I had severe depression from the time I was 13 years old until this year. It was only a few weeks ago that I was able to break my depression for the first time in any real way. I have studied visualization and altered states of consciousness for years, and a real motivation for me has been to try to crack the problem of my depression. On my average day, I had passive suicidal thoughts, which is to say that I wished I were dead without acting on it. Since my “cure” I have felt well on a daily basis, and have no desire to kill myself.
Although I still fall off the cart occasionally, I am able to apply my techniques to get back on easily enough and can stay well the majority of the time. With each passing day it gets easier. So, this is the product of twenty-four years of work on my part and I think it is applicable to a wide variety of depressions, anxieties and anger-related feelings that make our lives miserable. The system is based on using logic and reason combined with a certain model of self to create a change in how you feel. I am going to try to boil this information into the shortest possible form and without loss of important information. This is a bit of a rough draft so please be forgiving.
Before I share the technique, I want to emphasize that this should be used only as an adjunct to your existing psychological treatment. Please do not change your anti-depressant medication either before or during the use of this technique without supervision by a licensed psychologist, psychiatrist or therapist. If you are depressed and not currently seeking treatment, please do so and do not use this technique as a replacement for professional treatment, only as an adjunct to it.
Ok, the disclaimer is over, so now down to the meat and potatoes. Depression, anxiety, anger, greed and being driven are all products of a single source problem called projection. Imagine your life as it is, a present moment in time, is a picture. You can see and relate to that picture, or you can place another picture over it, thus obscuring it. This is what projection does. Projection is a fantasy that is meant to pull you away from your real life, distorting reality. It isn’t a healthy diversion or fantasy, but a manifestation of denial. It is an attempt to deny the reality of your life as it is.
Here are some examples of projection. 1) You imagine that you are rich and then back it up by spending money you can’t afford to spend. 2) You are filled with rage at a co-worker who irritates you. You imagine that they could be a nicer, more pleasant person, and that thought fills you with hatred because you know they are a jerk simply by choice. 3) You imagine that if you stay on your present life-path that you will end up broke, homeless and jobless, begging for spare change in the freezing cold. 4) You are filled with anxiety over an upcoming meeting where you will have to speak in front of your coworkers. You feel so scared that you wish you could die instead of having to face it. 5) You work extremely hard every day at your job. You know that if you are driven enough your efforts will be rewarded, even though the pace is taking a toll on your health.
You may have noticed how many of these fantasies are based on either the past or future. This is the key idea behind my technique. Your depression is a manifestation of being separated from reality by your own fantasy. You in effect become a fractured portion of your whole being. You, the person who is whole and can enjoy life and be happy exists potentially at every moment. This is an “unconditional happiness” that does not stem from having or not having anything, but simply comes from itself; it is a self-created feeling. It is not justified, earned or deserved, it simply is.
The depressed self has amnesia. It can only remember the unpleasant events and feelings in your life. It is also incapable of enjoying or understanding many things. Few events break through the dark clouds of depression to produce any happiness. The depressed self exists when you create a projection, a fantasy that distorts your perception of present reality. When this happens, you become involved in a fantasy reality that functions differently than true reality.
You can think of the depressed self as a smaller, weaker, uglier, meaner, more miserable and less capable version of yourself. If you have spent your whole life identifying with a depressed self, then you may not have any alternative point of comparison. The very good news that I discovered as a depressed person was that the process of generating projection/fantasy that creates depression is entirely an internal process. It can be controlled internally with the proper understanding. And, no external events control it. So, you can have negative events in your life and still have unconditional happiness.
This whole idea begs the question, why would we ever create a state of consciousness to make ourselves miserable? We would because it is a grab for power. Depression is a grab for power over one’s self. You are attempting to drive and motivate yourself with your own misery into being a person that you can’t be. So, you fail, and then you beat yourself up even harder. The idea that everyone can be a certain thing is insane. Everyone has real limitations that confine them throughout their life. Some limitations are obvious and some are not. You may think that you should have a lover at your current age and you don’t. You may think that you should be thin and you are not.
