Self Mastery Program Gary Van Warmerdam 10/10

[Richard Alpert]

those free mp3 were some good stuff

[Gary]

On 3/26/2016 at 1:50 PM, Hengame said:

@Garyhi Gary thank you very much for your concern on my signing up in your web sit. The problem which I am facing is that the password and confirmation some how can not be matched even though I was really careful about to confirm the password correctly but even 3 times I tried every time the same result with a message your password and confirmation does not match. Wit a big hope that I finally could get and sign up, thanks 

 

Hi Hengame,

I relaxed the strong password requirement, so any 8 or more characters should do.   I will leave it that way for now and deal with the bots another way.  Let me know by email if you still have an issue.  And perhaps provide more detail about where the signup process falls apart.  Other people are signing up without issue so I can't duplicate the problem. 

I did have server issues over the last couple days, so that shut down the signup as well. We think we have that solved. 

Thanks for your patience. 

 

 

 

[Gary]

On 3/28/2016 at 11:41 AM, Richard Alpert said:

those free mp3 were some good stuff

I relaxed the strong password requirement, so any 8 or more characters should do.   I will leave it that way for now and deal with the bots another way.  Let me know by email if you still have an issue.  And perhaps provide more detail about where the signup process falls apart.  Other people are signing up without issue so I can't duplicate the problem. 

I did have server issues over the last couple days, so that shut down the signup as well. We think we have that solved. 

Thanks for your patience. 

[Nic]

Tank you Gary for taking the time out of your retreat???

[Nic]

@Gary

Hi Gary, when you are back from your retreat, I would like to have your opinion and allowance about me releasing every now and then my notes and/or transcriptions about your (free) podcast, the theory (not the mastery course), with the link to your podcast, so that the people can see better what we are talking about here, so they can have a better view if they want to join your mastery course, which the first 4 exercises are free of charge, I wouldn't know why they have not already signed up. But some people like reading more than listening especially on forums, also they could use it, summarize it (if not already done by me), which was like doing a mandala in the Himalaya with buddhist monks. 

This also could help me here as I could link directly to an internal page the transcription/resume and the link to your podcast when I see that someone has questions related to a topics that could help to understand things better.

I would understand if you refuse, I mean this is your lifework and also, you might not see it as a helpful thing, people has to do the work on their own at the end, but I guess it could actually be good advertising and help a lot of people.

All I want to do is thanking you and help others, so tell me what you think of it!

Take care

 

[Nic]

I copied and paste this post from another topic on real growth because it is directly related to the course:

 

 

@Algi In my case meditation helped not so much, it was a good bonus, for me it was mostly emotions watching thank to the course I did. Because meditation helped me see and realize that ideas are out of my control, but I rarely have emotions when I meditate. Emotions are for me what makes ideas feel "real". I'm not saying that one should not meditate! Please do it as much as possible!

But I believe this is the way for me to mental sanity, real growth, long lasting happiness and this procedure gives me equanimity. I question the whole process of having emotions. This is what I would call wisdom and it is actually hard work, not to jump into an emotion and to do this for as long as it becomes a new way of life, to be an emotion hunter as my spiritual master would say. This is being self aware. This whole process detaches me from the lies of the voice and the voice itself, from the emotions that comes from being identified with it. 

I hope this can help someone to get rid of the daily drama he/she is living! You can change the dialogue at will for yourself, if you are being judgmental on yourself, this is of course only an exemple.

 

So I dive into the thinking/emotional process:

When I notice that feel any emotions (mostly bad of course, they are less pleasant...), I go and ask:

 

-Hey, what do I feel now exactly? Pain, anger/ joy, pride

- What created that feeling ? Ok, my thoughts. 

-What Am I thinking? He is so cool/a big asshole.

-What else Am I thinking, it's not only this, you know there's something hidden? That I'm not as good/better than as him or her.

-In what tone was I saying that? Accusing, judging and/or being victim, pity....

-What was hidden underneath that idea or that word? That I'm not worth being loved, that I'm worth being loved.

-How come did I make the shortcut to all this without noticing it in the first place? Because I was unconscious of the whole process, it happened so quick.

-What can I do now with that feeling I'm aware of? Let go of it.

-Why would you let go of it? Because I don't feel good/ why not? (If I feel good, I say, I didn't create this feeling on purpose did I)

-How can I let go of it? By changing perspective! Of course!!!!  I forgot I can change perspective, there is always at least one another perspective.

-What kind of perspective? Well I can for exemple choose the most simple perpective of all, the GRATITUDE perspective!

-Fuck off, not again!? Yeah right mate, Gratitude, you know they are thousand things to be grateful for right now, my breathing, my body, my job, my clothes, my family and friends and so many things I can't even see right now because I'm blind and emotional, but this guy who you think now is an asshole also just gave you a wicked exercise to be mindful... so be thankful!!!! Say thank you!!! Come on!

-Thank you! No sincerely, do not only say thank you, send him your gratitude, and feel the gratitude yourself, you will feel the emotion , not him, but you. He only did the best he could in his situation, he could be your own dad/brother or even yourself. Your dad/brother is not the most mindful guy either?! Yourself are not always aware as well... yeaaah sure!

-Will I care in ten years from now? Of course not, I'll laugh about it, I'll be actually thankful to have learn something! 

-So why should I care now? I don't really know as I remember that story of the zen master, the farmer and his son that found a horse, and that story makes a lot of sense to me.

-So you can forgive him right? I guess I could, fogginess does make me feel good, it would be the right choice for sure. There is not much sens in clinging to anger anyway, it only stresses me out, I only punish myself. If I can't do that, I just react unconsciously to an unconscious person. I want to learn something from it.

OH YES, so that you'll be better than him right?  Hmmm, sounds tempting but not really, I fell in that trap before... no, just because it feels good doing so. I'm not better than anyone you know. That would be judging, this is what I actually try to avoid here you little cheeky scamp, he he!

- There is no sens in judging anything anyway, the voice I hear is just playing with me. Thank you voice for giving me notice of your opinion but I don't see why I should refrain from expressing love/compassion right now, as expressing love/compassion is making me feel good actually. Love doesn't need any reason to be expressed, it only needs reasons not to be expressed. Try to rationalize love anyway... Rationality doesn't make me happy, it refrains me from being happy, like I could experienced it in the past. You made me loose my temper more than once and I've hurt people as well remember? By biting into your lies based in fear, you got me into depression some time ago remember? This was very painful, I had to get myself out of this, now I don't trust you anymore like you were the master of my life. Thank you for your advice. I'll listen to you when I need you. You are my friend, and you did your best, you did exactly what you were designed to do. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, See, it does you good as well when you feel this love, you're going quiet... Take care my friend, see you soon!

-Hmmmm, hmmmmmm....

 

The internal discussion I have with myself usually ends there, otherwise I just start it all over again if the pain I feel remains. After a few seconds comes the next idea again of course, will I bite into it is another question. When the emotion is there, I can see that I did bite into it! The more you do it, the quicker the change in emotion will get. But after a while of practice, you can anticipate what the voice would like to say and you know in advance it doesn't make sens. The whole process slows down, you see very clearly all the reasons, the lies flying around in your head like kids doing a ball game. And there comes the higher self, saying "wow wow wow, kids, stop playing around will you! Cheers!" and that's it. This happens when all the above discussion gets automatic. One day you might even don't need to say a thing anymore. The kids sit quietly.... They are waiting for you to go on holiday! Don't go for too long like I did! 

Even though it might sound quiet sick, that some might think I could need to see a doctor for having so much internal dialogue, those people don't realize they have internal dialogue because they identify with the voice all the time, the biggest mistake to do on the spiritual path.
 

If you combine this whole procedure with meditation, I guaranty that you will find peace. It works even better with meditation, you will get there faster.

I wish you all a very peaceful mind!

