Have you wondered why someone with so little can be so happy?
While someone with so much can feel so poor?
Why one person can be content with what they have?
While many others achieving more, more, more will never be fulfilled?
What’s going on here?
Two lives
It might be obvious to you.
But it wasn’t always obvious to me and it’s not always obvious in our society and in our own brain.
The life that you see outside of you is ENTIRELY different to what you experience inside.
While you expect that a “better” life out there causes you to feel better inside, ultimately they are independent variables.
Hence why someone can have a heavenly life but be living an internal hell, and vice-versa.
They might as well be two different lives.
It’s like dreaming at night.
What is happening outside of your sleeping body is ENTIRELY different to what you are experiencing inside.
In our school of transformation, RST, we distinguish these as your External Life and your Internal Life Experience.
So even if a person has a fabulous External Life, like Kanye West they can have a terribly sad Internal Life Experience.
This is the cause of ALL problems in our world.
More, more, more
More or less ALL the problems of our world come back to this one thing—
Humans feeling bad.
Feeling something is missing.
Living in lack.
Thinking we need to get, do, have things just to “try” and feel how we want.
This is the REAL reason that we are destroying our planet with consumption.
Even many wealthy proponents of climate change suffer from this, with their consumption burning more carbon than the far east.
Media too controls people with bad emotions, as it’s what brings you back for more, more, more.
Would we be constantly arguing with each other if we felt amazing?
War too.
I mean, would a shiny, happy species be constantly killing each other for more, more, more… dirt?
Feeling best
A client feels that this is his greatest achievement.
He’s achieved incredible things in his life, but he always felt that something is missing.
And it was doing the internal work, training himself to think and feel how he wants, that he considers his crowning achievement.
Because when you’re feeling full, whole, complete inside, no success or failure can add or take away.
Nothing warms my heart more because I’ve lived this.
See, in the old days I just assumed, really I thought I KNEW, 100%, that the key to feeling your best is creating your best life.
So when I stepped back from my career on Wall Street some 22 years ago I wasn’t asking, how do you think and feel your absolute best?
I was asking, what do you truly want?
Thinking that when you’re living the life you truly want of course you’re gonna think and feel how you truly want.
Wrong
Again, these are ENTIRELY independent variables.
So you can be living the life you truly want and still be feeling that something is missing.
Naturally, when you’re feeling this way, what does your brain do?
Well, especially for those of us indoctrinated by western media, it starts to think up those things that it now needs to do, get, have so you can feel how you want.
More, more, more is almost always the answer in that brain.
And it makes logical sense, kind of.
If you feel like some thing is missing, it makes sense that getting this thing will lead you to fulfilled, right?
Makes logical sense, doesn’t it?
It’s just, we’ve all learned that this logic fails over and over and over again.
How many times?
How many times do we need to learn this same lesson?
A person so desperately wants their dream house.
For years of their life they believe that when they’re finally in that dream home, their life will feel how it’s meant to be.
Then they get it, and how long does this feeling last?
Like a diamond, forever?
Or is it more likely that brain will adapt and start to seek that next thing it needs to feel full?
What about wedding bliss?
How many marriages feel like they do on their wedding day?
Now, it’s not to say that every day of your life will feel like your best days, although this is the goal of living Ultimate Days as I wrote about last week.
But it is to say that those things your brain thinks will lead you to be fulfilled rarely keep you full, do they?
Even if someone or some thing could “complete you,” how many of us feel complete?
Or does that brain of yours still keep scanning the world for that next thing it hopes will have you feeling this way?
Feeling how you want
This is one thing that I called myself out on some 11 years ago when this topic became a focus.
Back then I didn’t get it.
As I’ve written about plenty over the years it was the hardest time in my life, when by all measures it should have been the most fabulous.
I was living my dream.
After some 11 years of this work while I was in my career on Wall Street, just so desperately dreaming of doing what I want, I was now doing it.
For all this time I figured, really, again, I just “knew” that when I was doing what I want I would feel how I want.
I was wrong, and I didn’t know why.
How on earth can you be living the life you truly want and not feeling it?
Duh
Because they are entirely independent variables.
It’s like the accepted wisdom that money doesn’t make you happy.
Now of course money can make your life richer in lots of ways, but that never automatically translates into a richer internal life experience.
Just look around our world and you see plenty of examples.
All of us ferreting away, richer than we’ve ever been as a species, yet no happier.
Again, they are entirely independent variables.
It’s like trying to fill up a hole in your yard by dumping dirt in your neighbor’s yard.
And while it’s natural for us to spend so much time and energy trying to get, do, have more things outside, nobody ever teaches you how to feel more inside?
Can you imagine why?
Now, that’s never to say that you stop going after things out there.
I perceive going for what you truly want is key to living your best and most full life.
But that’s different to convincing yourself that getting things outside will fill up what’s missing inside.
Knowing this changes everything.
Matters so much
I’ve gone all the way down this rabbit hole because I perceive this is what most matters.
Perhaps it doesn’t for you.
But it does for me.
And I perceive for ALL of humanity.
Look at the world around us and you see why.
All the ills of our world are a reflection of how people are thinking and feeling inside.
This is the greatest threat and opportunity for each of us and our species.
No matter what we seek to change out there in our world, nothing changes until we change how we think and feel inside.