These are fantasies built on the idea that you failed at some moment in time in your past to live up to your potential. However, no one can appreciate the internal limitations that prevent us from doing what others achieve. Driven parents can create depressed children by setting up impossible standards for them to live up to. Children who buy these standards and fail to achieve them blame themselves and use depression as a last-resort tool to attempt to salvage some fragment of those lost dreams. You probably use depression to drive you into doing things that feel “wrong” or unpleasant to you. It probably isn’t a very successful way of motivating yourself.
Exercise 1: I am going to ask you do some exercises as part of this program. This exercise involves writing a paragraph about your own projection habits. Think about the most common thoughts you have during or right before a depressive episode. Bring those thoughts up and engage in the fantasy. While you are thinking along these lines, however, repeat to yourself “this is just a fantasy,” over and over again. Keep that awareness going while you have these thoughts. Awareness that you are engaged in fantasy and not reality is the cornerstone of this technique.
If you find that despite your best efforts you still believe the fantasy is “real”, then think of it in these terms. We are not arguing that the fantasy you are having is unreal or unrealistic. Rather, we are arguing that reality is the present moment. The past is no longer a reality and the future is not a reality yet. The present moment is where your true non-depressed self is and that is where we are trying to get. In order to do that, we have to abolish all fantasies that separate us from present reality. This doesn’t mean we have to never have a fantasy or think again. It means that we have to retain our awareness that certain thoughts are fantasy and not present reality.
We are not in the business of arguing if they could be true or will be true. We only want to remain aware that they are not true right at this moment. By doing this, we begin to move in the direction of present reality where we can reclaim missing (large) fragments of our consciousness. I know this is all a bit complex, but please bear with me. Try the above exercise again until you are able to sustain the awareness of present reality while you fantasize. Notice how this influences the emotional impact the fantasy has on you. Please keep a journal throughout the process of working with this material as you try to move out of your depression.
The Holy Grail of this technique is to be able to go as high as you can conceptualize into positive feelings. The normal thoughts and feelings that drag you down are defused by logical examination. This allows you to continue to operate at a high level. The more you master the higher logic, the longer you can remain in that state unchallenged. However, with practice, what was initially a “high” becomes later your normal state of consciousness as you shift your identity through changing your habitual identification. Your whole self is unconditionally happy. It is fully relating to reality and is glad to be in it. It remembers the dark and negative aspects of your depressed life, but is also capable of real joy and love and enjoyment. It has full memory of your life, whereas your depressed self is only a partial self, and as such can only remember the negative feelings of things. The severity of that depends on the severity of the depression.
In the examples I gave of different types of projections near the beginning, I had in mind projections relating to depression, anxiety, anger and greed. Depression projects a lie over your life to motivate you to change by self-brutality. This creates a feeling of having power over yourself that you don’t really have. Although you do have some power over yourself and your behavior, it is not as great as the depressed fantasy would make it out to be. You created the projection in order to feel more powerful over yourself. You hoped that you could defy reality and generate the artificial power needed to become the person you thought you deserved to be.
The problem is that the only way you can become engaged in non-reality is by becoming a non-real version of yourself. We have to pop the bubble of illusion we have cast over our life in order to get back to our real identity. Then we can enjoy being non-depressed. In order to get back we have to make a great sacrifice; we have to give up and accept that we cannot beat ourselves into the form we had hoped for. The good news is that we can potentially be happy for the rest of our lives in a way that is not tied down by the weather and circumstances.
Exercise 2: In this exercise we will have a brief experience of unconditional happiness. This will give you a preview of how it will feel in the future. This exercise will be more likely to work if you have experience with meditation and are not in the midst of a deep depressive episode. If it does not work, please don’t give up or get discouraged. Simply work on becoming more aware of your projections as you encounter them on a daily basis, taking notes through the day and discovering your personal habits of projection. Repeat this exercise every day until you get the desired result. It may take weeks, so please be patient.