 

[Gary]

On 4/9/2016 at 4:29 AM, Nic said:

I would like to have your opinion and allowance about me releasing every now and then my notes and/or transcriptions about your (free) podcast, the theory (not the mastery course), with the link to your podcast, so that the people can see better what we are talking about here, so they can have a better view

 

NIc, and to others, yes you are welcome to discuss any of the free material, podcasts, and even the free sessions of the course.  I think that can be helpful.  Once into the paid material I would ask you not to.  One, it is my business and allows me to work with people full time.  But also, there is some really different ways and practices of looking at what goes on in the mind that I use, and if a person gets a partial picture from a forum post, they are likely to think of it as weird if they don't have the full explanation and other sessions to build up to it.  

and if you have transcripts to the podcasts, that would be fine. Just link back to the original content please.  And, if you would be willing, I'd like to post them on my site. Let me know. 

Thanks

 

[Nic]

1 hour ago, Gary said:

NIc, and to others, yes you are welcome to discuss any of the free material, podcasts, and even the free sessions of the course.  I think that can be helpful.  

Perfect! This is really nice that we can discuss even the free session of the course, thank you Gary! But I don't think of it as a good idea, I wouldn't be for releasing anything about the mastery course even the free sessions, because in my opinion, one could benefit more from doing the work for the time recommended, 2 weeks per exercice, except for the first exercice, one week. If one get the content of the first 4 exercices at the same time, one could be tempted to do all 4 exercises at the same time, which I think is not the path to mastery. And mastery needs time as you know!

1 hour ago, Gary said:

Once into the paid material I would ask you not to.  One, it is my business and allows me to work with people full time. 

I won't release the paid material transcripts on the internet or anywhere else! I have no interest or intention in harming your business in any way! Rather the contrary actually!

1 hour ago, Gary said:

and if you have transcripts to the podcasts, that would be fine. Just link back to the original content please.

This was my plan!

1 hour ago, Gary said:

 And, if you would be willing, I'd like to post them on my site. Let me know. 

They would probably need some, maybe a lot of corrections though, as english is not my mother language, but I'd be glad if you can make use of it, I'll contact you!

Thank you Gary!

Edited April 12, 2016 by Nic

[Nic]

A quote by Gary:

-"Life is not a problem to solve. There is no answer. It is an opportunity for mastery of expression. Your life is your work of art."

 

So here is a mix of summaries and transcriptions of some of Gary's free audio series, sorry for the long wait but I had a lot of shadow work to do on my ego before coming to talk about the subject again.

I've realized that some of the podcast have changed title since the day I started with the transcription, so I'm not sure about the link to the podcast for some audio.

Here is the link to Gary's free audio series:

http://pathwaytohappiness.com/insights.htm

 

What is Awareness?  (sorry I'm not sure about the link to the podcast on that one)

Awareness is the ability to see with clarity the whole world, the invisible world of faith and to perceive the power of faith. Faith is not here concedered as a religious matter.
Your emotions are the feedbacks of your beliefs and the faith you invest in your beliefs.
Awareness is the capacity to open your eyes to the world of what is going on in your mind, your belief system, what you are doing with your personal power, what you are doing in your relationships and how you create your own happiness or unhappiness. You become independant to what you know, think and perceive. 

 

Understanding The Spiritual Journey  http://pathwaytohappiness.com/podcast/pod20-spiritual.mp3

-We tend to think that this spiritual journey is having a lot to do about God, but in fact, itʼs about us.
-The spiritual journey is about life and more specially about being happy in life.

-The feeling of being home is a personal experience. These things that are spiritual fall more into these personal experiences that we feel and therefore, just by their nature, are very difficult to describe.
Those descriptions in all religions and traditions can become very confusing and can become a myth.
When you add fear, judgments, self importance to a myth, there is a lot room for superstition and tyranny.

-Being happy means being kind to yourself and others, compassionate, generous, showing understanding, enjoying life.
Being happy means simply making sure you have more and more love within yourself and less and less fear.

-What makes sense is to take all the things that you fear and get rid of them. In doing so, there will be a lot more room for love.
Some other things have to change as-well, that included beliefs, internal dialogue and most importantly change the point of view, the point of perception.

Everything begins from that point of perception.
-Very often, the emotional state we create, begins with a certain point of view that leads to an interpretation and beliefs, that result in an emotional state. What often fixates a person's point of view in a state of victim, judgment or righteousness, pride, arrogance are a set of beliefs. Those might be in the self- image and beliefs about oneself.
Those beliefs fixate a persons point of view. That point of view dictates then how you make interpretations about everything.
If someone put its faith in the interpretation, the corresponding emotion comes out. Due to that emotion we put more faith and belief in that emotion that fixates our point of view. That point of view make all those beliefs appear true and so we create more and more emotions that fixate the point of view.

-A large part of breaking our fears is about breaking apart those core beliefs that fixate our point of view. By shifting the point of view we are able to take apart those beliefs. The result of which is a change in our emotional state.

-The challenge in our traditions around the world is that we are describing things that can't be seen with words.
-You have to have a quiet mind to create that euphoric state of love. By describing it with words, we fixate the mind on knowledge and informations. The mechanism of language that we have, is a part of the barrier of progress.

-This is why there is so much benefit in taking action and in doing something different, that creates experience.
This also why a lot of people can read a lot of different books of self-help, spiritual teachings, and not being really happier in their lives.

They have taking the process of opening up to an emotional experience and a clearer perception of life and substitute it with gathering knowledge, filling the mind. -Language creates a structure of conceptual ideas and creates massive amounts of knowledge, but not necessarily wisdom.

-What actions can you take?
Meditation, sitting still. On the outside it looks like you are doing nothing, but on the inside it can be very active, you are breaking up your every day routine and create a different experience. You realize how much chatter there really is in the mind and how uncomfortable it is for the mind for you just to seat still and do nothing.
That emotional state is done through actions, not through the intellect, not through feeding the mind more information.

-You measure that spiritual journey very simply by your emotional state.
To keep it simple, Are you happy or unhappy? Are you on a path to happiness or on the path to misery?
The quieter your mind, then the fewer illusions, temptations, distortions, contradictory beliefs you will have and the more peaceful you will be.

-The immunity against self importance comes with awareness by knowing where your happiness is coming from, by knowing that there are more points of view available.
-To have a common reference for a state of being where the mind is quiet and the emotional state is euphoric, you might have that experience, if you see something beautiful, like a sunset.

Some people say it takes their breath away. What it actually takes is all the internal dialogue. That experience of perceiving beauty transcends description, and that direct perception of beauty opens you up to a euphoric state of love.

That experience of emotional bless may come in meditation or may just hit you one day down the street, your eyes open up and you see the incredible beauty in front of you, in a way that you have never seen it before. We call that the spiritual experience. It transcends all the internal dialogue.

We can also call that feeling being free of the limitations of the beliefs and thoughts in our minds that fixate our point of view in a fixed limited range of possibilities.
-It is this desire to escape this limited state of consciousness, this feeling of being trapped by things we can't see that makes us seek the freedom of the spiritual experience, and see beauty in life, that we can only see when we shift our point of view. All of this happens behind the eyes.

-Besides meditating, one other method is to challenge that structure of beliefs in the mind that fixate the point of view. Dismantle the structure and start freeing up the way we perceive things that allow ourselves to have different interpretations, and therefore create different emotional state about the same experience.
-Another way is to control your dreams. Our mind is dreaming all the time, day or night. Memories of the past are dreams. When we imagine anything, it's a dream. We often experience the emotions that comes with them.
When you are aware that you are having a day dream, you are able to change it. In that way you change the interpretation your mind is making, you don't believe the old stories, you can change your point of view from victim or judgment, see it from a new perspective. You still have the memory, that haven't change, but you changed the way you see things and that's now under your control.

The spiritual journey is about common sense, respect and love that transcends those limiting points of view, and limited beliefs. 

