What Is the Number One Predictor of Human Happiness?

 

What Makes People Happy?

About a year ago, for several days, I wrote down everything that made me genuinely happy, even for a moment. I wanted to find out what was really making me happy, not just what I thought was making me happy, which I suspected might not be the same things.

There were things I enjoyed and that gave me happiness because they were pleasurable, like deep personal conversations with good friends.

Also, an emotionally moving song, a movie (less often), a meaningful sentence of insight, or a beautiful painting. All of these really involve thankfulness, appreciation, and gratitude.

My connection with God in prayer gave me the most satisfaction and feeling of love and meaning.

Friendships with good people gave me the second highest amount of happiness.

Fourth was gratitude for all the things above.

Third was what I read in an article was the number one predictor of happiness. I rank it number three, with communion with the Spirit of God in my spirit as, by far, number one.

Personal Control

I was very surprised to discover that one thing, over and over, gave me the most durable and constant happiness (not counting spiritual joy or relational happiness): PERSONAL CONTROL over the things I was doing.

There are several psychological research articles that strongly support this very important insight.

Not Passivity

Too many Christian believers and people in religious traditions take the attitude that it is God’s (or the universe’s) responsibility to choose their life, to do their life for them, as they sit back, passively. While we are to live in love and follow God’s Spirit by our spirit, there is a lot of creative freedom and responsibility that is ours, to take control over our lives, under God.

God made humans with freewill, and we are not happy when we do not use the creative gift that He gave us.

Curtis Smale

Welcome

Welcome to Lessons of the Soul and Spirit.

• This is a blog dedicated to valuable knowledge and wisdom of the soul and spirit that should be learned and valued and lived by.

What people don’t know about their eye health

Just as a reminder, if you ever see flashes or suddenly get a lot of new floaters, a lot of translucent stringy things in your eyes, you need to go to the eye doctor immediately, same day. The doctor told me that some people don’t come in for two weeks and in two weeks if you have a detached retina, or part of a detached retina, you can have permanent partial loss of sight, or total blindness, because the retina dies if it’s not being properly fed nutritionally. I don’t think a lot of people know this. I think they tend to think it is a lot like a toothache. They put off toothaches until finally they hurt really bad. With the eyes it’s not the same. Spread the word.

C.S.

Fake Smile

 

She put it on
Like cheap makeup
No soul in there at all
Fake smile

This one the soul inside was
Sad and hurting
More important was a cheap display
Fake smile

Then this one
From the heart
Couldn’t stop it

It is real.

C.S.

The Truth About Romantic Love

I am convinced that most people do not know what love is.

What most people think romantic love is, is really just lust and self-focused fantasy. It is fantasy about self and the projection of a fantasy onto the other person.

After thinking about, studying, and discussing this subject, I am also convinced that love is not an emotional response.

Love, that is, the quality that is common to all types of loves, is the desire to do right and good things for another person.

Romantic love is to do those things for a person of the opposite sex whom you like and admire.

Lifetime love is doing right and good things for another person consistently across many years.

Romantic love is not the selfish experience of one’s pleasurable emotional reactions.

Marriage is only a good deal if both people know their roles and are willing to be good and to do good to the other person.

Part of being right for another person and being a good person in practical reality is to fulfill your sex role.

Nice emotions are nice, but they are not what holds the house up.

People should wait till the rapturous emotions wear off completely before getting married.

Many people, people meaning women, think that love is a strong emotional feeling that their husband is obligated by marriage vows to keep alive for forty or fifty years. But this is an impossible goal and a delusional expectation.

If you continually converse with the person you desire and admire, daily, for two full years, without confusing things by having sex with them, you will know who they are.

Why get married and have kids before you know if you can even stand your potential spouse the way they really are?

With marriage, as with religious conversion, there is a honeymoon phase.

It is real, but it is temporary.

People need to wake up and not hope against reality.

The truth will set you free, but first it might tick you off severely.

Then it will set you free.

Curtis Smale

Pastor Sunshine

Click here to read the story: https://graceinsightandart.com/2016/08/02/pastor-sunshine/

Delusional Envy

It is crazy to feel envy at what someone else has when you don’t even want what they have.

Maybe what you envy is to feel the way you think they feel about what they have.

Or, what you fantasize that they feel.

Or maybe even what you fantasize that they fantasize?

See how removed from reality all of this is?

Sheesh, you might as well have your own fantasy, feel the emotions, and just enjoy that.

For instance, if movie stars have all the love and fun and significance that you think they have, why do they die from overdoses of painkillers and mood altering drugs?

Hmmm…

Curtis Smale