It is very important to use your inner strength in a deliberate manner rather than by accident.
It is very important to develop a routine of daily meditation.
It is very important to be clear about what is your life’s purpose now and what goals you need to achieve to fulfil this purpose.
It is very important that you clearly identify your values and having done this, to make sure that your values support your goals.
If, in this whole process of meditation, you find that there is a conflict between your ‘life’s purpose now’, your goals and your values, then you must be prepared to change one of these to bring them into alignment. Something’s got to change.
It is important to establish a hierarchy of purpose. It would seem to me that discovering your life’s purpose now is at the top of the hierarchy. Goals and values are the ways in which you pursue your purpose. They must all be pointed in the same direction.
Purpose, goals and values in alignment – that’s what this book is all about. And I believe we can create happiness intentionally by finding out what our purpose is and following it. In order to liberate ourselves to follow our purpose it is essential to examine deeply the values underpinning our lives. We’ve got to stop still for a moment in the rush of everyday life to look at our belief systems.
There is a Chinese word ‘Chi’ which deals with the concept of achieving peace by harmonising the work in all areas of your life. At the simplest level this involves harmonising the goals we are working towards with the value system we hold. There can be no harmony if our value system is in discord with our objectives.
Though the word Chi itself might be Chinese, the concept is by no means exclusively Chinese. It occurs in all cultures in one form or another. It is certainly deeply rooted in western culture and forms a major pre-occupation of important philosophers such as Aristotle and Aquinas. It’s the basic idea behind the term you hear in business from time to time – Synergy two different parts sharing some common ground and working together to produce a beneficial result. How many lives would be more fruitful and fulfilling if this simple concept of alignment of goals and values was followed? How many lives are led in complete frustration because people are perpetually divided in their attention, constantly fighting with themselves over what they want to do? How many lives are led, from start to finish, in mediocrity, boredom and aimlessness for the same reason? How many lives wallow in that limbo of not really being sad, but not really being happy either?
Modern life has done a lot to reduce the direct causes of misery, but has it really made us happy? Probably not. Happiness is in our own hands. It is our own responsibility. This is possibly the key concept of creating happiness intentionally. Happy people are often the ones who choose to be happy and who work at it!
Happy people are often the ones who have chosen a purpose in life, a reason to be here, and are working their way towards the achievement of the purpose on a day by day basis. They are on a journey towards their purpose and gain happiness from the process of being on the journey.
If other people can do it, you can do it too. You can choose to be happy. The bad news is that, in choosing to be happy, you might have to face some conflicts in your life and resolve them. This may present you with considerable hardship. You will have to work at it! The good news is that there are specific techniques, mental tools if you like, to help you in the process. These tools are easily learnt and applied and will be of enormous benefit if you want to Create Happiness Intentionally.
The vital, next stage in the idea of alignment is to go one step further than just aligning your goals and values in the conscious part of your mind. You need to find a process whereby the goals and values in both the conscious mind and the subconscious mind are put in alignment with each other. They need to be ‘synchronised’. A typical example of a mismatch between the goals and values of the conscious mind and the goals and values of the subconscious mind often occurs when a person makes a ‘spur of the moment’ New Year’s resolution.
The ‘spur of the moment’ New Year’s resolution is often made exactly at midnight on New Year’s Eve when everyone at the party is in an exuberant mood and all calling for resolutions to be made. A particular resolution is often chosen because the person making the resolution thinks he ought to do ‘such and such’. So the person is often acting under a sense of obligation to others rather than a true and deep motivation within himself.
An example comes in the New Year’s resolution to reduce weight. A person will often make this resolution on the spur of the moment thinking of all the television advertising he has seen telling him all the logical reasons why he should reduce weight. His wife has been ‘at him’ to lose weight and so, from a sense of obligation, he makes the resolution on the stroke of midnight. But the problem is, it is only really a superficial resolution. He has not paid any attention to delving down into his subconscious mind to find out if this is really what he wants to do and if he is really prepared to pay the price of changing his lifestyle habits. In this, his goals and values may be in conflict. For example he might have goals which result from his sense of obligation to others. These goals may include: the goal of keeping his wife happy, the goal of looking more physically attractive on the beach, and the goal of being able to tie his shoe laces without grunting and puffing. But the problem might be his value system is not really in harmony with his goals. His value system might emphasise the great social value of going and having a few beers with his mates after work every day, or eating out at fine restaurants regularly, or lazing about for several days at a time watching the cricket tests on TV. Such a spur-of-the moment New Year’s Eve resolution is usually doomed to failure because there is no harmony between goals and values and there is no synchronisation between the conscious and the subconscious mind.
If, on the other hand, the New Year’s resolution can be set deeply into the subconscious mind, and if the information in the subconscious mind is in agreement with the conscious mind, there will be a high chance of success for the resolution.
The important part of the process is to get both the conscious mind and the subconscious mind thinking and working in the same direction. It is typical that, when a person uses only the conscious mind to achieve an objective, the person’s actions are characterised by the exercise of strong self discipline and feats of willpower. These concepts of discipline and willpower are only required when one part of the mind has to overcome or dominate the other. Willpower is only required when the conscious mind has to subdue the rebellious tendencies of the subconscious mind.
If you are only working with willpower to achieve a goal, forcing yourself, and relying on an agony of self control, discipline and constant rejection of temptation, you are likely to fail in the long run. This is because the idea of using willpower is an idea of using only the conscious mind. You could call the idea of willpower alone, ‘conscious mind imperialism’ where your aim is to use the power of the conscious mind to overrule and subjugate the desires and prompting of the subconscious mind. Willpower alone can not work because the subconscious mind will resist it. What will the subconscious mind do when faced with a conflict of the conscious and subconscious mind? It will identify a change and change is scary. It may set up self sabotage.
By trying to use pure willpower the subconscious mind is not going to help you at all, it’s actually going to work against you. That’s the way it works.
So what do we need to do? We can use the subconscious mind to make it easier to change. We can actually achieve the change inside the subconscious mind first. Once this is done there will be no need to exercise strong willpower because there will be no need to subjugate the desire of the subconscious mind. We need to achieve the