Begin by getting into a quiet, undisturbed state and relax as much as possible. Make a real effort to put all problems and worries aside. When you are relaxed and you mind is clear, count from one to forty, with the goal that by the time you reach forty you will be in a state of unconditional happiness. When you reach forty, take a quick stock of how you feel. You may experience a falling off of your depression and anxiety. Try not to think about anything specifically but just enjoy the feeling. This is happiness that comes directly from your own consciousness without any cause. It is part of who you really are. Take any notes in your journal as needed.
At this point we are interested in reaching this state if we were not able to get there in the previous exercise, or keeping that state of consciousness if we did experience it. Practice this exercise at least once per day, but ideally several times per day. Don’t be discouraged but keep practicing until you get the desired feeling. Now we will set our sights at a long-term version of this state.
We said that depression, anxiety, greed and anger all come out of projection. They are all attempts to create artificial power that you don’t have in reality by creating a lie or illusion and believing in it over reality. Then, when there is a feeling of illusory power, the self hopes to shatter the walls of reality and to become somehow more powerful than reality allows. Anxiety creates a projection based on fear. By being “super-ready” for anything that could go wrong, the self seeks to become empowered to free the self from danger and real-life risks. It also seeks to motivate the self to be more and do than it is capable of by using fear tactics.
Anger seeks to project the illusion that people are more powerful than they actually are. It creates a scenario where people can exercise their “free will” to become successful, and so if they fail they are failures because they actively and consciously made the wrong choices. The failed people deserve to be hated for their crimes and need to be punished for their shortcomings. This fantasy does not acknowledge that many people make mistakes out of sheer ignorance. A person may knowingly hurt someone, knowing it is “wrong” in the purely social sense, but not operating out of a working conscience they may not understand what “wrong” is.
If they can’t feel for their victim, that is a form of ignorance that prevents them from being able to make morally right choices. They feel justified in their cruelty because they simply don’t understand that it is wrong in the most fundamental way, at the level of feeling. Or, if they do understand, they may feel compelled against their own will to do the wrong thing. Insanity and ignorance take many forms. The fantasy that people are “bad” and make bad choices from some sort of omniscient standpoint is a fantasy. It gives the angry person a grab at the power to become more powerful by punishing, lecturing and bullying others into making the right choices in the future. By refusing to acknowledge the ways in which people are entrenched in their own ignorance, the person lives in a fantasy world where they have more power over others.
However, like all projections, this makes the person unhappier and less powerful and they alienate others and hurt themselves. The greedy, driven person can see the rewards of their driven behavior. They fantasize that if they push themselves hard enough things will change for the better. They often do reap the rewards of their hard work. However, they mistake this power as coming from their driven behavior. Actually, if they were unconditionally happy they could drive themselves just as hard. They would not lose that power.
However, the unconditionally happy person has many cards in his hand, not just one or two like the driven/depressed/anxious/angry person. So, they may see a better approach and take it. This does not make them “less powerful” as the driven person might think. And, the driven person may fail to be rewarded for their efforts and will be devastated by it. They had a fantasy in their mind and it was unfulfilled by reality. This creates pain and frustration. The greatest pain can occur when a driven person achieves their goals and is miserable. This is a terrible place to be.
Only unconditional happiness can create real, lasting happiness. Unconditional happiness is Spiritual in nature as well, because it is full of wise compassion for one’s self and others. It is a loving, caring vibration that heals you. You can’t depend on life to deal you a winning hand through driven behavior. Soon or later you will experience misery and loss with that approach because life is unpredictable and no strategy is foolproof. So, developing unconditional happiness is the best strategy.
Below is a series of questions and answers that you will probably have to face as you confront you projecting thoughts. Each projection challenges you to logically explain why it is wrong and unconditional happiness is preferable. Please read these questions and rebuttals and try applying them to your own thought process in the days ahead as you practice identifying your projections.
