

### How to Achieve Extreme Happiness and Wisdom

### A Practical Guide

By Geoff Pridham

Copyright 2011 by Geoffrey Robert Pridham

Published by Geoff Pridham at Smashwords

This book is available in print at most online retailers.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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### Table of Contents

HAPPINESS AND WISDOM

A PRACTICAL VIEW

SECTION I - THE THEORY

SECTION II - PRACTICAL WAYS TO ACHIEVE EXTREME HAPPINESS AND WISDOM

1. SEEK HAPPINESS WISELY

2. ASK AN EXPERT

3. GO INSIDE AND KNOW YOURSELF

4. CALM YOURSELF AND INCREASE YOUR HAPPINESS

5. THINK AGAIN

6. MEMORIZE MORE

7. RECHECK YOUR OLD IDEAS

8.MAKE PLANS AND MANAGE YOURSELF

9. BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER (SEEK HAPPINESS WISELY AND WISDOM HAPPILY - PART TWO)

THANKS FOR SHARING THE JOURNEY

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HAPPINESS AND WISDOM

If we had extreme happiness and wisdom we would live the best possible life.

What exactly is the best possible life? Is it the same for everyone? Let's not worry about those questions for the moment - when we look back from later in the book it will be clear what the best possible life is. For now let's start by considering not what the best possible life is but how we could achieve it. What is the simplest practical way to achieve extreme happiness and wisdom?

Why the wisdom part? Why not just talk about extreme happiness? Because happiness without wisdom will not last and wisdom is the only sure way to retain the happiness you gain. Also, knowing about wisdom is the most certain way of making yourself happier at all times.

You want to live the best possible life - the answer to achieving this is wisdom. This is the practical approach to life, the sensible and realistic way that will lead you to happiness - extreme happiness - in return for the effort you are willing to put in. Maybe you already know this.

People cry out for the good life. Across the world and throughout the ages people have wondered how to be happy, how to live well, how to solve the problem of their own life and that of humanity. When will this ever be solved? What does the future hold for us in terms of understanding our own lives? Maybe we will never see this ourselves. Maybe we will be like the people of the past who saw their lives and their worlds very differently to how we see things today. Who knows what is to come, what is to be discovered, what is to be thought in that mysterious future so far away?

Let's not worry about that now, let's turn our attention to solving what we can today to the best of the knowledge and wisdom that we can muster. Let the distant future take care of itself.

MOVING FORWARD INTO A BETTER AND SUNNIER WORLD

But hasn't this been done before? Haven't we come up with solutions to living the best possible life in other times, other areas and other places? Haven't the people of the past worked all this out? Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and other answers have helped us before in living the best possible life in accordance with the most important and central truths... right?

In this book we will not be so concerned with discussing the various solutions of the past, or from different areas, so much as finding out why we think the things that we do and proposing a way forward. I will tell you about the way we think and feel and how this influences us - away from the best possible life in many cases - and what we can do to overcome this and move forward into a better and sunnier world.

Who am I to be telling you about these things? What are my qualifications? What do I know? It's important that you understand what you are getting into. You need to check the qualifications of the people who are talking to you, because not everyone is honest and not everyone is really qualified to tell you what they know.

I am a philosopher and thinker. I don't mean in an academic or impractical sense. I am not an ivory-tower theorist who sits alone trying to think up wonderful ideas. I am a straightforward person who wants to help you and others to lead happier and wiser lives.

What do I know about this? Well, I have certainly put a lot of time and effort into it! I started in 1976 when I first asked myself the question: "Why do we believe the things we do?" A simple question but one that has led me on a journey of research and study - and thinking - that has touched on many areas. I have read about psychology, philosophy, biology, religion, genetics, art, culture, history, and many other topics. What's more, I have thought carefully and practically about these things and have put them together into a simple and practical system. Not relying on study alone, I have put these ideas into practice and tried them out to see if they really work. It's been more than thirty years and I am confident that I know what I am talking about now.

It's your turn to see if what I am saying makes sense. I invite you to read this and form your own conclusions. We can have fun together as you hear about my ideas. In the end you will be able to make up your own mind about what I have said.

RISING ABOVE OURSELVES

This book has a structure - I have designed it to make it as easy as possible for you to build up your knowledge of what I have to say and then see the practical applications of the ideas. There are two main sections: theory and practical applications. In the theory section I will tell you what people are and how their nature can be simply broken down into emotions, thinking and knowledge. In the practical applications section I will tell you about methods we can use to improve ourselves and live better and happier lives.

The theory is that once we understand what we are then we can look at ways to improve on that. We can imagine what it would be like if we were superior creatures with better minds and ways of living. From these imaginings we can devise the steps that would take us from what we are to what we could be. We can "rise above ourselves", as it were.

How superior do we want to be? Do we want to be super creatures who can virtually walk on water or deal calmly and happily with anything? Or do we just want to be better and happier people who can deal well with most things in life? That is a question which I will answer by providing you with a range of options from the simple and easy to achieve through to the complex and difficult. You can choose which ones you want to follow - the simple, the intermediate, or the difficult. It's up to you how much effort you are willing to put in compared to how much benefit you hope to gain from making these changes to your character and being. You will be the captain of this voyage to happiness and wisdom.

A QUICK LOOK AT THE GENERAL AREAS TO COME

Let's take a quick look at the general areas that we will be talking about in this book. First, we will be considering the information and guidance we can find in the world today. What is generally known about our human nature? What has psychology and science discovered about us so far? What recommendations do psychologists and other authorities have for us about living our lives the best possible way?

Second, after we look at what the experts have to say we will do some thinking to see what we can figure out about our nature and that of others by looking inside ourselves. What do we find inside ourselves? What do we have in common with others and what can we learn from this? What is different between us and others? How does this limit what we can really know about what it is like in the minds of others?

Third, we will learn about methods for improving how we think. We have our natural thinking abilities but are there ways we can improve on this by using things like logic or creative thinking? How well do these work? What benefits will this give us and at what cost?

Finally, we will bring all these different ideas together into a single package. This package will cover a range from the simple and easy through to the complex and difficult. You can choose which area of the range is worth applying to your life based on how much effort it will take and how much benefit you expect to gain from it. We will also describe a powerful process which you can follow to ensure you achieve happiness and wisdom at all times.

THE POWERFUL PROCESS

You will not be able to understand all the steps yet, but to give you some idea of the powerful process that is to be taught in this book I will provide a rough overview here. The details will be explained throughout the book, especially in the practical section, and at the end I will describe this process fully.

The first step is to be done as often as possible:

1. Create inner serenity. (This will be explained in Chapter 4. "Calm Yourself and Increase Your Happiness.")

The next set of steps are to be done when you have some time:

1. Learn things that contribute to happiness and wisdom. (This will be explained in Chapter 2. "Ask an Expert" and Chapter 6. "Memorize More.")

2. Learn about yourself. (From Chapter 3. "Go Inside" and Chapter 7. "Recheck Your Old Ideas.")

3. Recheck your old conclusions. (From Chapter 7. "Recheck Your Old Ideas.")

4. Think again. (From Chapter 5. "Think Again.")

5. Make plans. (From Chapter 8. "Make Plans and Manage Yourself.")

6. Check progress towards your goals. (From Chapter 8. "Make Plans and Manage Yourself.")

The final set of steps are the things to be done when a situation "calls for action", asking for something to be done:

