Contentment
Find Your Deep Satisfaction By Doing Good Works For Others.
All Photos, unless noted otherwise, are by Don Pierce.
Key Assertions: The world is right because you feel good, you are a success, and you are spiritually developed. Environmentalists and other social activists find satisfaction for themselves by doing good works for others. EartHearts find satisfaction for themselves by doing good works for others. To evolve to higher stages of development one needs to learn how to live in the moment, surrender to the belief in an unseen natural order and higher power, and balance Ego/man/technology with Soul/God/Nature.
You already know that each time you incubate a certain dream with your intention you need to use present-tense affirmations, apply strong feelings, visualize what you want clearly, and covert weak hope into strong expectation. As you lie down to incubate a dream tonight, add one more element to your normal process of making your dreams come true. That element is dominance of thought right before falling asleep. Your thoughts, expectations, feelings, and visualizations need to be solely about the object of your desire; which in our present case, is to have a lucid dream that brings you into the nocturnal presence of Dream Characters that are Indigenous Images or the image of familiar attractive Natural Beings. If there is a certain Dream Character you want to summon into your lucid dream, make this desire your dominant thought immediately before falling asleep. Let any other competing thoughts pass. Concentrate on your singular intention up to the point of falling asleep and your desire will produce exactly what you want in your dream. Once the desire is in your lucid dream, you can make modifications, seek advice, plotting strategies, and do what it takes to set the stage for the manifestation of your desires.
When many of these desires are about developing yourself so that you can better help others, your happiness will become abundant, abiding, and authentic. This Triple-A happiness will occur in a stronger and faster way if the “other” that you are helping includes, not just people like you, not just people you serve professionally, and not just your family, but also all other sentient beings.
Persevere in your Dream Tending. There are vast riches in your dreams that will be most helpful in your life. After tending to your most recent dreams, go to a forest to make yourself available for a possible transcendent experience; that is, an unforgettable moment of extraordinary happiness and attunement to aspects of the Greater Self that are typically considered outside of the Individual Self. When your moment of focus is centered beyond your own individuality, and it feels very important, you are likely having a transcendent experience. These are peak experiences that propel you towards greater depth of character. Foster them and welcome them. They are a chief benefit of the kinds of outdoor experiences encouraged as you proceed through this course of learning.
HumaNatureConnect Activity
Determining What Motivates You
For this activity, determine if:
You seek to ensure your happiness by reducing your impact on the environment. For a person to fall into this community, one has to establish a strong relationship between the environment and the individual well-being: to become happier, one (has to) protect the environment (Lambin, 2012, p. 7).
You are motivated by fear. This classification will not be a good basis to determine the future stance of environmental campaigns. “The rhetoric of fear, which warns of a collapse of our civilization unless we abandon our current way of life, engenders denial among skeptics, cynicism among nihilists, despair among pessimists, and rejection by optimists” (Lambin, 2012, p. 7).
You are motivated by seeking environmental protection for the purpose of protecting nature––a source of happiness for you. If “a less degraded natural environment will make us happier, we would then enter into a virtuous, mutually reinforcing cycle of conservation of nature and an increase in personal happiness” (Lambin, 2012, p. 7).
Which statement from above––1, 2, or 3––most reflects what motivates you to happiness?