Projection Questions and Answers
Below is a list of common questions about unconditional happiness that you might run into in the course of trying to adjust your state of mind. At first, you might have difficulty adjusting your state and might find that it is frustrating to constantly go back and reset your unconditional happiness only to have it fall away again in a few minutes. Asking yourself the question “why can’t I or won’t I stay in unconditional happiness at this point in time?” is the best way to break the mental habits that have tied you to projection. If you run into a question that isn’t addressed here, reread the earlier chapters and apply the basic principals until you get the answer, and once you get it, write it down in your journal.
Q: Why should I be happy? My life is crap right now!
A: When you are unconditionally happy, you are at your best, given your current circumstances. You have the most energy and consciousness available to apply to problems. This is the best state to address problems, because you bring the most of yourself to the table that is possible. Depression and other projection related states tend to cause a kind of amnesia where you forget how it felt during those times when you were happy and satisfied.
Conversely, when you are unconditionally happy, you remember clearly both the good and bad times. You operate with the maximum intelligence and intuition. You see the bigger picture and the details at your maximum capacity. During depression you only remember being unhappy. During anger, you tend to remember all the times and ways you felt angry. You lose huge chunks of your being by being involved in these projection-related states. So, purely on a practical level, it is in your best interest to face your problems from a state of unconditional happiness.
Q: I am in physical pain and I am tired from lack of sleep. How can I possibly be happy?
A: Unconditional happiness is just that, unconditional. Although is seems nonsensical to say that you can be in pain and also unconditionally happy, it isn’t. You aren’t being happy “about” something, so no one can pull out the rug from that happiness. Physical pain can distract you from unconditional happiness but not prevent it. Psychological pain that has its origins in projection can be prevented. If it isn’t, it often is added as an additional layer of pain over your physical pain. It is experienced as anxiety, despair, dread, etc. So, when you are in physical pain you would want to reduce your pain by reducing your psychological pain.
I often find that my physical discomfort, if it is mild, can be relieved by shifting my psychological state to unconditional happiness. Sleepiness and tiredness are also targets for psychological pain. It is possible to be in unconditional happiness when you are sleepy. However, if you are so sleepy that you begin to drift off, you will lose your waking identity. If you have not been involved in unconditional happiness for a very long time, you will probably slip back into your projection-related states of mind out of habit and lack of conscious control.
If you are in this situation, just prop up your state of conscious often and don’t worry if you can’t be perfectly unconditionally happy every moment. This kind of practice shifting states will ultimately be fantastically beneficial to you. Through practice and perseverance early on you will reap great rewards ultimately. As a side note, it is a good idea to go into unconditional happiness when you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep. It can help you relax and get back to sleep in some cases, or help you fully wake up if that is the direction you are moving in.
Q: How can I become unconditionally happy when the world is working so hard to bring me down?
A: The first few weeks or months of your practice will be the most challenging. But, by continually getting in the habit of being unconditionally happy and addressing the issues that bring you down, you will achieve a state of being free of these kinds of distraction. The first step is to figure out the answer to the questions that come up in your mind. The second step is to continually raise the issues and then tell yourself the answers over and over again.
Eventually you will achieve breakthrough consciousness where you know the answers well enough that the questions no longer arrive. The knowledge becomes automatic and intuitive. There is nothing in the real world that can reduce your degree of unconditional happiness, no matter how horrible. The only thing that has that power is your own ability to create projection. If you are afraid of an impending event, think about the fact that only projection can bring you down, not the real world. Stop and reanalyze every new challenging situation that arises from a state of unconditional happiness.
If someone pushes your buttons, go into unconditional happiness and then tell yourself how you perceive this person or event from the new perspective. Write down what you say. You are using yourself as your own teacher. You will discover that the logic that your unconditionally happy self uses is more sound than the logic of the projected consciousness.