Edited July 3, 2016 by Nic

[Nic]

Can You Change Your Life? (is a customer interview) http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/pod11-holly-interview.mp3

The real transformation that you create for yourself, is in actual practice. Those exercises can be found in the self mastery course.
Before you start changing your life, you start with mastering yourself. You are the instrument with which you create your life. And without first tuning that instrument, you are likely to miss the mark of what you are aiming for in your life. 

 

Do You Need Guidance? http://pathwaytohappiness.com/podcast/pod21-teacher.mp3

-Enlightenment is when you see things as they are.
-All that one has to do to make that journey is to shift his point of perception
-Choose to put your point of perception to a different view point at anytime, to take you out of victimhood and out of judgment.
-To a certain point, you have to get free of the path, but to even get to a point where you can depart, you have to develop the skills to develop your attention and therefore follow a path.
-Book learning is quiet different from developing consciousness. What do we do with that knowledge? We have to pratice.

-Don't be under the belief that if you really care about someone, you have to point all what he's doing wrong to him. It's a different kind of caring, not as accepting or as respectful.
In the structure of belief system, of how to become more spiritual by having expectations in being more perfect, doesn't fit.

You have to adapt a point of view where you accept yourself (and others) completely the way you (they) are.
-Wanting to become perfect on the spiritual path is counterintuitive. 

 

Finding Your Self http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/pod16-finding-self.mp3

-The quest starts the day you're not happy with the global situation you're in. -To make possible to express more love, you have to get rid of your fears. That means getting rid of fears made of beliefs, beliefs that are connected to fear. -We bounce between our good self-esteem and our bad self-esteem. Those self-images create an identity.

-Within that matrix of who we are, having to find ourselves over the years, we' ve made hundreds of agreements "oh I'm this way, I'm not that way","I'm good at maths, lousy at english, I cant sing or paint". All those images exist in our mind. We've been defining ourselves by agreements and by imaginary characters, conceptual ideas of who we are, many of them based in fear. Some kind of self-rejection, some kind of "I wonder what they think about me" story.
The thing the people mistakingly go do in finding out who they are, they go looking among those imaginary characters they have among themselves, that they've had created. And all these imaginary characters of themselves not one is really them.
-That path to happiness or that path to love in your life is about uprooting all those false images based in fear even the positive ones based in illusions, because you aren't that imaginary character either. Your own mind becomes a big trap, it becomes a matrix of illusions and many of those are based in fear.
You might ask :"well if I'm I'm not any of those character, who Am I, what am I?" The who Am I question isn't a so good question to ask, because it leads us to believe in an imaginary character!
-At that point, it can be very frustrating to get more lost instead of finding yourself. But that is the nature of the journey. In the journey you have to dissolve all the illusions, and it can be pretty uncomfortable.
As you honestly dissolve all these false images and illusions you have about yourself, you will find that you'll be happier, because there is more room in your life. -As your consciousness expends, and you dissolve the fears, you dissolve the false beliefs

-From that divine point of view of truth, love or consciousness , only perfection exists.
-The mind has an idea of what the body is supposed to do and look like, it judges the body as wrong in some fashion. It's kind of ridiculous.

The world of the body is separate from the mind, and the mind very often tries to control the body, and therefore creates a conflict. When we are not aware, we create a judgement of our body, it can end up in feeling guilty, ashamed, being angry at our body.

The body by itself is a beautiful being, the divine world by itself is only perfection. It's in the middle world of the mind that there is all those comparisons, judgments, victimization out of emotional reactions.

-You have to let go all the egos versions of self in order to embrace the authentic self, witch is a divine self. It's a big and beautiful leap in consciousness.
It allows a world without conflict, in yourself and in the world, and see everything as beautiful. Unconditional love and acceptance for life.

-Why do get people angrier over the years?
We learn to accumulate stories, opinions, beliefs and agreements in our mind and we collect all these ideas in the mind, but we never clean up our mind. We collect them and a lot of them are in contradiction.
We are not taught to evaluate thoughts, we are not taught to let them go.

-In that quest of finding oneself, you have to dissolve the world of illusions of the mind, to find who but more importantly what you are... which is life, conscious life expressing itself through that body.
-It take consciousness, awareness and mastering control over your own attention, this is not an intellectual paradigm. 

Edited July 4, 2016 by Nic

[Nic]

Self Importance or The Ego 

-Self importance has 2 sides, positive and negative. We can be playing out those stories at the same time. Self importance is the structure in our mind that determines how we take things personally.
How does these images of ourselves work?

-We view the world, ourselves, other people from the point of view of the images we build about ourselves, the world or other people.

-We are not the one thinking our thoughts.

-The spiritual masters that have been studying the mind since thousands of years, have a completely different point of you than psychologists that have been studying the mind for decades.
You are not your mind and you are not the one generating those thoughts.

-From the point of view of the judge and the victim that statement looks true. We identify with the point of view of those characters, and we assume that it is us thinking about ourselves. And there in lies the lie. But the characters are not you and are not even talking about you, they are talking about each other. We get our identity lost in the mix.

-We can use those tools of characters to understand what we are not. We are not the judge or victim, we can separates ourselves from these aspects of our personality and use them to dissect those layers of self importance as oppose to accept and carry them further.

-When you think there is something wrong with you, think of it as "it needs to fix, it needs modification and change" not "you need to be fixed", and you are the instrument to fix it. In that way you can stop judging yourself.
-Our problem is the responsibility of what to do with those thoughts, it is different from us being the problem.

If we bring our car to the mechanic and tell him, it's not working, we haven't helped him at all. He is going to ask you a few questions to do systematic analysis to narrow down and see what is the specific problem. Apply the same technic in your mind, identify, cut out and dissolve.

-It is the faculty to change your point of view that make it possible to change your reaction.
-Without a systematic approach it is very difficult to break free of that false identity, because we have this old habit of identifying ourselves with those thoughts. You have to practice being not you.

You might think twice a day that you are not your mind, but it doesn't really have an impact compare to a disciplined practice, because meanwhile you will identify with the "I" and the "me". 

 

Changing Habits and Overcoming Addictions http://pathwaytohappiness.com/podcast/pod19-change-habits.mp3

-Quit one day at a time, You break these huge habit doing small steps at a time, you set the bar where you choose to set it.
-Old habits are like elastic bands around you. To cut a small one allows you to have more room to move, so that you can cut a bigger one after that. Donʼt try to cut them all at once, donʼt set too high expectations.

-The way you recover your personal power by not believing the judge, the victim in your mind can also become a habit, it becomes automatic.
-Your point of view will determine your interpretation, what you believe, what will you invest your faith in and then the emotion you create.

-The way to happiness develops in a lot of little steps. All those steps forming an entire path, a path to happiness, compassion and enlightenment.
-The way you stay free of doubt and opinon, once you are completely clear, is that you practice that until you get there. So then when you get there, you know how to keep your mind clean, free of doubts and false beliefs.

-Staying aware, free in your mind of fear, doubt, misery, judgment and victimization is a habit. After you do it for a while, it becomes an addiction, a habit, starting at the smallest little thing. 

Edited July 4, 2016 by Nic

[Nic]

Happiness as a Choice http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/happiness_choice.mp3

-There is this whole world of emotions that we don't have an awareness about.
Once we satisfy our physical needs, food, shelter and comfort, all our needs turn to emotional fulfillments, the satisfaction of passions.
-There are two kinds of emotions: Emotions that are based in love and emotions that are based in fear.

Emotions that are pleasurable, love, joy, gratitude, excitement laughter, ( there can be thousands of those specific ones) are based in love. On the other hand jealousy, anger, envy, fear, shame, guilt, etc... are based in fear and are generally unpleasant.

If you want to be happy in your life, then you need to create more love, which is more pleasure, and get rid of all the emotions of fear. If you eliminate the fear, there will be a lot more room for love. The thing about feeling emotions that is not easy to understand, is that emotions is something we create. We are not use to think of emotions in this way.

