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I HAVE TO SHARE THIS WITH YOU

It’s not that I have no one to talk to about myself or that I need your attention and recognition. No, it doesn’t matter. But the truth is that the subject of the book is happiness, and it cannot be understood in isolation from the person. Because this is not physics, or chemistry, or religious dogmas, where the essence of what is written does not depend on the author.

All evidence of happiness necessarily has a personal nature.

My path to writing this book has been far from straight. Yet it now emerges due to my belief in my impunity, huge self-confidence and the trampled sense of natural intellectuality. This was nourished by so many unnecessary books or inherited from my mother.

Once upon a time I used to drink a lot, without clinking glasses, without company, without unnecessary toasts, it was not a social matter. I liked the angels singing in my head (until I had had too much), the light of an awakening heart and the flowing knowledge of the miracle lying in the bottle.

But at dawn the angel turned into a demon, obsessed with the idea of making me atone for the evening’s inspiration and the dirty thoughts.

And I… quit! Stopped!

So what? Shit!

Happiness was in no hurry to my abode. And life circumstances took an ominous turn.

My soul screamed out,

«Drink and be happy! Or don’t drink, you won’t be happy anyway.»

«Desecrate common sense in the name of the Lord and yourself.»

«Do not seek, as you will not find it.»

«For when you seek, you find what you believe in.»

So this sober life awakened an even more desperate «addict» in myself.

Too weak to bridle my privy parts and not to run riot at the sight of a nice woman, I fell into the original sin of loving many of them.

This is such a queer mixture: an alcoholic, a scientist, a womanizer, an entrepreneur, a failed poet, and a thrill-seeker.

I have diverse knowledge about people from different worlds. I manage to live on two sides of the Moon that never overlap.

And the conclusion was this: you shouldn’t destroy evil in yourself. In its place, tomorrow there may grow even worse demons.

I want to decorate the path to myself and to the readers’ hearts with holy, pure truths. But it turns out that any truth contains exactly half a lie. Imperfection is better than perfection. I found such a balance. This kept me from falling into the temptation to avoid extremes and not to stick to the river bank of the «righteous.»

I learned to laugh at myself, and this taught me to respect and love myself, with all my faults. You would always find something comic in yourself. I grasped this, calmed down and rejoiced.

Inspired by my personal experience of struggling with the happiness that had befallen me and completely stunned, I decided that I could print and send this book around the world. It didn’t cost me much money, which I had nowhere to spend anyway.

Well, where is your admiring pause after the words of such a person?

Why, how can we trust someone who did not receive any but A-grades at the university? Where can life hide in this gloomy, boring perennial top student? He must lack true feelings and is so impeccably static.

What’s the point of my confession? Strange! In Russian, the word confession (ispoved’) sounds similar with the word underwear (ispodneye). Have you ever smelled fragrant human underwear? It’s a cocktail of sweat, urine, sticky fear and the shameful hiding of the beast inside. This is the real smell of truths and revelations.

There is only one redeeming point. Through love and respect for myself, from my feelings, thoughts and mistakes, I have woven this book, out of my conscious and concise sincerity.

I understand that I will often sound like an irresponsible cynic. But I do accept responsibility for my words and decisions always rely on what I know.

Of course, I do not know enough of this world. And there is nothing fundamentally new in the book (just like in any other). But, despite numerous quotes and references, it grew entirely out of myself. Reading the book, I can analyze myself and my happiness.

My main goal is for the Prince of this world to become the Prince of Happiness. But there is no universal recipe for this yet.

God, I love this book of mine! How wonderfully You inspired me to dump so much crap on those who will never read it! I could not even imagine that You could cause such an avalanche of verbiage from a tiny thought that once occurred to me.

I hope the book turns out to be short and I do not spew out all the stupidity I could.

Having read this couple of pages, you can then skip all the nonsense below and, without losing much, go straight to the latter sections: 6, 7 and 8. Reading books from cover to cover is the lot of boring scientists and single women.

1. THE IDEA

As paradoxical as it may seem, most of our problems — aging, death, illness, fear and others — are associated not so much with environmental pressure or lifestyle, but are caused by the fact that a person thinks of himself separately, outside the world. By changing your perspective on your relationship with reality and combining it with the achievements of modern science, you can get completely new ideas for maintaining mental and physical health.

