Taking your Conscious Point of Focus inwards is a deliberate directional choice. This singular choice of direction decides whether or not an unhappy, emotionally blocked person will ever be long-term happy again.
Once you take the journey inwards, regardless of how painful it is, your emotional process starts to sort itself out. You could have no access to any helpful support or information from any source – but if you simply took your Conscious attention inwards repeatedly and for long enough you would eventually find the resolution to your emotional problems.
Direction. Not hope; not faith; not knowledge; not ability; not anything else. Not the support of others; not medication; not goals; not even the desire for happiness; not another single thing I can possibly think of trumps this one truth. If you will not take the direction inwards nothing else will work.
Repeatedly journey inwards and all the things I’ve just mentioned become passing phases. They are useful at times, but completely pointless in and of themselves. None of them are permanent, you see.
We may hang on to them as if they are – but they are not and we know it. The journey into you is all there really is and you will see and use all of these ‘add-on features’ along the way but you must not make any one of them your goal.
Going into your emotional energies, positive or negative, is a lifelong process to be repeatedly engaged with if you want to remain emotionally happy and make decisions right for you in the long-term. The moment you decide not to go into an emotional response you have a problem you are one day going to have to acknowledge and deal with or ‘suffer’ from.
Going in allows energy to be released and the insights contained within those energies tells you who you really are and what external environments and relationships are right for you.
But even these insights are temporary steps on the journey. Just directional signs indicating the next path to take.
If you do not keep taking the right direction your inner world will become conflicted. Those feelings inside want to be heard and they will keep trying to get your conscious attention. To go in the wrong direction – we call this denial - you have to set up complex mental networks to repeatedly block an emotional response. Blocked emotional responses never stop trying to get release from your body – the only option is to acknowledge and release them.
To keep blocking an emotional response the urge to block has to become unconsciously habitual. Why? Well, if you were conscious of yourself doing this blocking you would not do it, would you?
Er, yes, actually you would. Here are four symptoms of blocking.
Hope, Despair, Faith and Fear
These are all temporarily useful tools or liars depending on how you look at them and how long you keep them in place. It is OK to use these states as temporary tools but if you grasp any one of them and establish it as a permanent way of seeing you are living in a lie.
Hope
Hope is the expectation something desirable will happen no matter what we do. Hope is a form of helplessness attached to positive emotional imagery.
It may feel nice but it is not real and it depends on external life events for those desirable things to happen.
Hope is hopeless when it comes to real life change. If you have to keep relying on hope to get you through a situation this can become a form of psychological denial.
We grasp at hope, for example, when we are in an abusive relationship but pretend we are not. One day, we hope, the person abusing us will stop. We enhance the affects of failing hope when we choose to idolise or please the abuser in the hope they see how highly we think of them, hoping they will change as a result.
Sometimes we hold ourselves responsible for their behaviour and they love this. When we do occasionally stand up for ourselves they deliberately trigger our guilt response with the intention of making us take the rap for their behaviour and getting us back into the false hoping state.
People stuck in hope become very useful to others until they hit despair.
Despair
Despair is the expectation that something undesirable will happen no matter what we do and is sometimes the result of ‘hope gone bad’. Despair is also a form of helplessness but is attached to negative emotional imagery.
Strangely enough, I see people deliberately use mock despair to get out of doing something that would actually solve a problem – they just do not want to do the work and hope mock despair will allow them the get-out without feeling too self-critical about it.
You will see despair in others as ‘mock’ when you know for sure what the solution to the problem is and have used it repeatedly and successfully – but no, no matter how often you point out your demonstrable success with the same issue, for them it will not work.
I have felt the occasional period of despair myself – but I do not buy into it for long. Despair is the opposite of hope but it is similar in that it is just as false and makes us feel just as helpless..
Faith
Faith is believing something unseen but wanted will happen if you behave in a certain way (so you go in that direction).
Faith has more of a behavioural edge to it than hope because unlike hope faith says you have to do something to get the ‘promised reward’. I quite like faith – I’ve seen it in action within me many times – faith feels actionable. Faith feels like I am empowered and moving forward.
But faith is actually a side affect of taking a chosen direction – it is not in itself enough. If after a period of time faith does not deliver the evidence and knowledge that justifies the work I give up on faith – and so we should.
Blind faith, spending day after day involved in actions that bring no identifiable benefit, are a waste of time to me.
Faith is false when adopted as a permanent outcome in its own right.
Fear
Fear is believing something unseen and not wanted will happen if you behave in a certain way (so you go in the opposite direction).
Fear of our own emotions is always false – False Evidence Appearing Real – but a lot of us fall prey to this mistake and avoid growth opportunities due to the fear that comes with taking the emotional risks associated with growth.
Fear, without direct evidence of the feared thing happening right now, is false.
A One Sentence Summary of an Example
In a difficult situation you got trapped into using hope to give yourself good feelings but your hopes did not materialise and turned to feelings of despair which got so bad they overcame your fear of leaving and forced you to have faith things would turn out right in the end.
An even shorter sentence: you changed direction because one direction hurt more than the other.
The Point of All This is …
If you are relying on hope; if you are full of despair; if you need to find faith; if you fear your inner world – these are emotional issues telling you your current direction is wrong.
These four related thinking and emotional states are meant to be temporary stopping places along the journey towards natural inner happiness.
If you have got stuck in one or more of them you need to get moving in the right direction again.
Regards - Carl
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