-Most of the time, when we speak about emotions we say: "He makes me sad", "I'm so happy to see you", "she really frustrates me", "that driver gets on my nerves". All these interpretations kind of effect how we perceive emotions, because we don't really see them as something we create, we are missing the in between part:
They called you stupid, you created an image in your mind of a stupid person, you believed that's what you were, you believed that is a bad thing to be, you judged yourself as that character, agreed with the judgment saying "yes that's what I am, I'm stupid" and then you felt this emotional reaction because you invested your faith in this false self image.
So now you are hurt and you are angry at this other person for causing you to feel hurt, because you are not aware of what is happening in that intermediate step in your imagination. By expressing yourself in that image, you create this whole emotional reaction to that picture you have in your imagination.
That's creating the pain, the hurt, the emotion, but we don't see that part, we only see what this person said.
That's because we are focusing on a physical reality and we are unaware of what is happening in our imagination in our mind, that is causing us to create the emotion. -When you don't create that image of you being stupid, and especially when you don't believe in that image, it doesn't hurt, no matter what someone calls you, because you don't do that intermediate part.
-When you become aware of your responsibility in the emotions we feel, we have a whole different game to play. The emotions that we experience are the emotions that we create.
If you aren't aware of that intermediate step and believe that the external things and other people make us feel this way, you can say: "Now I have to control other people and what they say, I have to control the traffic, the weather, the economy in order to feel good, because I'm reacting to all those things, those determine my emotional state.
We end up trying to control all those outsides circumstances and people, which are things we can't control. We ignore what's going on in our mind which is the one thing we can control with some practice and training.

-We can still be happy, but that happiness is depending on having our criteria met. That criteria says: "I will be happy if..."(I lose 5 Kg, redecorate the kitchen, get a promotion...). What it really means is "I will express love when my body looks a certain way", "I will allow myself to feel good when my boss recognize my work", "I express happiness when my partner does this and that for me".

-We have criteria to every emotion we express. "If this happens I express this emotion, if that doesn't happen I express this emotion".
The criteria of a belief system determines what we transmit emotionally. That expression of emotion is that what we actually feel.

-Happiness is the expression of love, if you want to be happy express love. The criteria for expressing love keep on changing, then even when you meet them, you don't express love and appreciate your successes, you can get tired of chasing them.

-If we see beautiful landscape, we see some pollution on it and we have a big story about the pollution, our emotional reaction is relative to our interpretation about the pollution, relative to that's what is going on in our head.

The experience that we create can be stimulated from something natural, direct perception or by perceiving something that we imagine or we tell ourselves as a story, our interpretation. But either way, the emotional body is just responding naturally to whatever we perceive.

-We are responsible for the material that we project in our mind.

At a certain point of mastery in awareness, you can have no material on your mind, empty all the internal dialogue, you end up just perceiving life as it is, wether it'd be your breath and your heartbeat on the inside or the world on the outside which is perfect as it is.

-To have a work that your passionate about doesn't make you happy directly. It is the expression of your love that makes you happy, your joy, your passion, your gratitude that you have in doing that work. Your love for this work is the way that you create joy in your life.

It's not having friends and family around you that make you happy, it is your love for them, your emotions, your joy and your happiness that you feel. It doesn't come from them, it is the expression of your love that you feel when you cook with them, play and talk with them.

A lot of people have a lot of good friends and family and they may be in depression because they are expressing completely different emotions to what their friends and family do.

-How do you make yourself happy? You have to express love. It's not a big secret because if you watch kids, they are doing it all the time naturally. However over the years, we have build up many reasons not to express love: "I'm not smart enough, not good enough, not pretty enough, the world is a problem, the traffic is a problem, my boss is a problem, my employes are a problem...". We create all these judgments we believe, we create all this sense of victimization we believe, we invest faith in those beliefs based in fear and we express negative emotions instead of positive ones.

There is a natural expression of happiness once you eliminate all those belief structures, criteria, judgments and opinions that fills the mind.
-A lot of people try to feel happiness by creating more financial wealth, having bigger and better vacations, finding the right partner... They try to meet the criteria they have in their imagination. They will withhold the expression of their love and express those emotions based in fear until those criteria are met. When those criteria are met they have such a habit of expressing those emotions based in fear that they don't have practice in expressing love, gratitude and joy.

-We can look at the world and find a lot of things that are injustices, lots of abuses, and we can defend our rationalizations. Withholding our love in that situation isn't helping any situation. Expressing anger isn't helping any situation to improve. Did you ever see a judgment make something better as much as the expression of love does?

-The easy way to start with, is observing all the stories and ways we create our unhappiness with. To look at those statements pull the stories out from behind them and start not believing them, not believing the stories and justifications for why you create sadness, why you make yourself angry.

-Has the world change, have you change? Not really, the world is in the same state of chaos, you still have your haircut and your weight but the way you look at it is different, the dialogues in your mind is different, the interpretation is different, what you believe is different, what you invest in emotionally is different. Therefore the emotions you express are very different and that expression coming out of you is what will make you happy.

-When you understand all that, and you take responsibility for that, then the choice becomes: "Will I express love and be happy or will I invest and defend a story that creates unhappiness"
You only have a choice if you have that degree of awareness.

-What it takes is a commitment to be happy and create love in your live or in your relationship. That commitment is critical, it is the most important step. -Making that commitment to be happy is planting a seed. The water you give this plant, is paying attention, it's looking around, starting to notice, reading this again... .Step one, make the commitment to be happy in your life , then keep your eyes open for step two as you create your own pathway to happiness. 

[Nic]

Faith and Personal Power http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/pod17-faith.mp3

-When you put your faith in something, you are putting your personal power in a conceptual idea or in something that is real. -The other option of putting your faith in something, is to doubt. To doubt in something is to put your faith in an opposing conceptual idea.
-To be in a state of I don't know is to be a skeptic. This isn't the same as being a doubter.
To be a skeptic requires a higher degree of awareness, a

discerning way that isn't negative and sarcastic to oneself or to another. This doesn't suspend our openness to possibilities. That's an art-form, a very high mastery in life.
-Yes, plan financially, take care of your health, but worry is not preparation! -When you worry about anything, the return on your investment of faith is fear.

-Your emotional body responds with its natural answer to that particular imaginary.

Emotion is what you get back from the combination of having a thought and putting your faith in that imaginary world called conceptual ideas. -Thoughts aren't generating emotions by themselves.
-Changing your thought is chasing the tail of the problem, the real power is where do you put your faith.

-You are going to find the beliefs or what you invest your faith in, by looking at the emotions.
The faith is between the emotions, the internal dialogue and the words that are coming out of your mouth.

-Do you have to believe in something? No! It's a reaction the mind has. As you don't need to believe in something as the truth. The sun is going to come up tomorrow.
Those things that aren't the truth, ideas we have, I'm ugly, I'm stupid, not good enough, I'm beautiful, better than someone else, all those ego self- importance conceptual ideas, need your undying faith in order to perpetuate themselves.
-How much effort does it take to not put your faith in something, that's a "not doing"! It's just easy as this, you just don't put your faith in it.
-We basically act on what we believe.
-When we have the conflict between the reality and the virtual reality in our minds. It can create a lot of unhappiness and misery.
-When you pull your faith back from those virtual outcomes that you imagined, which is to stop believing in that outcome, those images in your mind and your pain can dissolve. That is detachment.
-First, find where your faiths are by watching your emotions. After it's about investing your faith where you choose to invest it, so you are inspired to take action.

At last it is about learning to detach when it is time to detach, and to go create something else, take new and different actions. 

 

Free Will  http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/pod15-free-will.mp3 

-Do you really have free will?
-We are taking about free will in the context of the decisions we make during the day.
-The question has a lot to do with how much of social programming we had in our lives, and if we can break it?
-A lot of people think they have free will, but maybe they just don't really know what free will is.

-If you didn't have a choice because you didinʼt see the choice or didnʼt know there was a choice, then you didn't really have free will.
-Sometimes, you had the awareness of another choice, the intellectual idea of another choice but not the will power to change the momentum of your direction.

