Happiness & Well-Being – Scientists have proven what Toltecs have Known for Eons

Toltec Quetzalcoatle

Who is Happier, a Lotto winner or a Paraplegic?

According to Harvard Psychologist, Dan Gilbert who cites scientific data, after a year lotto winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives. Dan Gilbert is the author of the book Stumbling on Happiness.

Toltecs have known for centuries that experience follows perception, and you have control over how you perceive life (through tools such as recapitulation). You can either perceive life in a positive way or a negative way. If you perceive a problem as a challenge that will empower you and help you grow, it will do just that – benefit you. How you perceive life around you is your choice.

In the video below, Gilbert talks about how Homo Sapiens possess a Frontal lobe or Prefrontal Cortex. This amazing aparatus is an experience simulator. Human Sapiens can simulate experience before it happens. This is something that neither ancient man/woman (Homo Habilis (2,000,000 years B.C) or animals can do (ancient man/woman didn’t have a Prefrontal Cortex).

In his labs Gilbert has found that our experience simulator doesn’t always work as well as it should. He calls this phenomenon, Impact Bias. The experience simulator tends to cause us to believe that different outcomes are more different than they really are.  Things like winning or losing, gaining or losing a romantic partner, money and so on, have far less impact, intensity and duration than people expect them to have. Gilbert cites a recent study of how major life traumas affect people suggest that, if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness.

Why is this so? According to Gilbert it is because happiness can be synthesized by your prefrontal lobe. The problem is that you have the ability to synthesize happiness, but you don’t use your ability. You have beliefs that stand in your way such as the belief that happiness is something to be found. You have the belief that synthetic happiness is not of the same quality as what Gilbert calls natural happiness.
Gilbert says natural happiness is when we get 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 strong belief that synthetic happiness is inferior to natural happiness. Gilbert says that one of the reasons for this is that our whole economic engine is built on the principle that you must get what you want to be happy, that a shopping mall full of Zen monks isn’t going to be profitable because they don’t want stuff.

Toltecs know that it is all about how you perceive things. A man compliments a woman on 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 call one’s inventory, in this case emotional charges from her past that are stimulated by the man’s words, she will have a negative experience. His words will make her unhappy. The experience simulator is not working properly.

In the following video, Gilbert goes on to prove scientifically that what he calls synthetic happiness is every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you are aiming for. It is a very interesting experiment.

From a Toltec or Metaphysical viewpoint, I would go beyond what Gilbert shows 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 want, or lose what we had, we are unhappy. It is a powerless type of happiness because we are 100% dependent on our external world.

Our ability to create happiness actually has a physical counterpart in our brain, the frontal lobe or prefrontal cortex. How well this experience simulator operates, depends upon our perception, which depends on how well we have cleaned, cleared and healed our inventory.

Knowing this, we can no longer blame people, events or situations outside of us for making us unhappy. Only we can make ourselves happy by using the faculties we all possess.

Now you know that you have everything you need to be happy inside of you. Unless you are a Homo Habilis (an ancient man/woman), and don’t have a Pre Frontal Cortex, you have everything you need to be happy right inside your brain. All you need are the tools to return it to a fine running machine. The Toltec Path provides these tools.

Click here to view happiness video