The projected self is smaller than you, uglier than you, stupider and meaner. It makes poor decisions, uses twisted logic and hurts itself and others. It operates out of greed and hatred, is sexually and emotionally frustrated, tense and miserable. Why would you want to be that person when you can be the greater you, who is strong, wise, beautiful, creative and full of life and joy. When I was depressed, I thought my depression was a mark of intelligence. I thought I saw a side to life that no one else saw. Now I realize that misery is a common language and that I can be happy and still see misery and suffering around me. The difference is that now I feel love and compassion where I once felt rage and hurt. Events have no ability to do anything except trigger our projection habits. Be forgiving with yourself and reinforce your unconditional happiness often.
Q: What if I am suicidal?
A: I would be irresponsible to try to speak to this subject too much, or to ignore is altogether. Suffice it to say that you should seek professional intervention in any situation where you are feeling suicidal. If you are not suicidal but are concerned that you will lose your ability to choose to end your life, it is important to understand that you do not lose your power or choices in unconditional happiness.
A good metaphor is having a hand of cards during a card game. The projection-state person has only one or a few cards to play. They have the power to act on a limited range of options. On the other hand, the unconditionally happy person has a large hand full of cards. Each card is an option that they have the power to explore. You deserve to make the best choices in all situations that you encounter. You don’t lose the ability to take any card, or choice, and act on it. It is simply a case of having a better hand and so you have possibly a wider range of possible courses of action to choose from, and in this case suicide is less likely to be an action you will pursue. You will enjoy your life and want to live. However, it is possible that there are circumstances that are painful enough that you might choose to die, even from a state of unconditional happiness. But always consult a psychological professional if you feel compelled to make such a drastic choice.
I spent most of my life wishing I were dead, from the time I was a young teenager to my late thirties. I felt that way at least once a day during that period, and often for extended periods. Now I enjoy a pleasure in being alive and a satisfaction in the process. Taking a walk or writing or reading all can bring me great pleasure. I see beauty where there was mostly pain and emptiness. So if you like there is no hope, be patient, seek professional help and in the mean time help yourself by pursing unconditional happiness.
Q: I feel like I can’t be happy as you describe because I have to push myself; the world is fast paced and competitive and I can’t afford to be “satisfied” or I will slack off and fail in life.
A: First of all, I would like to say that it is an ignorant approach to decision making to choose between two options where you only understand one of them. If you don’t have any experience of unconditional happiness, then you can’t know that it will make you lazy and useless, sitting around in a satisfied rut. I am capable of doing more now than I did when I lived under depression. For compulsive people who are greedy and driven, they need the feeling of power and control that comes from asserting themselves. They tell themselves that their projected fantasy of who they should be drives them to be a better person. They assume that if they are happy they will give up and rest.
As I have said before, you don’t lose any of your power to do things in unconditional happiness. You can go to the store (happy), wash the dishes (happy) and do all the other things that you feel you need to do. That includes pursuing personal goals and dreams. If, however, you become unconditionally happy and see that your greedy, driven approach is hurting you, then you will probably make better choices that might include partially slowing down or pursing a new line of work. It is impossible to predict where it will take you. You have to learn to trust yourself at some point or be forever a slave to your own delusions. Being unconditionally happy is an important foundation upon which your life can be built. But a life without that foundation will always be built on quicksand.
It is also important to realize that people change and evolve. Driven behavior is basically fixed in time. It is a statement of a person’s unwillingness to change and grow. To not participate in one’s own personal evolution and to actively pursue stagnation and repetition is to attempt to defy the nature of one’s own consciousness. Consciousness is in a continual state of evolution every minute of every day and that evolution of consciousness is what we are. The vice-like grip of the control freak is a useless attempt to resist personal growth. When you are unconditionally happy you will be able to see how to enjoy your life on a day-to-day basis without asserting “control” over what happens to you. You can make choices and live in the present, allowing yourself the freedom to make decisions as they arise.
Q: I am filled with hatred toward so many people who have hurt me. I can’t let go of that rage and just “forgive and forget”!
A: Rage, or the basic awareness of what you are angry about will still be in you when you are unconditionally happy. You will just process that consciousness differently. Allow yourself the freedom to experience this perspective before you reject it. The memories and feelings that make up that anger will still be a part of you. Anger is pain; it is a living hell. Anger cuts to the core of the heart and maims you emotionally. It is violent, cruel and merciless towards self and others. The pleasure of anger is a feeling of self-righteousness or the pleasure of hurting others.