-In another case you could see and you had awareness of what was coming. And you had the will power to direct your actions in a way of choice. That is what we can call free will. You have a free choice and you can make it.

-There was always the potential for the choice in all the 3 examples.
-Most people think they have free-will, but they end up going so fast to an emotion like anger or frustration that they never looked at other options on the menu. They didn't even see other options. They didn't even know there was a menu.
-How many time do we actually see that road, the possibility for that interpretation before we end up to a dead end called anger and frustration?
-As you gather awareness, you gather to see all the different roads, before you pass by and you are able to see them further and further away before you get there. That is awareness!
-You can make another interpretation and feel much more happy about this situation and use for example forgiveness, joy, gratitude...
It can change your life, and a large amount of emotion you feel.

The mind works on habits, it's what drive the mind forward, it's his resistance to change in its state of motion, its inertia. The habits are not going to change unless an outside force is being applied to it. In this case, the force is your will power.

How you are able to turn habit around is depending on your will power. The more will power you have, the faster you can change direction.
But you can have all the will power in the world, if you don't have awareness, you won't see another road.

With practice, you'll drive by the same intersections again and again, that one day you'll know the dead end is coming up, you'll take the foot off the gas soon enough -Everybody has the opportunity to make a different choice. But very few people see any other choices than their pattern and habits of emotional reactions that they are programed with. Free will is when you have any kind of situation and you can see numerous options and when they aren't any emotional reactions anymore.
-You never have to get down the road of anger or an interpretation to feel victimized. You never have to go down the road of judgment and feel righteous or do anything else that sabotages your relationship and your well-being, because you can see there are some other choices, and you have enough will power to be able to make the choice.

-To resist the only possibility that you seem having means acknowledging something about your current state. It means realizing that you've been living with a socialized program of the past agreements in your mind instead of making the choices.

-To realize that you don't have free will over your emotions is an uncomfortable truth.
Some people don't admit that. They prefer living in a comfortable illusion. They have the potential to see the turn off but they refuse to see it, in that way they don't have a choice. 

 

Emotional Reactions http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/emotional_reactions.mp3

-When we are battling to change our emotions, what we are looking for to change is our energy field.
The emotional field comes with words, an attitude, feelings and sensations that have a dialogue. In times of stress, that dialogue runs in our mind.

-We have to wake up from our day dreams. Don't believe anyone ourselves, meaning donʼt believe the dreams in their or our own mind.

-This field of energy has a life on its own.

-That expression of I don't like this, rejecting this field of energy leads to wanting to fix it or push it away with anger.
That judgment attitude is predicated by another attitude which make you feel like as you are the victim

-We have 3 different aspects: we have a victimization, we have a judgment about this experience, and that leads to a hero or a destroyer expression/ attitude. This is a typical response to experiencing emotions that are unpleasant.

-This desire to fix the original emotion gets distorted and corrupted into these four different characters that then get agitated and build our emotional field even further
-What we are creating and expressing with our words of wanting to fix the situation is rejection and judgment.

-By wanting to fix the situation, we are actually creating more bad feeling. The desire is authentic, the expression of it through these distorted channels, creates more of this very thing we are trying to free ourselves from. It is the way we have been conditioned to approach changing the society but it doesn't mean it works.
-One of the most important aspect is to refrain from those stories of "I want to change or fix something, this is wrong or bad, I wish this would go away", so that we don't feed that field of energy anymore with that poison of distorted stories.
-If you try to fix you are agitating the field, you are in a paradigm of rejection.
-Our habit is to jump into an opinion about... or think about.... If you do this you, are into another character.
In order to stay into that witness observer mode you have to take action and think about for example being present, putting your attention in the "Here and Now", That shift you out of all those character stories.
-If you practice shifting that emotional state, your point of view on your day to day basis, then you have lot better chance to shift out when you are in a reaction.
-By generating the emotion of gratitude, you are infusing it with a whole different dream, a whole different emotional field. You are modifying the emotional field of anger or frustration. You are replacing that old dream with a new one. 

[Nic]

Don't take anything Personally http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/pod13-taking-things-personally.mp3

-To get hurt we have to:
1) Agree the statement about us or what we have done.
2) Think that this means something about us
3)Think we deserve some kind of an emotional punishment for being a failure

-We have been conditioned as an automatic program to react emotionally to what people say. We have been conditioned to accept other people's opinion as being true. We agree with that opinion that if we create a failure, we are a failure, and when we fail to meet other people's expectation's we punish ourselves with emotions.

-This is just a habit. You have to develop your awareness to the point that you can see those interpretation being made in the moment.
In the beginning you start to see it after the fact. The more you practice, the closer you start to see it to when it's happening until you see that scenario happen in your mind while it's happening.

-With that level of awareness, you change everything that happens in your mind, you change the thoughts, the interpretation, you change what you believe, and by changing that, you change the emotional experience of everything.

-When someone criticizes what you do, it's only telling you that he is criticizing what he sees in his imagination.
-What they see is something in their mind. This is one of the most challenging aspect of sharing what goes on in people's mind.
-When someone criticizes you, it's really about the picture in their mind they have of you, it gives you total immunity to not believe what they say. It allows you to change that very first interpretation. 

 

Self judgment, stop beating myself up http://pathwaytohappiness.com/podcast/pod43-beating-myself.mp3

-Self judgment is at the core or at least an element of just about every kind of unpleasant emotional reaction there is.
And if it doesn't involve a self judgment it is probably a judgment of someone else or anything else outside you. -But when the mind is automatically putting ourselves or someone else down, there is generally not a healthy emotion with it. It is something that leads to unhappiness.

-Talking about self judgement can have different aspects : I shouldn't be or do this, but it can be harsher like "I'm such an idiot, I'm so stupid", it might get projected on to someone else in the form of "they might think I'm an idiot, or stupid".

You are still judging yourself but you are imagining that somebody else is joining you in that affair.
-A lot of people try after the judgment to get some comfort with reevaluating themselves by saying "I'm not that stupid, I learn a lot from what I just did, I'm not a bad person of this and that, just adding positive thoughts.

It's somewhere effective but the judgment in your head might come back

-We can put those positive thinking on top of the bad ones, but there is a whole belief structure underneath that hasn't gone away. No matter how many positive stories we put on the top of it.
-The part of the judgment that you hear and feel, is the visible part of the iceberg. 90% of the structure is below the surface, and you don't see it... until you learn how to look for it.
-When we break it down in smaller pieces, we can move the pieces quiet easily Let's say that the comment "I shouldn't have done that" comes from one voice in the mind, the one particular comment we are talking about is called the "inner judge" , the judge is pushing all those negative opinions.
There is another side of our personality that agrees, that part is called "the victim".
-It's the side of the judge to do the condemnation and the side of the victim that is accepting the condemnation.

If you don't have the awareness to take a gap from those condemnation and agreement, it feels like it's us.
By practicing awareness, you realize more and more of a gap of time between when the judge says something and the victim accepts it, even to the point that before the victim accepts it, you say "hey wait a minute, I don't know that I agree, I don't know that I accept that".
When you can do that you don't end up with fear, the embarrassment of shame...You don't have to agree with every opinion that goes thru your mind. When we accept those comments, we put our faith in them.
-What happens before the judgment, is what's really buried in the ground. Because the judgment is a conclusion, the judge has already some idea of what you should do instead, what would have been the successful thing to do.
We have put our faith in what the judge says, in what the victim says and all the images of how we are supposed to be, those images of perfection the judge can compare us to.
-We have build a huge structure of beliefs, it's a belief system. We can see a small percentage of it, we feel all the emotions of it but we don't know about the chain of events that precedes it.

-Achieving all your goals is not a way to get out of self judgment!

-Some people would like to keep the judge in their head active because they think as the judge would be the only motivation they have.
If this statement is true, then the most successful people on earth would be the ones that are the most harsh on themselves.

