One Truth (handout)

There is only one simple truth about unhappiness.

WHEN YOU BELIEVE YOU ARE WRONG TO BE HAPPY YOU WILL DENY THAT YOU ARE AND FEEL THAT YOU ARE NOT.

That is all unhappiness is. Happiness is not believing that.

Understand this. Your happiness depends on it. Unhappiness is believing that being happy is being.the way you should not be. It is impossible to be happy once you believe that.

People are unhappy when, and only when, they BELIEVE that being happy would be a contradiction to what they are or want to be or have. When this is questioned by the Option Method unhappiness disappears.

Unhappiness is believing that you are not the way you should be. It is believing you should be unhappy if you are not.

You are allowed to be any way you choose or happen to be. You are allowed to be any way.

“NEEDS”

People believe they “need” things in order to be happy because they believe they will be caused to be unhappy without them. But unhappiness was merely believing in the first place that it would be wrong to be happy without those needed things. Continuing to be unhappy or fearing becoming unhappy is just denying that that belief “caused” the way they felt.

Since they are still believing it would have been wrong to have been happy and therefore are going to continue to deny that they were merely acting on that belief. To do otherwise would be to admit that they were really unaffected emotionally but were only believing that that was wrong. We are afraid to admit that we don’t “need” as if simple desire alone had no right to be sincere. All the subsequent unhappiness or fears of it is in order to deny that they could actually be so wrong or bad as to have remained happy. They then search for the conditions where it might not be wrong to regain or insure happiness. This is called “trying to get what we need”.

Fulfilling a need is, therefore, the creating of the condition for making it unnecessary to deny that you are happy. Because when needs are fulfilled it will not wrong to be happy.

“ACTING UNHAPPY”

The difference between acting as if you were unhappy, for whatever reason, and being unhappy is that acting does not include believing that it would be bad or wrong to be happy. An actor doesn’t believe he is not really happy. He denies his happiness to another but not to himself.

When you are done being unhappy you can just admit that you made yourself “feel” that you were and are not really unhappy. There is no being really unhappy. There was only believing it was wrong to be happy.

“Wrong” is a model word meant to be equivalent to any concept that means bad, crazy, contradictory, insincere, lying, immoral, inappropriate, undeserving, no right to be, unworthy, sinful. All these ideas mean “bad for you to be happy”. The implication is that you will be more unhappy later if you’re not unhappy now (because you are not being the way you should -unhappy). But that only repeats the imperative that you not be happy in the future after being happy now when you should not have been.


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