If you don’t want to live like that, you certainly don’t have to. Create new habits of being and you will become a different person. I remember the first time I felt like unconditional happiness was who I truly was, rather than some artificial high I had somehow achieved, some fragile state waiting to be shattered. Although I fell back into depression many times after that, I have shifted more and more to a total life experience of unconditional happiness. If a miserable and hopeless person like myself was able to do it, so can you.
Q: What if I just don’t want to be unconditionally happy. I’m sick of trying to get into that state. I’m satisfied with how I feel now.
A: If you enter into unconditional happiness, you will no longer prefer your old state of mind to unconditional happiness. But you won’t believe me until you try it. When you do, you will see this for yourself.
Q: If I am used to being depressed and kind of enjoy it, what is the harm?
A: For lack of a better word, depression is evil. Depression reduces us to a caricature of who we could be. It distorts our thoughts and causes us stress that harms our body. Plus, we run the risk of losing the battle with our depression altogether and killing ourselves. Also, you hurt other with your depression by engaging in negative and down-putting dialogue with others. You subtly discourage others, sapping them of hope, creating negative emotional energy around yourself and sucking the life out of the room.
You can harm your career and alienate people at work with your negativity. Depression is cold and unloving, and it can hurt your love life at many different levels. Your inability to handle normal stressors can ruin your life or degrade your quality of life terribly. You become a negative influence on the lives of others. Your presence becomes burdensome. These words should not lead you to feel discouraged, but to face and conquer your depression by any means necessary.
You are not to blame for the negative force of your depression, but it is all the more reason to seek unconditional happiness aggressively. The turning point in my life was when someone I had recently met told me that depression was a negative force in the world. I initially felt hurt and insulted, but then I realized he was right. This more than anything spurred me to break through my depression of 24 years and find a better way to live.
Q: If I get into unconditional happiness and then think about all my various problems, won’t I just get miserable again?
A: No. That will only happen if you engage in projection. There isn’t anything in the physical world that can destroy your unconditional happiness except falling asleep or being knocked unconscious.
Q: I feel like my life has passed me by. I am old and washed up and all my great opportunities are gone. The one person I truly loved is gone and now there is only loneliness. With this horrible life behind be, how can I ever truly be happy again?
A: When you are unconditionally happy, you are aware of all the things that are gone, but you are able to truly enjoy everything you have now, perhaps for the first time ever. You can redeem you whole life in a single moment of happiness, so how much more so when that moment becomes several moments, then later hours, day, weeks and years of true happiness? How would you calculate the value of your remaining days on earth? Your memories which bring you sadness and depression when you are depressed become the fuel of fond memory and new ideas for the present and future.
Q: I am filled with a sense of dread about an event that I think may be coming down the road for me. I don’t know for certain but it is very likely to happen, and is unpleasant. How can I be unconditionally happy in the face of this?
A: Unconditional happiness happens in the present moment. That doesn’t mean you can’t remember events, anticipate events or fantasize, but it does mean that you fundamentally know who you are and where you are. You are approaching life rather than fleeing it. You want the power to stop an event you see as inevitable because it fills you with fear and dread. The element of projection is to create an ugly picture of your life that causes you to separate from your present moment. Have a relationship with the present moment. Realize that you are producing this idea of the future as a fantasy overlay to your real life.
In the present it is just a fantasy, regardless of the supposed reality of it in the future. You want the projection because you want to be able to prevent the future event. You associate the present moment with the future you don’t want, so you push reality away. The negative feelings I have come from the projection. You’re the one giving the projection the authority to override reality. No one else can do that. The idea that I know the future is a fantasy, because it isn’t founded in the present. I don’t know that in the present.