1. Calm your emotions. (From Chapter 4. "Calm Yourself and Increase Your Happiness.")

2. Gain perspective on the situation. (From Chapter 4. "Calm Yourself and Increase Your Happiness.")

3. Broaden your perception so you can observe all the clues. (From Chapter 5. "Think Again.")

4. Think of some realistic positive points. (From Chapter 4. "Calm Yourself and Increase Your Happiness.")

5. Classify the importance and timing of the action called for. (From Chapter 8. "Make Plans and Manage Yourself.")

6. Discard unnecessary actions. (From Chapter 8. "Make Plans and Manage Yourself.")

7. Carry out selected immediate actions. (From Chapter 8. "Make Plans and Manage Yourself.")

8. Put other selected actions in a diary or list, if needed. (From Chapter 8. "Make Plans and Manage Yourself.")

All this will be made crystal-clear as you read the book and you will be able to apply it successfully by the end, where the more accurate version will be given.

~~~~

A PRACTICAL VIEW

Theories about the nature of people and living the best possible life have flooded over us throughout the history of the world. We have believed in all manner of explanations - spirit forces, giant animals, a multitude of gods, a single all-powerful god, and a materialistic view. Each theory has given us a way of looking at life and people that tells us who we are and what we should do.

Isn't it obvious that if you believe a particular thing then that will lead you to certain conclusions about the world? Other people may say that your belief is foolish or wrong, but you have to believe in something, don't you? Otherwise how would you know what to think about anything? You would be lost at sea, with no idea of when the rescue might come. No doubt you have your beliefs and I have mine, and these may not be the same.

What you and I could do together is debate about what belief or view is true and what is not. We could search for the best one and then draw our conclusions about life from that. Or I could take the approach of selling you a particular view of the world. I could try to convince you that this view is true and then tell you what to think based on this. But what if we didn't agree at the end of our discussion or my sales job? What if we realized that my view was not okay by you? Would we have to go our separate ways - you thankful for my efforts but disappointed that they didn't really help you and turned out to be wrong, me sad that I had failed to provide something of benefit to you? That is not a pleasant scenario! Better that we come up with something more useful to both of us.

What could this better outcome be? Since we cannot be sure to agree on everything is there something we are certain to agree on? Is there some way of looking at things on which you and I are sure to agree? I think there is. It is a practical view - that is what we could agree on.

What do I mean by a practical view? One that would make sense and work for any reasonable person, and would fit in with their religious or philosophical beliefs.

To work out our practical view we can take a step back and look for things that everyone can agree on. For example, rather than try to work out which God is the true one we can observe that some people don't believe in God at all. Why is that? Why do different people believe different things? What is the nature of belief? How do we make our decisions? By looking at these things we can come up with a practical level view that will make sense to most people no matter what particular beliefs they may hold.

Let's get started on working out this practical level view.

LEARNING FROM THE EXPERTS AND AUTHORITIES OF TODAY

What guidance can we get from the world today about forming our higher level, practical view? What is believed by psychologists, scientists and other authorities of today? What is the latest information we can find on this? What does the latest research show?

Let's take a look at these things and see what they tell us.

There is a lot that isn't known, so we should keep this in mind when forming our theories. We may be able to find out many things from the experts and authorities in the world today, but this will definitely leave gaps and holes in our knowledge which we will have to fill in or take account of as best we can.

At the simplest level, the psychologists of today say that our thinking originates in our brains and is influenced by our hormones.

The brain is immensely complicated. It has roughly 15-33 billion neurons (brain cells) linked by up to 10,000 connections each. This, for all we can tell, can create tens of trillions of possible pathways or "thoughts." An amazing number.

The brain has specialized areas. These can be seen by observing what is going on via a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) device. This is a device that allows us to "see inside" areas of the body by using strong magnetic fields. We find that for vision there is activity mainly at the back of the brain. For hearing the activity is mainly at the side of the brain. Emotions cause activity in the deeper, underlying areas and higher thinking seems to occur in the very front area of the brain, referred to as the "prefrontal cortex", which is part of the frontal lobes.

Our brains are similar to those of the animals but proportionally much bigger. Compared to our closest genetic relative, the chimpanzee, our brains are about three times the weight. But to be more accurate about how smart an animal might be we need to look further. The size of the brain is related to the size of the body: generally speaking the larger the animal the more brain cells are needed just to run its body. To get a fairly reasonable idea of how smart an animal could be it is better to look at the size of its brain compared to its body, (known as the Encephalization Quotient). When you do this you find the following:

HUMAN - 7.44

BOTTLENOSE DOLPHIN - 5.31

ORCA - 2.57

CHIMPANZEE - 2.49

RHESUS MONKEY - 2.09

ELEPHANT - 1.87

WHALE - 1.76

DOG - 1.17

CAT - 1.00

HORSE - 0.86

SHEEP - 0.81

MOUSE - 0.50

RAT - 0.40

RABBIT - 0.40

Are these the sort of figures you expected?

What do all the above points tell us? Our thoughts come from our brains, which have specialized areas for performing different functions, and are influenced by our hormones. Also, we are very likely smarter (brainier) than all the other animals on earth. This is a good, practical, high level start to our understanding of who we are.

What else can we learn from the experts and authorities of today?

How much are we the product of our environment and how much are we born with? What is our destiny and what role does our luck - good or bad - play in forming our personalities over our lives?

One study of identical twins who had never met, Jack Y. and Oscar S., who were separated in infancy by their parent's divorce and raised apart in Czechoslovakia and Trinidad, found that at age 46 they each had a trim mustache, liked sweet liqueurs, stored rubber bands on his wrists, read books and magazines from back to front, dipped buttered toast in his coffee, flushed the toilet before and after using it, and enjoyed sneezing loudly in crowded elevators to frighten other passengers, among other things. It is extraordinary that people who had never met were so much alike. Other identical twins who had never met had similar identical personality traits.

There is still a lot of discussion about this but many experts believe that there is a major contribution from our genes to our personalities. They have come up with a range of figures, finding that between 41% and 60% of our personalities are due to what we are born with. The remainder seems to be due to our experiences.

One area that is hard to establish about these figures is how much they apply to each individual. For example, if the average personality is 50% caused by our genes then how does that apply to you? Is your personality 50% down to your genes or are you different to the average? Maybe in your case your personality is only 10% genes, or maybe it is 90%. How would you know for sure? This is difficult to determine with our current scientific knowledge.

So where does this get us? Details may not be clear but it does indicate that you have a personality, that this can be different to other people's, and you were born with some percentage of it.

This does not prove that you can't do something about your personality, you may just have to be clever and persistent in carrying it out.

Braininess, specialized brain areas, inherited aspects of our personalities... what else can we learn from the experts and authorities of today? What can the psychologists tell us?

Modern psychologists can tell us some interesting things about ourselves based on the results of well-conducted experiments.

One is that we react to "priming." This is a process where the environment we are in before we make a decision influences what we will decide later. For example, if we have just been reading some words that put us in a negative frame of mind then we are more likely to make negative judgments about the next person we meet. If we had been reading positive words then we are more likely to think well of the person. For example, if you were about to interview someone for a job and you had just come from a meeting where a difficult customer issue had been discussed then you would be more likely to judge the candidate as a poor prospect. If you had come from a more upbeat meeting then you would be much more likely to view the candidate as someone who would benefit the company.

That may not sound like much but it does tell us something about our human frailties or limitations. If our environment changes our decisions then how good are those decisions? This is something we will cover later in this book. This also tells us something about how our mood or feelings contribute to our decisions and so gives us an insight into how our minds really work.

A second thing we can learn from modern psychology is that we tend to rationalize our decisions after we have made them - even if they weren't the actual decisions we made. To explain, psychologists conducted an experiment where the subject had to quickly choose between two photos of people's faces. The psychologist then handed them the photo they chose and asked them to explain why they preferred that face. That sounds simple, but there was a trick. Sometimes the psychologist handed the subject the photo they had rejected and asked them to explain why they preferred that. In 80% of cases the subject didn't notice that they had been handed the wrong photo and proceeded to explain why they liked it. This is an extraordinary result and suggests that we may tend to explain away the decisions we make, even when they go bad. It could be that we look back on our decisions through rose-colored glasses, viewing them as better than they really were just because that is what we decided to do.

On the other hand, there may be some alternative explanation for the above. Possibly it is our wish not to appear foolish that prevents us from seeing the truth when explaining our decision to the psychologist. It just may be too much to face for us to admit to the psychologist that we don't know why we would have chosen the wrong picture. Perhaps we don't even admit that to ourselves.

A final point about the above is it only happened 80% of the time, so not everyone falls for this trick of the mind all the time. Perhaps some people don't fall for it at all.

A third thing that modern psychologists have discovered in conjunction with neurologists (who study the nervous system) is that our emotional centers are triggered before our higher thinking centers. We always have feelings about something before we start thinking about it. They have also found that in extreme cases the emotional centers can directly trigger action areas in the brain before we are conscious of what is happening. This can occur when a situation seems so extreme that we cannot afford to wait and spend time thinking about it before deciding what to do. We spring into action and then wonder what has happened. We can find that we have jumped into the water to save someone before we became conscious that we saw them in trouble.

The impact of the triggering of our emotional centers first is that we always have feelings about something before we have had a chance to think about it. We may not notice it every time but our feelings are always there. If we are to be rational about our decisions then we have to do something about our feelings after they have occurred. Recent studies of the brain have shown that about 80% of people do not do anything about their emotional responses after they occur - they tend to take them at face value. We need to do more than that if we are to achieve extreme happiness and wisdom.

What sort of things could we do to deal with our feelings after they have occurred? Should we put them under scrutiny and say "No! Stop right there!"? Or can we do something subtler like reasoning with them, diverting them, or helping them in some kindly way? Could we go even further and do something about the occurrence of our feelings in the first place? Maybe we can do something that reduces their intensity to a level we can deal with. More on this later.

What have we discovered so far?

Our minds are influenced by their environment and we are not always aware of the effect of this on our decisions, we tend to rationalize why we decided or did something, our emotions are triggered before we have time to think - but we can take action about this after it happens. Were there any surprises in these discoveries for you?

STOP AND CONSIDER

Let's stop and consider what we have learned so far. Do you see any pattern to the scientific, experimentally based information on our human nature that we have seen?

By looking into the operation of the brain through techniques like Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans and conducting properly constructed experiments on human behavior the psychologists and neurologists (among others) have been able to tell us - reliably - that we are highly intelligent (in animal terms), have emotional and rational parts - with the emotions tending to lead the thoughts in time, and can be unconsciously influenced by our environment when we are making decisions. We each have our own personalities which can influence how we see the world. Finally, we tend to look back on our past decisions and actions with unjustifiable satisfaction.

LIFE ADVICE FROM PSYCHOLOGISTS AND NEUROLOGISTS

We have had a brief look at the sort of things the neurologists and psychologists of today can tell us about our basic nature - what advice do they give us for living the best possible lives?

Here we may have to be careful in accepting what we are told. We may need to take the recommendations with a grain of salt and check them to see if they really make sense and match what is known so far.

The advice they give us is something like this: for the fact that we are more intelligent than other animals they have little to say.

For the inheritance of our personalities they often advise us to work with that and not try to change too much: "Do what you have to to improve your life but don't expect to be able to change yourself too far"... "Make a compromise."

For our past decisions: we should be cautious about accepting them at face value and should carefully recheck them.

For the unconscious influences of the environment on our thinking: we should become aware of this so we can take it into account.

For the fact that our emotions occur first in a situation: we should learn to control them after they occur. Some psychologists recommend that we change the things we tell ourselves about a situation. This is known as "changing your self-talk." By doing this we can improve our emotional state to a more realistic and less troubling one. We will discuss how to do this later in the book. We will also look at a technique not often mentioned by neurologists and psychologists, which is a way to reduce the intensity and negativity of our emotions before they occur. By using this technique we will not be easily overwhelmed by the strength of our feelings and will be more able to act serenely and wisely. Finally, we will put all this together into a set of techniques that you can perform in the background and as situations occur so that you are happier and wiser at all times.

OTHER ADVICE

What other kinds of advice have we received from psychologists and similar experts of today? There has been Positive Psychology, Lateral Thinking, Emotional Intelligence (known as EI), and advice from many motivational speakers and writers. Which of these is credible? Which ones can you really trust? Which are based on properly conducted experiments and which are more like educated opinion or even common sense?

Positive Psychology is a recent development in the field of psychology led by Dr. Martin Seligman and says that we can do more than just cope with our limitations, we can rise up to higher states of thought which are more positive and beneficial to our lives. For example, if you concentrate on positive thoughts then your mood improves and you feel better. If you keep thinking about bad or negative things then your mood gets worse. Perhaps not so surprising a discovery, but it is one which most of us ignore. We want to feel better but we find ourselves concentrating on negative things a lot of the time. On the other hand, we have to ask ourselves which things _should_ we do? Do we need to concentrate on negative things from time to time so that we do what is wise? We will discuss the best approach to this later in the book, where we can be both serene and wise while dealing with negative things.

Lateral Thinking is a method of thinking which was formalized by Dr. Edward De Bono in the late 1960s. Dr. De Bono has continued his work in this field for many years, producing more than 80 books and teaching and advising people, businesses and institutions all over the world. The basis of Lateral Thinking is the idea that our minds automatically fall into the trap of categorizing new information according to what we have experienced in the past. This can be inappropriate and we may fail to see that the things we are thinking - the old patterns of our thoughts - no longer apply. Also, we may miss out on opportunities to form new and better ideas because our minds overvalue those of the past - we think we know what's what and so cannot see what _might_ be.

De Bono and his supporters have conducted many real-life experiments with his ideas and these have shown how practical and useful his approach is. For example, a teacher in New Zealand introduced De Bono's thinking methods to youngsters in prison and this reduced the rate of return to prison (recidivism) to one quarter of what it had been.

Emotional Intelligence (EI), a term popularized by Daniel Goleman, says that knowing about and understanding our emotions is more useful to us than having a high intelligence or IQ. This is because our emotions can hijack our thoughts and direct them to areas that do not really work for us. There may be better ideas or ways of thinking, but caught up in our emotions we will be unable to recognize these or consider them fairly. If we can understand our own emotions, and those of other people, we will be much better at living our lives and choosing better and more satisfying options.

Later in the book we will look at how understanding our emotions can help us to guide our feelings and make better decisions so we can live happier and wiser lives. We will also look at a technique for reducing the force of our emotions so we can improve on our natural feelings. By doing this we feel more serene all the time and will be able to think more clearly and effectively. Imagine being more serene.

Motivational speakers and writers have provided us with a mountain of positive and inspiring advice. Which is the most credible? For example, is it really true to say: "What does not kill me makes me stronger"? Is it true that "Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit"? These are statements that are not meant to be taken literally. Their intention is to provide you with a way of thinking that stops you from giving up in the face of adversity and drives you on to potential success in spite of the hardships we all face in life.

What can we learn from the advice of these motivational speakers and writers? At least not to give up and to keep trying in the face of adversity. We can go further than this, however, and come to an even wiser and sounder point of view which also makes us feel happier. I will talk about that throughout the rest of this book.

We can go further than motivational ideas and reach a full understanding and success in living happily and well.

THE WORLD INSIDE

Let's now turn our attention away from what we can learn from the world outside us and focus on the inner world, the world inside our heads. What can we learn from this? What is reliable and would pass the standards of well-conducted experiments?

In the world inside our heads we find that we have feelings and thoughts. Also, we find that we are aware of these things, that is, we are conscious.

Consciousness is a strange thing. In science and philosophy there are still many debates about it - what is its nature, what it really is. To most of us, however, it seems straightforward - we are aware of ourselves and what we are doing. We naturally assume that other people and things are conscious too, because they seem to act in similar ways to us.

If a dog is friendly we assume that he is aware of us and feels that he likes us. However, in the world of experts it is not so easy to decide what the dog is aware of or even if he is aware of anything at all. He wags his tail and comes over to us, looking up at us with a happy face. It seems so obvious that he is feeling glad to see us and wants to please us. But the experts debate about whether he is conscious of this or not, based on experiments such as how the dog reacts when presented with a mirror. Does he react to what he sees as if it was himself or does he treat the image as another dog different from himself? In fact, dogs do not seem to recognize themselves in mirrors, suggesting to experts that they are not all that conscious of their own existence.

What are we to make of this? Is the dog aware of us or not? It is not so clear what the mirror experiment is really telling us.

Let's get around the complex issue of consciousness for the purposes of what we are trying to achieve in this book by accepting that other people are similar in their awareness of consciousness to ourselves. Whatever is happening in detail we can study another time.

We have feelings, thoughts and consciousness.

What feelings do we have? Some are: anger, remorse, worry, guilt, happiness, joy, fear, concern, dislike, hatred, love... there is quite a list! Let's try to simplify the list by placing the emotions on two scales: the first being how negative or positive the feeling is, the second being how weak or strong.

A negative feeling would be one like anger or despair because these feelings try to move you away from something or to get you to destroy it. A positive feeling would be one like love or calm because these feelings try to move you towards something or to get you to at least tolerate it. Is being calm a feeling? Maybe it is. On the second scale you might say that it is not a strong feeling, it is a weak one, because you can continue to think clearly while it is going on. Not so with extreme anger! That is a very strong feeling that can completely drive out your ability to think.

What can we observe about our thoughts? What are they based on? Where do they come from? What do they lead to? Do we have total control over them or are they sometimes a mystery to us?

We feel that we are in command of our own thoughts yet external experiments have shown that this is not always the case. Our recent environment or the words we have been hearing may influence us unconsciously. Also, we often imagine that our previous decisions were better than they really were - as shown by the experiment mentioned earlier where the wrong picture was handed to people yet many explained why they preferred it. Our thoughts may not be as reliable as we believe them to be.

Where do our thoughts come from? This is something of a mystery - we know they occur within our minds and very likely that is within the brain. Inside our own heads we can see them happening and we can follow their reasoning: "That person is no good because all such people are no good", "There is danger in this type of situation so we should be on the alert", "We are good at this kind of thing and so we look forward to doing it." There is a kind of logic to our thoughts - we see that they are often based on our past experiences. If a situation looks similar to one from the past then we assume that something similar will happen now.

In general that approach seems completely reasonable. But it has its limitations. For example, if the situation only _seems_ to be like the one from the past then anything might happen this time. We can't really know what is going to happen because we have mistakenly chosen an unrelated situation from our past to make our prediction. Also, our memory of past incidents may not always be completely accurate, or it may miss out some factors, such as these situations do not turn out the same way every time. We need to take account of all these things if we don't want to get it wrong!

What's the best way to do that? I will explain the best approaches to this in the section on Practical Ways to Achieve Extreme Happiness and Wisdom later.

By looking inside our heads we have found that we are conscious, probably in a similar way to other people, we have feelings, which can be classified on scales of negative to positive and of weak to strong, and thoughts, which mostly seem to be related to the things that happened to us in the past.

Not so surprising really.

WHAT WE HAVE FOUND SO FAR

In this chapter we have found that although we may not agree on all details about life, we can agree that we are smarter than the other creatures on Earth, our brains have specialized areas for doing different things, we inherit some proportion of our personalities, our thinking can be influenced by our environment, we tend to overrate the quality of the decisions we made in the past, and our emotions can be triggered before we have time to think about something properly. In spite of this we can change the things we tell ourselves about a situation (our "self-talk") so we learn to deal with the influence of our emotions on our thinking and guide them to more positive outcomes. We can also use a technique which will reduce the intensity and negativity of our emotions before they occur so we can act more serenely and wisely. We will describe this later. We will also put all this together into a set of techniques that you can perform in the background and as situations occur so that you can be happier and wiser at all times.

We looked at the advice given to us by the psychologists and similar authorities of today and decided to go into this further later in the book.

In the next chapter we will look deeper into what our feelings, thoughts and knowledge are about. Then we will consider what life would be like if these were improved. Imagine what an improved life of happiness and wisdom would be like.

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SECTION I - THE THEORY

OUR EMOTIONS

Let's look at our emotions in more detail.

Earlier we said that emotions could be classified according to how negative or positive they are and how strong or weak. We also saw that we can learn to control them after they occur through techniques like changing the things we tell ourselves about a situation.

When we look inside our own heads we find that we definitely have feelings and that it can be difficult to control the stronger ones. How difficult may depend on your inherited personality, or it may be a matter of training.

Let's consider what the emotions are for: what do they try to achieve?

For example, what is anger for? What does it drive us to do? If the anger is directed at our enemies it drives us to... destroy them. We want to fight them and see them wiped off the face of the earth. Those damn enemies deserve nothing, they have earned nothing, except our contempt. It will be a joyous day when they are gone and are but a memory of a difficult time we faced heroically together, our friends and us!

Admittedly not all anger feels this strong, but it always has the common theme of dislike and a wish to be done with that hated thing and to get it out of our lives.

What is this emotion trying to achieve? We want to destroy the problem and get it out of our lives. Why would the emotion want us to do that? I suggest that this is because it seems better for our long term survival if we could resist the dangerous elements in our lives and overcome them. If there were no evil people or things our lives would be more secure.

Is destroying our enemies then the real road to happiness? Well, maybe not, for as we well know, attempting to destroy our enemies can lead to our own destruction. It can be difficult to carry out the desires of this emotion and can lead to greater trouble for ourselves.

So, if following our anger to its logical end can be dangerous for us, why does the emotion exist? Perhaps because it is a simple solution to our lives' problems. If we are facing a difficult problem then maybe it is a simple solution to get angry and just destroy that problem. It may be simple but it also may not be effective.

We all know that if we did everything our emotions told us without thinking then we would soon get into a lot of trouble! The emotions may not be smart like our thoughts, but they do tell us the direction they want us to go in. Consider people whose emotional centers in their brains have been damaged. Observations of these people have shown that they find it difficult to make decisions, even about simple things. For example, one person whose emotional center was damaged could not decide which of several restaurants they should go to. They studied the seating plan, menu and atmosphere of each restaurant for several hours and still could not make a decision.

Without your emotions to give you direction it can be difficult to decide what to do. On the other hand, the emotions could be pushing you towards dangerous actions which will only harm you. What can we do about that? Before we look at the actions we can take about this, first let's think some more about what our emotions are for.

If there was some sense to our emotions they would all work together to do what? To make us live well! That is what they would help us to achieve if they were sensible. We would conquer our enemies, love our friends, eat when we were hungry, seek safety when we were in danger, run, chase, hide, strive... do whatever was good for us... the best action at the time.

Now unfortunately the reality is that we don't always take the best action at the right time, and sometimes that is the fault of our emotions. Yet it has never been the intention of our emotions to get us into trouble, they really want what is best for us.

Why are our emotions on our side, generally speaking? I suggest that we could think of them as ancient "animal" ways which were invented to help us survive well. These ancient emotions are similar to what exists in the animals. Maybe not exactly the same, but similar. From the outside we see animals expressing what looks like fear, love, aggression, desire, tiredness, energy, excitement, interest, boredom, and many other feelings. We do not know for sure how they experience these things in their own minds, if at all, but we can see the striking similarities in what they are expressing. Supporting what we see on the outside is the fact that inside the heads of the higher animals we find similar brain structures to the ones in the emotional parts of our own brains.

As they do for the animals, our emotions aim to lead us away from danger and towards a good, long life.

If we fight our enemies, love our friends, eat and drink, keep safe, collect useful and attractive things, develop our skills, and so on, then we should survive better... at least, if we are good at those things!

Now that's the point isn't it? How good are our emotions at actually achieving better survival for us?

If we fight our enemies and lose, love our friends and they let us down, eat and drink and it destroys us, keep safe and avoid opportunities, spend all we have and more collecting useful and interesting things, and harm ourselves while we are developing our skills, then what? What will we have achieved by following our emotions?

It seems obvious that merely following our feelings without judgment will lead to disaster. We need to think and assess what our feelings are asking for so we can make sound decisions for the future. We can learn how to deal with the influence of our emotions on our thinking and guide them to more positive outcomes and also change how they initially occur so we feel more serene all the time.

Let's leave our discussion about our feelings at that for now. We have found that our emotions want to help us to live better, happier and longer lives but they need help from the thinking and judging parts of our brains. Left alone they may not achieve the good things they really want for us.

