This book mystifies happiness, and tries to solve it from within the aspects of human nature which gatekeeps your happiness in order to prevent you from wireheading yourself. That you’re actually under these constraints is merely what your mind wants you to think.
The only thing which prevents you from being happy all the time, is actually that you do not give yourself permission to be happy all the time, which is because you don’t feel like it’s justified. That emotions have to be justified, e.g. that you have to work for happiness as a reward, that you’re only allowed to be happy when you do well or when things are good, is a defensive mechanism of the mind. You can do away with these mechanisms if you want, as long as you can convince your mind that the negative emotion is harming you, or that more positive emotion would aid your chances of survival (you likely enjoy the higher needs like self-expression, but the brain tends to focus on lower needs like security)
Your enemies are not innately evil
This quote is a lot like “You’re not your experiences”, “This too shall pass”, “You’re not the ego”, “Nobody can make you feel bad without your permission”, and this is because they’re all insights into the self, which allows one to remove some of the illusions that the mind places itself under in order to create that punishment/reward loop in which most people live. I think these illusions are the mind making reinforcement learning with the environment possible. Of course, society has already subverted this system, for all the rewards are unhealthy superstimuli like porn, drugs, fats and sugars, ASMR, gambling, reaction videos and so on, so we might as well design a better system before we teach ourselves that inaction is the only good strategy).
The reason that happiness is a skill is because the mind fights back, and because there’s many things to manipulate and many mechanisms to understand. When you try to lucid dream and the dream characters notice what you’re doing, they usually attack you because your mind wants to prevent what you’re doing. These are likely evolved defense mechanisms against wireheading behaviour (perhaps lucid dreaming prevents deep sleep, meaning that people who did it too much didn’t pass on their genes). And when the mind fights back, it’s likely because you know that you’re doing something that you shouldn’t, which means that your mind knows that you’re doing something that you shouldn’t. In other words, it is mostly subjective, and if you change your beliefs about what you’re doing, your mind will change its response to what you’re doing as well.
You don’t need wisdom, you don’t need to understand anything about life, you just need to understand your own brain, how to make agreements with yourself, and how your belief structure relates to your subjective experience of the world.
Compassion does not lead to happiness unless perhaps you’re rewarding yourself for being a compassionate person, but your brain really likes the feeling of fitting into a group, and social relationships are a great source of meaning. It’s seems that the brain uses similar mechanisms to simulate other people as it does to understand itself, meaning that people who experience others at a surface level also tends to experience themselves at a surface level (and vice versa). I can’t explain it nearly as well as this article does, so I highly recommend at least skimming it.
This is basically all you need to know. If you want stronger, broader, more positive valence, you need to become more sensitive, meaning that you need to feel yourself, feel your body, feel other people, feel alive, feel immersed in different contexts, and to have beliefs (conscious or unconscious) which makes this valence more positive than negative (so that your mind doesn’t choose numbness as a defense mechanism against it, harming your efforts to become sensitive).
Another thing I recommend is decreasing the abstract distance of the relation of negative experiences. If you feel bad when you eat meat because you know that farming animals suffer, and because you know that farming animals is necessary in order to produce the meat that you’re eating, and because you dislike the idea of other beings suffering, we could call this a distance of 3-4 steps. The more steps you allow negative things to spread, the less you will enjoy reality, as your mind will fight against them by infusing them with negative valence. The less distance, the more you can enjoy things. The same is true across time—live in the moment and you will likely experience that nothing is wrong, but simulate 2 months of the past and 2 months of possible future consequences of each choice you make, and you will find that most actions will feel bad: “I’m wasting time”, “If I do this good thing, they will just expect more good things of me in the future”, “My current behaviour is not consistent with the other behaviour I’ve shown these exact people, I need to conform to their model of me”, etc.
All of these pain-in-the-ass restrictions aren’t as real as they look. If you feel bad, it’s ultimately because you choose to feel bad, even if your brain coerced you into making that choice. If you want to feel good, just do so.
Edit: I used to be interested in lucid dreaming, so I’d read about it on online forums. Breaking the 4th wall seemed to end badly for the vast majority of people, but there’s some level of “dream characters react how you expect them to react” involved as well. Everything else is just what I learn naturally, or my own original research. I’d also love to read scientific papers about these things if any exist.
