Impermanence…

Today I’d like to share an article of a newspaper (Sunday Telegraph) from my favorite section (quiet now). It’s written by Paul Wilson. I like to read his writing~~ it shows deep insight and wisdom.

Okay~~ keep reading, and hopefully it would shad away the shadow over your head.

The world is a very different place, depending on whose eyes you’re looking through.

You’re in luck. Today I want to share with you the three ways of approaching life which, depending on which one you choose, can be the difference between success and failure, happiness and unhappiness, good health and misery, salvation and damnation (if you are of such a mind), enlightenment and ignorance.

Let’s start with the two that are most familiar to you. They work like this: person A and person B look out a window onto a fairly standard cityscape - houses, buildings, traffic, noise, and so on.

Person A sees a field of opportunity and potential. She can see buildings full of relatively good people who, even if they aren’t particularly happy at this moment, have the opportunity of soon becoming so.

Person B can’t see anything like that. He sees buildings full of people whose lives are being destroyed by ill health, duplicity, violence, poverty and inequality. Although they’re looking at the same cityscape, A and B are experiencing two entirely different worlds.

What’s your world view?

You might be inclined to write off these differences as emotional interpretations of one event. But it is more fundamental than that. Your world view will always be different to mine. Intellectually, we can rationalise that we are observing the same scene, but deep down we’ll always suspect the other is misinterpreting. This is true.

The world you experience is different to mine. Academics say that there is some sort of objective reality that is the same for all people, but I don’t agree.

The world you experience is simply what you perceive and what you choose to believe is there. Nothing more.

The beauty of this understanding is that it presents you with a choice of how you experience life: you can choose to see the uplifting side, or you can choose to see the miserable side. Both sides are there.

You can objectively assess a situation or event, then consciously moderate how you respond to it.

Accentuate the positive

If you want to feel better, choose positive… simple as that. Some will say this is being delusionary (I don’t) but it’s empowering to know that you have some control over the way you feel. Just search out the positive. Even the greatest disaster has a positive side: for example, if people learn from it, or if society changes, or if families grow closer as a result.

You can even take a more holistic approach to making your experience of life more positive. For example, you can start to substitute carefully chosen words and ideas that emphasise a positive style of thinking.

Make them part of your thoughts and conversations. Interventions like these are a powerful way of changing the way you think and responds to events.

There you have two of the ways you can approach life - the positive and the negative.

There is a third. And, for my money, it’s the most powerful of all. This is to live mindfully, as it’s happening. Without filtering it with thought, or comparing it with other events. Then you discover that what emerges in life is simply what is - neither positive or negative. Just neutral. And you discover that it is how you respond to this that makes the difference.

In the past I’ve written a number of books encouraging readers to apply a positive perspective to life. It was my belief that with a bit of effort you’d find the good in everything and thereby enjoy life more fully.

If you happen to be living a miserable life right now, this might be just the psychological shortcut you need to get you through to the next level. After that, however the richest way to life is mindfully. To live in the moment. To do everything with 100% of your attention. To limit comparisons and assessments to those times when they’re needed rather than as a constant process of interpreting what you are experiencing.

Then you can accept and observe life as it is, rather than how it should be or how it once was. And if there is a secret to happiness, this is it.

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