Bharat S. M. Karavadra

Feelings, Happiness and The Future

Monday, September 21st, 2009

This post is part 1 of a conversation with someone wishing to remain anonymous but are happy for me to publish the conversation. Read Part 2.

This post is a message I wrote to someone who had questions in their mind about feelings, happiness and the meaning of life and has a brief discussion about it at the time.

They then sent a message, which you can ready as an introduction and I replied with what is written in the rest of this post.

Thank you for allowing me to post this.

(names have been removed or replaced to maintain confidentiality and privacy)

hey hope u are well n had a good day! firstly thanks for the replys and the, ill be honest not bin great today so not had a chance to read but i will just after ive sent this :)…erm what uve sed does make sense…i guess losing john has affectd the way i feel emotionally but just realising theres always bin questions at the back of my head but ive just pushd them to the back in hope itl all just be okay…in other words ive been lost for a while ..people have said i am too ..and ur right it doesnt feel nice…but i dont wna hide and be someone im not…and thats what most people to..i believe in god and my religion but sometimes thats not enough..i feel im doing the right things but things still seem confused and wrong..y dont all people deserve to be happy? i hate complaining cause i know people are worse off and my problems seem small…what if ive prayed for something but nothings changed yet? i dont ask for much..after whats happend i keep thinking everythings so unfair hence im wondering whats the point of being here..and theres no reasoning behind what happens…im just wondering what the future holds..i guess we can only control how we feel not whats to come? sorry if im going on abit just typing my thoughts…please read and get bored..lol :) i just want to be happy within myself and the same for my family..

My reply was:

The fact that what I’ve said actually makes some sense to you is a good start. So let me tell you something about myself which relates to why I have written this article for you.

I was “lost” a few years ago and my life went on a downward spiral. I was at a similar stage to you, and I also believed that I was doing the right things but everything and everyone I knew was going “wrong” and everything I believed in up to that point was not making me happy anymore, quite the opposite actually. Read the following linked article that I wrote to find out more. It’s called “Perceptions and The Reality of Life”
http://www.karavadra.net/blog/2009/perceptions-and-the-reality-of-life/

I asked God (Universe is a more appropriate word for my experience) for help, not in the usual and humble way of prayer as most people would (as you will find out in the article above) but in anger with God  because I knew I was a good person and did not understand what I was experiencing. Literally the next day or so I got my answer in the weirdest way (again details are in the article). Even though I got an answer, I knew deep inside myself that there was more to it than that I had received. This knowing created an expectation (you could call an internal prayer) that brought more information to me. Even though I have not got what I wanted, I did get what I needed and over the period of a couple of years. You may think that this is a long time to get what you did NOT ask for, and I would have agreed before I knew what I know now. The only way I can explain it is that if I had been given all the information in one go it would have been like being given a set of instructions the size of many encyclopaedias, and I either would have jumped to the end or not read them at all. Either way I know receiving everything in one go simply would not have helped me and that I had to go through the journey of learning and applying what I received.

Therefore with regards to your praying and “things not changing”, I hope my example above demonstrates how God perhaps has something better for you and at the right time.

Asking for something in particular, from my experience, comes from a perspective of desire – e.g. wanting things, situations or people to be better. I believe the wanting does NOT make you happy. It’s a bit like saying, if I get that job, or if I meet a good partner, or if I get that car, or if those people would be happy, THEN I’ll be happy. Such desires never end and I have seen myself that WANTING, including wanting the best for others does NOT make you happy.

The key is that if you are happy within yourself NOW then situations and people in the outside world stop affecting your feelings as much they did. You will also notice then when you are happier within yourself, you will meet more happier people within themselves and also some, if not all, of the people around you will become happier. Some people (even the closest to you) will change their behaviour, not affect you at all or simply disappear from your life (e.g. by having to move away or you moving away). This may sound a bit way out but when you YOURSELF have direct experience, you will KNOW what I mean.

