When someone goes through some hard times or aspires for a goal so big that it makes them doubt whether they have what it takes to achieve it, we tend to encourage them by saying, “be strong”, or “trust yourself”. Faced with similar circumstances, we may say the same words to ourselves and even write them down as an affirmation to repeat to ourselves with the hope it would come true and raise our level of confidence in some way.

It often goes without saying that much of the things we say to ourselves and to each other, even in simple ways such as the greetings we exchange, are only words and gestures, and superficial symbols of what we really intend to express to each other. Their meanings are often implied, and this causes communication between people to often be unreliable as a result of its ambiguity. This diminishes our reliance on communication as a means to share our thoughts and our world with each other. Diminished reliance on communication is what causes men and women of very high stature, proponents of good will and peace who are often very educated and knowledgeable, to resort to brute force as a way to deal with matters of co-existence among people.

The inability to communicate, even among people who have all the necessary means to, is a result of a diminished ability to embrace personal truth. It often shows itself as an acting out of other people’s expectations of us while supressing our inner truth; a truth which we only feel free to express whenever we believe the spotlight of attention has moved away from us. We then hear people saying one thing in public, and then something else different when they are in their spaces, in the confidence of their close friends, contradicting what everyone knows them to publicly stand for. This dissonance is at the centre of our politics, business, and religion, while its roots are in the greater society, from where politicians, religious and business leaders emanate.

Dissonance of any kind creates inconsistency in our communication with others, which in turn diminishes reliance on the message and even trust, because any form of trust in a relationship is made possible by what we know about the one we are relating to, and that knowledge comes from communication. We cannot sustain trust without firstly establishing whether we are working towards the same goal with the one we are choosing to trust.

For others to trust us, we firstly need to trust ourselves by trusting our own truth. To trust who we are comes by firstly knowing who this self is that we are referring to. We are all one people, and we are one with all things in existence, including those that we think we are not one with. Each of us is a splinter of the oneness of existence, expressed as an individual form that each of us assumes, whether a person, animal, bacteria, or an atom, among others.

There is no power that is in any person that is not already in any other, and that makes us all the same in our potential to realise any form of happiness in existence. The differences we see among people are only those of outward appearance, based on the unique situations of space and time in which each of us lives. The different skills and decisions that each person exhibits in life, which also make us look different, are a result of how we each respond to these unique circumstances of our lives, while in our essence we remain the same.

The only way to recognise anything is to firstly have its picture in our minds, the same way we may wonder in our minds how many red cars are on the road, and then begin to be more aware of red cars on the road than any other colour we are not specifically looking for. What makes each person happy can only be defined by themselves, in their minds, because happiness happens in the circumstances of life, and it could only be realised personally through the direct use of our bodies and minds. It is only the person who defines their happiness in some specific way who would know its form, as well as determine when it has been realised.

To trust ourselves is to understand happiness from our own perspectives, more than trying to understanding it from that of another, since we would not know the motivations behind their definition of happiness. In any situation of life that we share with others, we need to trust them to define and pursue happiness in their own ways while also trusting ourselves to define and pursue happiness according to what is best for us, for the broader circumstances of each one of us. We can do that when we embrace our equality – in the world that provides all its resources for the sustenance of all who are born into it – to live and to let live.

Each person’s primary purpose in life is to be happy, and to realise this happiness in each situation of their lives, according to how they have defined it for themselves, as well as through their own sense perceptions, the body, and the choices of their minds. The ability of represent our best interests in each shared situation creates a state where we could truly establish our needs in comparison with those on others and to then find more meaningful ways of helping each other, instead of entering a relationship when our personal needs are not known, possibly even to ourselves.

When we perceive our circumstances from the perspective of another person instead of ours, we then look for the happiness they are looking for in it, and not our own. The other persons happiness in that situation may not be realisable while ours may be. Our participation in a situation may then become unhappy when we cannot find happiness according to how another person has defined it for themselves, even when it may be there according to our own definitions, and we are unaware of it because we have not yet begun to perceive it from that point of view.

Anything that we spend more time and effort focusing on becomes more real to us than the things we choose not to focus on. The more we look at our own lives from other people’s perspectives and not our own, the more we are likely to see other people succeed in their pursuit of happiness while seeing less success for ourselves, a point at which we may begin to believe they have more opportunities than we have, better abilities, more luck and maybe are even more favoured by God or the ancestors than we do. Such thoughts are a breeding ground for all our perceptions of inequality, and the scarcity that it creates, which we then try to eliminate by dispossessing others.

All beliefs in scarcity, from which feelings of envy, jealousy, unworthiness, and inequality emanate, are a failure to realise that the only inequality that exist is that of focus, where the needs of other people get both their own attention and ours, while there is no one who is giving attention to our own needs, which makes the failure of another to realise their own aspiration becomes our own failure, simply because we believe more in how they define their own happiness than how we define our own, even when their happiness may not necessarily be our own.

All the causes of worry that ever develop in our minds are a result of holding on to perspectives that are not our own, and over which we have no control. Whenever you find yourself having many unempowering thoughts in your mind regarding yourself, another person or situation, always ask yourself, “whose point of view am I assuming right now?” and then immediately, reset your mind by deciding what you want the purpose of your thinking to be – its end result – and begin to see your thoughts only from the perspective of how they serve the goal you have set yourself for them.