This book mystifies happiness, and tries to solve it from within the aspects of human nature which gatekeeps your happiness in order to prevent you from wireheading yourself. That you’re actually under these constraints is merely what your mind wants you to think.
The only thing which prevents you from being happy all the time, is actually that you do not give yourself permission to be happy all the time, which is because you don’t feel like it’s justified. That emotions have to be justified, e.g. that you have to work for happiness as a reward, that you’re only allowed to be happy when you do well or when things are good, is a defensive mechanism of the mind. You can do away with these mechanisms if you want, as long as you can convince your mind that the negative emotion is harming you, or that more positive emotion would aid your chances of survival (you likely enjoy the higher needs like self-expression, but the brain tends to focus on lower needs like security)
This quote is a lot like “You’re not your experiences”, “This too shall pass”, “You’re not the ego”, “Nobody can make you feel bad without your permission”, and this is because they’re all insights into the self, which allows one to remove some of the illusions that the mind places itself under in order to create that punishment/reward loop in which most people live. I think these illusions are the mind making reinforcement learning with the environment possible. Of course, society has already subverted this system, for all the rewards are unhealthy superstimuli like porn, drugs, fats and sugars, ASMR, gambling, reaction videos and so on, so we might as well design a better system before we teach ourselves that inaction is the only good strategy).
The reason that happiness is a skill is because the mind fights back, and because there’s many things to manipulate and many mechanisms to understand. When you try to lucid dream and the dream characters notice what you’re doing, they usually attack you because your mind wants to prevent what you’re doing. These are likely evolved defense mechanisms against wireheading behaviour (perhaps lucid dreaming prevents deep sleep, meaning that people who did it too much didn’t pass on their genes). And when the mind fights back, it’s likely because you know that you’re doing something that you shouldn’t, which means that your mind knows that you’re doing something that you shouldn’t. In other words, it is mostly subjective, and if you change your beliefs about what you’re doing, your mind will change its response to what you’re doing as well.
You don’t need wisdom, you don’t need to understand anything about life, you just need to understand your own brain, how to make agreements with yourself, and how your belief structure relates to your subjective experience of the world.
Compassion does not lead to happiness unless perhaps you’re rewarding yourself for being a compassionate person, but your brain really likes the feeling of fitting into a group, and social relationships are a great source of meaning. It’s seems that the brain uses similar mechanisms to simulate other people as it does to understand itself, meaning that people who experience others at a surface level also tends to experience themselves at a surface level (and vice versa). I can’t explain it nearly as well as this article does, so I highly recommend at least skimming it.
This is basically all you need to know. If you want stronger, broader, more positive valence, you need to become more sensitive, meaning that you need to feel yourself, feel your body, feel other people, feel alive, feel immersed in different contexts, and to have beliefs (conscious or unconscious) which makes this valence more positive than negative (so that your mind doesn’t choose numbness as a defense mechanism against it, harming your efforts to become sensitive).
Another thing I recommend is decreasing the abstract distance of the relation of negative experiences. If you feel bad when you eat meat because you know that farming animals suffer, and because you know that farming animals is necessary in order to produce the meat that you’re eating, and because you dislike the idea of other beings suffering, we could call this a distance of 3-4 steps. The more steps you allow negative things to spread, the less you will enjoy reality, as your mind will fight against them by infusing them with negative valence. The less distance, the more you can enjoy things. The same is true across time—live in the moment and you will likely experience that nothing is wrong, but simulate 2 months of the past and 2 months of possible future consequences of each choice you make, and you will find that most actions will feel bad: “I’m wasting time”, “If I do this good thing, they will just expect more good things of me in the future”, “My current behaviour is not consistent with the other behaviour I’ve shown these exact people, I need to conform to their model of me”, etc.
All of these pain-in-the-ass restrictions aren’t as real as they look. If you feel bad, it’s ultimately because you choose to feel bad, even if your brain coerced you into making that choice. If you want to feel good, just do so.
Edit: I used to be interested in lucid dreaming, so I’d read about it on online forums. Breaking the 4th wall seemed to end badly for the vast majority of people, but there’s some level of “dream characters react how you expect them to react” involved as well. Everything else is just what I learn naturally, or my own original research. I’d also love to read scientific papers about these things if any exist.