OUR THOUGHTS

Let's turn our attention to the thinking part of our minds. What is this about and how good is it at going about its business?

We saw earlier that our thoughts are mostly based on what has happened to us before - our memories of similar events tell us what to do today. Also, we tend to overrate the quality of our former decisions. Finally, we tend to be too eager to classify a new situation as similar to what we have experienced before, causing us to miss out on the opportunities provided by new ideas.

The most important thing for us to understand about our thinking is that we are not as smart as we could be, we have our limitations. If we did not have these limitations then the progress of the human race to get to where we are today would have been much faster and our own lives would be much happier and wiser.

Let's consider an example of our thinking to see what it tells us.

Imagine you had to go down to the waterhole to drink but it was full of crocodiles. How would you approach that? With caution, I would think! As do many animals, but our human caution seems to be on another level. We might discuss the situation and try to come up with some plan: "I will watch for crocodiles while you collect the water in something." "No, _I_ will watch while _you_ collect the water!" There can be a sense of humor while we discuss the problem and think it through.

Maybe we will come up with a better idea. Maybe we can put our water jar on a stick and lower it into the water from afar. If a crocodile comes up we will be able to keep out of its reach.

Maybe we can get a gun and shoot the crocodiles. But they are a protected species.... Not if you are trying to save your own life - there's only one protected species then!

Maybe we can build a dam and get our water through pipes from there.

Maybe we can dig a well and draw up our water in a bucket.

All this is what our thinking is like. If we already know the answer we don't have to think much - we identify what to do straight away and go with that: "Don't go to the waterhole, use the tap over there by the shed." If we don't have an answer and we need that water now then a lot of frantic thinking can follow. Hopefully we'll find an answer through that - one that really works.

Sometimes there just isn't time to think carefully - we need an answer right away. Other times we can think at leisure, but we might find something "better" to do with our time. Sometimes thinking is tiring and as much as we try we don't seem to get anywhere. It's frustrating and we feel like giving up... some of us refuse to give up and we try even harder to get the answer. This often doesn't get anywhere. Some of us just get angrier and angrier and say and do crazy things. Have you ever been like that?

So what is thinking? It is a process where we try to get answers. And its objective then? It is to get the answers we need to live our daily lives. Hopefully the decisions of today will make us happy and benefit us and not lead to trouble in the future!

Finally, how good is our thinking at giving us full, happy and long lives? In some cases it is good and in others it is clearly not that effective. For example, when our thinking allows us to overeat to the point where our excess weight leads to diabetes or heart disease then it has clearly let us down. How did our thoughts allow us to be led to that? So whenever our thoughts let us down they are not so great. Is there anything we can do about that? I think so and will describe it in the practical section of this book.

OUR KNOWLEDGE

Finally, let's look at the last of the three things we associate with our minds - knowledge. How good is our knowledge and what is it supposed to achieve?

If only we knew everything - then we wouldn't need to think because we'd have the answer to every possibility. No problem would be too much for us.

Unfortunately it is not like this. We have to think to work out answers and sometimes our knowledge is not good enough for us to get our thinking right. We try to think about something and we come up with the wrong idea.

We all know that we don't know enough. Many things confuse us and are not that clear. On the other hand we tend to be confident about the things we do know, especially when we are talking to others. What a shock it is to find out in public that something we have believed in is wrong, that something we have done for many years has been incorrect and has been silently bringing us trouble.

For me this happened with posture. I always thought I walked along the street the same way as everyone else. Then one day my fiancé pointed out to me that I was not standing straight when I walked, I was leaning forward and was hunched over.

At first I didn't believe this and thought this was some peculiarity of my fiancé's European background. But I made some effort to pull in my stomach while I walked as I had read this was the key to good posture.

Lo and behold! What a revelation this was to me. When I pulled in my stomach I stood up straight and suddenly I could see everyone's faces as I walked. Why had I not seen their faces as I walked before? Because I was hunched over and looking at the ground. My fiancé had been right all along.

As I walked more upright I noticed that people began to treat me with more respect. Rather than blocking my way or pushing into me they began to make room for me on the crowded city streets. When I stood I stood taller. People who had once seemed extremely tall to me were now of similar height to mine. My hunching over had made them look taller!

What is the point of this story? That the knowledge we hold so much faith in may be full of gaping holes which we don't even notice. It can take someone else or a major catastrophe to bring home to us just how many holes there are in our knowledge.

There are the things you don't know and the things you don't know you don't know.

Our knowledge is supposed to provide us with answers, the right answers, to living the happiest and best possible life. What a pity that it can let us down. Sometimes that's our fault, for not learning enough, and sometimes it is the general problem we all face together in that we don't yet know all the answers to this complex problem of life.

Luckily there are things we can do about this problem of the lack of sufficient and accurate knowledge in our own heads. I will explain this later.

THE SUPER-CREATURE

Now that we have looked at the emotions, thoughts and knowledge and seen what they are supposed to achieve - a happier, longer and better life - and how good they are at achieving this - usually not as good as we'd like - we can move on to the next phase. This requires a bit of imagination because now we need to consider what it would be like if we were superior creatures. What would our emotions, thoughts and knowledge be like if we were born not as human beings, but as some sort of super beings of the future?

THE EMOTIONS OF THE SUPER-CREATURE

If we were super-creatures what would our emotions be like? How would we feel? Would our emotions be stronger or weaker? Would they tell us what to do or merely suggest a course of action mildly? Or would they be more precise, for example, leading to one kind of action for one type of anger and another for another type?

All interesting questions, I think. We can answer them by considering how our own emotions would work if they were improved. For example, anger against our enemies would be improved if it made a distinction between powerful and less powerful enemies. We could feel hot and powerful anger against enemies who could not really harm us, and a slow, cold, patient anger against those who could really hurt us if we got out of line. Don't we do this now? If our boss is driving us nuts don't we consider the repercussions of speaking up? Maybe we can't really afford to lose this job. So we go home angry and frustrated and maybe take it out on our loved ones who, we imagine, cannot so easily harm us. Or we "let off steam", telling our friends or trusted colleagues how tough our life has been under this irritating boss.

Yes, we do something like this now, but what I am saying is that we should _feel_ differently about this powerful enemy. Our method for dealing with this now is to keep control of our anger within our own heads because we cannot easily let it out. Later we try to find a way to vent our anger, to let off steam. But if we were superior beings we wouldn't _feel_ the same sort of anger towards our boss as we do today. It would be a cold, slow, patient type of anger, and it would only be directed towards our mortal enemies - our families and friends would be safe.

That's just one example of this idea. It shows you how we could proceed in answering our questions about the emotions of superior creatures. For example, we can see that the strength of our emotions would vary according to the repercussions they held for us. We would hate our enemies in proportion to how much harm this could cause us, love our friends in proportion to how much good could come from this, and worry about the future in proportion to how much we could control it. The emotions would seem a lot cleverer than they are today.

If you like, our emotions would lead us towards "ultimate happiness and survival." Today they sometimes help us, sometimes hinder us, in our quest for happiness and survival... or should I say " _their_ quest for happiness and survival"? Wouldn't it be better if they always helped us, never hindered us, in achieving their true objective? Imagine what that would be like.

THE THOUGHTS OF THE SUPER-CREATURE

What would our thoughts be like if we were super-creatures? What would they tell us to do? How would they help us? Would they be able to fulfill our dreams?

It seems obvious that they would be superior thoughts, perhaps in the same way that our thoughts are superior to those of our nearest living cousins, the chimpanzees. It has been recently said that the genetic difference between us and chimpanzees is about 6%, but what a difference this leads to in the formation of our brains! Our human brains are three times the size (and Encephalization Quotient) of the chimpanzees' brains. So how superior are our thoughts?

When we look at the life of chimpanzees we see them using simple tools, living in social groups, raising their young, fighting for position within the group, and keeping safe from predators. Their simple tools include sticks, straw, blades of grass and twigs, which are used to extract termites from within their mounds, and a rock anvil on which they place hard nuts and strike them carefully with another rock to break the shell and eat the seeds inside. Their social groups are similar to ours, with hierarchies and loose "family" structures. They keep safe by avoiding predators, such as leopards, and they signal to each other to warn of danger.

Compared to us they do not look so smart. Our tools include spanners, rockets, nuclear missiles, microwave ovens... the list never stops growing. Our social groups can be heavily regulated and run under different political systems which are often discussed and even fought over. Some of us strive for advancement in the hierarchy, but we don't usually use brute force to do it, rather we tend to admire true leadership qualities and lively confident minds that seem to know where we should be going as a group.

Let's take that a step further. What tools would we use if we were super-creatures rather than human beings? It blows the mind, doesn't it? If chimpanzees have twigs and rocks and we have spanners and rockets then what would super-creatures have? Possibly "magic spanners" and "hyperspace transport devices"? The order of their inventions must be that much better than ours. On the other hand we can imagine inventing those super-tools given enough time.

Maybe we should look at this from a different angle. Maybe the point is not what we would invent but how long it would take us. Chimpanzees move forward with their inventions slowly and we move somewhat faster than that. Maybe the fact that we had simple things like spears, fire and stone knives for most of our history is the point. The super-creatures would have used the same things but for a much shorter time.

In the same way we can imagine that if our thoughts were super thoughts then we would invent and discover things more quickly over our lives. Our knowledge would be super knowledge and our innovations would come thick and fast.

Would we be able to fulfill our dreams with such thoughts? Even if we couldn't fulfill them at least we could get a lot further towards them than we do now. How would our knowledge contribute to that if we were super-creatures?

THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE SUPER-CREATURE

The level of knowledge held by the super-creature is easy to imagine. Their knowledge would be as superior to what we have now as our human knowledge is superior to that of the chimpanzees. They would know and remember all kinds of things and with a greater accuracy than we do. Whenever they needed to draw on some fact to help them with their thinking it would be readily available. They would only need to refer to the dictionary once and forevermore the word and its spelling would be in their memory. No trouble frantically cramming for exams or interviews - they would only need to see something once and it would all be at their fingertips!

What a joy it would be to have a memory like that. No more difficulties with facts, no more troubles with choosing the right idea. Life would be easier and probably longer than it is now.

So what have we worked out so far? We have discovered a super-creature which would have finely-tuned emotions, adjusting in intensity according to the power levels in a situation, excellent and accurate thoughts which rapidly improve over time to give the best chances of happiness and survival, and a remarkable memory which allows those wonderful thoughts to be formed.

Such a creature would be a marvel to behold. It would have none of the problems we have in living in the world, it would solve them rapidly and easily. Its life, its inventions, its ways would be so much better than ours. Its jokes funnier, its answers more complete, it would be simply fantastic, just as we are when compared with the chimpanzees.

But we are not like this, this super-creature. Our emotions are cruder and they do not adjust their intensity wisely in accordance with the power of the oppressor. Our thoughts are more cumbersome, less exact, and prone to error! Our knowledge is full of holes and inaccuracies... what can we be expected to do with that?

IMPROVING UPON OURSELVES

Is there anything we can do to improve upon ourselves so we can achieve a state of being closer to that of the super-creature? What ways are open to us?

We are not in a position to make our genetic structure as advanced as the super-creature, as yet. What else could we do to improve upon ourselves while staying exactly the same genetically?

Is there some way we can improve upon our emotions to make them seem superior, happier and more refined? Is there some way we can improve our thoughts so they seem more intelligent... more useful? Can we do anything about our lack of knowledge and improve our level of wisdom?

IMPROVING UPON OUR EMOTIONS

How could we improve upon our existing emotions? What should they be trying to achieve?

As we have said before, the emotions should be helping us to achieve a happier, longer and better life. What exactly is this? The exact answer to that question may depend on how you see the world and what you believe in, but if we try to find a common ground that we can all agree on then we can simply say that the emotions should be aiming for a life where we are both happier and wiser. "Happier", because we feel good about ourselves and what we are doing, (and even about what is happening to us), and "wiser", because we know how to take the right course of action nearly all the time.

We know from recent research that our emotions are triggered before we have time to think about them and that some of us are able to successfully deal with and guide them after that. If we are to get anywhere in our search for happiness and wisdom then at the very least we need to know the best ways to deal with the influence of our emotions on our thinking and how to guide them to happier, more positive outcomes after they occur. However, for the ultimate in happiness and wisdom we need to know how to reduce the intensity of our negative emotions _before they occur_.

If you think about it, the people we most admire in life include those who can deal with their emotions well. We look at people like Mother Theresa and think how admirable was her self-control in keeping her own needs subordinated to her mission to help the poor of India. She tirelessly sacrificed herself for the good of others. How was it that she was able to maintain her calm and not worry about the impact that her actions were having on her own life? For many of us it is unthinkable that we could sacrifice our own interests, our own families, our stability and security, to launch out on an unpredictable life of self-sacrifice in the service of others. Yet Mother Theresa was able to do this. We think of her as a "saint" and not similar to us, which kind of lets us off the hook of having to walk in her footsteps. In this book we will not try to work out how to live like Mother Theresa but we will look at ways we could improve how we deal with our own feelings so that we feel more serene about what we are doing in this sometimes difficult world.

Methods for improving our feelings could include external actions like moving away from upsetting things and towards happy things, and internal actions like coming to understand our feelings and those of other people, and also learning methods that help to calm our minds and make us happier, such as meditation, imagination, changing our "self-talk" (the things we tell ourselves about the world and who we are), putting things in perspective, and creating inner serenity. We can put all this together into a set of techniques that we perform in the background and as situations occur so that we are happier and wiser at all times. In the next section on Practical Ways to Achieve Extreme Happiness and Wisdom we will look at these methods in more detail. Soon you will be learning how to achieve serenity and happiness.

IMPROVING UPON OUR THOUGHTS

Let's turn our attention to our thoughts: what should they be trying to achieve, how could they be improved?

It seems obvious that our thoughts should be aiming for the same thing as our emotions: a happier, longer and better life. What this exactly means we will discuss later.

How can we improve our thoughts? There are various techniques we can use including improving the knowledge our thoughts are based on, learning more about how our thoughts work, and practicing "creativity techniques", which allow us to generate new ideas from what we already know. In the next section of this book we will explore these techniques in detail.

IMPROVING UPON OUR KNOWLEDGE

Finally, let's look at our knowledge: what should it be like and what should it be useful for achieving?

Our knowledge should be useful for aiding our thoughts in achieving a happier, longer and better life. Some areas of knowledge would be more useful for doing this than others. The knowledge that best helps us to achieve a happier, longer and better life would include knowing how our mind works, ways to deal with the influence of our emotions on our thinking and how to guide them to happier and more positive outcomes, techniques for improving our thinking, and knowing enough to make the best possible decisions in the areas relevant to our lives. All these will be explained in the next section of this book.

COMBINING THE ABOVE

The last thing we need to think about is what it would be like if all of the above were combined. How can we combine the above ideas about improving upon our feelings, thoughts and knowledge in a way that is useful to us?

The common theme to the above was that they should lead us towards a happier, longer and better life. This common theme can be used as a measure for all things in life. For example, we could examine a technique which is supposed to help us deal with our emotions better by asking if it leads towards a happier, longer and better life. If it does then it could be a technique worth learning more about. If it doesn't then it would have less value to us in our quest to improve upon ourselves and become something like the "super-creature" we dream of.

" _Is this emotion useful for achieving a_

happier, longer and better life?"

" _Does this thought lead us towards a_

happier, longer and better life?"

" _Does this knowledge help us to achieve a_

happier, longer and better life?"

With these measures we will be able to evaluate all types of things and change ourselves over time to become happier and wiser people. Imagine what it would be like if you could efficiently choose from the various options that are put to you by the world. We are bombarded with advice that is supposed to make us better people, sometimes with the wrong motives. With the measures above we can ask ourselves if the advice from one expert is really as good for us as that from another. Who should we follow, who really knows what's what? Does one expert's course really offer us the true road to a happier, longer and better life? By asking the right questions we will be that much closer to the goal we seek.

As well as using the above measures we can also develop a powerful process that will guide us towards happiness and wisdom at all times. This will be described at the end of the next section, where we will look at the practical techniques we can follow to achieve our goal of a happier and wiser life.

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SECTION II - PRACTICAL WAYS TO ACHIEVE EXTREME HAPPINESS AND WISDOM

LEVELS OF HAPPINESS AND WISDOM

We have heard the theory, now let's talk about practicality. We want to find ways to achieve a happier, longer and better life through happiness and wisdom, but what level of happiness and wisdom? Do we want to achieve extreme happiness and wisdom? Possibly, but at what price? It may take a lot of effort and time, extreme effort, to attain extreme happiness and wisdom. Maybe we would be satisfied with a lower level of happiness and wisdom, a milder level, which did not take as much effort or time to achieve. Which level would you choose?

I suggest that you would choose whatever level made sense to you at the time. In everyday life you might feel that you don't need too much more happiness and wisdom because you are already reasonably happy and your environment is safe enough for you to get by with the wisdom you have. On the other hand, when you face particularly difficult and distressing situations you may need as much happiness and wisdom as you can get. Perhaps this is why we expect wisdom to come from those who have experienced extreme hardship, rather than from those who have had an easy life.

With this in mind I will tell you about the range of levels of wisdom and happiness so you can choose which one you want in any given situation.

WHAT APPROACHES CAN WE TAKE TO ACHIEVE HAPPINESS AND WISDOM?

Let's think about our practical needs in life \- how do these break down? We want to achieve happiness and this can be done through external or internal means or both. For example, we can add to our happiness through external actions such as obtaining good things from the world around us. Or we can obtain happiness through internal actions performed within our own minds by improving our inner thoughts through things like religion, philosophy or meditation. Or we can perform both external and internal actions such as attending classes on successful thinking, which involve the external action of going to the class combined with the internal action of studying and learning what successful thinking is.

For example, we could try to get rich so that the troubles of life do not bother us. But does this really work? Can money really prevent everything bad from coming into our lives? Some people have found that sudden wealth, such as winning the lottery, drives them into conflicts that cause the breakup of their families. How can such a useful thing as money do that? Maybe we should turn out attention to fixing the inner things - maybe we should focus on the spiritual side of life. But do we want to end up living in a cave somewhere with no money, no family and no luxuries? What should we really do? What is the best way to live our lives?

The above approaches could lead us to a happier life but we have to ask ourselves if they are always wise. When we choose an action that makes us feel happier we need to be sure that the action is wise enough for also achieving a better and longer life. We don't want to go down the path of the foolish person who does things that make them feel happy but also make their lives shorter and harder.

We want to achieve happiness with wisdom - and wisdom with happiness - and we can take external or internal paths to get there. Let's work out the general types of paths we could take for our feelings, thoughts and knowledge. We can then go into these in more detail in the following chapters.

FEELINGS

For our feelings we could improve these externally by doing something in general like moving away from upsetting things and towards happy things. Internally we could come to understand our feelings and those of other people. Also, we could learn methods that help to calm our minds and make us happier, such as meditation, imagination, changing our "self-talk", putting things in perspective, and creating inner serenity.

THOUGHTS

For our thoughts we could do something external like asking an expert for guidance, (for example a doctor, lawyer, financial adviser, counselor, psychotherapist, priest, and so on). Internally we could generally do things like learning about and understanding the basis of our thoughts and how they work. Also we could apply this understanding of ourselves to help us understand others. We could take internal action by rethinking what we already know so we can improve upon our ideas and understanding.

KNOWLEDGE

For knowledge we could generally do something external like studying what experts say (similar to what we did for thoughts) and increase our own knowledge so we become more knowledgeable ourselves. Internally we could spend time memorizing the knowledge we studied externally and also allow that knowledge to help reformulate our ideas - putting them on a sounder footing than they already have. This would include going over our old ideas and seeing how our new knowledge generates new patterns in our mind, some of which may be much better than our current ideas.

PUTTING THE ABOVE TOGETHER

Putting the above general ideas together we can work out the topics for the following chapters.

1. The first chapter will be about external ways to improve our feelings. These include moving away from upsetting things and towards happy things. We will need to check if these are wise things to do before we take any action. We will call this chapter "Seek Happiness Wisely." This is at least one of our big goals!

2. The second chapter will be about an obvious and straightforward external technique we can use to improve our thoughts and knowledge, which is to "Ask an Expert." This would include studying what the experts have written or said. As with all these chapters, we will look at the simple and easy approaches through to the complex and difficult ones, which may take more effort but can also benefit us more. Imagine how good it would be to know more.

3. The third chapter will be about the internal things we can do to understand our own feelings and thoughts and those of others. We will call this "Go Inside and Know Yourself." Imagine having an inner knowledge of yourself.

4. The fourth chapter will be about the internal things we can do to calm our minds and make us feel happier, such as meditation, imagination, changing our "self-talk", putting things in perspective and creating inner serenity. We will call this "Calm Yourself and Increase Your Happiness." Imagine being able to be calmer, happier and more serene.

5. The fifth chapter will be about the internal things we can do to improve our thoughts, such as rethinking what we already know. We will call this "Think Again." Imagine the power of your improved thoughts.

6. The sixth chapter will be about the internal things we can do to improve the knowledge we have stored in our minds. We will call this "Memorize More." Your mind will be filled with useful information.

7. The seventh chapter will be about the internal method of going over our old ideas and seeing how our new knowledge generates new patterns in our minds. We will call this "Recheck Your Old Ideas." You will be much more certain about the value of your ideas.

8. The eighth chapter will be where we work out how to plan and manage our lives so we can achieve our objectives and be the kind of person we want to be. We will call this "Make Plans and Manage Yourself." You will be able to take charge of your life.

9. The ninth chapter will be where we check the impact on our lives of the above and see how they could be combined into a powerful process for achieving happiness and wisdom. We will call this "Bringing It All Together." What will our lives be like when we have combined all these techniques into a powerful process and put it into practice?

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1. SEEK HAPPINESS WISELY

We want to be happy so we seek it in the world around us. We try to move towards those things that make us feel better and away from those things that make us feel worse. Also, we try to surround ourselves with happy things and occasions, and we try to remove and avoid those things and occasions that make us feel unhappy.

This all makes sense, doesn't it? If we are similar to other living organisms then this is what you would expect - this seeking of life and avoidance of danger.

From the simplest through to the most complex of organisms we see this seeking of life and avoidance of danger. The worm through to the dog seeks to stay alive and to continue their species. The single-celled creature does it. The whale does it. In the world of plants there is a similar objective, though not carried out in the same way as with the animals, as plants cannot travel under their own will. We may be more complex in our ways than the other animals but we still seem to aim for similar things. We think of happiness and work towards it in one way or another, while being cautious about taking paths that may endanger us. A complex equation, working out what each person's pursuit of happiness and avoidance of danger will result in, and one that changes over our lives and from one situation to another.

As we said earlier, we need to be sure that the way we seek happiness actually makes sense - that it is wise. That way we can hold on to the happiness we gain and avoid those things that make us feel happier but are actually bad for us.

WHAT IS WISDOM?

What is wisdom? It is knowing the right thing to do and then doing it. How can we know the right thing to do? And how can we make sure that we do it after we have worked it out?

Knowing the right thing to do comes from effort and study. Making sure that you carry it out requires a knowledge of what the self does - the emotions, the thoughts, and the influence of your old knowledge. It also requires a friendly yet shrewd leadership of the self - you have to become your own wise leader.

The wise leader of the self is one that knows that the effect of the emotions has to be controlled if we are to act wisely, but also that we need to find a way to work with our emotions rather than against them. Otherwise we may find ourselves getting overwhelmed by the force of our pent up, ignored or overridden feelings.

The following chapters will provide you with the tools needed to wisely guide your emotions and know what is the right thing to do. In "2. Ask an Expert", "3. Go Inside and Know Yourself", "5. Think Again", "6. Memorize More" and "7. Recheck Your Old Ideas" you will learn about the tools that improve your knowledge. In "4. Calm Yourself and Increase Your Happiness" and parts of "3. Go Inside and Know Yourself" you will learn about tools that can help you to guide your mind and make yourself happier and more serene.

Finally, in the last chapter, "9. Bringing it all Together", you will see how all the previous chapters can be brought together into a powerful process that allows you to be both happier and wiser at all times.

Let's move on to the next chapter and start our journey to wisdom and happiness via practical means. Later in the final chapter for this section we will bring all this together into a way to Seek Happiness Wisely and Wisdom Happily, from the simple and easy through to the complex and difficult levels.

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2. ASK AN EXPERT

One of the most obvious and simplest ways we can improve our knowledge and thoughts is to Ask an Expert. We can do this by talking with experts or by studying what they have written or said.