So being happy, or more appropriately enjoying life, NOW is the key.

How do you be happy and enjoy life NOW?

You need to remove the beliefs and conditioning that is lodged within you that are creating negative thoughts, feelings and experiences.

And how do you do this?

As you believe in God and praying, simply ask for yourself to be happy.

There are a few “other” techniques that are and are not related to praying that are quite simple but it helps to understand a few things about the techniques and much more about your thoughts and feelings because of what you can go through when using the techniques. From my experience of applying these “other” techniques, I can say that your feelings, emotions, and experiences can get quite overwhelming and you need to know how to manage them. We can meet or you can ask me about this, for more details, but it’s related to the SURRENDERED and AWAKENED perceptions outlined in the linked article above.

You seem to have the DETERMINED, EMPOWERED and SURRENDERED perceptions within you, which gets me back to praying. As I said before you sometimes get something better than what you have asked for when you pray, especially if you let go. You must believe that GOD knows what’s good for you, better than you do. That could be why you are not seeing the changes you expect. To help, change your prayer to something on the lines of “I would like to experience myself to be happier, people (on your mind) to be happier, or SOMETHING BETTER. Thank you God.” Then let go and leave it to God. Please note that I have put your happiness first as, without you being happy, even if you wanted other people to be happy, how could you really make them happy? How could someone who is not happy make other people happy? I hope you get that!

Also, really be happy with yourself that you KNOW that you and others can be happier. That’s a great gift you have and it’s that KNOWING that will serve you on your journey. Therefore really stop complaining, whether it be to people, to God, or by keeping the complaints within yourself. Simply remember that you know from the bottom of your heart that things can be better and enjoy that knowing ,and the happiness will appear. However, do not try to think about the whos, hows, whichs, wheres, whens and whys. Well, you know the answer to why;  you want yourself and others to be happy.

It’s also good to know that your “problems” may seem small because other people are worse of, but remember that these other people may know other people who are worse of than them. It’s all relative, and depends on your perspective. For example, I know of people who have worked hard all their lives and created what many people would call comfortable amounts of money, nice homes, a nice car and other things, but they are not happy and definitely not comfortable within themselves. However another person may see these people’s so called wealth and believe that these people are better of than them. Each person’s perception of apparently the same reality can be different.

Let’s move on. Your belief in their being a God, whose “definition” only you will know is a belief in there being a greater power or “creator” of everything we experience in life, and everything we have not experienced to date. You’ve got to love God for this power, simply and harshly because, without the creative power, you would not exist.

The facts that something is not right for you in your reality and does not make you happy, your belief in there being a God, and the knowing that other people are worse of than you, all create a good foundation for the following steps that you can take, if I have made the smallest bit of sense to you:

Admiration:
If other people are worse off than you then, and based on my example that they could actually be better of than other people, with the beliefs and desires that you have there must be people better of than you.

Don’t go looking for people better of than you though. They will just appear and when they do, select what is better about them and their reality than that of yours and not just in terms of material things but more so in terms of qualities and values. Then simply, but really, admire them. When I use the word really, I mean you really need to feel the admiration. The best example I can give at the moment is that I am scared of heights (or was, as I have not been very high recently), but I love how people can jump out of an aeroplane and sky dive, and have a whale of a time (if you’re using a translation tool to read this then “whale of a time” means “great enjoying experience”) and so I admire them and the fund they are having. The admiration will create a belief in potential, courage and joy within you, and using my example, the admiration will not necessarily make me want to sky dive, but it will create a shift in me by giving me the potential and courage to do things that perhaps I do not do which will bring ME joy in life, like writing this for you.