Success means also happy and confident. A confident person isn't beating himself up on the inside.
A successful person is not measured on what he has but more on what he feels.
-When there is no comparison there is no self judgment, when there is no judgment there is no self rejection, no shame, no embarrassment, no guilt, no insecurity, no fear of what other people will think of you because you will accept yourself just the way you are, without conditions. 

 

 

[Nic]

Feeling Not Good Enough  http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/not_good_enough.mp3

-If you try to replace an image of yourself by the another image of yourself that could somehow discount this other belief, but it doesn't make the other one go away.

-To create this image of what you want to be, puts the bar in your head always higher.
Trying to follow the voice in your head don't take you there where you want to be. You need to change the beliefs about yourself.

-To accept not being good enough makes you feel a lot better.

You realizes that those images of being good enough or not good enough donʼt exist. They are boxes made of duality you put yourself into, which consist of conceptual ideas of yourself.
We can describe them in our imagination but they don't exist, we dream them up. Those dreams can run our lives, if we don't have the awareness to step out of them.

To live in this "good enough box" is such a small place to get into, that youʼll find out you donʼt fit in the box.
-Why would you want to trap yourself in a virtual reality in your imagination? Why would you want to put yourself in a conceptual box?

-You have the power to shift your point of view, to step out of story you imagine and that you puts your beliefs in. you are not those low self images and not these high self images either. You might believe in these illusions but they are not you!
-When you have awareness, you get a hold on your attention and step outside the illusions in your mind, no longer living in the duality of conceptional ideas, and instead enjoy live and be happy.

-The only way to win the game of being good enough or not good enough is to not play the game.

 

Problem Questions and Hidden Assumptions  http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/hidden_assumptions.mp3

-There are questions that hook our minds into settle patterns of traps of impossibility, of pursuits where there is no answers. Some questions are tricky. They send you to see possibilities that don't exist, send you to a ghost chase in you mind.
"What is the sound of one hand clapping?" That question comes from Zen practice.

-"What is my life's purpose" is a great subject to get ourselves frustrated with.
It is obviously something we have to know in order to be successful in our life, it applies also that in your life you have something you have to fulfill in order to be a success, if we don't fulfill it, we would be a failure. It may have a lot of applied meaning to it but it hasn't.

We are tricking ourselves into making a much bigger deal than it is, or a very different deal that it is.
-When people start putting their life's purpose in terms of what they have to accomplish, wether it is to save the world or feed the hungry, teach kids to read or serve their country etc... now life's purpose have a measurement of success and failure. The people feel like they have to succeed at it and the mind might trick them saying they are a success or a failure, depending on the results, that they cannot control.

-Those questions seem logical but they don't have real value at all.
This is because we haven't learned to analyze questions, to be a skeptic of them, and ask if this is a valid question or not. To see all the implied assumptions and the traps that they possibly can pull us into.
Beware of the question, beware the assumptions of the questions, where they direct your mind and the traps that they can take you into.
With "what is the meaning of life?" kind of questions, we end up doing intellectual somersaults for years.
-The question "Am I a good dad/mom?" The roam of the possibility that the question allows to answer is "Yes or No". That question is a trap. It send our mind in only two different directions, but both answers are false, because it's an image of what we are, it's a picture in our imagination as being a good parent.
-It puts us into two dream in our imagination one of those is, "Being a good parent" we build this imaginary world of being a good parent, and do the same thing with the image of "being a bad parent". As we create those world in our imagination, our consciousness shifts into the point of view of those characters that we imagine as ourselves.
We step into these characters and than we imagine that whole world from that role or the other.
-We believe the two images, we have two images of ourselves and they are in conflict.

-This is how the mind structures duality:
I'm good enough or not? With that question which one is me?
It only has two possibilities. Which one of these two Am I? Now you start to see the problem with the question. Because maybe you are both, or maybe you are not, but we don't usually look at ourselves like this.
As soon as we ask the question "Am I good enough?" (as a parent, as a boss, as a lover), we cast ourselves in two conflicting roles. Our consciousness put us into two different points of view about ourselves at the same time and gather evidence of both virtual realities, imagined realities which are in conflict.
We are so busy battling in our mind that we never notice that the question was invalid. We end up chasing illusions of answers.
-You will never get a description made of words that will accurately give you that answer. We get descriptions but they won't be the truth, we get picture images but they won't be the truth.
-Should I have done that? Am I lovable? Am I good enough? Did I do the right thing? Did I do the wrong thing?
Whenever we put a duality context into a question about ourselves or on an action, we are going to have illusions going. If we try to answer those questions, we will not find the truth, we'll be chasing conceptual ideas of what we are or of what other people are.

-Did he do the right thing? Should they have done that?

Those problem questions, duality questions has a lot to do with the suffering in our own mind, because of all the illusions we chase.
So again: Beware of the question and beware the assumptions of the questions, where they direct your mind and the traps that they can take you into. 

 

[Nic]

Love Relationships Part 1 http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/relationship_desire.mp3

-Because of what the society says about being in a relationship, our mind tells us that our aches of not being able to have our desires fulfilled, go away with the help of one single person, and that you will live happily ever after. It is not that way most of the time.

-The mind creates the hurting by setting expectations of how the relationship is supposed to be. Having someone pushing those buttons in your head, pushing against those expectations, hurts.

Does love hurt? Expressing or being in love isn't painful. It is the shattering of the illusions of how we expect people to be, expect them to act like and the amount of faith we invest in those illusions that are painful.
Does truth hurts? No! It's like having a splinter in your hand, you want to take it out with a tweezers and to say: "the tweezers hurts".

The illusions we have about our relationship that's the splinter, the truth, that's the tweezers! As it comes out, it can hurt more than when it was just in here. But if I let it in, it's going to be more painful overtime than pulling it out.

-Because of the set up illusions we have in our head, the mind tells us that If you fall in love with someone, he/she must be the one for you, even though you don't know this person very well.
-But the agreements in my mind aren't really as authentic like our physical or emotional desire.

-This is how a lot of relationship get started: We have sex, we feel emotions, the mind thinks it fits the bill, you put on the person expectations without knowing the person.
People assume that the emotion and the agreements they have in their mind are the same as the other person has.

-When the sexual chemistry lines up and there is emotions, the mind says: "it's a fit!" and starts to take the image of our prefect soulmate, our expectations and paint it over this person. We then assume that this person is our soulmate, we assume this person will meet all the criteria we have in our head. -You can eliminate all the pain if you pay attention to the stories you paint in your mind and recognize our role in that half. As much as you pay attention to satisfying your desires, you have to watch the mind, so you don't believe in things that aren't true.

 

Love Relationships part 2 http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/relationship_desire2.mp3

-The mind expresses the ache of the non-fulfillment of our desires as pain. It is associated in our mind to being alone. The greater the ache, the greater is the fulfilment of that desire when you finally connect.

-In a couple, your desire of having a good time and being happy together is the same. However, the agreements in the mind are in conflict.
The agenda of both becomes to "how can I persuade my partner to do what I want him or her to do to actually feel good".
One of the way is to disrespect the other person's agreement by making comments. In this process, the emotional quality is getting trampled on. The desire of the other person to express love is diminished as she feels no longer safe to open her heart. She represses her emotions and the relationship becomes unsatisfying.
In that case you can say that each person's expectation to have their own agreements met became more important than expressing their love.
-The solution is to set the priority on the emotional quality of the relationship by taking care of how you express yourself. Even when you express what you want or don't want. You have to set the priority to the quality of the communication, the manner of how you express your differences is affecting your relationship.
-In a relationship, when you both practice communication in a way that is respectful and kind, you are satisfying the emotional quality of the relationship.
If you do this, the criteria of the mind become less important, you become more flexible of how you are going to fulfill that emotion.
You have to set the priority on the relationship and not on the desire of the mind and pictures of how it is supposed to be like.
When you speak or ask something, what is the quality of the emotions that you express?
If you choose anger, you'll satisfy the agreements of the mind to the detriment of the (emotional quality & communication) relationship.
-The importance has to be set on the emotional quality as you get through this together. If I communicate with kindness, love and respect, maybe the solution is not that important anymore.
-Whatever you do, wherever you go is not important, you just enjoy being together. This shift happens when the emotional quality is set over the agreements in the mind.