You can Ask an Expert at various levels - let's take a look at these. What level of Asking an Expert do you use now?

LEVELS OF ASKING AN EXPERT

Think about what your need is with the expert. What do you need them to tell you, what do you need to find out? How much advice do you need to take? How believable do you find the expert - are they the type you trust or are you suspicious about them or what they are saying? You will need to consider all these things when deciding what to do when Asking an Expert.

What approach is at the simplest level for Asking an Expert? It is just to ask and see what they say. If you can't understand them then you can ask if they can explain it in simple language. Often an expert will be able to explain things in simpler language, perhaps your expert will be able to do this. If not then the next simplest thing you can do is to try to puzzle out what they said, or you can go and find another expert you can understand.

At the other end of the spectrum you can make the maximum effort and become an expert yourself. This could take many years of study. At a slightly lower level you could find out where the best answers lie and refer to that. Maybe you know a site on the internet that is very reliable. Maybe you know some books or authors you can rely on. Try checking those.

In between the maximum and the minimum are a range of actions you can take, from the fairly simple and straightforward to the reasonably difficult and complex. For example, you could do a bit of study but not become a qualified expert yourself. You could become a kind of "informed amateur" who knows a thing or two but is not officially qualified. That way you can at least have a reasonable view about what is going on, even if you would not be able to prove that to someone else. It would be enough that you know it for yourself.

Whatever position in the range you choose to take you will be better off than someone who does not consult an expert at all. Such people may rely on the advice of their friends or colleagues, or what is written in the popular press. They have a difficult time sorting out what is true and what is just nonsense. How could they know what is true when they haven't made the effort to study it themselves? And the advice of the non-experts they consult may be well meant but it cannot compete with that of people who actually know the subject they are talking about.

If you "Ask an Expert" at the lowest level then what are you doing at the highest level? What have you achieved if you have studied many things and become an expert on most of them - what have you become? We can call this something about knowing a lot in a very wise way: "Be a Sage" is the term I use.

So you can Ask an Expert through to Be a Sage. In between you could Be Well-Informed, or Be an Informed Amateur. You could Be Well Studied or Know a Lot, or Know What Really Matters, or Have a Good Idea About....

At least you could Know Who to Ask, maybe even Know What to Ask. Asking the right question can be half the battle in finding out the truth about something. That's quite a skill... and not easy to come by. If you can ask the right question then you probably know a lot about the world.

To summarize: when you're the expert you can have a fair idea about what's going on in your field of expertise. When you are not an expert you can find out more or ask the right person the right question. In this way you can become wiser, or use the wisdom of other people, and seek happiness in the right places, the safe places, and in the right ways, the safe ways.

MORE ABOUT KNOWING WHICH EXPERTS TO TRUST

If you are an expert yourself then you can know which experts to trust. At least you will have a fair idea, even though you might not always be right, because even the experts have turned out to be wrong from time to time.

If you are not an expert then you will find it harder to work out which experts are good. One way you can cover yourself is to learn more about the subject - check up on the experts to see if what they are saying makes sense when compared with the latest information. Another thing you can do is to find out which experts are trusted by others. If a lot of people say that a particular expert helped them then this is a safer bet than just going to any expert. You can also find out which experts to avoid as you discover that other people have had trouble with them. This will not always work perfectly as people may report success with a particular expert yet the expert will let you down. Or people may tell you to stay away from someone who turns out to be right. Even the majority of experts can be wrong about something, and the maverick who puts forward a controversial new idea may turn out to be right.

It's not easy to find the right expert but at least you can reduce your chances of being wrong.

STUDYING A FIELD

As we mentioned before, you can increase your knowledge or expertise in a field. This could mean learning "bookish" things by reading a lot, or it could mean training in particular actions such as gymnastics, sport, tai chi, karate, and so on. It depends what kind of field you are looking at. Some fields are a mixture of knowledge and action, such as skillfully driving a car while remembering the traffic laws.

Is it worth it to study a field of knowledge or expertise? If something is important to you then you will probably make the effort to learn about it. If it is not important to you now should you study it anyway? There may be fields that you don't think are important but actually are. For example, you may know nothing about escaping from a fire in a high-rise building but one day you might regret that. Or you may know little about diet and nutrition yet one day you might suffer a heart attack or other injury from that ignorance. It's important that you think carefully before you decide that some field or other doesn't matter to you. In most cases you are probably right to ignore many things but there will be some that you really could benefit from taking a look at.

What is the best way to study? What is the best way to become a sage? The simple answer is effort, you need to apply effort. But how much effort, and in what way? In the end it is up to you to decide how much effort you should put in, based on what is important to you and the practical needs of your life. To assist you in your efforts, the most effective way to study will be discussed further in Chapter 6, "Memorize More." Finally, in Chapter 9, "Bringing it all Together", the steps for Becoming a Sage will be added to the powerful process you can use to make yourself happier and wiser at all times.

CONCLUSION

Asking an Expert can be a powerful and straightforward way to find the wisest way to do something or think about something. It can help you to control your thoughts and also improve your feelings because you are more confident that what you are doing makes sense. You can be both happier and wiser in how you feel and what you do.

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3. GO INSIDE AND KNOW YOURSELF

Let's turn our attention to the things you can do internally or in your own mind to improve your life when you "Go Inside and Know Yourself."

When you Go Inside your own mind you can look at three areas in more detail: your feelings, your thoughts and your true self (or will).

YOUR FEELINGS

We have been looking at feelings a lot so far. We have come to see how they can interfere in our thoughts and redirect our minds towards what seems important to them. We agreed that our feelings can be seen as having the best intentions - aiming to achieve happier, longer and better lives for us - but that these intentions may not be wisely expressed. If we just followed our feelings without thinking we would soon get into a lot of trouble. Have your feelings ever caused you trouble?

No, our feelings have to be measured against the yardstick of how effective they are at helping us to live better and longer lives happily and wisely.

Some people say that you can control your feelings by ignoring them or doing little about them. They believe that you should just think realistically and do what those thoughts dictate, regardless of whether you like or dislike the outcomes. This is a dangerous approach and one that can lead to problems. It is dangerous because you make no allowance for part of your being, treating it like some useless appendage which has to be cast off. Also, it can cause problems because you cannot actually cast off your feelings. You can do something about them - take some action about them - as we will see in the chapter on Calming Yourself and Increasing Your Happiness, but if you choose to ignore them then your feelings are sure to come out in various ways, from the sneaky little indications through to the outright mental or nervous breakdown and failing health.

Rather than try to fight against them, a more effective approach is to get familiar with your feelings so you can understand them and guide them like a kindly old grandparent does for their inexperienced young grandchildren. You may rightly believe that your feelings are primitive elements left over by history, but it will be more helpful to think of them as inexperienced young grandchildren who are always with you and need your wise guidance. That way you can reach for a better, happier, wiser life together.

How are your feelings to be guided? First of all you should know them and understand them, that way you can know what to do for them. For example, if you see that certain situations make you angry then you can think about why that is and what you can do to improve on the situation or your reaction to it. In this way your feelings can be catered for and no unwise actions need occur. You will also need to consider the situations that make you happy, as these also may not be wise. We can be in just as much danger from the things that make us feel good as from those that make us feel bad. For example, if you feel good about drugs or alcohol the feeling may be ruining your life. You need to be able to consider if what your good feelings are asking you to do makes sense. By studying them and finding out why some self-damaging situations make you happy you will be able to gain some perspective on what you are doing. With perspective you will find it easier to design a solution where your feelings are catered for but no unwise actions occur. In Chapter 4, "Calm Yourself and Increase Your Happiness", we will look at further techniques for dealing with your feelings successfully. Also, in Chapter 9, "Bringing it all Together", the steps for dealing with your emotions successfully will be added to the powerful process you can use to make yourself happier and wiser at all times.

YOUR THOUGHTS

Let's now turn our attention to our thoughts. What are they doing? Where do they come from? What are they about?

HOW THOUGHTS WORK

Thoughts are amazing things and do a lot for us, though they sometimes go wrong. If our thoughts are on the right track then everything goes smoothly, if they are on the wrong track then a derailment can occur!

Our thoughts mostly come from our memory, which contains categories based on all the things that have happened to us over the years. When something is happening to us our minds compare this with the categories in our memory and look for matches. If a match can be found then our thoughts form and we feel that we know what is likely to happen and what we should do.

There can be a myriad of matching categories to any situation but our minds will try to focus on the most obvious or well-known ones. As long as the situation fits into the current categories in our memories then we feel satisfied that we know what to do, or what not to do. If the situation refuses to fit into our current categories then we can get agitated and try to force it to fit. If that doesn't work then we can become extremely agitated and may try to escape or get away. We may even get angry and go on the attack. Alternatively we may pay a lot of attention to what is going on - maybe we will be able to figure out what to do in these new circumstances.

Of course we can come up with new ideas without the outside world having to force us into it, but most of the time we feel that it is enough for us to go with what our experiences have taught us. At least, we go with the way we have interpreted them, as all our memories are accessed via the sets of categories that we gave them at the time... or that we added as we thought about our experiences again. For us these categories tell us the whole of what we need to do in most of the situations that we find ourselves in on most days. Normally when we talk about thinking it is to do with solving the problems that unexpectedly crop up or the situations where we don't have ready-made or effective answers. We can return to these unsolved issues again and again, with our minds frantically searching for an answer that will work for us.

We have seen that our thoughts come from our memory - the categories in our memory - but that does not explain how we form new ideas. It is easy to see how our old thoughts come from the categories in our memory, but how could new thoughts form?

Say we were remembering something from our past, for example we could be remembering an argument we had with our partner. There could be many categories associated with this memory, things like "partner", "argument", "our own shortcomings", "our working life versus our home life", "headaches", "not being smart enough", "difficulties with stubborn people", "our parents' relationship", and so on. How could new ideas be formed from these? Could we do something with these categories that would allow us to form a new idea? What would this be?

One thing we could do is to insert a new category into the list. For example, we could add the category of "Go Inside" to this situation. That might generate new thoughts, such as wondering what is in the mind of our partner. How is our partner feeling? What thoughts are they having during this argument? What memories are they working from? How much do they know about the topic compared to us? How does this affect what they are saying? What is making them angry in this situation?

Thoughts like these are automatically generated when we add a new category to our ideas... that is, to the categories that are stored in our memory.

What else could you do to generate new ideas?

You could challenge the accuracy of your existing ideas. For example, you could question the category of "argument" that your memory applies to this situation. Is this really an argument or is it in fact an "opportunity" to develop a better relationship with your partner? Maybe if you could learn to understand your partner's thoughts then you could find a way to improve your relationship with them and get even closer. Maybe this really is a chance to bring increased understanding into your relationship and to live a happier and wiser life!

We will talk more about practical ways to generate new ideas in Chapter 5, "Think Again." This will also be added to the powerful process in Chapter 9, "Bringing it all Together". Imagine having the power to generate new and better ideas.

YOUR TRUE SELF (OR WILL)

The last area we need to look at is your true self or "will." This is the part of your mind that oversees what is happening in your emotional and thinking areas. It has a vital role to play in leading and guiding the rest of your mind in what to do and how to be happier and wiser about it.

There are times when your true self is overwhelmed by the wishes of your feelings or gets caught up in complicated and wandering thoughts which can divert it from where it wanted to go. You need to work on being more conscious of what is going on in your mind so you can take command more often and guide it towards the better and happier outcomes you desire.

How can we be more aware of our inner self or will so that it comes to our minds more often? Practice is the guaranteed way. What should you practice? Being aware of what is happening in your mind - "Are your feelings what you wanted or are they taking control, as they tend to do?", "Are your thoughts useful ones for getting where you want to go or are they diverting you from your true direction?", "Are your thoughts also taking you away from happiness and in what way?" It's worth thinking about these things. The more you practice being aware of what is going on in your mind the better will become your control. You will be familiar with the workings of your feelings and thoughts and will be able to develop strategies for dealing with them.

At its simplest, awareness is the primary way to improve the self-control of your will. At its most difficult, you need to become like an auditor who has checked and categorized and rechecked what is in your mind at various times. The most difficult and time-consuming technique is to be a kind of brilliant and strict self-auditor of the workings of your own mind, but this is also the "Go Inside" technique with the most rewards.

At the simplest you can "Go Inside and See Something of Yourself." At the most complex you can "Be a Brilliant and Strict Auditor of Your Own Mind." In-between these are levels like: "Go Inside and Take a Quick Look Around", "Go Inside and Check What You Find", "Go Inside and Do a Careful Study", "Go Inside and Conduct a Strict Examination of Your Thoughts and Feelings."

In the following chapters, especially Chapter 4, "Calm Yourself and Increase Your Happiness", we will look at further techniques which will help you to increase your awareness and bring your mind under your control. Also, in Chapter 9, "Bringing it all Together", we will describe the steps in the powerful process that will help you to enhance your awareness, self-knowledge and happiness at all times.

GOING INSIDE THE MIND OF OTHERS

If you were a Brilliant and Strict Auditor of Your Own Mind then you would be ready to deal with the thoughts of others as they share much of the processes that go on in your own mind. Not exactly the same, of course, because everyone is unique and has had a unique set of experiences to feel and think about, but similar enough for you to be able to form a shrewd idea of what is going on in their minds.

If, on the other hand, you had merely Gone Inside and Taken a Quick Look Around then you might be able to guess at the general nature of the thoughts of others. In return for the effort you are willing to put in you will receive a level of understanding that can be directed at the thoughts and feelings of other people.

Obviously you cannot really know exactly what is in the minds of others, you are just making general conclusions about what might be there or is likely to be there. Some people's thoughts may be very different to our own, but in general most people's are of a similar nature. Thanks to this we are able to form a reasonably good understanding of what is in the minds of the majority of people.

How is this to be achieved? How do we go about understanding the minds of others? Since we are trying to understand people who are similar to ourselves we can start by projecting our thoughts and feelings onto them. For example, if someone appears angry and upset we can remember a time when we felt angry and upset - we will then have some insight into their thoughts and feelings. If someone is talking about some great achievement of theirs then we can recall a time when we had achieved something - even if it was just something small that happened in our early school years: a gold star on our essay, a "Good job!" from our coach, a quiet thank you from a friend, all these things can lead us towards understanding the general thoughts and feelings of someone who is talking about their achievements.

It's not rocket science to do this but it's not so automatic either. If we are having strong feelings about someone then we can get bound up in those and forget to look at the situation through their thoughts and feelings. This is natural, this self-centered view of the world, but we can build on that and go further so we truly understand what is going on in the minds of others.

What is the simple and easy path and what is the complex and difficult one for Going Inside the Mind of Others? The simple path is to look for similar occurrences in your own life to that of the person you are trying to understand and work from those. If you can find something similar, even remotely similar, then you should be able to get a fair idea of what most other people are thinking and feeling. The most complex and difficult path you can take is to become an expert on your own feelings and thoughts and those of others - in other words you should Become an Experienced Psychologist.

If that seems too extreme for your needs you can aim for an in-between level of expertise. For example you could become a Well-Read Amateur Psychologist, or a Qualified Psychologist Who Hasn't Had a Practice Yet, or a Person Who Has Read a Lot of Popular Psychology, Someone Who Has Spent a Lot of Time Thinking About Others, a Counselor, or many other things between just projecting your thoughts and feelings onto others through to being a fully-qualified and experienced psychologist. The level you aim for is up to you, based on your needs. What level will you choose?

GOING INSIDE TO CALM YOURSELF

The final point to make in this chapter is that you can use the technique of Going Inside the Mind of Others as a way to Calm Yourself and even Increase Your Happiness. We will discuss this further in the next chapter.

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4. CALM YOURSELF AND INCREASE YOUR HAPPINESS

We have seen that you can improve your way of dealing with a situation by doing things like Asking an Expert and Going Inside and Knowing Yourself. What else can you do inside your own mind?

In this chapter we will look at practical ways to take charge of your mind and increase your happiness. Let's start by looking at some of the well-known ways to Calm Yourself and improve your feelings, which include meditation, yoga, tai chi, using your imagination, changing your "self-talk", and putting things in perspective. Let's also look at a less well-known technique, though not new, which allows you to create inner serenity at all times. Why do these things work? What exactly are they about?

MEDITATION

Meditation is a method of concentrating your mind on one thing so that your brain state changes into what are known as "alpha waves" (or sometimes the slower "theta" or even "delta" waves). Alpha waves are detected via an Electroencephalogram (EEG), which is a device that measures the electrical activity in the brain. The alpha waves are a slow rhythmic pattern of electrical activity that is found in the brain when a person is relaxed - extremely relaxed - and yet still alert... not sleeping but at peace.

When you are functioning normally the EEG usually detects "beta wave" activity in your brain. These waves are more varied and faster than the tranquil languid alpha waves. If you are extremely agitated the EEG can detect an even larger and more frantic level of these beta waves. These reflect the wilder, hectic thoughts that are going on in your brain at the time. Meditation overcomes these hectic, wild states and moves you towards a peaceful, alert, calm state of mind.

How does meditation do this and what is the result?

Meditation works, it is thought, by focusing the mind so that only one thing is happening. This takes your mind away from the multitude of thoughts and feelings that are going on all the time when you are awake. Practitioners of meditation say this is a way to "stop the incessant chatter" that is going on in your mind. While you are doing this a feeling of absolute calm comes over you. You start to see things in perspective and it becomes crystal clear what really matters in life.

YOGA AND TAI CHI

Yoga and tai chi exercises are designed, among other things, to focus the mind on what you are doing at the time. This is a kind of focusing on the present - living in the now. The advantage of this is that, as with meditation, you achieve a kind of inner calm and tranquility that makes you feel that nothing worldly really matters. All this striving for property and a better life is nothing but a diversion from the things that really matter, such as inner peace and a tranquil, all-seeing mind. This "all-seeing" mind helps you to see things in perspective in the world, to know what really matters in the big picture and not just to focus on your own narrow problems and wishes.

IMAGINATION

Using your imagination is another way to improve the state of your mind. This is where we change our current perception by making the effort to imagine some other view.

One approach is to imagine an alternative way of seeing a situation which puts it in a better light. We tell ourselves a story which helps us to view the situation in a new way. It is important to realize that this "story" cannot be a lie. If you try to lie to yourself your mind will eventually reject this, in one form or another. You must tell your mind a truth, a believable truth, yet one that puts the situation in a better, more positive light.

Another technique based on using your imagination is to redirect your thoughts to some tranquil or happier setting. For example, you could try to remember some time in your past where everything was going well and you had no problems. You were sitting by the sea and listening to the waves rolling into the shore. The sun was warming you as the soft white clouds drifted by in a blue as blue sky. Imagining this for a minute will make you feel better and you will be able to put things into perspective in your current situation.

You could also just remember a time when you were happy, whether it was your wedding, listening to some music, attending a concert, watching a movie, thinking about something, spending time with friends or loved ones, playing with your baby or a pet, getting a special gift, helping someone in need, or whatever time you remember that was especially happy.

You could also try to imagine the future when all this trouble is behind you. In those days you will be laughing at what happened to you today. "If only I had realized how unimportant this was going to be in my life," you might think.

Another form of imagination is to think of yourself as someone different - for example, you could imagine yourself as that "super-creature" we discussed earlier in the book. If you were not simply human what would it be like for you to face this situation today? Maybe you would know the answer easily, or maybe your emotions would adjust automatically to give you the best outcome in relation to the power of the issue over you. Who knows what you will discover when you imagine this?

On a similar track to imagining yourself as some other creature you could imagine that someone else is in the room with you. Maybe you could imagine some respectable expert on the situation giving you immediate and knowledgeable advice. Maybe you could think of some religious or spiritual authority advising you. Who or what would you choose to help you?

Finally, there is the imagination of going inside the mind of the other person to see what they are thinking and feeling. Even if that is not always completely accurate can it help you in making your own mind calmer? As you try to look at the world through the eyes of the other person you will come to see things from their point of view. Even if you don't agree with them you will find yourself able to see the situation in a better, more accurate light. Your emotions will subside and you will be able to take control and think about the situation. Your thoughts will become clearer and you will find it easier to make a sound, rational decision about this.

This Going Inside the Mind of Others as a way to calm yourself can be a powerful technique. It may surprise you with the insights it brings and the perspective you gain on other people. You will find it easier and easier to gain control of your own mind in difficult situations and to make calm, disciplined, sensible decisions that incorporate others within them. You will be a calmer, relaxed, happier person in situations that used to immobilize you and drive you crazy.

CHANGING YOUR SELF-TALK

What is self-talk? This is a term used by psychologists to describe the things you tell yourself about a situation, person, group or yourself (who you are). Psychologists say that if we can change our self-talk then we will be better at handling the issues in our lives.

How can we change our self-talk? One approach is to set aside some time to review what we think about certain things, especially troublesome things, and note what we find. We can then think carefully about whether our views really make sense and when they don't, change them to a more realistic view. For example, if you tell yourself that all people are no good then you will have a negative reaction to them. Maybe it is misleading to generalize like this. Maybe some people are no good, some are normal, and some are great role models. If you can change your self-talk on this then you may be able to live a more realistic life with a correspondingly realistic reaction to the individual people you meet. You would still be able to look out for the bad people, but you would also be able to get on with normal people and respect and admire the wonderful ones.

Another approach we can take is to immediately do something about the negative emotions when they occur. We could promptly tell ourselves something that is actually good about this experience or observation. For example, when we are encountering a difficult person we could remind ourselves that it is good that not all people are like this. In fact, most people are not difficult at all. What a lucky thing that is for us!

As we said before for the imagination, the change or addition you make to your self-talk cannot be a lie - you must be able to believe it or things will go off the rails and your mind will come back at you with the truth in one way or another. You must follow the truth when you revise or add to your thoughts, allowing you to come up with a happier yet realistic view which will continue to work for you over time.

HAPPINESS

Let's look further into the use of self-talk in making ourselves happier. How can we best approach this?

The two self-talk solutions we have proposed for making ourselves happy are to spend some time examining and then changing our self-talk, and to promptly tell ourselves something that is actually good about our current experience or observation.

Both approaches can help us to overcome the impact of our negative emotions and take a more realistic view of the world.

We know that negative emotions can occur before we have a chance to think about something, changing our self-talk can immediately help us with this. If we don't intervene then our negative emotions can set up a kind of cascade effect in our minds where we get more and more negative thoughts as we try to rapidly solve the problem. If we instead insert a realistic positive thought into our minds then the natural buildup of negativity is interrupted. We get a chance to gain a foothold against the flow of our negative thoughts and to think more clearly.

The game in our heads is something like this: first the negative emotions occur in response to some event outside us, or to our own thoughts, then we rapidly respond with a positive but realistic observation related to this, then our feelings become less negative to some extent, somewhere between a little and a lot, and we are in a more stable state for making good decisions. Later, when we have some time, we go over our thoughts to see what they are telling us about the world and ourselves. We examine them carefully to see if they can be replaced with more realistic ideas that are also more positive. As we add these more positive realistic ideas to our mind then our thoughts are modified, either a little through to a lot, and the next time we encounter a negative situation we feel better about it than we used to. If there is any negativity left we again respond with a positive but realistic observation and later we go over our thoughts to see if they can be replaced with even better ideas. By repeating this process over and over, again and again, we improve our thoughts and feelings to better and better levels over time. Even the fact that our emotions can occur before our thoughts ceases to matter because our whole minds are involved in improving our response.

We can become happier but also remain entirely realistic in our approach to our lives, which is what attaining extreme happiness and wisdom is all about.

GAIN PERSPECTIVE

One way we can reduce the strength of our emotions is to put them in perspective. This has some similarity to changing our self-talk in that we can change what we are telling ourselves about a situation. In this case we are changing our normal approach to situations that cause strong emotions by immediately thinking of the perspective we could see them in. For example, if our boss asks us to work late and we don't want to then we can immediately try to see this demand in the context of our whole lives. Where does this fit in with what we want to achieve in our lives? Does working late really match who we want to be? Is being obedient to the boss one of our values? If we can look from the perspective of our whole lives or who we want to be when examining this situation then one of the effects will be that our emotions will be brought under control. At least we will see what emotion would really apply to us if we were to examine this in the context of our whole lives. Maybe we will decide to obey the boss and work late this time, or maybe we will disagree. Whatever we do it will be decided in a broader context that will make us calmer and more certain about what we really think.