Appreciation:
If God is the creator of everything then God creates your day. At the end of every day, go back through the day and make a list of all the good things and events that came to you. Go through the list and give God a “thumbs up” by thanking him from the bottom of your heart and feel joyful that you experienced all the goodness, especially those things you take for granted such as the home you lived in, the friends and family you saw, the knowledge that you received, the money you had (no matter how small or large it may have been), the food that you ate, your good health, your toothbrush, etc, etc, etc. Please note that I use the past tense as everything on your list has been and gone – they were just experiences (good ones). By really appreciating the creative power of God that brought you the things on your list, you are effectively creating a pray of appreciation and the potential of God to re-create the things on your list, and perhaps in bigger and better ways.

Shifting Your Awareness:
You may still be thinking somewhere in your mind “What about the unhappy people and life being unfair”. The only thing I can say is that you consciously need to shift your attention to and focus on the positive things that you experience in life and the negatives will take care of themselves. This may sound and be difficult at first, but if you only think about good things and have good thoughts, something WILL shift inside of you and keep shifting, and the outside world will change. However your mind will still say to you “What about the unhappy people and life being unfair”, so really do and think about this; Pick a country which you don’t hear much negativity about from other people, news or media. For me such a country is Switzerland. Now, if you think about you being born, living your life and passing away without ever hearing any bad news related to the country, you would never know whether things were good or bad in the country. If things were actually bad in Switzerland, for whatever reason, you would still never have known about it in your life. If you don’t know about it then it’s not part of your reality, even though it exists in others’ realities. To take this concept a little step further, now ask yourself is there a country or region of the earth which you simply don’t know of no matter how small it is. The answer must be yes. So whether good or bad things happen in this country or region, you don’t and may not ever know about it. Now that you know there could be a country or region that you do not know about at all, and if you had the opportunity of visiting it, would you look for good things or bad things? You should now understand that if you look for good things you will find good things and if you look for bad things you will find bad things. That’s why I say to consciously focus your attention on, admire and appreciate the positive things in life because then that’s all that can exist more of in your reality. Now, read this paragraph again.

To finish off I will attend to the later parts of your message and give you my current beliefs and personal views about what you have written.

With regards to “wondering whats the point of being here”, I believe we are here to experience life from different perspectives and to create awareness and values to make life more enjoyable for yourself and life as a whole. From what I have experienced, you come into this life with nothing and you leave with nothing, so you can only leave behind something that does not exist in material terms. This something is the values that I mentioned. It can also be called spirit.

With regards to “theres no reasoning behind what happens”, what happens IS life. The only reason behind life is the reason you give it. If you don’t give it a reason, then nothing happens. If you give it a bad reason, bad things happen. If you give it a good reason, good things happen.

With regards to “wondering what the future holds”, wondering is great because life is wonderful but don’t turn wondering into worrying because life will then become a worry. The future is only held in your mind as thoughts. So change your thoughts to change your future.

With regards to “i guess we can only control how we feel not whats to come? ”, don’t control your feelings or label them but just let them be. Feelings are like people; they are tingly, wibbly, wobbly things and sometimes don’t know why they have come to you. Let them come and let them go. Don’t try to control them because they may try to control you. Simply, let them come and let them go. What’s to come, you will experience, and then it will go. Enjoy and learn from the experience.

With regards to “i just want to be happy within myself and the same for my family”, you don’t have to do anything to be happy within yourself. So just be happy with and in yourself. Once there is happiness within you, that happiness will grow without you having to do anything outside of yourself.

With regards to your second message:

“ive just seen the video..i kind of understand wer its coming form but what about other ppl? dnt they have an impact? its hard to see the best in all ppl right? is this going back to our conversation about no one actually hurt u emotionally/about your own beliefs against others?..not letting someone hurt u mentally is hard to achieve!?”

I don’t think I need to write anymore in reply to this message, apart from thanking you for looking at the video, as I believe I have covered everything I wanted to say above.

But I do want to leave this question with you “How can someone hurt you mentally?”

Thank you for taking the time to read my words and I hope they have made some sense to you.

Speak soon.

Bharat

Read the reply in Part 2.