight into the cause of our feeling of unhappiness. Remember, you are never unhappy because of what you are doing, but because of who you are being. When we understand this universal truth, we can advance towards deeper states of balanced awareness; in the process we "receive" the reward of happiness.

A quick note about the use of the word reward in the earlier quote from The Middle Theory. Generally speaking, a reward is something given or received in return for a service rendered. This definition has application here. From now on, think of happiness as the gift life freely gives us when we consistently use the energy of our beings to manifest the attributes of love - patience, humility, inner balance, harmony, fairness, and so on- within ourselves and within the world around us. There can truly be no more precious gift than this.

Deshon Fox
www.themiddletheory.com
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Re: Live Your Best Life

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dfox63 wrote:It is possible that you have never thought of happiness as a reward. It is also very likely that you have never before connected happiness with the utilization of the force of love. Love, a force? OK, let's take a closer look at this piece of wisdom. What is really being said?

Happiness, as we all know, is a condition of being. When we are truly happy, we not only feel happy, but we are happy. Feelings are as fickle as the wind. One stubbed toe can cause us to go from feeling swell to feeling angry or frustrated in an instant. When we are happy our being - our motivations, perceptions, emotions....our awareness - achieves a condition of balance. We may not feel happy in every instant, but as long as our outlook is positive and our aspirations motivate us to be consistently honest, caring, and compassionate, we will be happy.
dfox63 wrote:

You talk of love as the great force leading to happiness. I also feel certain that it is one important aspect to happiness. I believe there are other forces at work that must be recognized and dealt with in order to reach the happiness you speak of.

I don't see any mention of that other great force which prevents so many of us from making progress towards greater happiness in our lives. I'm speaking of that very powerful force - the unconscious, the part of the brain that has been totally concerned with survival over the history of our species. The part of the brain that is too often in conflict with the conscious desires of the mind.

Some of the Book Talk members at this site are currently in the middle of a discussion of Jonathan Haidt's book The Happiness Hypothesis. After years of research and study, Haidt has come to recognize the power of this force, its origins in the mind and some realistic suggestions for dealing with it. During my many years on the planet, I've seen so many friends and acqaintances get immersed into self-help books and programs, fail to make the expected progress and blame themselves for not having the will power to stick with it.

Does your program recognize this conflict in the human mind?
dfox63
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Re: Live Your Best Life

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Thank you for your very thoughtful response.

Clearly you have given the topic of happiness much thought and no doubt have read about it quite a bit. I have not read the book you referenced ("The Happiness Hypothesis"); however, your comment brings up a very important aspect of happiness: our subconscious mind, the part of the mind that accounts for 90% of our experience, and yet is, figuratively speaking, tucked away from our waking thoughts. It in interesting that you mention that the unconscious (often referred to as subconscious, although there is a slight difference) mind, being in an evolutionary survival mode, is often at odds with the conscious desires of the mind. Again, I haven't read the book you referenced, so I cannot speak to what it contains. I have learned from my experience that the human being is simultaneously "evolving" on both the physical and spiritual planes. As our capacity to understand broader spiritual truths/precepts increase, our subconscious/unconscious mind is also changing. These spiritual changes cannot be proven scientifically per se (at least not yet), but in persons who become what we may call enlightened, we observe a convergence between our dominant unconscious desires and our conscious choices. One way to think of the relationship between the unconscious/subconscious and the conscious is to think of the former as being a vast pool, and the latter (the conscious) as being a bowl that dips into this pool from time to time. Clearly, whatever the bowl retrieves each time is dips into the pool is only a small portion of the water that is there. The sub-conscious part of is vast, illimitable. We can never know all there is to know about this part of us, or understand precisely how it operates. We do know, however, that as we strive to bring our conscious thoughts into alignment with our highest virtues (love, kindness, mercy, justice, equality and so on) our perceptions become clearer - we literally see life with new eyes. This ultimately has a profound effect on the choices we make in this life - which in turn has an effect on our state of being - happiness is then experienced as a condition of this heightened state of being, not simply as an emotion or transient feeling. Balance, as discussed in The Middle Theory, is a heightened state of being where our conscious thoughts align with our highest aspirations (even aspirations that we not know exist that are within the domain of the subconscious mind). Essentially, as we choose to allow our inner light (our inner awareness that goes beyond the limits of the conscious mind) to flood our being, whatever conflict exists between the conscious and unconscious parts of us dissolves allowing us to achieve perfect clarity that originates within us and is expressed in our thoughts and actions - a state we commonly refer to as enlightenment.....again, thank you so much for your thoughtful response. I look forward to hearing more from you and others on this important topic.

Deshon
www.themiddletheory.com
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