 |
Byer has come to a self-truth which was marked by the end of a long-time career and the beginning of a desire for a deliberate life. This truth ultimately led to freedom from within, something portrayed right from the start in this first chapter. Happiness is Chosen Wisely captivates on the principle that we are not using our brains for higher thinking, but as an emotional vehicle instead. Herein lays the struggle of mankind to become enlightened without stress or fear. By using our brains for higher thinking, we will ultimately become blissfully happy and fulfilled. Byer establishes the tone early on and promises to deliver thoughtful and educated clues into becoming a happier person, including diving into the background and science behind the study of neurology in cohesion with higher thinking. The best-kept secret is that our minds will do the work for us. The journey appears promising to transform its readers into a state of awareness and reasoning.
Chapter One
WHY THIS BOOK?
To understand life and myself
This book is the result of my writing for discovery, to better understand life and myself in order to become contented and happy.
While working in engineering for many years and advancing my career to become a manager of larger projects and sales, I started noticing my personal life was in complete disarray. This was from working longer hours out of town away from my family; I was drinking too much, using drugs, and some other indiscretions. That's when I thought, “Why don't I just turn my successful project managing skills back upon my own mind’s functioning and start managing myself as a self-styled project?” This was a point in my life when my higher thinking caught up with my lower desire for pleasure and fear of pain. That's also when I quit my career and started the search for a deliberate life of contentment and happiness to where I am at today.
This book is meant to define the differences between pleasure and happiness as two distinct opposite states of mind. While pleasure is the effect of our desires as an instinctive motivational process, all emotions originate in our consciousness as a desire, which then results in stress, anxiety and despair (S.A.D.) in order to acquire the pleasure we desired in the first place, with an added fear of loss. For all pleasures last but a short time because of hedonic adaptation and are required to be reinforced at a later time over and over as a closed loop system. This requires us to give pleasure to others in order to receive pleasure in return, either by mutually pleasurable benefits of a social barter system or paying someone to give us what we desire. Happiness, on the other hand, is our mind’s higher thinking that first must override our instinctive motivations for pleasure to be realized in our lives at all. The cause of happiness is peace, calm, tranquility, bliss and harmony, but the effects are the same as the cause. This is our absence of desire from our higher thinking, wisdom, and enlightenment without any stress, anxiety or despair at all.
Our minds are like a coin. One side of the coin is tails. It's the emotional side that's always motivated toward what looks, tastes, feels, sounds, and smells pleasurable. While the other side of the coin is heads: that's our reason and logic for what's best for us to become happy and contented. Both these sides occupy the same brain, but are looking out at our lives in two opposite directions, often at the same times of our lives. Thus lays the struggle between our emotions and higher thinking.
Our desires are a fantasy from the body’s ability to produce chemicals that feel good without any logical reason; generally all that feels good is not good for us. We tend to rely on emotion as opposed to reason, which is why we have suffering in our lives. The definition of enlightenment does not say what it is, but instead how to acquire enlightenment: Questioning of traditional doctrines and values, tendency toward individualism, emphasis on the idea of universal human progress, method of science, use of reason. That’s what this book is meant to address, the result of our higher thinking is for the enjoyment of happiness all our lives without the burden of desires or fears.
This book is an abridged version of a much larger text, while still retaining the sense of the original. These 3300 axioms are short propositions of self-evident truths and common sense that can be read anytime out of context of the whole. They are all meant to be original writings and any resemblance to other books is unintentional.
“Life tests us all, but it is up to us to test ourselves. All self-evident truths and common sense are the two best friends we will ever have.”