 

What makes Relationships Work (Love Relationships Part 3)  http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/relationship-work-podcast-14.mp3

-A relationship that works is depending on the 3 points triangle:

1) The physical intimacy (holding hands, cuddling, sex...)

2)The emotional intimacy (if both are happy, jealous, calm...)

3)The structure of agreements, You have to ask your mate and yourself:

-What are your core beliefs?

-How do you handle with money, what are your savings program?

-Do you want children?

-Do you want to settle down or travel and live free?

-Do you want to live in the country or in the city?

As much as you love each other, those criteria can be deal breakers.
Those differences in agreements are not insolvable if you have good tools of communication and if you both are flexible.
There has to be compatible flexibility.
-Communication requires that you both listen as being open enough to share how you see things and why. If one starts to judge and minimize the feeling of the other person, she will close down on what she communicates.
-Trust means, it's easy to be yourself with them, you don't need a mask and no need to pretend, so you can enjoy life more, being completely honest and open.
-As you eliminate your judgments, your appreciations, your gratitude and respect grows and make a lot of flexibility in the relationship. The listening comes down to respect, to honor the other person.
-We should respect the lover to the extent of the admiration, it is a key factor to a sustained long term relationship!
-Respect in the way that it is palpable means admiration.
-Watch how your lover treats others, it may give you a better insight of what he is really like. 

Edited July 4, 2016 by Nic

[Nic]

Fear Doctrine: The Creation of Anger and Aggression http://pathwaytohappiness.com/podcast/pod22-fear-leads-to-anger.mp3

-Underneath all those dynamics of behavior around all the emotions of anger and jealousy, greed, ego and arrogance, there is some kind of fear, there is some kind of a threat.
-We try to control our environment, we try to make it safe, we don't challenge what is going on in our imagination, but we feel better by doing these controlling or compensating strategies.

-When a dog has been beaten, you pass that dog and it bites you. You think that's a mean and bad dog. But the dog has been conditioned to react this way, protecting itself. It appears evil. But what it is really, it's afraid, it is hurt, and it feels threatened. From the dog point of view of logic, it is just protecting itself.

You always see humans that are mean or angry as evil. You might think of them as evil, but if you see underneath that, what you see is a human being that is emotionally wounded afraid of being hurt again. Some people imaging being hurt or have develop such self judgment and self abuse, that the feel abused all the time by their own mind. They might blame other people for it. But they create that emotion themselves and the way it is created is artificial. -It is easier to see this when other people or cultures are being aggressive, It is harder to look at ourselves and see this because it is more uncomfortable. We have been conditioned not to be comfortable with our own emotions, which are the very thing we create.

-Those who stops the aggression aren't weak, in reality they are sane. The insanity is to continue. The aggression goes back and forward, waiting for the other one to stop.
-Gandhi introduced us to a different way. He looked at these two options, he said "I can either fight this injustice, or I can flee".

He sat with those two option for a while and said "I will do neither". There is more then two options! “There is no way to peace, peace is the way”   Gandhi
The real enemy in all this, generally is not the other person, it is not our anger or our aggression, that is just a reaction, but fear is the real enemy. Fear is based in the lies we believe. The real fear exist in a scenario in our imagination that we invest our faith in.

-When you try to control someone else's behavior, they become afraid, and now there is more fear. You are planting the seed of more aggression. When you try to change someone's beliefs, you challenge there beliefs, their beliefs feel threatened. They go to fear and attack back.
-If you fall into fear, your chance for sanity lies in not believing what your mind projects. This implies to be the observer of the mind and that there is what the mind projects and then there is another world that is not distorted by our fears, insecurities and aggressions.
-When we say someone is evil, they just try to survive, they do the best that they know, very often protecting themselves. This is ignorance.

-The base of evil is: fear and ignorance.
Ignorance doesn't mean stupidity. But intelligence is not the same as consciousness and awareness. Your intelligence doesn't protect you from fear as awareness does.
Intelligence doesn't protect you from ignorance. Only that larger consciousness that gives us the possibility to look at things from multiple points of view, that protects us from ignorance and allows us to see other choices.

-The real problem of resolving conflicts on international scale, in a your relationships or even with yourself is that we try to beat ourselves up.The inner judge judges us for being angry, so you feel hurt again, the reaction to feeling that pain is: we fight back.

We do the same in international conflicts than in the microcosm of our mind and then it plays out in the outer world on a mass scale.
This is one aspect of the dynamic of human suffering. The enemy is not outside of us, it's within. The root of the disease is fear, and the seeds of that root are believing in lies that make us afraid.

-When you try and change somebody else's fear, you try to change someone else's beliefs, and trying to change them generally ends with a poor reaction. That is why the only battleground is your own mind, and nobody else's. There is no point in trying to clean other people's mind from fears if you haven't cleaned up your own.

 

Fear of Love and Happiness http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/pod9-fear-of-change.mp3

-When we look at our fears and try to change them, it may make a lot more to sense to see these habits, these behavior patterns as own living beings. They are aspects of our personality that have taken a life of their own.

-The mechanism of the mind, that is making the decisions is in self-preservation mode, and is causing us fear of not succeeding.

-You can be afraid of loosing a whole side of your personality. That's true, but it might be the side of yourself that you are not particularly happy with, frustration, anger, fear.
-The judge in your mind is afraid of being uprooted, the victim in your mind is afraid of being uprooted.

-The part in our mind that we'll be annihilated is very much afraid. That is not our fear!
-Even though the voice speaks with I and me, it's not us! When you have that clarity, you have an opportunity for a gap, between the fear that cause us to resist the very medicine that will cure you from those emotional reactions and the real you.

-Faith is like water and fertilizer in your mind that is going to make those belief stronger and those roots deeper.
-You have to practice the skeptic "you know what? I don't know if they are true or not!"

-You'll find that they often involve an initiation of death, but it's not a physical death, it has to do with the letting go of all those aspect of the personality.

-We've got to kill all the conceptual ideas of what we think we are. The image that we're better than someone else, good enough or a not good enough are conceptual ideas, you can call it the false self.
-Love requires to be vigilant in your mind to not believe those stories, it requires awareness.

Love is the great force that can shatter all those false images. 

Edited July 4, 2016 by Nic

[Nic]

Fear of What Others thinks of You  http://pathwaytohappiness.com/podcast/pod27-overcoming-fear.mp3

-You don't need to have fear to avoid harmful situations, what you need is awareness.
-If we have awareness, we can be more creative then if we just live by the rules.

Artists break the rules when they come up with new way to express themselves
-An "If this, then that" assumption is an assumed fearful and painfull outcome.

-Taking no action is still an action, it's a fearful action, it's a fearful inaction, but it's still an action, doing nothing is still a doing.
-What is not as obvious is that if you continue to live by the rules, you are continuing to live with fear controlling your life, because those rules are made of fear.

-Can you imagine being afraid of crossing the street because there is no traffic light or because someone is not holding your hand?
This is the kind of fear we have about so many things, about our money, about relationships, about what other people think of us.

We are so use to it, we don't even notice them anymore.

-You might think that you are not being afraid of anything, (because of the amount of self importance you have), this is a big denial and the lies are underneath that denial.
How many time do you try to look good in front of the people who mean something to you, the amount of money on your account, afraid of your career, afraid of not being good enough, ask yourself "what will they think of me?" Realize that these are fear based stories and questions.

Realizing that this is fear, is not enough to let it go.