Man is a part of the whole which we call the «Universe,» a part limited in time and space. However, he perceives himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from this whole, which can be called a kind of optical illusion of consciousness. …Do not harbor them [thoughts and feelings that man is separate from the Universe], but try to overcome them — this is the way to an achievable peace of mind.

Albert Einstein

2. WHAT A PERSON REALLY WANTS AND ACHIEVES. THE ANATOMY OF HAPPINESS

The comprehension of meaning, true joy and happiness is, in fact, the main occupation for the human mind and body. This is what every person seeks and craves.

…The purpose of life is to find happiness.

All religions are essentially tools to help people become more perfect. Whereas in some religions the main practice involves recitation of prayers, and in others — the curbing of the flesh, the essence of Buddhist practice lies in the transformation and improvement of the mind.

The Dalai Lama

Despite the diversity of approaches and phrasing, all religions produce a small number of identical truths, which give rise to certain practices. Their goal is to improve our consciousness and achieve a state that can be internally assessed as joy or happiness.

To test the possibility of achieving such a state, it is necessary to turn to the structure of our psyche.

Whether happiness exists per se

or is merely a product of faith, a myth, a legend of consciousness guarding its loneliness?

Historically, happiness was believed to be a state of individual faith rather than of external circumstances. But faith as such does not make us happy.

I support the idea that happiness comes from objective states of the body and psyche.

Sterilization of happiness

as a pure concept or state is impossible. This is a quantity that is equally variable with suffering and obscurations. A person cannot be happy and joyful and sad at the same time. He is either asleep, joyful and happy, or sad. If there are no such sensations, he must be dead drunk.

Our long-lasting states are just long shifts in the balance between these polarities.

For example, my angel and demon live in my head simultaneously, then in my heart, then visit my intestines, and most often, my genitals. But they have never met.

Happiness and Nature

What a lot of time is lost and how many misfortunes befall those who seek happiness outside the laws of Nature. To pacify them, temples of tolerance and tranquility were erected. But they are empty, and those who serve in them do not hear their own or other people’s voices. The icons in these temples in their beautiful frames are saturated with deadly poison.

But the shining truths of Nature are not forgotten or broken. It has created many perfect things from inert matter of stone.

The best of the best in man are laughter and joy. And they are above love and compassion.

We must respect Nature. We should observe her, not bother her with advice. And it is quite helpful to reduce your exorbitant self-conceit as a Great Essence to a cog in the mechanism of the Universe.

Happiness and personal experience.

Personal experience is the source of choosing the route to happiness. It is also the source of the main misconceptions about it.

We are all just like our happiness, as much as we are not similar to ourselves.

Is happiness possible?

Or are we simply fulfilling our biological purpose: breeding, continuing the victorious path of the Code of Life? Is our happiness contained in the gonads and is its size proportional to them? Do we become happy only by effectively performing these functions?

This is one of the paradigms of happiness: to squeeze everything out of your reproductive organs and continue to live at any cost. And happiness has nothing to do with anything else. For a man it is only in a woman, and vice versa.

But a long life is often of no use. Much of what we consider alive is already food to worms and torn apart by chaos.

How close

do you have to approach happiness in order to recognize it?

Happiness becomes happiness only at a happy distance. At a certain distance, even a flock of gray sparrows may seem like a bird from a fairytale.

In accordance with the principle of complementarity that permeates nature, every mental development… has its own optimum, which, if exceeded… turns into its opposite.

Carl Gustav Jung

Don’t come too close to your happiness. Otherwise it may turn into a misery, and its fine nuances become sticky, causing obsessiveness and suffering.

Happiness is relative and all truths are half-truths.

Dynamics of happiness.

Does happiness require any specific object or state for a strictly defined definition? If it does, it quickly outdates, turns into a fossilized creature and perishes. Happiness cannot be a static, immovable dogma. Like everything in life, it is subject to change. Today’s happiness is likely to decay and transform into misfortune tomorrow. True happiness must have something deeper than any situation and time when it happens. It must fit in with the sequence of events as its highlight, it requires form and direction. For example, these could come from knowledge.

Happiness can appear and exist only in accordance with the laws of Nature. It fluctuates between different poles. It is a dynamic process, not a state. Otherwise, it would quickly exhaust its vital resource. A smooth graph of the human psyche points to fear and dying.

The dynamism of happiness is a challenge for the human mind.

Happiness is a type of mental energy that can also be wasted, meaninglessly and uncontrollably.

