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God is the being that would exist if all the physical and non-physical parts of existence were to be brought together into one. At the specific place where each and every single part of existence is located, over space and time, each one of them has in it the essence of God. The essence of God is eternal peace; eternal because in the oneness of all things, each thing can be found to exist in all other things and for that reason it has no end; and peace – because the oneness of each part of creation with all others means it is in harmony with them, since it is of the same nature as them. This essence of God is thus distributed by creation over time and space into being everyone and everything that we have ever known; everything that could ever be imagined or perceived. We are – each of us – God being who we are in the different situations in which we live.
Happiness is the purpose of life. It is the harmony that comes when we recognise someone or something to be of the same kind as us. It is the highest value that any person or thing could aspire for in all existence, and for that reason, the primary purpose of all life. All life is one, the same way that a human being is one with all the different parts and functions of their body. The purpose of all our body parts and their functions is to work towards the same goal of keeping us alive, even though they are different in form and in their functions.
Universally in their oneness all things in existence are one and the same, whereas situationally in their distributed form they seem apart and different. Regardless of the differences in their situations, the universal essence of eternal peace makes them all one. At a situational level, we regard this peace as happiness because it is the harmony that comes with recognizing different aspects of creation as being one. In its essence, life is all bound together by peace, which in our separate situations is referred to as happiness. We sustain our lives by finding this happiness in all the various situations of our lives, in all the ways we can, and in that way, we live up to the purpose of life.
Meaning is a measure of relevance to purpose and so, the meaning of life is the extent to which we could find happiness in anything that we do in it, within our minds and bodies, with any person, at any place and within any situation in life.
Happiness is the primary purpose of life, and we experience it whenever we encounter anyone whom we regard as having a similar purpose as us. To suffer is to be in a state of delayed happiness where we have not yet established our similarity of purpose with the one we are encountering. In that state, we are not yet living up to our purpose of happiness in that situation.
Our primary reality as people is in our minds, where we give meaning to all our encounters, whether physical or non-physical. We give meaning to the people, things and places that we ever come across, and in that way we determine whatever we want our experience to be with them.
The moment we believe the happiness of our interactions with them comes from whoever or whatever we are interacting with, instead of it coming from the meaning in our minds that we are giving to them, that’s when we begin to suffer. We suffer because externalize the source of our happiness instead of keeping it within and making it available all the time. When we externalize it, we then expect happiness to be available only when something happens, or someone does something, and if nothing happens and no one does anything, we become helplessly unhappy.
Every person has different perspectives (or meanings) of any one thing they think about. Some of these meanings are more empowering while some are less so. Ultimately, our action and how we interact with anything at all, depends on the most empowering meaning that we may find among all the different meanings we have of it. If, of all the meanings we have, we believe driving a car is dangerous, we would then interact with a moving car according to how we believe we would prevent it from harming us or someone else, and when we arrive safely at our destination, the happiness we experience would not necessarily be provided by the car, but by what we were able to achieve using it. Whatever we want to achieve in any situation, through any means, is happiness, and that goal is set in the mind before it could be seen to be achieved through any means.
Morality is about good things and bad things; things that we find helpful in certain situations, and those that delay our happiness in certain situations. Some things delay our happiness only a little. However, they still fall under bad things but because of their minor impact, we may use softer language to refer to them, such as calling them snags, glitches or setbacks. Some things delay our happiness on a greater scale, and we may refer to them as disasters, catastrophes or calamities. We use the word ‘Evil” to refer to something that exacts an extreme delay or disruption to our happiness. It is not a quality of the thing we are referring to, since the same thing could still be used in another situation where it would bring a different result, but only a term used to express the magnitude of its interruption on our happiness at that time.
When these extreme delays continue to cause our suffering, we may begin to think someone else, outside of ourselves, the evil devil, is responsible for them. Because we believe this attack to be from outside of ourselves, we then seek help from someone whom we believe is also outside of ourselves – we make an appeal to God. Before long, we perceive the threats to our lives to be from outside of ourselves and our salvation to also be possible only from outside. All this while being forgetful that if being hit by a car on the main road would be an act of evil or even a calamity, the ability to wait by the roadside until we could safely cross the road when it is all clear is always within us, because within us are all that we will ever need to be happy – our own salvation.
