The quest for pleasure and happiness has driven us into a lot of emptiness, addictions, and violence. However, the post-shallow-happiness era is all about meaning. What do we get from it? Joy. The fear of not getting enough leads to unhealthy opulence. The over-desire to be safe and comfortable leads people into risks and symptoms of dissatisfaction like, for example, obesity and depression. It’s worth to examine one’s desires awareness-intelligently. Some people seem to manage their exaggerated desires well. But often they have just replaced one unhealthy obsession with another, stronger one. This might lead to some application of one or two Awareness Intelligence modes, but not of all the three. That’s why often the deepest motivation of athletes can stem from anger, the motivation of politicians from greed for power, and the one of religious teachers from the desire to withdraw from inter-personalities. These awareness-unintelligent motivators often claim a high price; the more dominant their position, the more they block the soul’s longing for expanding into a harmonious application of all three tenets of Awareness Intelligence.
Anger, like many other negative emotions, is a reminder of limitations in a larger perception of life. It can be only replaced and kept away with certainty with a quality of mind that is unconditional love, timeless kindness, and purposeful service at the same time.
Desires don’t have to be something bad. Life itself is the soul’s aspiration to expand and to become aware. The crucial differentiation is between extrinsic and intrinsic desires. Extrinsic desires do seek pleasure from material and outwardly supplied motivators, while intrinsic desire is the realization of the inspiration from within. Intrinsic and extrinsic desires are both legitimate to a certain extent; one puts the priority on the sensing of the culturally understood world of form, while the other focuses the real, conscious universe of socio-temporal awareness.
When getting tired in the hedonic treadmill of life understood as depending on pleasing sensual pleasures and relieving bodily tensions, it is helpful to remember that real joy lies in virtue-seeking and virtue-realization.
Joy feels so superior to pleasure because it comes from meaning. Conscious life itself is the meaning. So, whenever our thinking and activities are congruent with the holy, whole, and wholesome nature of life, a sense of meaning arises. Pain, which is not to confuse with suffering, is often closely implicated with the experience of joy as well. For example, without patient waiting, there is no joyful arriving; without childbirth pain, there can be no joy of birth; without dying during a lifetime, there can be no personal growth.
Pain indeed is unavoidable, but it always comes with joy. Suffering, on the other hand, is the result of awareness-unintelligent conduct, such as attributing one’s destiny to the conditions of the outer, uncontrollable world instead of creating the world one wants to realize from the inside.
Joy ultimately comes from the trialogue of your awareness with your true self, your unconditional relationships, and the selfless contributions that connect you to humanity.
Fearful attachments to fleeting pleasures cause more fear, greed, hoarding, protective, and aggressive reactions. These are the reasons for our suffering. Fear incapacitates love, the love for ourselves, for our relationships, and for any fellow human being. The socio-temporal matrix of the intra-past, inter-present, and extra-future (see earlier chapters) helps you to remember what you really want and what brings you infinite and immeasurable joy in place of mere glimpses of pleasure that will never sustain any real sense of feeling safe, satisfied, and connected.
Problems from unharmonious awareness occur when the universal desire for learning is restrained. Critical thinking diminishes when human’s inherent compassion and desire for truth is constrained. Unsatisfied desires are substituted with harmful pleasures, which can be found all too easily. Not everything that momentarily feels good is good. Be it through sugar-laden food, tobacco, caffeine, alcohol, or other promises of consumable salvation; resourceful enterprises invest all they can in turning us into dependable customers. The streets are full of advertisements for that purpose. There is little visible promotion for helping people staying independent and self-sufficient human beings though. Nevertheless, more or less consciously, people feel that they are caught in dependability as their control over their behavior is slipping. Losing control then is compensated with aggression and violence against oneself and others. It is only a return to awareness-intelligent thought that allows self-control to be regained. Spirituality is an indispensable factor in most approaches to cure addictions and other out-of-control behavior. Understanding the use of Awareness Intelligence in that vein might help to overcome the stigma that still is attached to spirituality. Spirituality, in that sense, is nothing else than respecting all life’s nature that is in ourselves and anybody else. Life’s true nature that we all are is free of the self-imprisoning stress of lining up urgent desires and exclusive events instead of a timeless and inclusive state of being of importance.
Don’t fight your negative habits. Don’t fight symptoms. Hopelessness raises the value of chemical aids. Therefore, it’s hopelessness itself that needs to be addressed in the first place.
Hope comes from within, from your intra-past. Don’t rely on external approval and support for becoming who you really are and want to be. Use your Awareness Intelligence to freeing yourself from others’ opinions and potentially wrong beliefs about yourself that may hold you down. You are not dependent on single substances, behaviors, or even persons. Doctor’s don’t heal you, healing occurs within yourself. It’s life itself with all its rich variations, diverse types, and different ways that expect you to know and express what you really want. If life can create new bodies and souls, why shouldn’t it be able to heal the same?
You will find everything you need in life if you serve it by helping all humanity that comes and goes. Real healing may require you to quit some situations, be it jobs or relationships, anything that is unsupportive of your journey in line with holy thinking.
The assertive expression of your legitimate desires and quitting temporal states, spaces, and dependencies that are awareness-unintelligent is unavoidable to remove what is inhibiting the wholesome life in humantime that is available to you too.
So far:
Chapter 1 – Life’s introduction of Awareness Intelligence
Chapter 2 – The awarenessland of Awaria
Chapter 3 – Your life that is humantime
Chapter 4 – Consciousness, awareness, and social intelligence
Chapter 5 – Broadening the social scope
Chapter 6 – Increasing the attention span
Chapter 7 – Distraction of the mass
Chapter 8 – Missing systematics and links in science
Chapter 9 – Spiritual consumerism and mystification of spiritualism
Chapter 10 – Expanding the here and now
Chapter 11 – Individual revolution, human evolution
Chapter 12 – Mental coordinate system
Chapter 13 – Ignorance is not bliss
Chapter 14 – Awareness Intelligence is learnable
Chapter 15 – The difference between Awareness Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence
Chapter 16 – Technology and the distributed intelligence of the mind
Chapter 17 – The choice to be part of something bigger
Chapter 21 – The Inter-present
Chapter 23 – Full awareness and pure thoughts for coherent meaning
Chapter 24 – The three awareness sparring partners
Chapter 25 – The joy of being, doing, and becoming
Chapter 26 – Learning to die during a lifetime
Chapter 27 – Physical spacelessness and spatial mentalness
Chapter 28 – The law of creation: Intuition, intention, and imagination
Chapter 29 – Energy and the illusionary objectification of life
Chapter 31 – Trialistic harmony, not dualistic balance
Chapter 32 – A tripartite world that works in triplets
Chapter 33 – Triadic philosophies and wisdoms
Chapter 36 – Unconditional love
Chapter 38 – Unimportant urgencies versus purposeful service
Chapter 39 – Becoming wholly human
Chapter 40 – Exchanging and building energy through gratitude
Chapter 41 – Enthusiastic learning and teaching
Chapter 42 – Surviving and thriving through change
Chapter 43 – The ability to respond
Chapter 44 – Safety, satisfaction, and connectedness
Coming next:
Chapter 46 – Establish integrity and integrational abilities
— In love for my daughter Natalie and all children of this world. —