All roads lead to happiness, but not everyone is happy along the way. But at the end of life, descending into the collective unconscious and below, everyone becomes impeccably calm.

Readiness for happiness

Why cannot we, although we understand a lot, become happy immediately, right now? We do not want and are afraid to become happy. This is the essence of the game. Inner fears stop us in front of the open door of happiness. It is fear that as soon as we enter it, our existence will cease. We are almost always ready to exchange happiness itself for the time of expecting it. How many wonderful thoughts I had! Of these, the most beautiful was the idea of not turning thoughts into deeds.

At one pole we view free choice, a subjective readiness, at the other one there is unconscious inhibition. This oscillatory process often does not have a final stationary solution and can continue throughout a whole life.

The possibility of achieving happiness is the result of subjective readiness to accept it. Therefore, it is necessary to look for opportunities to cultivate your happiness.

To paraphrase Jung, you can help one to become happy only if s/he wants it by all means. But if their actual goal is not to become happy at all costs, help them not to do this; only then will they be fine.

Happiness as an inherited archetype.

Happiness cannot be a spontaneous state, arising out of nothing. The possibility and readiness for happiness grow from the unconscious inside us. Otherwise, it could not be realized at all, even when influenced by favorable objective factors.

We would like to believe in our will, in our energy, in the fact that we can do something, but when something has to be done, we discover that we are only capable of this to a certain extent, because those little devils — our complexes — interfere with us. …Our personal unconscious consists of an indefinite number of complexes or fragmented personalities.

Carl Gustav Jung

DNA transmits to children the mental traits of their parents and their experiences from the past. Happiness and the predisposition to it, like eyes, skin and other external features, are inherited properties. We are hostages of the sediments of experiences of past generations contained in our unconscious. To a certain extent, happiness is an innate historical category and represents a hereditary archetype.

Therefore, happiness as a legacy can be achieved easily, but may also never be achieved, regardless of external circumstances. There is a category of people who remain unhappy in any conditions. In this case, artificial influences on the psyche can only reduce inherited suffering.

Happiness and suffering are innate properties of our personalities. Therefore, although in most cases we are accustomed to referring to external circumstances, we should not exaggerate their significance. Much, if not all, is contained within the individual.

Happiness and external conditions.

Although consciousness and its various states grow from the unconscious, they are at the same time a product of the external environment, which forcefully transforms human instincts. Herein lies the possibility of external artificial control of these states. The unconscious itself also changes under the impact of the coercive force of reality.

Happiness and the valley of roses.

The wholeness and fullness of life require a balance of joy and suffering… happiness is poisoned if a portion of suffering was not applied.

Carl Gustav Jung

The way to happiness is inevitably painful and certainly does not run through a valley of roses. Suffering and fear are inevitable, but they are also evidence of movement. These indestructible polarities will fuse in a person into a single essence and provide energy for development. Happiness always has a price and is never given for free.

Encounter with oneself.

We all seek God and go to Him. But the main thing is not to meet yourself or your shadow on this path. Yet true, deep, unfaltering happiness cannot be achieved without meeting yourself.

He who goes to himself risks meeting with himself.

Encounter with oneself is among the most unpleasant.

Self-discovery is an adventure that takes you unexpectedly far. Even a moderately deep acquaintance with the «shadow» may cause great confusion and darkness of mind, since it creates personal problems that the person never suspected before.

Carl Gustav Jung

The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.

Albert Einstein

Only a few people have been able to meet themselves and completely free themselves from predispositions and prejudices.

In order for you to wake up, everyone else should fall asleep.

3. DIALOGUE LANGUAGE

3.1. Material and spiritual technologies

Mental (spiritual) technologies (MT) are directly aimed at reducing suffering and finding happiness. But their capabilities remain unknown to many people.

Technologies of material production (NT — natural technologies), growing from the natural material foundations, are widely spread and exert much more influence. Their stated goal is to achieve the most comfortable material components of life, but at the same time they embody man’s internal need for knowledge and mastery of the forces of Nature. This is a manifestation in man of a universal law operating at all levels of matter. Nietzsche called it «the will to power.»

While defining their goals in different ways, both directions of technology coincide in the main thing: they move towards each other, implementing the same thing in different spheres. They have no fundamental contradictions. Neither has superiority. The imaginary one-sidedness of the goal of material technologies in the form of achieving material well-being even at the expense of the spiritual component is not essential. They do not contain any semantic coloring within themselves. This is the problem of their use by individuals.