Happiness - Scholars Have Corroborated What Toltecs Have Understood For Eons. Are You Happy?
Who is Happier, a Lotto winner or a Paraplegic?
In the words of Harvard Psychologist, Dan Gilbert who explains 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 control 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 - serve you.
Gilbert discusses how Homo Sapiens possess a Frontal lobe or Prefrontal Cortex. This amazing aparatus is an experience simulator. Human Sapiens are able to simulate experience prior to when it occurs.
In his labs Gilbert has seen that one's experience simulator doesn't work as well as it should. He calls this phenomenon, Impact Bias. The experience simulator causes us to accept that divergent 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 continuance than people assume them to have. Gilbert cites a recent study of how major life traumas affect people suggest that, if it happened over three months ago, it has no impact on your happiness. This is also borne out 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 receive what you wanted. Particularly in Western Society we have a ardent belief that synthetic happiness is not as good as natural happiness. Gilbert states that our whole economic structure is created on the principle that you must get what you desire to be happy, that a shopping mall full of Zen monks isn't going to be profitable because they don't want things.
Toltecs recognize that it is all about how you perceive things. A man compliments 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 teasing 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 refer to as one's inventory, Due to emotional charges from her past being brought up by the man's words, she will have a bad experience. The experience simulator is not working properly.
From a Toltec or Metaphysical viewpoint, I would go beyond what Gilbert states 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 impermanent as when we don't get what we crave for, or lose what we had, we are not happy. It is a weak type of happiness because we are 100% dependent on our external circumstances.
Knowing this, we can no longer blame people, events or situations external to us for causing us to be unhappy. Only we can make ourselves happy by using the capabilities we all carry.
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 have the whole range of what you need to be happy right within your grey matter. All you need are the tools to return it to a well running machine. The Toltec Path provides these techniques.