When we see things in a broader perspective then it will become clearer to us what is important and what is not. Perhaps a lot of the things we do today are not really important to us, and perhaps there are things we really should be doing that we have not concentrated on. Putting things in perspective will help with this. How many people have said that after someone passed away they wished they had spent more time with them or told them how they really felt about them? If they had seen things in perspective then maybe they would have realized this and told the person how they really felt. Maybe they would have told their parents how grateful they were to them for their help and guidance over the years. Maybe they would have told their partners how much they loved them. Whatever makes sense for you, perspective will help you to realize which things really matter and where you should put your effort and time.

Apart from the obvious advantage of knowing which things are really important in your life, putting things in perspective will also help to calm your mind. Many situations that demand our attention and inflame our emotions with a "call for action" can be promptly put in perspective. This will cause our minds to adjust the emotions to match the real value of the situation. Strong calls for action may immediately be reduced to a low emotional level when our minds see that they don't really matter in our lives. And those important actions that we may have been putting off or ignoring may gain more emotional strength when we look at them in perspective. Calming our minds so we do what really matters and don't waste our time on unnecessary calls for action is one of the great benefits of the simple action of putting things in perspective.

METHODS FOR PUTTING THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE

What methods are there for putting things in perspective? Basically there are as many methods as we can imagine. Anything that puts things in perspective based on what is important to you will work. For example, if you were to imagine a view of your whole life, say it was a summary written on one page, what would this situation look like then? Would this event be important enough to appear on that one page? Or would it be forgotten in the light of the things that really mattered? Given that you see it now in context, is it still worth pursuing? Should you carry on with this action or is it too unimportant to worry about?

Another method which I quite like is to imagine climbing a tall tower and then looking down on the world from high above. How would this situation look when seen from high above on the tall tower? Maybe it will seem trivial, maybe not. One thing is sure, you will certainly see it from a clearer view than if you stay on the ground and look at it when it is right in front of you. From the tower you will see "from above" rather than just what is in front of your face. This will make it much easier for you to see how it fits into the whole world and your own goals and view of who you want to be.

The tall tower view will be incorporated in the powerful process that will be described fully in Chapter 9, "Bringing it all Together."

BEING A GRANDPARENT

Let's return to the topic of "Being a Grandparent" towards your emotions, as mentioned in the previous chapter: "Go Inside and Know Yourself." If you think of your feelings as young grandchildren then you can Calm Yourself and Increase Your Happiness via your relationship with them.

In a way, our feelings are brought to us by the distant past. They appear to have been honed by millions of years of growth and change in the animal world and they work reasonably well in guiding our lives and determining what is important to us. For all that, they are still limited in what they can do and we can certainly guide them to a better outcome. If we treat them as if they were our ancient grandchildren then we can lightly and pleasantly, yet cleverly, guide them towards a happier, better result.

Imagine that you are more mature than your emotions, those young grandchildren, and you can see that they are going the wrong way or taking the wrong path. Wouldn't you like to help these grandchildren to lead a better and happier life? So you take command and guide them towards better answers and a more mature and thoughtful attitude towards their feelings.

"Dear Grandchildren," you might say, "let's take a better and happier attitude to what we are doing, acting in both a more mature and responsible way and negotiating with our emotions so we can guide them towards a better and happier life together."

Of course you might not say it like this because it could be too difficult for your young grandchildren to follow, but this is what you would be aiming for as you spoke to them. The exact way you would speak depends on how far you have got in teaching maturity to your ancient emotions. If you have reached extreme maturity you might be able to say something as extreme as:

"Dear emotions and ancient thought patterns, the time has come for us to be mature and put aside the ways of the past. We need to work together to realize the possibilities of the future and the nature of the "super-creature" that we should try to emulate. We need to overcome the past that is holding us back from true happiness and wisdom... of an extreme kind. Let's go forward together into the light of the future world, the world that has been waiting for us all these years.

"The eons of time have come to a close in us and we can go on to the life that was promised to us in the hidden paths of history."

Whatever words work for you, you will be able to Calm Yourself and Increase Your Happiness by acting like a kindly, old, wise grandparent towards your ancient grandchildren emotions. Does this sound like a helpful idea to you?

CREATING INNER SERENITY

Finally, let's look at the less well-known but not completely new technique of Creating Inner Serenity, which can be done at all times.

Research has shown that our feelings occur before we have a chance to think about something, so we have proposed solutions above which are designed mostly to deal with our feelings after they occur. Wouldn't it be great if we could actually deal with our feelings before they occur? Is this really possible?

Since feelings are based on our inherited nature and our experiences it would seem that little could be done to improve them. Perhaps some small advances could be made but nothing dramatic. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that you can do a lot to improve your feelings to levels you never dreamed of before. What is this dramatic technique that seems to work miracles in the mind?

You may recall that meditation works by concentrating your mind on one thing so that your brain state changes into alpha waves. These are a slow rhythmic pattern of electrical activity that is found in the brain when a person is extremely relaxed and yet still alert. In this state it is difficult to have wild, emotional thoughts. To have these wild, emotional thoughts you would first need to increase your brain wave activity to the faster beta wave level that exists when you are functioning normally. Then from the normal beta wave level it is relatively easy for your thoughts to move quickly into the larger and more frantic beta waves that exist during higher emotional times. But from the alpha wave level it seems to require an effort to fire up your brain into the frantic beta wave state. There is a kind of inner resistance to moving from the pleasant, tranquil, highly-aware state of mind into the narrowly-focused, frantic, emotionally-intense state. This resistance can be used to your advantage.

Studies have shown that you cannot go into the alpha wave state without closing your eyes. This would seem to mean that you will have to meditate all the time in order to stay in the alpha state. But what you can do with your eyes open is reduce the frequency of your beta wave state so that it is close to the alpha. You can continue to live your normal life while still having a reduced beta frequency. What this means is that you can be that much more resistant to having frantic emotional states at all times.

Another benefit of being close to the alpha wave state is that you will feel happier. As with meditation, the concentration on reducing your mental turmoil will result in a more tranquil, pleasant feeling where you have a wider focus and can see things in perspective. It will be difficult to feel unhappy in this state. The little things in life will not disturb you.

How is all this achieved? Is it hard to do? Well, it does require some effort and a retraining of your mind. This is where you will have to gain a kind of mental maturity in how you manage your thoughts. But the payoffs are huge. Imagine feeling happier and less disturbed by life's problems all the time. The method you will use is to reduce the frantic nature of your inner thoughts by drawing yourself away from them. How can you draw yourself away from your more frantic thoughts? By any means that will focus your mind elsewhere. For example, you can focus on the Here and Now, as described in Eckhart Tolle's book _The Power of Now_. This includes becoming fully aware of what is going on around you at this exact moment.

You can extend your attention out from your thoughts and into the world that you can perceive - both the near and the far. Can you hear everything that is around you, not just what is right in front of you but also those distant sounds? Can you see all that is around you, both the near and the far, and can you see it in great detail? What can you smell? How does your body feel? Where is it positioned or what is it doing? Concentrate your mind on perceiving all these things and the incessant chatter of your thoughts will fade away.

Another way to focus your mind away from your more frantic thoughts is to learn to "accept" what is. This means that rather than automatically judging everything according to some standard you should first learn to accept that it exists by saying to yourself that "this is." "This is what is at the moment." Our minds tend to judge first in an attempt to maximize our survival, to do what is best for us, but most of the time this just results in us fretting about things we cannot change or do not really need to take any action about. In the modern world there is a kind of onslaught of irritating things and demands that mostly do not genuinely threaten our existence or require any action. We think we are dissatisfied with our lives and our minds come up with all kinds of solutions when the real problem is just our dissatisfaction. No outside action is really needed.

We need to retrain our minds to initially "accept" what is. By doing this we will have refocused our thoughts away from judgment and will be able to feel happier and more tranquil about what is happening around us. Now this is not to say that we shouldn't then be dissatisfied with something and decide to take some action about it. It is just saying that our initial reaction will be to accept it. We are then free to think more clearly and in perspective to see if this really matters in our lives. From our closer to alpha wave state we can make sounder decisions than if we frequently escalate into a frantic and emotional beta wave level due to all our worrying about the continual onslaught of irritating things and falsely urgent demands made on us by the modern world. We will gain perspective and see things as they truly are in relation to our lives.

Acceptance and focusing on the Here and Now are two powerful techniques for reducing the frantic nature of our inner thoughts. What else can we do? Just as these techniques are a kind of refocusing of your attention away from your more frantic thoughts you can also "refocus" by learning to actually watch your thoughts and feelings. If you are finding your thoughts and feelings overwhelming then rather than attempting to stop them, which can be very difficult, you can simply watch what is happening in your mind. If you are having strong frantic thoughts then watch them and see what they are about. Do not judge them or try to stop them. Do not argue with them. Just observe. What are they saying? What words are they using? What is their argument or what point are they making?

The same can be done with strong feelings that are demanding action from you. Simply watch them. What are you feeling? What is the feeling about? What is it asking you to do? What does it want from you? As you merely observe your thoughts and feelings you will find that they start to lose their power over you. You will be able to step back and gain some perspective on what is going on in your mind. You may even find that the thoughts and feelings come to a stop for a while. You will have returned to a more tranquil mental state closer to the alpha waves.

One of the simplest ways you can refocus your awareness away from your frantic thoughts is to concentrate on your breathing. Become aware of the breaths going in and out of your body. Feel the air passing through your nose and into your lungs. How much air is going there? Are you breathing quickly and shallowly or can you slow and deepen your breaths? Slow, deep breaths automatically calm you, as the oxygen in your blood is enriched and the carbon dioxide waste product is removed. Your heart rate will slow and you will feel the calm spreading over you. Draw the air deep inside you. Feel the benefit.

Now that you are breathing well you can continue what you were doing. Keep a bit of an eye on your breathing as you go about your activities. You don't need to concentrate heavily on your breathing, just keep a bit of attention aside for it, an awareness in the back of your mind. This small diversion of your attention away from what you are doing or thinking about will keep you grounded - centered, if you like. The world around you and your internal thoughts will not be able to draw you away from your proximity to the alpha wave state of mind. This sliver of attention on the awareness of your breathing will protect you from the pull towards frantic, highly emotional thoughts.

Another way you can keep a focus elsewhere is to think about your body. Where is it now? What position is it in? What is it doing? Can you feel the position of your limbs, are you moving, what can you feel as you move? Can you feel your feet in your shoes, the gravity that pulls you down, the heat or cold on your skin? The wind on your face, the fullness or emptiness inside, the feel of your clothes? Do you have any pain - how does that feel, where is it exactly, what exactly is it doing now? Even pain can draw your attention away from frantic, hectic thoughts. Think of the blood pumping through your body - can you feel it moving through your limbs and out to your hands and feet? Can you imagine this? Can you detect your heart beating, keeping all this in motion? Can you imagine a kind of living energy going throughout your body, pervading it, keeping it alive?

This focus away from your thoughts or what is happening to you will help to bring you back towards the alpha wave state. You will feel calmer and more focused on what really matters, with a broader view than what is immediately being presented to you by the world or your thoughts.

Just as you could do with breathing, now that you have drawn your attention away from the more frantic thoughts and the world around you, keep a bit of an eye on your body as you go about your business. Just a bit of attention at the back of your mind will help you to keep from being drawn into the whirlpool of thoughts and activities into which your mind and the world may try to suck you. You will continue to float rather than being drawn under. From time to time throughout the day it is useful to remember your body and think about where it is and what it is doing now. Take time out to do this no matter what is happening to you. It will refocus your attention and protect you from frantic, highly emotional, fast beta-wave states.

MORE ABOUT BETA WAVE STATES

What are beta wave states really about? What are they trying to achieve? Beta is the normal frequency range of your thoughts when you are awake and going about your life, doing normal things. It shows that you are thinking, reacting and feeling in a perfectly normal way. Your focus will be on achieving what you set out to do, or reacting successfully to whatever is presenting itself to you. It will be difficult to see past that. What goes wrong, in terms of Extreme Happiness and Wisdom, is when your beta waves increase in frequency to a highly active state. This indicates that your mind has increased speed and is racing to keep up with whatever is being demanded of it or the cascade of thoughts and feelings that are going on inside. This is a very intense state and is difficult to escape from. Once it starts your mind becomes highly focused on whatever is occupying its attention and it simply cannot see a way out of that at the time. This is often referred to as "being unconscious", because your normal conscious awareness has disappeared. You are trapped, until you can claw back some perspective on what you are doing or thinking, or something external draws your attention away. Have you ever been lucky enough to have your attention drawn away from an "unconscious" state?

"Being unconscious" applies to the normal beta wave states too. Although you have some greater perspective in these states compared to the intense one, you are still mostly captured by what is going on around you, as well as by your thoughts and feelings. You are largely unconscious, even if to a lesser extent. You need to move towards the alpha state to achieve full consciousness.

What is beta trying to achieve? What is the purpose of this narrowing of focus and speeding up of the thoughts and intensity of the feelings? Basically, this is a survival mechanism. Beta is designed for normal life and intense beta is designed for dealing with extreme situations. Intense beta is extreme because it is meant for those times when all else has failed - our careful preparations and sensible way of running our lives has let us down and we need to work fast to escape or deal with the situation. We are at our wits end and are having to do all we can just to keep up. Maybe we will even fail. The mind is running at full capacity, maybe even beyond that capacity, and has to shut down many facilities in order to focus on the job at hand. No more perspective here! No peace. No serenity. No enlightened mind. No space - only the continual onslaught of the emotions and racing thoughts about the situation.

The trick here is that this survival mechanism may not be all that effective anyway. This shutting down of the faculties and speeding up of what's left may have worked in ancient times when we were running from our predators or fighting for our survival, but in the modern world with its many complexities we may actually need all our faculties to be fully functioning if we are to deal with the situation well. A half shutdown mind may not be the answer to modern problems!

What are we to do about this? How are we to prevent this crazy intense state of mind from coming about in the first place, because once we are in it it is hard to see our way out of it? The answer is to be further away from it at all times so it doesn't have the chance to start. We will have to move our mental state that much further to get to high beta and this will give us time to think about what we are doing. Our habit of maintaining full consciousness in the Here and Now, closer to the alpha wave state, will also help us to turn back from the frantic waves as we notice them start. Finally, our strong serene and peaceful feelings will make it hard for us to move to high beta as we will not want to give them up - our minds will resist the move to unpleasant feelings in the same way that our bodies try to keep away from pain and discomfort.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND SERENITY

Like all the techniques in Extreme Happiness and Wisdom you are going to have to work at this. You are going to have to retrain your mind to turn its attention away from the incessant chatter of its thoughts and towards the Here and Now, Acceptance of What Is, Watching Your Thoughts and Feelings, Concentrating on Your Breathing, and Awareness of Your Body. There are other techniques which you could read about in Eckhart Tolle's books or similar works.

As you train your mind to focus on these things it will move closer to the alpha wave state more and more often. You will feel the increased serenity that comes from this and you will enjoy the inner peace that quietly builds within you. You will also experience an increase in your "consciousness", by which we mean that you will start to see things with a more realistic perspective. You will not be caught up in the problems of the moment but will be able to see them in context - where they really fit within the world - and they will lose their power over you. You will still act, but it will be action within a broader context. Your vision will be wider and your decisions will be founded on a broader base.

Serenity at all times could be yours, depending on how much effort you are willing to put in. You could Calm Yourself From Time to Time through to Create Inner Serenity At All Times, depending on how often you want to concentrate on this.

OPTIONS

For Calming Yourself and Increasing Your Happiness you have some options: meditation, yoga, tai chi, using your imagination, changing your self-talk, Perspective, Being a Grandparent towards your emotions, and Creating Inner Serenity. You can aim for just Calming Yourself From Time to Time through to achieving the most difficult but beneficial state of extreme happiness and wisdom by Creating Inner Serenity At All Times. In Chapter 9, "Bringing it all Together", we will describe steps which will cover the main elements needed to Calm Yourself and Increase Your Happiness at all times.

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5. THINK AGAIN

We have already discussed how the limitations of our thoughts keep us from leading better lives. What practical things can we do to improve on this?

One approach we can take is to learn methodical thinking methods that will make our minds work better than if they were just left to nature.

There are several ways that we can do more with our minds than what they were naturally designed for. Some of these methods are commonly taught today, such as mathematics, logic, and critical thought. Others are less widely taught, such as the use of deliberate creative techniques and broadening your perception.

MATHEMATICS

Mathematics is a technique where we replace our normal thoughts with a system based on numbers and symbols. The symbols, such as "+", "-", "÷", "x" and so on, have rules about how they work. If we follow those rules then we can arrive at an answer. The symbols basically work automatically to provide us with the answer we seek.

One way of describing what a mathematician tries to do is that they seek better combinations of symbols or invent new ones so we can calculate outcomes more easily or accurately, enabling us to do complex things successfully. For example we have been able to go to the moon, run nuclear reactors, launch satellites into space, build skyscrapers and bridges, design electronic circuits and many other things by using mathematics.

How does mathematics improve our ability to think? Well, without it we are unable to deal with large numbers of things, or focus on the nature of the tiniest components of the universe. Our minds tend to remember groups of things as "a large group", "a small group", and so on. Usually we can recognize when there are three objects in a room, but few of us can automatically say how many objects are present when there are more than seven. Our minds have a kind of "fuzzy logic" which gives us a general and useful view of the world but does not focus in on what is accurate. This is a practical approach because we would quickly become overwhelmed if our minds were so detailed as to count everything we saw, such as the exact number of people at a football stadium, or the exact number of blades of grass in a field. If we saw the world like this we would not be able to function. If the thoughts and perceptions of our minds are there to help us then they are doing a good job in ignoring the exact details about large numbers of things.

Yet mathematics can help us overcome that and work out answers when there are large numbers of things, or tiny fractions of things. In this way mathematics encompasses the world and makes us act like smarter creatures without us having to overwhelm our limited minds. It's a strange but wonderful thing.

LOGIC

Logic is similar to mathematics in that it has symbols which you can use to "calculate" the logical outcome of the statements involved. For example, if you saw a statement with the symbols AND and THEN then you would conclude that it was saying that something was true only if both things on the left of the statement were true. For example, if a "Politician is talking AND Their lips are moving THEN The politician is lying." These formal symbols enable us to avoid the naturally inaccurate qualities of our minds that can lead us down the wrong path - in logical terms.

Just as is with the next topic, Critical Thought, there is no guarantee that what is logical is true. You could put forward a perfectly logical statement that was based on false assumptions and draw an equally false conclusion from it. For example, if you made the statement "Politician is talking AND Their lips are moving THEN The politician is telling the truth", then the logical conclusion would be that the talking with lips moving politician is telling the truth. It is logical but it is not necessarily true.

The benefit of logic, on the other hand, is that it eliminates any conclusions that could never make sense. For example, if you drew the conclusion politicians may sometimes tell the truth from the statement "Politician is talking AND Their lips are moving THEN The politician is lying" then you would not be thinking logically. This, at least, is something that logic can give you - an improvement on the conclusions you would draw from your natural thoughts.

CRITICAL THOUGHT

Our minds have a natural tendency to believe things. This is both a blessing and a curse for us. If we believe something just because it feels right then we may be going down the wrong track. If that belief is major then it can take our whole lives on that erroneous journey. We will be ruined yet we may never know it - our minds failing to reveal it to us. Is there any way out of this?

One technique that we can use is to be critical of our thoughts and those of others. In this way rather than believing things at face value we can take a closer look at them before we decide if they are true. This is a kind of "rational skepticism" that we can apply: if something makes sense to us when we are being skeptical then it may actually be true. "No guarantees, you understand, but maybe it is okay," we might say.

Unfortunately you cannot be sure that everything that seems all right when you are being rationally skeptical is indeed actually true. By the same token you cannot be sure that everything you reject when you are being rationally skeptical is indeed false. That is the problem with rational skepticism: you may throw out the ideas that are right and still believe some that are not true. Yet this seems better than just believing everything that your mind finds good or interesting.

DELIBERATE CREATIVE TECHNIQUES

Deliberate Creative Techniques are about using the existing properties of your mind to discover more than would normally be possible. Dr. Edward De Bono has been the leading worldwide expert on this topic for many years. De Bono proposed a new way of thinking called "Lateral Thinking" in 1967. This breakthrough idea led to a whole new approach to using the mind.

Lateral Thinking is a Deliberate Creative Technique which utilizes the nature of the mind to connect up ideas in new ways. De Bono explains that our minds are designed to look for the common factors in ideas and link these together. For example, if you saw a documentary about North Korean interrogators and then for the first time in your life saw a North Korean person, your mind would automatically link the common factor of them being North Korean together with interrogators and you would be suspicious of this innocent person because you imagine that they may have this "interrogation factor" in their make-up. That could be true but it is more likely to be wrong.

In real life we are exposed to a multitude of information and ideas and we have to find our way through this knowledge minefield. Our brains are naturally "wired-up" to help us find the commonality in what we see so that we can focus on the important factors and come up with solutions based on those. Who is dangerous, who is kind, who can be trusted, who can not? These are the questions that our minds have to answer so that we can live better and safer lives. What makes us happy, what makes us sad, what gets on our nerves, what does not? These questions lead us towards the things that make us happy and away from the things that make us angry or sad.

All this linking up of our ideas helps us to live better lives, but it also hinders us. If something makes us unhappy then we tend to avoid it, if possible, but we may then be avoiding something that is actually good for us. Because we never take the time to look at this unsettling thing then we never find out all the elements in it, some of which may make us happier and better off than we are now. It is so much easier for us to stay in our "comfort zone" than to try out new and perhaps frightening ideas. Maybe we need to step out of this zone, at least in our thinking, to see what really lies in the unexplored areas of the world outside. What do you think you might find?

MORE ABOUT LATERAL THINKING

Let's take a closer look at De Bono's Lateral Thinking techniques.

Apart from opening up our minds to consider ideas we have been avoiding, Lateral Thinking can also help us to create new ideas. There are several ways to do this which are fully described in De Bono's books and courses. Here I will only talk briefly about the general way it is done.

Generally speaking, the way you can deliberately create new ideas is to consciously use the natural ability of your mind to link up ideas and find common threads in them. For example, if you take one of your existing ideas, such as the nature of a refrigerator, and then you put forward a second unrelated idea, such as the current political system, your mind will automatically find the things that are in common. This could include ideas like:

1. We could lock our politicians away in some cold place and only take notice of them when we opened the door to ask them for something.

2. What happens when you close the door on your politicians? Does the light go out and nothing really happens?

3. Do our politicians live in a kind of sealed-off world where nothing from real life bothers them, a kind of happy place where things never go seriously wrong and all is well?

4. Maybe we should put our politicians "on ice" and see how well they cope with the difficulty. Maybe we would learn who was really tough and who was weak. Perhaps this is what political debates represent - a test of the toughness and resilience of the political leader.

5. It would be good if our politicians could "cool off" and make more rational decisions.

6. How long should we keep someone in office? Should they have a "Use by" date which warns that they have lost their freshness and are no longer good for us?

7. How long should an unpopular leader be left in power? To the end of their term, or could we remove them earlier by some democratic process? When the politician (the fridge) stops working then all the good things start to rot and there is a terrible smell.

8. On the surface our political system looks all clean and white but inside there is a great deal of complexity and all sorts of hidden things are going on.

These are only some of the ideas we could generate in a few minutes just by comparing our existing ideas on the nature of a refrigerator with our unrelated ideas about the current political system. If we kept doing this we may even find a really interesting "breakthrough" idea that changes our lives and the way we see things. Finding out that the Earth goes around the Sun must have been something like that.

One of the obstacles to using Deliberate Creative Techniques is the natural objection of our mind to new ideas when it already has perfectly acceptable answers to our problems. Generally speaking, our minds are designed to stop when the answer is found and not to carry on looking for new and even better answers. There is a feeling of futility, a kind of annoyance that we get when we are forced to reevaluate what we already know. If we are to live happier and wiser lives then we will need to overcome this natural reaction and get on with the business of using Deliberate Creative Techniques.

