Who is Happier, a Lotto winner or a Paraplegic?
According to Harvard Psychologist, Dan Gilbert who explains scientific data, after a year lotto winners and paraplegics are evenly happy with their lives. Dan Gilbert is the author of the book Stumbling on Happiness.
Toltec wisdom has stated for centuries that experience follows perception, and you have power over how you perceive life. You can either perceive life in a auspicious way or a adverse way. If you perceive a problem as a challenge that will empower you and help you grow, it will do just that - benefit you.
Gilbert discusses how Homo Sapiens contain a Frontal lobe or Prefrontal Cortex. This astonishing aparatus is an experience simulator. Human Sapiens can simulate experience before it takes place.
In his labs Gilbert has seen that our experience simulator doesn't work as well as it is supposed to. He calls this phenomenon, Impact Bias. The experience simulator causes us to accept that different outcomes are more different than they truly are. Things like winning or losing, gaining or losing a romantic partner, and so on, have far less impact, intensity and duration than people assume them to have. Gilbert cites a recent study of how major life traumas affect people suggest that, if it happened over three months ago, it has no impact on your happiness. This is also borne out in Toltec writings such as The Four Agreements.
Gilbert states natural happiness is when we get what we wanted. Synthetic happiness is what you make when you don't get what you wanted. Particularly in Western Society we have a ardent belief that synthetic happiness is not as good as natural happiness. Gilbert says that our complete economic engine is created on the principle that you must get what you desire to be happy, that a shopping mall filled with Zen monks isn't going to be profitable because they don't want things.
Toltecs understand that it is all about how you perceive things. A man says nice things to a woman bout her hair, for example. It makes one woman happy as she perceives what he said as a compliment. Another woman, who grew up with her brothers teasing her about her hair and has an emotional charge about it, will perceive what the man says totally different than the first woman. Due to, what Toltecs refer to as one's inventory, Due to emotional charges from her past being brought up by the man's words, she will have a bad encounter. The experience simulator is not working properly.
From a Toltec or Metaphysical viewpoint, I would go beyond what Gilbert states in his talk, that what he calls synthetic happiness is actually true happiness as it is not dependent on what happens to us in our lives. What Gilbert calls natural happiness is fleeting as when we don't get what we desire, or lose what we had, we are unhappy. It is a impotent type of happiness because we are 100% dependent on our external circumstances.
Knowing this, we can no longer blame people, events or situations outside of us for causing us to be unhappy. Only we can make ourselves happy by using the faculties we all hold.
Now you understand that you have everything you need to be happy contained in you. Unless you are a Homo Habilis (an ancient man/woman), and doesn't have a Pre Frontal Cortex, you possess all you require to be happy right within your brain. All you need are the tools to return it to a fine running machine. The Toltec Path provides these tools.