Suffering is not bad if we could at least, use it as a means to happiness or at most, transmute it into happiness. To stay home and study while we could go out to party with friends could be regarded as a form of suffering. To exercise hard and cause pain to our muscles in preparation for a marathon could equally be regarded as suffering. However, the moment we perceive that suffering as happiness itself, that is when we perceive meaning in it and transmute it into being one of the possibilities of being happy.
Noone knows God except only for who or what we each believe God to be. In general, the totality of our reality is comprised of ourselves as individuals; other people and things in our environment, and God, whom we generally regard as a separate being who is the source of us and all who are in our environment. Any problem in our lives would then emanate from one of those three environments.
God could be the cause of our suffering if we know who God is and are able to see God’s hand in the creation of our suffering. This would also apply if we thought someone else is causing our problem and were able to see in what way they are doing that and maybe even ask them to stop. Without the ability to perceive the cause-and-effect relationships involved in the creation of our problems, false conclusions , and even accusations, are possible.
However, any type of problem or of happiness that we experience is always defined within each person by whatever values we set for ourselves. Each person has the power to define their own problems values differently, and even to eliminate them by ceasing to regard them as such, giving each person the power to create or resolve problems from the only place where they have control, within themselves.
Yes. By attributing our suffering to causes that are outside of ourselves, and beyond our perceptions and control, all while ignoring the ways in which we are the root cause of our own suffering. Our suffering is then perpetuated by not beginning to address our problems from their primary cause, within us, as we continue to expect the solution to be outside.
In each situation the means to realise happiness may be readily available and easy to use, causing our happiness to be instant; whereas it may be difficult to be happy in some situations because the means may not be as readily available. We refer to the means that make our happiness instant as being good because they remove any delay to it, whilst regarding the difficult means to be bad because they delay our happiness. Everything is good, and nothing is bad in itself, but only in how we perceive its helpfulness to the happiness we seek to pursue in a specific situation.
Every person is good, and no one is bad in themselves, except only for the extent to which we find them helpful in our pursuit of a particular form of happiness. That is why even our worst enemies could still be good friends with other people who consider them to be good, since being bad is situational.
Choice makes people act differently in the different situations of life. This is because in our pursuit of happiness, we require different situations, means and people to help us achieve specific forms of happiness. The means that we find useful for realising one form of happiness may not be efficient for achieving another. In that way means continue to switch between relevance and irrelevance as we move from situation to another.
Whenever we suffer and believe someone is bad, it is not them who are bad, but us choosing to use a means to happiness which at that time is too difficult or not readily available to us. We think they are bad because we made a bad decision regarding how to be happy in that situation.
We only suffer whenever our happiness in a specific situation is delayed. The suffering often comes by way of being defensive; frustrations and angry, among other things, and is caused by the fear that we may not be able to live up to our purpose of happiness in that situation.
We are not meant to suffer. What we need to do to stop any suffering is to correct our decision on how best to be happy in any situation. The most efficient way to be happy in any situation is in knowing that our minds are our primary source of happiness by which we could decide on what meaning to attach to anything, or what means of happiness to focus our attention on at any moment for our happiness to begin to flow, until such time that even the means that are not yet efficient to our happiness also begin to be more helpful.
The reason we continue to live is because we choose to live, hence we do all that we consider to be necessary to sustain our lives. When we are happy in life our will to continue to live is inspired, and we choose to continue to live. We can only choose to live when we are confident of our ability to live up to life’s purpose. To continue to live is to use this confidence as a means to finding more happiness in the endless situations of our lives.
Our happiness in life is the only measure of our success in it, because happiness is the primary purpose for life. To be motivated to do whatever is necessary to sustain our lives, we need to believe that we have whatever it would take for us to continue to be happy in life.