How can we overcome this natural tendency of our minds to keep away from new ideas when an answer is already known? By using the same techniques we have already discussed in the previous chapter on "Calming Yourself and Increasing Your Happiness." When you have calmed yourself you should be ready to see the potential positive benefits that may come from searching for new ideas. After all, how much good has come from the new ideas we human beings have had over the centuries? Isn't it a wonderful and happy thought that we could be part of that movement forward? Our new ideas may help other people and they may help us as well.

BROADENING YOUR PERCEPTION

One of the problems with our thinking is that we don't take into account all the factors that are presented to us. We tend to focus only on the most obvious ones that seem the most relevant to us, but this natural overlooking of all factors may be causing us to leave out vital clues about what is really going on. We need to consciously Broaden Our Perception of the situation so we can consider all the factors that may be involved. That way we can more easily form accurate answers that will cover what is really going on.

For example, if our partner is asking us for something then what other things are going on at the time? What exactly is their expression, what tone of voice, how loud, where are they sitting, what are they doing, what body language are they displaying, is anyone else around - what are their expressions like? What else is happening in the room - is there any clue, even a remote one, that may help us in fully understanding what is going on? Similarly if our boss is asking us about something then what clues can we get from their expression, their body language, their tone, what notes they have with them, who they have just come from a meeting with, what has been happening this week, how the year has been going, what they are wearing today, and any other clues that are around? In social situations, in practical situations, when dealing with people or things or nature we can Broaden Our Perception and look for all the clues as to what is really going on.

It has been said that 90% of errors of thought are errors of perception. If we take a moment to Broaden Our Perception then maybe we will be able to reduce those errors in our own minds.

This broadening of our perception approach will be included in the powerful process in Chapter 9, "Bringing it all Together." This will help us to deal better with situations that arise in our lives as they occur. The same broadening of perception can help when we are considering problems later, though we will have to imagine what some of the factors were because we can no longer see them.

THE SIMPLE THROUGH TO THE COMPLEX

What would be the simple through to the complex levels for these Think Again tools?

At the simplest level you would know a little about mathematics - how it works, what it is based on; critical thought - when it applies and when it is overkill; logic - a basic understanding; Lateral Thinking at a basic level, as shown in this book; and the idea of Broadening Your Perception.

At the more complex level you would know more than the average person about mathematics but not necessarily be a mathematician yourself; know how to apply critical thought in a methodical way when evaluating ideas; know something about logic without necessarily being an expert; be at least competent at using Lateral Thinking in a methodical way, as laid out in De Bono's books; and be skilled at Broadening Your Perception and taking in all the clues. You would be reasonably skilled at thinking and generating new ideas, with the generation of new ideas being the most important in your set of thinking tools.

What would it be like at the highest level?

At the most complex and difficult level you would be very good at generating new ideas and understanding if they make sense or not. You would be a kind of methodical thinker who deals with ideas with the same skill as a circus acrobat deals with their bodies. You would be able to do back flips, somersaults and trapeze work at will... with ideas. Imagine flying through the air mentally and catching the trapeze with the audience applauding and crying out "More! More!"

Of course it takes effort to become an acrobat, years and years of work, and it can be the same for Becoming a Thinking Again Acrobat. Is it worth it to spend these years to become dexterous at thought? You will have to decide based on your needs. But even if you just choose to be a reasonably skilled person at Thinking Again this will put you ahead of most people around you, and it can help you with your life in ways you never dreamed of until now.

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6. MEMORIZE MORE

If we are to become experts ourselves, at least at some level, and be able to draw on our knowledge so we can think better, then we are going to have to study some things so we can improve what is in our minds. Our store of knowledge needs to be stocked up so that when we go to the pantry we have all the ingredients necessary to "cook well" and come up with better ways to do things in our lives.

How can we efficiently stock up the pantry of our memory so that we have a lot to draw on when we need to solve something or improve our lives? Also, what kind of memories should we be stocking up on?

There are methods that can help us to memorize things more easily, especially when those things are not the natural type of information our minds seem to be designed for. These methods are based on turning the items we want to remember, but find difficult, into the type of things we find easy to recall.

Everyone's brain is different and one person may find it easier to remember one type of thing than another. For example, it is said that women find it easier to remember when something occurred and what people were wearing or eating at the time. Generally men find this much harder, but find it quite easy to remember where something was and what direction is needed to get there. Many women navigate by remembering the sequence of objects along the way, such as "You go past the white house then there is a large fig tree where you turn left, then you...." Many men tend to navigate by remembering the direction and imagining a kind of map inside their heads - generally speaking. This difference between one group of people and another highlights that everyone remembers things differently and needs to tailor their techniques for improving their own memories by applying what works best for them.

MEMORY TECHNIQUES

Memory techniques that may work for you include converting lists of items into stories, converting numbers into images, and using external aids, such as keeping a diary or a "to do" list which you look at every day.

One technique used by memory experts is to convert the things they want to remember into a story. By doing this the memory expert can be given a list of random objects to remember and easily recite it back after having taken only seconds to memorize it.

An example is when you give a list to the memory expert of things like: carrot, cat, car, country and cracker. The expert may make up a story which uses the list: "The person providing the list hands me a carrot with the list carved on it by a cat's claw. The cat had to be driven by car across the whole country to prepare the list for me and it was rewarded by being given a cracker for its troubles." This story makes it possible for the memory expert to recall the five unrelated objects in the list with ease. Some memory experts can do this with one hundred objects without too much difficulty, thanks to their constant practice, and are able to astonish audiences across the world.

Another memory experts' technique is to have a pre-memorized list in your head to which you "attach" the objects. For example, you could have the pre-memorized image of a spear for number one in your list, (as it looks similar to "1"), and then attach the first thing to remember, a carrot, by thinking of the carrot being stuck onto the spear. The advantage of this technique is that you can recite the objects in any order back to your questioner. For example, you could memorize ten things against your list and then recite them backwards from ten to one, or all the even numbers followed by the odd numbers, or you could answer the questioner when they asked you to name the fifth object.

Although these types of techniques are great for party tricks they are not really all that useful for memorizing the type of information that will help you in your quest to become an expert on happiness and wisdom.

Rather than develop your skill at using clever memory techniques, the best approach to memorizing useful information is to really understand the topic you are looking at. How do you _really understand_ something? You have to relate it to what you already know and keep with it long enough until you see how it really works, what the thinking is with that thing. After you have done that it will be easy for you to remember it in future.

An example would be learning how a car works. You could take a look at what is inside a car and try to relate that to what you already know. For example, if you wanted to understand how the engine gets its power then you could imagine what would happen if you lit a small amount of petrol. What would it do? It would "explode", or at least burn very forcefully and fast. This is basically how the engine gets its energy.

If you wanted to explore the workings of the engine in more detail then you could take a look at diagrams or animations showing how each piston moves up and down and compresses the petrol and air mixture which is then ignited by a spark from the spark plug, causing it to burn rapidly, driving the piston back down. You could study the four stroke cycle that is common to most petrol engines and how that draws in the air and fuel, compresses it, is pushed by the "explosion" and then pushes out the exhaust gases in the final stroke.

Another example of learning something that you don't know much about might be the difference between intuitive and logical thinkers. If you find the idea of intuition confusing then you could study how that is different to the way you normally think. If you think in a logical step by step way then you will have to imagine jumping to the end of all the steps in one go - what would you see then?

If you were able to jump immediately to the end of your sequence of thought then it would be similar to what happens when you make one step - your knowledge and understanding will grow, but in one go, not by a series of little steps.

On the other hand you may be the type of person who finds the logical approach of some people inefficient. Why don't they just go to the end of the problem and not waste time plodding around in the unimportant details? You could try to understand them by throwing a lot of doubt on your intuitive answers. If you are experiencing doubt then you may need to plod carefully and logically through all the aspects of the problem. Sometimes you really do need to put in a lot of effort to get to a solid and certain answer.

WHEN AND HOW MUCH SHOULD YOU LEARN?

All this thinking about things so you understand them to a reasonable degree is going to take time. When is it worth it to you to take the time to understand things? How much effort should you make? As usual this is up to you: you need to decide how much effort you are willing to make for the benefits that Memorizing More will bring.

Unfortunately you can't be an expert on all things - no one has that sort of time - so you will have to decide what areas are more important to you and spend your limited time studying those. For example, how to survive a fire may be an important thing to know, especially if you live in a fire-prone area. It may help you if you gain an understanding of smoke detectors and which ones work best.

When are you going to do all this studying? Probably it is best to do it in little steps each day, or a few times each week. If you set aside a little time to regularly work on understanding things then you will steadily work towards the knowledge that will make you happier and wiser in your life.

WHAT SHOULD YOU LEARN?

As we have just mentioned, you need to decide what areas are the most beneficial for you to study in your life. To help you in your thinking about this I have written some points below.

1. Basic_Survival_Skills

These can be vitally important for your life but have you considered them carefully? Do you believe that your life is safe and secure and you don't really need to consider basic survival skills? Are you sure that no unexpected event is going to threaten your future? Is there some area you may need to know more about?

What about your family - how safe are they? Will their future be bright? Are you doing the right things to help them achieve that?

You don't necessarily have to learn about surviving in the wild or how to make a fire from rubbing sticks together but maybe you need to know how to survive the dangers that occur in your normal environment. The city can be a kind of wild place too.

2. Difficult_People

How good are you at dealing with difficult people? Can you maintain your inner peace and happiness when you are dealing with them? Maybe you would benefit by studying some of the well-known techniques for dealing with difficult people while keeping your thoughts positive.

Also, how good are you at dealing with the non-difficult majority of people? Are you good at this or is there room for improvement?

Unfortunately there really are some difficult people out there and they can make trouble for you or spoil your peace of mind. Among other things wouldn't it be great if you had some basic tools for dealing with them? Rather than letting them make you their victim you could find your way out of these difficulties with dignity and honor.

3. Politics

What do you know about politics? Are you an expert on this or do you have at least some idea what it is about? Is understanding politics important to you in your life? Would it help you if you knew more about how it works?

If you were an expert on politics would you see it as a system in need of reform? Would you understand how it came to function as it does today? What potential might you see for its future?

The notorious book by Machiavelli called _The Prince_ was written in Italy in 1513 and describes some sinister techniques that the politician (or prince) can use to control other people to achieve their own ends. You don't necessarily have to read this but a glance at it might give you some idea about how politics may work, at least at its most manipulative level.

4. Finance

Do you know how the world of finance works? What are its principles and modes of operation? Do you know enough to be able to work with these successfully?

What is the best way to apply for a loan? What are the best investments? How can you prevent yourself from getting into trouble with your loans? When is it better to borrow and when is it not?

What about business? Do you need to understand how borrowing to run a business works? Do you need to study why so many small businesses fail in the first year and what can be done to help your business survive?

If you were more of an expert on finance would you pursue a safer or a riskier approach than you do now?

One expert on investing wrote that making money is not the hard part. The hard part is keeping it after you make it.

5. The_Law

How does the law work in your country? Is it for the benefit of the rich or the lawyers or can it genuinely be used to do what's right? How much do you know about this? Do you need to familiarize yourself with it, do you need to study more?

Two beggars were arguing over who owned an oyster. A lawyer came along and offered to help. He split the shell in two and gave one half to each of them and then swallowed the oyster. "What are you doing?" the beggars asked. "That was my fee," replied the lawyer.

6. Health

What is truly healthy and what is not? What do you think of the many claims about what is good and what is bad for us? Which of these are based on fact and which are exaggerated? Do you need to be better informed about health so you can make better decisions or do you already know enough?

How much exercise is necessary for good health? Which sports are good for you? Do you know how to keep yourself motivated to keep fit?

Have you got an illness? What is the best way to treat it? Who really knows the truth about your illness? Have you researched this enough to know whether your doctors are getting it right?

Some people say that health is the most important thing in our lives - if you've got your health you are wealthy.

7. Influencing_Techniques

When can you take what people tell you at face value and when should you be cautious?

Do you know the techniques that are used by professional advertisers to influence people? Have you studied the psychology they use?

Do you know the methods that politicians and other leaders can use when constructing their statements so they convey a particular point of view and make it sound like it is the only right one?

How might being an expert on influencing techniques help you in making safer decisions about what you see and hear?

A major work on advertising techniques was written in 1957 and was called _The Hidden Persuaders_. Among other things it warned that the message that really sells the product is hidden in the advertisement and is the need for acceptance by other people.

8. Wisdom_and_Happiness

This is the topic at the heart of this book.

How happy and wise do you think you've become reading this so far? How much more do you need to learn for your life?

Can you imagine what it would be like if your happiness and wisdom were increased?

For all the areas above you could do the simplest thing and Memorize Some More or you could make the great effort to achieve the most difficult and complex level and Become an Expert on Living Happily and Wisely. We will include Memorizing More as part of the powerful process in Chapter 9, "Bringing it all Together."

CONCLUSION

Memory is important. It plays a central role in your ability to think and to come up with the right answers. If you have good quality memories about the important areas then you will find it easier to live a happier and wiser life. If you make sure that you really understand the things you want to remember your memorizing will be effective and you will know about the things you have studied for many years to come.

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7. RECHECK YOUR OLD IDEAS

When we have improved our memory by increasing its stock of important information we will be in a better position for Rechecking Our Old Ideas. How well will the things we have known for some time stack up against our new and better knowledge?

What often happens when we hear new information is we add it to our memories but without realizing it keep our old ideas about the world and ourselves. It's like someone looking out at the world and thinking themselves quite young, yet when the world looks back it considers them quite old. How can we avoid this error and keep our thoughts up to date?

Sometimes we have to change our ideas as the old ones no longer work. At other times our old ideas hold us back from new ways to do and enjoy things. We may be comfortable with the past or feel that the new is too confronting, too difficult to bear. How can we more easily accept change and enjoy the benefits of the future?

RECHECKING OLD IDEAS

Our old ideas may be right, they may be perfectly in tune with the latest discoveries, or they may be okay for us even though not completely up to date. On the other hand, new information may have thrown our old ideas into doubt - if we don't take the trouble to look at the new information then how can we know when we are no longer right or are not living as well as we could?

The solution is to spend some time, when you are not too busy, Rechecking Your Old Ideas against the latest information or thoughts.

WHICH OLD IDEAS SHOULD YOU CHECK FIRST?

There are two sets of old ideas that you might like to check before looking at others. One is the ideas found in the eight areas discussed in the previous chapter, "Memorize More." Improvements in your ideas about basic survival skills, dealing with difficult people, the nature of politics, finance, the law, health, influencing techniques, and wisdom and happiness could be of great benefit to you. It could also benefit those around you, such as your family, friends, relatives, colleagues and community.

The second set of old ideas that you could check first are those related to your livelihood and the things that are important to you in your life.

HOW CAN YOU RECHECK YOUR OLD IDEAS?

What method can you use for Rechecking Your Old Ideas? One approach is to "mull over" your old ideas and compare them with the way the world really works, including checking them against the latest believable information.

"Mulling over" your old ideas is similar to daydreaming. You relax and go over the way your ideas have formed during your life and wonder how they might be changed to be more accurate and worthwhile. Is there something you have thought for some time that may be wrong or might need improvement? How would you know which idea was right and which was wrong? Isn't there some kind of blind spot that we all suffer from where our old ideas are concerned? Maybe we would prefer to believe in the things we have already put our faith in and not worry about updating them - is that possible?

As you mull over your old ideas you can start to wonder where they came from and why you believe them now. This is similar to what we were talking about in Chapter 3, "Go Inside and Know Yourself." If you drill back into your memory and find out what you used to think and the memories that these conclusions are based on then you will be that much more open to seeing the value of new ideas. Admittedly it requires some effort to study your old ideas and look for new ones, it can seem easier to stick with what has worked for you before. But in the long run, for the things that really matter in life, sticking with the old ideas may not be what's best for you.

It's up to you how much effort you are willing to make based on the benefits you can see in exploring the past and comparing it with the latest information, however, this is one area where it is difficult to see the benefit or even the problem with your old ideas because you currently look at the world this way. It is through your old understandings that you see the world and evaluate the impact of new ideas and information. Since you look from the past you may not see the benefit of the future - you may be unable to perceive what is right in front of you. To find the benefit you need to make the extra effort to open your eyes and see what you cannot see... that there may be grand and beautiful vistas out there if only you could step around the old wall of your past ideas and get a clear view.

CONCLUSION

At the simplest level you could just Recheck Your Old Ideas From Time to Time or you could try to achieve the most complex and difficult level and Thoroughly Audit Your Old Ideas Against the Latest Information. What do you think you might find?

In Chapter 9, "Bringing it all Together", we will add this to the powerful process that can help you to be happier and wiser at all times.

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8.MAKE PLANS AND MANAGE YOURSELF

After you have developed your skills in managing your emotions and improved your thinking and knowledge you will still need to choose your goals and decide what kind of person you want to be. To help you achieve this it is useful to think about and write down your goals in life. You can write down the goals you have for your whole life and also the ones for the medium and short term. Writing down your goals will help you focus on what you want to achieve in any situation. This will be incorporated into the powerful process in Chapter 9, "Bringing it all Together." You can also write down what kind of person you want to be. This will help you understand what you consider important in day-to-day life and keep control of the way you express yourself so you are satisfied with what you are doing. This will also be incorporated into the powerful process in Chapter 9.

MAKE GOALS AND PLANS

When you can set aside some time, think about your goals in life. Do you already have some idea what these are or will it require some thought? Think about them and write down what you find. There may be a range of goals so you will need to go through them and classify them according to their level of importance to you. Some goals will be vital and some less important. Use any classification method that makes sense to you. For example, you could classify your goals at the level of "A-vital", "B-reasonably important" and "C-not so important." After you have done this you might like to break up the "A" goals into the most vital through to the least, for example, if you had nine vital goals you might call the most vital "A-1" and the least vital "A-9."

There are many excellent books on making goals and setting priorities, such as _The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People_ by Steven Covey - you might like to study one of these to get more ideas about managing your time. In this chapter we will only look at a basic, high-level view of this topic in as much detail as is needed for achieving happiness and wisdom.

After you have set your goals you can then go about making plans on how to achieve them. What sort of things could you do to get to where you want to go? The things you have learned from "Ask an Expert" and "Think Again" can help you a lot here. As you did with your goals, after you have come up with a list of actions that could help achieve each goal you can then classify them based on their level of importance or effectiveness.

Apart from working out your specific goals and actions to achieve them you should also spend some time thinking about the kind of person you want to be. How do you want to conduct your life? You may have a goal to be famous, but famous in what way? Do you want to be ruthless in your approach to fame or do you want to be a kind and likable type of person? It's up to you to decide who you want to be, but if you don't consciously do this there is a risk that in the pursuit of your goals you will lose your way and start to act differently to what you would really like. You may even rate being a particular kind of person higher than any of the goals you have. For example, if you want to pursue a spiritual lifestyle, like a Buddhist monk or other type of spiritual person, then the way of your day-to-day living may be more valuable to you than any long-term goals. I wonder what kind of person you will choose to be.

When you have thought about and written down your various goals - long-term, mid-term and short-term, your selected actions or plans for achieving them, and who you want to be as a person then you will be in a good position for running your life happily and wisely.

CHECK PROGRESS TOWARDS YOUR GOALS

After you have made your plans you will need to check how well you are progressing with them from time to time. You might set aside a regular time each day or each week where you go over the most relevant actions and check how well you are executing them and moving towards your goals. You could also check how well you are going as a person in staying with who you want to be - are you living your life according to your ideals?

This regular checking of your progress and personal behavior will help you to keep on track - moving towards your goals. Without it you may find yourself wasting time on things that are not important to you. Or you may find your behavior drifting away from who you really want to be. Regular checking will help you avoid this.

CLASSIFY ACTIONS

Once you have written down your goals and plans you will be in a much better position for evaluating all the "calls for action" that come in each day. A "call for action" occurs whenever an event, person, thing, situation or thought triggers a need in you to take some sort of action. We are very much action beings and any call for action finds us ready to do something about it. We need to stop and compare this call for action with our goals and plans and who we want to be before we go ahead and do something about it. Some calls for action may not be all that important to us, if only we could see them in perspective when they arise.

One of the things you can do when a call for action comes in is to classify it against your goals, values and other important considerations, such as whether it could have any really bad effects on you or your life, or whether it could have some positive benefits. There are also the things you just have to do - there is no real choice but to carry out the action that is called for, such as stopping at a red light at a busy intersection.

When a call for action comes in you could classify it like this:

1. Effect on you:

a. Negative results to your important life areas or who you want to be as a person. For example, if you don't do what the boss asked you might lose your job.

b. Positive results to your important life areas or who you want to be. For example, if you do study to get this university degree you will be closer to achieving your goals.

c. Neutral/no significant results to your important life areas or who you want to be. (This may still have to be done.) For example, if you do take time to argue with this irritating person you will achieve nothing.

2. When action is needed: Immediately, Soon, Today, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, ..., Next Week, After Next Week, and so on. For example, you need to immediately stop at this red light but you can call your friend later in the week.

3. Action not needed immediately but could result in great benefits when done. For example, when you can take some time to improve your work processes this will reduce your effort in your job.

4. Quality level of action needed: Good Quality, Average, Light. For example, it may be worth driving well if your boss is in the car.

If you don't have time to go through all these steps then you could try to make a quick classification that suits the situation.

DISCARD UNNECESSARY ACTIONS

After you have classified the call for action you may find that it is already covered by your previous plans. Or you may find that your previous planned actions are not as effective as what you are being called on to do now. You can then discard the unnecessary action as it is just a duplicate or inferior to the one you are going to choose to do. There is no point in being drawn into actions that are inferior or a waste of your time.

Sometimes a short term action would be better addressed by your plans to do things in the long term that would overcome all the negatives and bring positive results for yourself. Is this short term action really necessary now - can you wait until the long-term plan is completed? Or will you have to carry out this short term action anyway, as your long-term plans do not cover this need yet?

ACT

Finally, after you have classified your calls for action and discarded the unnecessary ones, you will be left with some on which you need to act. Some of these will need to be done now and some will be able to be put off until later. For the ones that need to be done now, act on them according to the style that suits you and your goals.

Think of the type of person you want to be - how would you describe them when they are "in action"? If you can think of a description or word that stands for this type of person in action then that will be useful for guiding you in how to act. At first it may seem a little strange to you to be thinking of a word to guide your actions, normally you just go ahead and act, but this will help you to align your life with your true goals. If there is anything you are doing now that is not aligned with who you want to be then this word will help you to realign that to its proper place. Maybe you will choose more than one type of "actor word", or maybe you will aim to be the same in every situation.

UPDATE DIARY

Not all your selected actions will need to be done immediately. In fact this will not even make sense with some, such as celebrating someone's birthday or having lunch - these are things that have to be done at the appropriate time in the future. To keep track of the important actions that you will need to perform in the future it can be useful to put them in a diary or some sort of planner. You don't need to put all your selected calls for action into your diary, you only need to add the ones that you want to be sure of carrying out or that you are likely to forget.

A diary is not the only place you might want to write down things to act on - some people use a "To Do" list to keep track of their future actions. Also, sometimes you just need something like a shopping list, or some other type of list of things to be obtained or done. It's up to you to choose what type of diary, calendar, planner, list, note, reminder, alarm, or so on that suits your purpose.