This book is the result of many years of a self-driven quest to read and write for discovery. The bulk of this writing was handwritten by lamplight early in the mornings on a boat. Far removed from the influences of a desire for pleasure or fear of pain that society, family, or friends afford, in solitude, but not lonely so as to see life and myself clearly. My first subject of study was the main religions of the world, but I could not find definitive reasons or logic for their beliefs. The second subject of study was philosophy and this was much more informative. Then at the period known as the “Age of Enlightenment,” and specifically Brock Spinoza wrote: “Men think themselves free because they are conscious of their actions, but ignorant of the causes of these actions,” also “They always act in accordance with the laws of their nature and for that reason think themselves free.” This has prompted the third and last subject of study that this book is about, human behavior that was the cause of the first two subjects of religion and philosophy in the first place. We may have gotten more instructions on how a computer system functions than on how our brain system functions. Then since our mind is the cause of all of life’s experiences as the effects, we rarely try to understand the reasons for our decisions.
To become free we must control what controls us and that is us. The scientific study of neurology is the neuropathic system that is a higher advanced form of instinct establishing our value system, with over 50 complex chemical molecules of neurons. The best known are: Dopamine, Norepinephrine, Serotonin, Cortisol, Oxytocin, Vas-opressin, which neuroscience researchers are unraveling for their combinations and related effects on our reward and punishment responses for feelings of well being. The entire motivational system originates at the Protoself (Wikipedia) lower level of our brain stem, rather than at the cerebral cortex or higher thinking.
This is not thinking at all, just emotions that are the cause of our decisions for desire or fear. Then to be human, as opposed to any other species, was to acquire our higher thinking over our instinctual emotions that are diametrically opposed to each other, resulting in questionable life decisions.
The human species has the most complex mind on this earth yet we get virtually no instruction on how it works. The human race is noticeably dysfunctional in many ways, but the lack of knowledge or understanding of itself is not questioned. The educational system seems to be just teaching what it was taught itself. The greatest demand for improvement is for us as a society to make more money and not to become more knowledgeable of ourselves so we could make better life decisions. That would be meaningful and not meaningless. We may also get more instruction on how to drive a car than we do on how to drive our minds. A race car driver knows how their car was designed, operates, and its limitations so as to be a better race car driver. Wouldn’t that same logic apply toward humans as well if we know how our minds worked? Wouldn’t we be able to make our lives run better by planning and understanding our weaknesses and strengths, when all our instructions or plans for a decision is “if it feels, sounds, tastes, looks and smells good then we should do it?”
The biggest and best kept secret in our lives seems to be how our minds work because our mind has a reluctance to know itself. We are concentrating on the outside world and the effects of our desires, but never want to really learn what the cause of those effects were. We go to great extent to get an education so as to influence each other by those credentials, maybe for fame or fortune, but mostly to make greater income so as to have more pleasure and less fear of pain. The fictional books read out of school are for our personal enjoyment for pleasure or entertainment. Those that are nonfiction are of many other subjects, but few are self-discovery.
Our species is blind to itself yet we all operate our own minds without any instruction or knowledge, as a child does from birth till death: if it feels good we want to do it. We have learned very little about ourselves, which is why history always repeats itself. The cause of the problems of the entire human race is the cause of the motivations of our own life’s race; that we are the cause of the effect of our lives from our emotional responses and not our higher thinking. Then our lives would become the effects of our higher thinking, instead of our lowest desires for pleasure or fear of pain, which is the result of ego, lust and fear. In order to counteract our instinctive emotions we must fight and flee, that’s to fight fear and flee pleasure. This is to become free from ourselves now, not in maybe some afterlife in another world.
By utilizing our higher thinking we can make our lives a better place to be by controlling ourselves and not to be controlled by some unknown aspect of our outdated instinctual emotions, which are harmful in this advanced culture, but not advanced emotional state of mind. Our highest purpose is found through experience, awareness, and introspection, so as to direct ourselves to become the cause of our life’s motivations for happiness. That is peace, calm, tranquility, bliss and harmony, which is heaven on earth. This can be accomplished through knowledge, influence and will: we can acquire the wisdom in order to be happy without pleasure or pain that leads to suffering. We may be unaware of the capacity of directing ourselves that’s either better for happiness or worse for pleasure. Either from feelings of emotions or reasoning of our minds, life will unfold as effects now. The present moment as we determined it, is either meaningful or meaningless.