When I am unconditionally happy, I won’t believe or disbelieve it and it won’t interfere with my happiness. When I move closer to reality, that feeling will be automatically resolved. The fear will be gone. Regardless of whether it will be real or not, it isn’t reality right now! So, the fantasy can push away present reality. The fundamental crux of the issue is trusting reality or not. If you choose to trust reality despite the dire prediction you can move into unconditional happiness and make me feel better. Say, “I choose to be my whole self, rather than a demi-self. I choose to move deeper into reality, which is where unconditional happiness is. I reject the path of seeking power in lower states of consciousness that reject reality.”
Exercise 3: Your Daily Practice
This exercise will constitute the remainder of your practice with unconditional happiness at the basic level. I have advanced material, but that is not written down yet, so let me know when and if you have mastered this basis practice and are ready to move on to higher degrees of unconditional happiness.
This is the basic process that you will repeat over and over again throughout the day. Be patient with the process, as it will feel like you are pushing a rock up a hill only to have it fall down again, at first. With practice you will start to memorize the understandings that break your projection and they will be second nature.
1) Put yourself into unconditional happiness with a forty count. You can use a lower count if you have done this a few times. You should shoot for an ultimate goal of a five count.
2) Once in unconditional happiness, ask yourself if there is any reason that you can think of that you don’t want to be unconditionally happy. If there is, remind yourself that it is the best possible state of being for you, the most powerful, creative, and the one in which you have the most power and options.
3) Ask yourself if there is any reason that you can’t stay unconditionally happy. If it is a current problem, remind yourself that external problems can’t bring you down from unconditional happiness because it is only created by generating an illusion over present reality, and only you can choose to do that. Remind yourself that if you are having real problems in life, you need to be in the best, most powerful state of being that is available, and that is unconditional happiness. That will maximize your choices in terms of dealing with your problems.
4) If the problem that makes you think you can’t stay in unconditional happiness is anger, remind yourself of the limits that other people are restricted by, and that you also have real limits. Recognize that anger does not make you more powerful, but actually less powerful, by reducing your being. If you are in unconditional happiness you can take that consciousness of your anger and rethink it into a new form. So, you will not be stuffing or denying your anger, but simply experiencing at a better level. Remind yourself that anger is suffering, and you shouldn’t have to suffer for the mistakes of others.
5) If the problem is an impending event that seems inevitable or even is inevitable, remember that you can be unconditionally happy both now and when the problem arrives. If worry and fear are interfering, understand that your present thoughts about the event are a fantasy. This does not question the validity of the future situation; it is only a reminder that in the present that event does not exist and your thoughts about it are a fantasy. You will not become more powerful by fantasizing about the event, but will actually become depressed, anxious and lose a great deal of power. When you are compelled to think about the future event, think about it while reminding yourself repeatedly that it is a fantasy. This will bring you to the present reality while allowing you to mentally prepare for the impending event. If you do this you will be able to stay in unconditional happiness while thinking about the future event.
6) After clearing any issues that remain in the above manner, ask yourself if you feel a strong desire to be in unconditional happiness. If you don’t examine the reasons why as in above.
7) Make notes as you discover new patterns of projection in your thoughts. If you find a projection that you can’t break with logic, shift to unconditional happiness again and see if you can get some immediate insight. In the first few seconds after a shift up, before your projections have a chance to operate, you can get important insights into how your unconditionally happy self thinks that can help logically break your projections.
If this doesn’t yield results for you, try imagining that you are asking your unconditionally happy self questions and receiving answers in an imaginary room. Write down what your unconditionally happy self reveals to you. This can also be used if you are having difficulty discovering the exact nature of a particular projection.
8) Repeat the above steps as often as possible, daily. Expect to struggle with constant ups and downs for at least the first two weeks, after which you should experience some increasing stability and the ability to stay in unconditional happiness for hours.
This is the end of the basic unconditional happiness instructions. Please feel free to email me at [email protected] with any questions or comments. If you go through with this process, and it is successful for you, please contact me as I could really use your story as part of the book. I would like to promote this technique, but I really need some success stories to back it up and any contribution you are willing to make would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks and Best Wishes, Chris