Happiness - Scientists Have Corroborated What Toltecs Have Known For Eons. Are You Fulfilled?
Who is Happier, a Lotto winner or a Paraplegic?
As per Harvard Psychologist, Dan Gilbert who cites scientific data, after a year lotto winners and paraplegics are synonymously happy with their lives. Dan Gilbert is the author of the book Stumbling on Happiness.
Toltec wisdom has stated for centuries that experience follows perception, and you have command over how you perceive life. You can either perceive life in a beneficial way or a adverse way. If you perceive a problem as a challenge that will empower you and help you grow, it will do just that - do good for you.
Gilbert talks about how Homo Sapiens have a Frontal lobe or Prefrontal Cortex. This awesome aparatus is an experience simulator. Human Sapiens can simulate experience before it takes place.
In his labs Gilbert has seen that one's experience simulator doesn't perform as well as it should. He calls this phenomenon, Impact Bias. The experience simulator causes us to accept that different outcomes are more different than they really are. Things like winning or losing, gaining or losing a romantic partner, and so on, have far less impact, acuteness and duration than people expect them to have. Gilbert cites a recent study of how major life traumas impact people suggest that, if it happened more than three months ago, it has no impact on your happiness. This is also shown in Toltec writings such as The Four Agreements.
Gilbert says natural happiness is when we receive what we wanted. Synthetic happiness is what you make when you don't get what you wanted. Particularly in Western Society we have a basic belief that synthetic happiness is not as good as natural happiness. Gilbert states that our whole economic system is built on the belief that you must get what you want to be happy, that a shopping mall full of Zen monks isn't going to be profitable because they don't want things.
Toltecs understand that it is all about how you perceive things. A man says nice things to a woman bout her hair, for example. It makes one woman happy as she perceives what he said as a compliment. Another woman, who was raised with her brothers cajoling her about her hair and has an emotional charge about it, will perceive what the man says absolutely different than the first woman. Due to, what Toltecs call one's inventory, Due to emotional charges from her past being actuated by the man's words, she will have a bad encounter. The experience simulator is not working properly.
From a Toltec or Metaphysical viewpoint, I would go beyond what Gilbert shows in his talk, that what he calls synthetic happiness is actually true happiness as it is not dependent on what happens to us in our lives. What Gilbert calls natural happiness is fleeting as when we don't get what we wish, or lose what we had, we are not happy. It is a impotent type of happiness because we are 100% dependent on our outside world.
Knowing this, we can no longer blame people, events or situations outside of us for forcing us to be unhappy. Only we can make ourselves happy by using the capabilities we all have.
Now you understand that you possess all you need to be happy contained in you. Unless you are a Homo Habilis (an ancient man/woman), and doesn't contain a Pre Frontal Cortex, you possess the whole range of what you need to be happy right within your brain. All you need are the tools to return it to a well running machine. The Toltec Path provides these techniques.