CONCLUSION

These six simple self-management methods - make goals and plans and decide who you want to be, check progress toward your goals and who you want to be, classify calls for action, discard unnecessary calls for action, act in a style that suits your plans and who you want to be, and put future actions in a diary or list - can be extremely helpful in guiding your life towards happiness and wisdom. At the simplest level you could just Make Basic Plans and Manage Yourself From Time to Time, or you could try to achieve the most complex and difficult level and Thoroughly Plan and Manage Yourself. The six self-management methods will be incorporated into the powerful process in Chapter 9, "Bringing it all Together", which will ensure that you can achieve happiness and wisdom at all times.

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9. BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER (SEEK HAPPINESS WISELY AND WISDOM HAPPILY - PART TWO)

We have looked at some practical techniques we could use to become both happier and wiser, from the simplest and easiest through to the most complex and difficult. What can we learn from this - how could these be combined into a workable system that would make us happier and wiser at the level we need and for the effort we are willing to make?

In the next three sections we will look at the simple, intermediate and most difficult levels and combine all the practical techniques we have come up with into simple sayings that you can refer to often. After that I will describe a powerful process which you can follow so you can be happier and wiser at all times.

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER AT THE SIMPLEST LEVEL

At the simplest level the practical techniques for achieving happiness and wisdom were called: 1. "Seek Happiness Wisely and Wisdom Happily (at the simplest level)", 2. "Ask an Expert", 3. "Go Inside and See Something of Yourself", 4. "Calm Yourself and Increase Your Happiness From Time to Time", 5. "Know a Little About Thinking Skills", 6. "Memorize Some More", 7. "Recheck Your Old Ideas From Time to Time", and 8. "Make Basic Plans and Manage Yourself From Time to Time."

One way we could bring all these techniques together at the simplest level is to just write a long sentence that includes all the ideas: "Seek an okay level of happiness while making reasonably okay decisions by asking an expert when needed while having some idea of what lies within your own mind and keeping fairly calm and somewhat happy about it, doing some basic thinking from time to time, memorizing some of the information that seems useful to you, rechecking your own ideas from time to time against some of the information that is available to you, and making some plans and managing yourself from time to time."

That sentence is correct but it can be hard to remember. A method that can help is to have a short saying that you write down and carry with you and refer to often. Alternatively you could memorize the saying and make sure you think of it often. If you practice doing this you will find that over time you will automatically think of the saying when you need it. This will help you to focus on doing the things that lead to a happier and wiser life at the simplest level.

The short saying is:

Make Better Decisions and

Improve Your Happiness.

How does this saying work? It is based on the idea that all of the wisdom side of your efforts leads to better decisions and all of the feelings side leads to improvements in your level of happiness. What are the wisdom things? They are the "ideas side" of the simple techniques, such as 2. Ask an Expert - for good answers or information, 3. Go Inside and See Something of Yourself - in terms of why you think the things that you do, 5. Know a Little About Thinking Skills -- applied to your ideas, 6. Memorize Some More - of useful information along the lines of wisdom, 7. Recheck Your Ideas From Time to Time - to improve the ideas you have, and 8. Make Basic Plans and Manage Yourself From Time to Time - to guide your decisions and actions. These are the wisdom-related techniques that help you to _Make Better Decisions_.

The feeling things are: 2. Ask an Expert - about your feelings and how to improve them, 3. Go Inside and Know Something of Yourself - in terms of your feelings, both good and bad, 4. Calm Yourself and Increase Your Happiness From Time to Time \- the core feeling improvement technique, 5. Know a Little About Thinking Skills - applied to your feelings, 6. Memorize Some More - of the information that helps you with your feelings, and 7. Recheck Your Ideas From Time to Time - about why you feel the way you do. These techniques can help you to _Improve Your Happiness_.

Unlike the person who is not conscious of the need to seek happiness and wisdom, you could face a situation that bothers you by remembering that you need to _Make Better Decisions and Improve Your Happiness_. For example, you could Ask an Expert for good answers or information that would help you to solve your problem. Or you could Ask the Expert about your feelings and how to improve them. Either way you would be much better off than the person who is not really aware of what they are seeking. Such a person drifts along at the whim of their feelings and unexamined ideas - they know something is bothering them but they do not have a plan for what to do about it. With your simple saying and an awareness of happiness and wisdom techniques you will be a lot likelier to improve your life than they will.

At the simplest level, if you follow the techniques above you can expect in time to achieve an okay level of happiness while making reasonably okay decisions. If that doesn't sound like what you want then you will have to apply yourself to the more complex and difficult work needed to achieve a higher level of happiness and wisdom. This does not have to be at the highest level, instead you can aim for one of the intermediate levels of happiness and wisdom.

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER AT THE INTERMEDIATE LEVEL

At the simplest level there was just one set of practical techniques for achieving happiness and wisdom, but between the simple and the most complex levels there are many intermediate ones.

For example, between the simple level 2. "Ask an Expert" and the most complex "Be a Sage" there are intermediate levels like: "Have a Good Idea About", "Be an Informed Amateur", "Know Quite a Lot and Who to Ask", "Be Well-Informed and Know a Lot", and "Know What Really Matters."

Rather than attempt to describe all of the intermediate levels we will list the ones exactly in the middle of the simple and complex. For example, for 2. "Ask an Expert" we will list only: "Know Quite a Lot and Who to Ask." You can then compare the exact level you want to aim for with the simple, middle and most complex ones to see where it sits.

At the middle level the practical techniques for achieving happiness and wisdom are called: 1. "Seek Happiness Wisely and Wisdom Happily (at the intermediate level)", 2. "Know Quite a Lot and Who to Ask", 3. "Go Inside and Check What You Find", 4. "Calm Yourself and Increase Your Happiness to a Good Extent", "Be Accepting and Helpful Towards Your Emotions" and "Create Inner Serenity Often", 5. "Be Quite Good at Thinking Techniques", 6. "Be Quite Knowledgeable and Competent at Living Happily and Wisely", 7. "Recheck Your Old Ideas to a Reasonable Extent", and 8. "Make Plans and Manage Yourself to a Reasonable Extent."

When we bring all these techniques together into one sentence we get: "Seek an intermediate level of happiness while making reasonably good decisions by knowing quite a lot and who to ask when needed while having a good idea of what lies within your own mind and keeping quite calm and mostly happy about it by being accepting and helpful towards your feelings and reducing the frantic nature of your inner thoughts by often focusing your mind elsewhere, being quite skilled in using thinking techniques and also knowledgeable about how to live happily and wisely, fairly often rechecking your own ideas to a reasonable extent against new and existing information and making plans and managing yourself to a reasonable extent."

That sentence is correct but it can be hard to remember. A short saying that you can refer to or think of often so you focus on doing the things that lead to a happier and wiser life at the intermediate level is:

Make Good Decisions and

Increase Your Happiness.

Unlike people who are not fully informed about ways to seek happiness and wisdom, you could face a situation that bothers you by remembering that you need to _Make Good Decisions and Increase Your Happiness_. For example, you could Calm Yourself and Increase Your Happiness to a Good Extent by reminding yourself that it is your self-talk that guides your emotional responses to a situation. You could adjust your self-talk to some extent so that you feel better about the current issue. You would be much better off than the person who is not familiar with the impact of their self-talk on their feelings. With your intermediate level saying and a good knowledge of happiness and wisdom techniques you will find it straightforward to improve your life to a reasonable extent.

At the intermediate level, if you follow the techniques above you can expect in time to achieve a reasonable level of happiness while making quite good decisions. If that doesn't sound like what you want then you will have to apply yourself to the more complex and difficult work needed to achieve a higher level of happiness and wisdom. You can aim for either Extreme Happiness and Wisdom or a level above the middle one.

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER AT THE MOST COMPLEX AND DIFFICULT LEVEL

At the most complex level the practical techniques for achieving happiness and wisdom were called: 1. "Seek Happiness Wisely and Wisdom Happily (at the highest level)", 2. "Be a Sage", 3. "Be a Brilliant and Strict Auditor of Your Own Mind" and "Be an Experienced Psychologist", 4. "Achieve Ultimate Happiness", "Be a Kindly Old Grandparent to Your Own Feelings" and "Create Inner Serenity At All Times", 5. "Be a Thinking Acrobat (using Deliberate Creative Techniques)", 6. "Be an Expert on Living Happily and Wisely", 7. "Thoroughly Audit Your Old Ideas Against the Latest Information", and 8. "Thoroughly Plan and Manage Yourself." Is being at this extreme level your dream?

When we bring all these techniques together into one sentence we get: "Seek the highest level of happiness and make the very best decisions by knowing as much as a sage and which experts are worth consulting while having an exceptionally accurate understanding of what lies within your own and others minds and keeping extremely calm and generally happy about it by applying realistic, positive thoughts while guiding your emotions like a kindly old grandparent and reducing the frantic nature of your inner thoughts by constantly focusing your mind elsewhere - such as on the Here and Now, using deliberate thinking techniques with the skill of a mental acrobat and memorizing all the important available information that is related to living happily and wisely, frequently rechecking your own ideas against the latest information and making thorough plans and managing yourself well."

As with the previous levels, that sentence is correct but can be hard to remember. A short saying that you can refer to or think of often so you focus on doing the things that lead to a happier and wiser life at the complex level is:

Make Extremely Wise Decisions and

Achieve Extreme Happiness.

Unlike people who are not expert at the ways to seek happiness and wisdom you could face a situation that bothers you by remembering that you want to _Make Extremely Wise Decisions and Achieve Extreme Happiness_. For example, you could Use Deliberate Creative Thinking Techniques with the Skill of a Thinking Acrobat to generate new ways to solve a situation. Your clever new ideas would be much better than the unexamined thoughts of a person who is not practiced in thinking techniques. With your extreme saying and an excellent knowledge of happiness and wisdom techniques you will be able to improve your life to an amazing extent.

At the most complex level, if you follow the techniques above you can expect in time to achieve an extreme level of happiness while making near perfect decisions. If that is more than you want to try for then you can aim for a lower level of happiness and wisdom. On the other hand, if you want to make the effort then extreme happiness and wisdom could be yours.

JUST HOW MUCH EFFORT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT AND WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE TO DO?

To achieve Extreme Happiness and Wisdom you would need to make quite an effort. What would you have to do?

You would have to study and understand a lot of information about the things that are related to wisdom. This would need to be done for both the things and people in the world, and also for the things within your own mind. You would have to become a sage about the outside world and the inside world of your thoughts and feelings. You would have to become extremely wise.

This sounds hard and it is. Becoming an expert on wisdom is just as hard as becoming good at anything. Think of skateboard riding: it takes years of practice and many falls to become an expert skateboard rider and it is the same with the things in your own mind. Sometimes it seems that if you could slow things down and watch what some expert is doing then you could become an expert through that. This is like saying that if you could slow someone else's skateboard moves down and watch them carefully then you would become an expert skateboard rider. But the truth is that you will also have to spend a lot of time practicing and practicing at the real speed that you have to move in order to be good at your sport. You cannot become great just by watching a slow motion recording of how other riders do it, even though this may give you some pointers. You have to be a rider yourself, who has learned to move at the real speed that gravity, friction and the other forces demand. As it is with skateboards so it is with wisdom.

The reward for learning about skateboard riding and putting in a lot of practice is that the moves become easier and easier for you. You will be able to do most things almost automatically and seemingly without effort. So it is with happiness and wisdom. If you are willing to make the effort to learn and practice these things then one day you will be like the expert skateboard rider, making your spectacular happiness and wisdom moves with apparent ease. You won't even notice the effort yourself, just the exhilaration of doing wonderful things seemingly by magic. People may say it came easy to you but you will know better.

For those unwilling to make the effort and take the falls there will never be moments like this.

If you really want Extreme Happiness and Wisdom then if you work at the techniques we have examined in this book and keep practicing until you become an expert in all of them you will reap the rewards. To assist you in your quest I have developed a powerful process that will be explained now.

THE POWERFUL PROCESS

In the first chapter I gave you a rough overview of the powerful process that was going to be taught in this book. You have now learned enough for an accurate description to be given.

The first step is something you want to do as often as possible. Whenever you get a chance you should try to bring your mind closer to the alpha wave state by Creating Inner Serenity, as described in Chapter 4. "Calm Yourself and Increase Your Happiness."

FREQUENT BACKGROUND TASK - TO BE DONE AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE

1. Create Inner Serenity At All Times.

* You could imagine being like a BUDDHA, maintaining a calm, close to alpha wave state of mind.

The next set of steps is the things you could do when a situation, feeling or thought makes a "call for action" - asking you to do something.

FOREGROUND STEPS - TO BE DONE WHEN THERE IS A "CALL FOR ACTION"

1. Calm Your Emotions. (From Chapter 4. "Calm Yourself and Increase Your Happiness.")

* As with Create Inner Serenity At All Times, you could imagine being like a BUDDHA, maintaining a calm, close to alpha wave state of mind.

2. Gain Perspective - on the situation. (From Chapter 4. "Calm Yourself and Increase Your Happiness.")

* You could imagine climbing a tall TOWER and looking down on the situation, feeling or thought.

3. Broaden Your Perception - so you can observe all the clues. (From Chapter 5. "Think Again.")

* You could imagine climbing down from the tower and then looking widely at the PANORAMA of the whole situation that is before you.

4. Rapidly Think of Some Realistic Positive Points - about the situation. (From Chapter 4. "Calm Yourself and Increase Your Happiness.")

* Imagine quickly shining a tiny KEYLIGHT on a few parts of the situation, briefly looking for some realistic positive points.

5. Classify Actions - based on their importance and timing. (From Chapter 8. "Make Plans and Manage Yourself.")

* Imagine writing down the selected calls for action and then filing them in a FILING CABINET, based on their level of importance (top drawer, middle drawer, bottom drawer), danger or benefit to you (or lack of interest), when action is needed (now, soon, later), relationship to your goals and who you want to be, and so on.

6. Discard Unnecessary Actions. (From Chapter 8. "Make Plans and Manage Yourself.")

* Imagine that when you are filing you find that the new action is already covered, or an action in the files is not as good as the new one. Imagine putting the unnecessary document through the SHREDDER.

7. Act - on selected immediate actions. (From Chapter 8. "Make Plans and Manage Yourself.")

* Some actions will need to be done immediately. Think of the type of person you would like to be - how would you describe them when they were "in action"? Choose a word that reflects this, such as ACTOR, WORKER, DANCER, WARRIOR, or whatever works for you to remind you of who you want to be as a person when you are carrying out an action. Now carry out the action in the right way for you.

8. Update Diary - putting other selected actions in your diary or a list, if needed. (From Chapter 8. "Make Plans and Manage Yourself.")

* Some actions will need to be done later. If you need to be sure of remembering them, write them in a DIARY, or a calendar, list, planner or whatever works for you.

These are all the steps you could go through when there is a call for action. You won't need to do all of them all the time. You will find that in many cases you realize you can stop going through the steps as the action is not really needed, or it is obvious what you want to do. As long as you respond to each call for action by starting at step 1 and then go through the rest in the correct order you will find yourself acting with happiness and wisdom at all times.

The next set of tasks is the things you should do when you can find the time and you think they will help you to improve yourself and your abilities.

BACKGROUND TASKS - TO BE DONE AS NECESSARY, WHEN YOU CAN

1. Learn - things that contribute to your happiness and wisdom. (From Chapter 2. "Ask an Expert" and Chapter 6. "Memorize More.")

* When you have time you can act as a SCHOLAR and study and memorize the things that will contribute to your own happiness and wisdom. This will enable you to better deal with situations and also make happier and wiser decisions in your life.

2. Learn About Yourself. (From Chapter 3. "Go Inside" and Chapter 7. "Recheck Your Old Ideas.")

* Study yourself - why you think the things that you do, where your ideas came from - like a SELF-AUDITOR, PSYCHOLOGIST OR ANALYST.

3. Recheck Your Old Ideas. (From Chapter 7. "Recheck Your Old Ideas.")

* Recheck your old ideas against the latest information, like a CHECKER or QUALITY ASSURANCE OFFICER.

4. Think Again. (From Chapter 5. "Think Again.")

* Spend some time using Deliberative Creative Techniques, acting like a THINKING ACROBAT as you skillfully create new ideas.

5. Make Goals and Plans. (From Chapter 8. "Make Plans and Manage Yourself.")

* Spend some time working out your goals and who you want to be. Then like a PLANNER (or ARCHITECT, PROJECT MANAGER or LEADER) make plans on how you want to achieve these.

6. Check Progress Towards Your Goals. (From Chapter 8. "Make Plans and Manage Yourself.")

* Like a PROJECT MANAGER, check what you are doing in your life so you can keep perspective and keep moving towards your goals or who you want to be.

Apart from the background task that you should do as often as possible, Create Inner Serenity At All Times, the above six tasks can be done when you are not too busy with assessing calls for action or doing things. If you take the trouble to perform some of these from time to time then you will benefit from the improvements that building up your knowledge and skills can bring. It pays to improve your knowledge of things that contribute to your happiness and wisdom, develop new ideas, make goals and plans, learn about yourself, recheck your old ideas, and check your progress towards your goals and who you want to be. If you put in the effort then you will reap the rewards.

HELPING YOU REMEMBER THE POWERFUL PROCESS

It can be a bit overwhelming at first to try to remember all these steps and carry them out so I have written a story to help you.

The best way to memorize something is to understand how it really works, as seen in Chapter 6. "Memorize More." This story is designed to help you to understand the powerful process. Read it carefully and as many times as necessary until you fully understand what it is saying and then practice the steps until you always do them. The benefits are enormous.

THE STORY

When something presents itself to you and "calls for action" you are going to have to decide, sometimes quickly, whether to do something about it.

Calls for action can cause strong emotional reactions, so the first thing you have to do if you are going to be able to think clearly is to Calm Yourself. Imagine a BUDDHA becoming calm as he detaches from the situation and moves his mind towards alpha waves.

Once your emotions are under control you will be able to think more clearly, but what should you think about first? The critical thing is not to lose sight of your objectives and who you want to be, otherwise you could be wasting your time on trivial or non-productive activities, so you try to Gain Perspective on the situation, as if you were ascending a huge TOWER and looking down on what is happening far below.

If you still believe it is worth thinking about the call for action then you will need to know enough to be able to draw a good conclusion about it. The first thing you can do to improve your thinking is to Broaden Your Perception so you can take in all the clues or evidence that you can see, hear or perceive by looking at the PANORAMA that is available now.

If after looking at this you still feel that it is worth going on then you may find that you have some negative reactions distracting you. It can be helpful here to briefly look for some realistic positive points about the situation, like shining a small KEYLIGHT to illuminate a few bright points.

Now you are ready to do some thinking about the call for action and classify it. If you use some simple categories every time to classify calls for action then you will be able to quickly put them in their place. You can classify calls for action according to categories like (1) negative consequences if you don't act; (2) positive consequences if you do act; (3) neutral outcomes; (4) when action is needed - now, soon, later, etc.; (5) relationship to your goals and who you want to be; (6) quality level of action needed - good, average, light; (7) any other category that is important to you. This categorizing is like filing the calls for action in a FILING CABINET.

The classification will have helped you in deciding what is worth doing and also what must be done. You may have noticed that some of the actions that are worth doing or must be done are already covered by other plans you have made or other things you are already doing. There is no need to do both things so you can discard the calls for action that are less important or useful. This is like pulling out papers from your filing cabinet and putting them through a SHREDDER.

Some of the calls for action that you have chosen to do will need immediate action. It's time to act on these now, similar to an ACTOR, WORKER, DANCER, WARRIOR or whatever meaningful word you have chosen that describes the type of person you want to be when you are "in action."

Some of the calls for action that you have chosen won't need action until some time in the future. It can be worth writing down some of these in a DIARY, To Do list, shopping list, phone reminder, or whatever makes sense for your life. Obviously not everything needs to be written down, but for some things it is wiser to write them down or store them so you make sure you do them at the right time.

Think carefully about the story above. Make sure you understand it so that it is clear to you why these steps make sense. You may find it helpful to visualize each step above in terms of the memorable images for: BUDDHA, then TOWER, then PANORAMA, then KEYLIGHT, then FILING CABINET, then SHREDDER, then ACTOR (or WORKER, DANCER, WARRIOR or word you chose), then DIARY. Can you picture action being taken with each one of these? A situation presents itself to you, calling for action, and your emotions immediately kick in, telling you what to do, but you promptly remind yourself to act like a BUDDHA towards them and calm yourself. Realizing that you need to get perspective on the situation you climb a TOWER so you can see from above. You look over the situation in relation to your goals and your life and see where it fits. Climbing down the tower you decide to look at the situation further and you look widely at what is presenting itself to you in the PANORAMA. This helps you to see more of the clues related to this situation which allows you to form better ideas about what could be done. Some aspects of what you have seen make you feel bad or uneasy so you take your key-ring out of your pocket and shine a little KEYLIGHT on the situation, briefly looking for small realistic positive points. You spot some of these and this makes you feel a little better. You are ready to be able to classify the call for action according to the categories written on the folders in your FILING CABINET, so you take the call for action and put it in the appropriate file according to things like your life goals, who you want to be, and the possible impacts or benefits it could have on your life. During your filing you find that there are already documents in the files that are related to the new document you are filing. You check the related documents and either take out the unnecessary ones or the one you are holding and put them through the SHREDDER. Satisfied with your filing you realize that some calls for action need to be done immediately, so you act on those, doing what is typical for you, either the ACTOR, WORKER, DANCER, WARRIOR or other type that represents who you are or want to be. You realize that not all calls for action need to be done immediately so you write down the important ones in your DIARY, or other list. You are sure you will remember to do the ones you do not need to write down. The next call for action comes in and you start the process again: BUDDHA, TOWER, PANORAMA, KEYLIGHT, FILING CABINET, SHREDDER, ACTOR, DIARY.

These are the eight steps that I recommend you go through to be assured of achieving happiness and wisdom when a call for action presents itself to you. Now obviously you don't need to complete all eight steps all the time, because as you go through them you may realize that the call for action can be ignored or doesn't really matter to you. Or it may already be covered by other things you are doing. Treat this practically and stop right there. You can ignore the rest of the steps and move on to the next thing in your life. On the other hand, if you don't start from the top with BUDDHA then you may quickly find yourself lost and not acting happily and wisely. The steps of the powerful process will help you here. Each time you use them your life will become better and better and you will find yourself acting happily and wisely.

HELPING YOU REMEMBER THE BACKGROUND TASKS

The steps above are the ones you can use when a call for action presents itself to you, either in the outside world or in your own mind, but to achieve the ultimate in happiness and wisdom you will also need to do other things. These things are known as the "Background Tasks", which you do either at regular times or when you get a chance.

The background tasks are designed to build up your strengths in happiness and wisdom so you are more able to achieve Extreme Happiness and Wisdom at all times. They include activities to build up your happiness and to build up your wisdom. When a call for action comes you will be ready to deal with it.

To build up your happiness the single-most important thing you can do is to Create Inner Serenity as often as possible. That way your mind will be closer to the alpha wave state and it will be more difficult for a call for action to move it towards the unpleasant, frantic, high-beta wave state. Also, you will feel better all the time that you are creating the inner serenity. If you want to be happier then this is the background task you should be doing as often as possible, while still going about your daily business. You should be aiming for this BUDDHA state as often as you can.

What else could you be doing in the background to increase your happiness and wisdom? The main things are to improve your knowledge, thoughts and plans. You can improve your knowledge by acting like a SCHOLAR and studying things that are useful to you, especially things related to your own happiness and wisdom. You can also improve your knowledge by checking what is already in your own mind, acting like a SELF-AUDITOR (or PSYCHOLOGIST or ANALYST) of your own thoughts and what they are based on. Over time you will build up an understanding of yourself that will help you to remove old, unhelpful ideas and also give you relief from the disturbing thoughts of the past. Understanding will bring you peace. Finally you can act like a CHECKER or QUALITY ASSURANCE OFFICER and consciously recheck your old ideas against the latest information to see if they still make sense. Maybe new knowledge has changed what you used to think was true.

You can also improve your thoughts by acting like a THINKING ACROBAT and using Deliberate Creative Techniques to generate new ideas. Who knows what useful ideas you may find?

Finally, you can improve your plans by acting like a PLANNER (or ARCHITECT, PROJECT MANAGER or LEADER) and making deliberate plans for your future so you can achieve your goals. Maybe your goal is to be a particular kind of person right now, or maybe you have long-term plans for your life - if you write these down it will help you to focus on what you want to do with your time. Also, from time to time you should act like a PROJECT MANAGER and check your progress towards your goals. Are you doing the things that are important to you for achieving your goals? Or are you wasting your time on activities that are not really important to you?

Working in the background are these seven tasks: BUDDHA, SCHOLAR, SELF-AUDITOR, CHECKER, THINKING ACROBAT, PLANNER and PROJECT MANAGER. To improve your feelings you should do BUDDHA as often as possible. When a call for action comes in this is also the first of the eight steps you would go through in the foreground to decide what to do. To improve your knowledge you could schedule some time or just do the SCHOLAR, AUDITOR and CHECKER tasks when you can or you think you need to. To improve your thoughts you could add it to your schedule to act like a THINKING ACROBAT, or just do this from time to time or as needed. To improve your plans for the future or ability to keep to who you want to be you could act like a PLANNER and PROJECT MANAGER when needed.

These background tasks will help you to be happier and wiser according to the amount of effort you are willing to put into them. Don't forget them and they will not forget you!

Achieving Extreme Happiness and Wisdom requires effort, but the powerful process will make this easier for you. If you take the time to understand and memorize the story that helps you remember the eight foreground steps, and then make sure to try these out, you will quickly notice the benefits. As you practice these steps and use them for all calls for action your happiness and wisdom will increase. If you then make the effort to work on the background tasks you will reap even more rewards. Finally, if you work continuously to practice the background task of Creating Inner Serenity At All Times then your emotional state will get better and better. Make sure you implement the powerful process and Extreme Happiness and Wisdom will be yours.