One may be in a current state of unhappiness due to problems in some area of their lives. Their unhappiness would, however, be limited to only that part, since in other parts there would be the happiness brought by the fact that some of the problems they had in the past would have already been resolved. It is unfortunate that sometimes we may get too focused on the problem situation and fail to see happiness in the broader areas of our lives. Whenever we believe we can no longer make ourselves happy, not only in one situation but in all of them, we tend to consider our lives to be meaningless, and to question why we live. When we lose confidences in our ability to continue to make ourselves happy in life, we become frustrated and depressed, a state in which our will to sustain our lives is diminished. This is the state of mind that may cause one to give up on life.
The greatest benefit we could ever derive from our relationships with others, family and friends, is in how we could help strengthen each other’s continued will to sustain themselves and live by ever making each other aware of the various ways in which happiness in life is still possible and developing each other’s confidence in the ability to realise this happiness for ourselves – to live and to help to live.
No. Morality is about good and bad, good and bad are reflections of situational conditions and not the permanent nature of things. Good and bad come from our pursuit of happiness in life. We derive our happiness from doing different things such as swimming; being in a relationship; breathing and so on. Each of these forms of happiness requires certain people, tools, environments and methods for it to be possible. Whatever method or mean we think is best for achieving one form of happiness, may not be suitable for achieving a different form of happiness, and in that way, nothing is always good or always bad.
We regard anything that helps us to achieve our happiness as being good, and whatever does not help us, or hinders our happiness, we regard as bad. Good and bad are only determined by the form of happiness we are in pursuit of at a particular time, in a specific situation, and for that reason, morality cannot be universal.
Yes. Eternity is the unending nature of things and is the inherent quality of anything that we allow ourselves to perceive from different perspectives. When we find more ways of viewing anything, we also find more ways of experiencing it, which creates unending possibilities for happiness. We create scarcity by limiting our perspective, in which case the possibilities for our happiness are also limited.
Accidents are a result of the decisions we make at one point, and then forgetting that we made them, only for us to later become victims of these decisions, leading us to believe that we are not responsible for the suffering we experience. If we throw a banana peel on the floor and then later on slip on it and hurt ourselves, the accident is a result of the decision we took earlier when we did not have the presence of mind to see how the same decision would affect us in the future. Awareness makes us mindful of the decisions we ever make, and the need to change them if necessary. Our mindfulness of the decisions we make gives us power over our actions and circumstances.
Each of us is personally and primarily responsible for the pursuit of our own happiness in life, and we use various means and abilities to achieve this happiness. A relationship is a means to achieve happiness by working with another and helping them to achieve their happiness while as they help us achieve our own. A relationship can only be sustained by mutual happiness, and ends when we perceive this happiness to no longer be possible.
Trust is a result of being in a relationship with another in which we believe we are working together towards the same goal. Even when we are together and pursuing a common goal in a relationship, much of the time we pursue this happiness separately, requiring that we make time to communicate our progress with each other.
Trust is possible only when there is clear and honest communication in a relationship, and wanes when communication breaks down. Honest communication makes us vulnerable because it exposes our thoughts and intentions to another person, both our victories and defeats, which makes it possible that they could be used against us by the one we are sharing them with. However, in a close relationship where the will to pursue happiness together is mutual, sharing our thought with another is a necessary risk to take, which could determine whether the relationship succeeds or fails.
Very often, a new couple may decide to have a baby even before they have had enough time to develop a relationship of honest communication and trust with each other. This is where the fundamental problems of any relationship emanate.
Pregnancy and children may create an uncertainty in a relationship where one or both partners may wonder if the coming of the new baby at that time is in their best interests, considering their own state of health, their career progression or emotional readiness, among other things. If the uncertainties of a pregnancy find the foundations of a relationship to be unstable, the problems of the relationship may compound to a point where separation may be a better option.
For a relationship to grow, it requires that it goes through periods of uncertainty, whereby it is ever presented with opportunities for new forms of happiness. These episodes require that the couple is close together, both emotionally and physically in order to provide much needed support to each other. Only trust could make this form of partnership possible.