The Declaration of Independence of the USA has within it an imbalanced priority, which no one is talking about. We have all fallen into the trap, and yet most people still don’t know that it even exists.
It touches almost every aspect of our lives. It could be driving our actions right this minute.
Do you know what it is?
“Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Did you catch that? We were fed a belief, passed on from the year 1792.
We were programmed to believe that we are to pursue happiness.
Have you considered ask ‘why’? Because happiness ‘feels good’? So does heroin, why not pursue that? In fact, a lot of people do pursue heroin as a means of pursuing happiness. This is all part of the game we have been indoctrinated into playing, unnecessarily.
If you take a look at the ‘happiest’ people in the world, they all have one thing in common: they aren’t afraid to be sad. The greater our capacity for sadness, the greater our capacity for happiness. Happiness is positive, sadness is negative. Together, they create balance.
Would you rather be happy, or balanced? It can be a confusing question for a lot of people. Do we need to choose one? If we pursue positive happiness, negative sadness will sneak up on us unconsciously when we least expect it. Our life will naturally neutralize itself. This is very similar to the physical process of ‘entropy’ – nature naturally moves toward neutrality. For every up there is a down.
It’s within our power to create balance on purpose. How can we do this? We can take responsibility for the way we think.
If we are feeling excited about possibilities, we are generally employing creative thinking. Creative thinkers tend to feel child-like, and tend to be happy. They also tend to achieve less because creativity is not a highly motivating force.
If we tend to feel negative, we tend to employ realistic thinking. Realistic thinking is a highly motivated force which tends to achieve greater results: security, effectiveness, and sacrifice. Realistic thinking does not acknowledge an abundance of possibilities, however, and therefore can turn out to be shallow, boring, and tedious.
It is up to us to create true balance by employing True Participation in our thoughts. We have the ability to bring in a bit of reductionist, masculine, realistic, imposing (+) thinking when our liberating, creative (-) thinking gets out of control. We have the ability to bring in a bit of big picture, feminine, relaxed, creative thinking (-) when our protective, safety oriented, realistic, defining (+) thinking gets out of control. If we’re stressed – we can stand to have a little more fun. If we’re having a ton of fun, it might make sense to employ a bit more self-discipline. Together, this creates balance.
This is of course not to say that it’s wrong to want to feel happy. There’s no use in trying to unwant something that we want. The need for balance is simply a reminder that very often in order to feel happy, we must first feel sad on purpose. First thing is first. We can’t get to step 2 until we’re done with step 1. Sadness is an extremely useful emotion, telling us what isn’t working in our lives and helping us understand how we’re connected to all of humanity. Sadness is simply the negative polarity of deep love. When sadness becomes depression, this is simply an indicator that we are resisting our own sadness – we are judging our own awakening humanity and love, whether consciously or unconsciously.
An alternate title for this image could be “Types of Love”
Life is intended to give us the experience of exploring: realizing what we and what we are not. Happiness indicates what we are, sadness indicated what we are not. When a tragedy occurs, it makes us sad, because we know intuitively that we as a species can do better for each other. We can make changes. We are not imprisoned. We can do something about it. When something great happens, we intuitively feel a YES! This is what we are. This is what life for. We are finding ourselves. Together, these polarities create what is called love. Love is not an emotion – it is what we are, and it is expressed through every level of emotion along the way, as seen in the image above.
So if we achieve true neutrality, why would we do anything? We are designed to create. Humans are creators. Just as a tree creates leaves and branches, we create computers and rock concerts. Just as a wolf creates packs, and bees create honey, humans have the unique drive of create experiences through which they can better understand themselves. Our gift (+) and curse (-) of this time in human evolution is to experience a level of realness beyond what any human has ever experienced before. This is the cosmic joke – and by choosing to laugh about how incredibly painful it all is – or by choosing to cry about how beautiful it all is – over time we are creating balance.
If you are reading this – you probably want to achieve more more balance in either your personal life, your business life or both. Whether you need to create more realistic thinking or more creative thinking, True Participation has powerful tools to help achieve this transformation toward balance. Please see our Store for all of our latest offerings, and share with the people you care about.