~~~~

THANKS FOR SHARING THE JOURNEY

Thanks for reading this book. I hope it has been interesting and of use to you. We have talked about a lot and covered many areas, including a range of ways to be happier and wiser, from the simple to the complex, from the easy to the difficult.

Think about what you have read and choose the things that you believe can help you in your life. Practice them and see what happens. Experiment with the techniques and take note of the results. It might surprise you how easy something is or how powerful. You might be inspired to try using more of the techniques or go further with the ones that worked for you.

Maybe you will be able to think of new ways to apply the techniques that worked for you. You might be able to adapt them to suit yourself better or to more easily achieve the outcomes that you desire.

Even the techniques that you didn't like or thought would not be of much use to you might be able to be experimented with and developed until they suit you and work for you. It could be worth a try. You never know what benefits you may gain.

I WISH YOU EVERY SUCCESS FOR THE FUTURE

The answer to the problem of living the best possible life is wisdom. I hope I have done a good job of showing that to you and you have come to agree with me over the course of this book.

Wisdom is the way to happiness and a good life. You may add techniques to that, but without wisdom they will never work as well. There are no guarantees if you are not wise.

How much wisdom? How much happiness? That is up to you. You have seen the levels of wisdom you can use, from the simple and straightforward through to the more complex and difficult. It's up to you which levels you choose to apply. I wish you good luck with this.

People across the whole world and throughout the ages have cried out for the answer on how to be happy and live the best possible life. Now you have some of this in your grasp. Maybe you don't have all the answers for all time, we don't know what will be discovered or thought of in the future, but you have the best that I could give you after over thirty years of study and work. Together we have explored the knowledge that is available today and thought about what we can discover in our own minds. We have come a long way together and I wish you every success in finding the best possible life for yourself and living it in happiness and wisdom for as long as you can.

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### ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Geoff Pridham has been seeking the answers to leading the best possible life ever since he first asked the question in 1976: "Why do we believe the things that we do?" Since then he has made it his mission to find out what really matters and how we can live happier and wiser lives. He has left no stone unturned in his quest for this knowledge - studying philosophy, psychology, biology, religion, art, history, science, lateral thinking and any other field that could help us find the truth about life.

After more than 30 years of work Geoff says: "We have a lot to learn about our true place in the universe, but with a practical and realistic approach we really can lead happier and wiser lives. It's not about academic theories but the things that real life teaches us. Anyone who is sincere can take the journey to a better life."

Geoff works as an IT professional and lives happily in Sydney, Australia with his lovely wife.

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