The fear is pushing you through all the patterns of the logic.
-That looks like a nice carrot, to have friends and people that respect you, it doesn't look like you are doing it out of fear until you say to yourself, "what happens if I don't do what is expected from me?"
You loose friendships that requires you to be false that only worked if you are wearing a mask of pretend, you aren't yourself.
If you don't face your fears on the other way, what the others will accept and respect, is this false pretends that you are projecting.

In this case all the things that you thought are worth having are actually false. Fear is pushing the logic with artificial pressure.
-Our minds are filled with rules, how we should be or shouldn't be, what the world should be or shouldn't be, and most of them are fabricated out of fear. It's the fear that is taking the decisions for you, your belief system choosing for you, blinding us from free will and free choices.

-Living by those rules of how or what should or should not be, creates a lot of unhappiness. Living without all those fear creates a lot more room for love, not only for yourself, but for a lot of other people.
When your fears dissipate, your internal dialogue dissipates.

-Living without fear, when you begin to do it, feels scary. You'll feel fear and uncomfortable, because you are starting to break the agreements in your mind about what your belief system says you have to do and have to be, in order to feel safe. It's an uncomfortable path to happiness.

 

Dealing with financial fears  http://pathwaytohappiness.com/podcast/pod25-financial-crisis-fear.mp3

-Take the time to evaluate what you are attached to, do an inventory of it to see why the emotions come up and what are the plans and assumptions you build. -You have to let go of the plans of the future that you have made in the past so that you can face today.

-The awareness, the detaching makes it easier to let go all the mental structures.
-The way that you reach the end of the road, is to do one step at a time.

-The emotion of fear or any other emotion we feel is perfect, we are supposed to feel that way and we are supposed to create emotions.
-The emotional body doesn't care what emotions you demand him to produce and doesn't care if it's real or not. If you are creating fear, it's creating fear. Your emotional system is working perfectly.
-What we can have control over, are the things we project in the mind and watch how much faith we invest in them.
-The emotions are the perfect response to what our mind is doing. You can be thankful, appreciate that everything is working properly.
In that way you will be more focus on what is coming out of the mind if your fear is rational or irrational.
-The goal here is to believe less the chatter of the mind, to be skeptical about our fears. The reactions we have, the emotion we feel is the tail end of the story.

 

Facing Fear and Overcoming Fear http://pathwaytohappiness.com/sound_files/pod8-overcoming-fear.mp3

-When you really look what's behind the fears, they fall apart all by themselves.
-What's hurting? The fear of failing or the fact that other people are judging us?

No! That is the faith you invest in the belief of being a failure. If we knew we were going to laugh at ourselves, we would be totally free to express ourselves.

-What we are really afraid of, is of judging ourself. We are afraid that we will believe those thoughts about ourselves, that we are a failure

because only in believing those things will we feel emotional pain. We are afraid of what we believe about ourselves.
-When you have the awareness not to believe what you think about yourself, there is a great deal of freedom opens, a whole world of opportunities shows up and what you do with your life is depending on that.

Not because you are no longer afraid of what they think about you, but because you are not afraid any more of what you think about yourself.

-The people don't challenge their fears because:

A) They don't have a way to go around it. We aren't taught to question the stories in our minds that loop over and over again and generate fear.
We aren't taught to challenge what we believe, so we end up recreating it over and over.

B) It's uncomfortable to challenge fears. But not challenging our fears is actually just as uncomfortable if not more uncomfortable, we just don't realize it.

-When you are afraid of something, you have to realize that you are experiencing all the emotions that you are trying to avoid and that you are doing this everyday by not taking action.
Then you take the suffering of a single day, you multiply this by the numbers of days you suffered, you will find out after a while, that this is a whole lot less painful to go do this thing that you are afraid of.
Stagnation is not a remedy for fear.

-The key is to notice and to know that the minds assumptions aren't true. -The real way to overcome fear is to become a skeptic of the assumptions that your mind generates.

 

Reasoning Your Way Out of Fear http://pathwaytohappiness.com/podcast/pod28-reasoning-out-fear.mp3

-Is there a battle between the heart and the mind?
There is no battle between them, it's all happening in the mind. The battle is more between truth and fiction we can call illusions or false beliefs.
Fear arises from these false beliefs.
The battle is more between the love in the heart and false logic in the mind. Having no more fears, opens the way to more love,

and that means more happiness. This is where common sense is in alignment with love and being happy.
-Reason is the part of the mind that is driven by logic. It is forming beliefs about how the world works. and is building an internal working model of understanding.

-The funny thing about the reason is, itʼs looking for an answer, it gives you the feeling of confusion if it doesn't have an answer.
The reason is looking for an answer, and when it has an answer, it feels relieved wether that answer is true or not. The reason doesn't care for the truth, what it wants is an answer that fits a logical pattern.

When it has an answer, even when it is an illusion, provided it fits well enough with other beliefs, it gives us that feeling of being relief and our tendency is to stop the inquiry process.

-Here is two motivators to accept that answer:
A)They feel relieved of confusion, they found an answer
B) There is a relief by not opening that door and go face to face with their fear.

Accepting an answer doesn't give you the structure of the false beliefs, it's like looking a car from the outside saying "the car is broken". But it doesn't help much. To know what is broken helps, "The tank is empty".
To ask then "Why is the tank, empty?", maybe will prevent from happening in the future.

-Fear of the unknown don't exist but the reason loves that kind of simplicity, not really needing the truth, thatʼs why we accept such answer to be true. You are not afraid of the unknown, you are afraid of what you think will happen. Before we learned to be afraid we were thinking that any experience can be exited, this is our nature.

-People use to think that the earth is flat, they had an answer, they stopped inquiry further into truth.

-The other layer to this, is when we have an answer, we know, and within that knowing we develop a sense of superiority. The self importance expends, and we feel better and more powerful than if we didn't know.
So we have the relief of feeling better from the confusion, we have the relief from fear of what might happen in the nightmare scenario, and this elevated self importance state, the sense superiority of knowing.

-We find the same logic when get angry and we want to justify it: "Oh, if you hadn't done this! That was disrespectful! I wouldn't feel this way, if you didn't do that..." All are justification for our own behavior and our own emotional reactions. But so we so easily accept what our logic take as right, as it relieves us from the confusion. Particularly when we blame someone else. It is seductive because it feels better to comfort ourselves with certain type of fiction. -Notice the feeling of shifting from confusion to relief even when the answer is not true

-It's a little disconcerting when you realize that we comfort ourselves in fiction.
When you get over that, you can ask yourself the questions: "What can my life be like without fear? What happens if I leave these layers of false logic in my mind behind me? How much love, happiness and joy can I experience?" This is really going into the unknown and life becomes a much more exiting adventure.

-Living with common sense is living with open heart.
What we have to pass through is to identify the part of mind called reason and not letting dominate our choices and our decision making. Not letting it decides for you in its fiction based logic. Because that part of the mind is desperate for an answer, however it doesn't really care if it's the truth. When we discover the truth, we experience the emotional state of love. Love is the emotional vibration in the body when you are aligned with truth. In a much more profound way than only being relieved from confusion. 

Edited July 4, 2016 by Nic

[Richard Alpert]

Thanks Nic. Im currently in chapter 11 in the course, but these are good reminders/highlights, because you tend to forget these at some point.

[Nic]

@Richard Alpert you are welcome!

I'm glad you joined the course!

I hope you'll do a review on it too! 

I've been doing his relationship course lately.... OMG absolutely fantastic! Totally worth it! I've been putting it on the side for years as it came out after the advance series... and Gary decided to put it between the 2 courses. Now that I've done it, I understand why. At first I thought it was for commercial reasons. But no it isn't. It's a smart course on how to avoid drama in any relationship.

I'm going to do another review on the relationship course someday too! Still working on it! I still have a lot of progress to do...  a lot to unlearn. The quality is definitely there and I feel it work doing the work every day.

http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/self_mastery.htm

If anybody is interested on doing the relationship course without the mastery program... I guess you could, but you'd be for sure better off doing the mastery program first.