Eastern medicine has taught for over 2500 years that feelings of health, happiness and meaning in life are associated with the free-flow and balance of life-force energy in body, mind and spirit. Our brain orchestrates and oversees this flow of life-force energy throughout our body, both consciously and unconsciously, to keep us healthy, active and alive. When our life-force energy is flowing freely and is in balance, we feel happy. When our life-force energy becomes blocked or out-of-balance, we experience this imbalance as stress, tiredness, depression, pain, unease, and even disease, all of which lead to unhappiness.
There are many sources of unhappiness in life – a difficult childhood, losing a job, rejection in love, failure in marriage, addictions, and so on. According to Eastern medicine, the unhappiness associated with any of these “negative” experiences is characterized as an imbalance in life-force energy. No matter where you start from, the path of Advanced Awareness to authentic happiness leads to consciously working on balancing (or re-balancing) your life-force energy in body, mind and spirit. It is a simple, yet highly effective journey that helps anyone increase long-term feelings of happiness in their life.
Authentic Happiness
“Authentic happiness” is described as long-term feelings of happiness that may grow within a person throughout their lifetime. When we are “authentically happy”, we know that we will be happy today, tomorrow, next week, and next year, no matter what happens in between. Research conducted by “Positive Psychology”, a new psychological movement based on the power of positive thinking, has found that in general, “authentic happiness” develops in a person as a result of three major areas of experiences in life:
1. Pleasure – the “smiley-face” positive experiences that relate to short-term happiness driven by internally produced chemicals such as dopamine in the brain.
2. Engagement – healthy involvement in relationships, work, play, romance and/or interesting hobbies.
3. Meaning – using personal strengths to serve a larger end beyond our own self-interests.
Psychologists today believe that about 50% of our basic feelings of happiness are due to our genetic makeup. About 10% is believed to come from major life circumstances such as how much money we have, or the kind of car we drive. That leaves about 40% of our feelings of happiness under our direct conscious control. It is this 40% that we are going to focus on in this Advanced Awareness program as we learn how to consciously increase happiness in our life.
Conscious Energy
About 70% of our life-force energy is used in our body as physical energy, the energy we use to run, jump, work, play, breathe, etc., that takes us through our daily life. The other 30% or so is converted in our brain into mental energy. Most of our mental life-force energy is used in our sub-conscious brain to control metabolism, the processes in our body that bring life-giving energy to each and every cell, all 100,000,000,000,000 of them! The relatively small amount of mental energy left is used in our conscious brain to think with, make decisions, act on those decisions and interact with others. This is our conscious energy. Conscious energy is the mental energy that guides us to follow whatever path we choose to follow in our life.
The Conscious Energy of Personality
Western medical science has discovered that the two hemispheres that make up the human brain are each responsible for different manners of thinking. Our left-brain prefers more rational thinking while our right-brain prefers to think more emotionally. Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist, published his book “Psychological Types” in 1921 in which he suggested that the personality thinking preferences of just about every person on the planet, regardless of religion, sex, ethnic background, age, or any other difference, fits into a combination of four personality temperaments he called: Thinker (T), Sensor (S), Intuitor (I) and Feeler (F).
The Thinker and Sensor personality temperaments prefer left-brain thinking while the Intuitor and Feeler temperaments prefer right-brain thinking.
Our individual personality temperaments describe the way our conscious brain prefers to use our reserves of conscious energy to think with, make decisions with, act on those decisions, and interact with others. This is the conscious energy that Eastern medicine believes we should work on balancing in order to achieve greater levels of authentic happiness in our life.
We all exhibit these four personality temperaments, we just have them in different proportions. We typically have a dominant temperament that is the most developed in us; a secondary temperament that is less developed; a tertiary temperament that is even less developed; and an inferior temperament that is the least developed in us.
Personality Temperament Spectrum
Participants in this Advanced Awareness program take a Personality Self-Assessment to obtain a ranking of their individual personality temperaments. Temperament scores range from a low score of 5 to a high score of 20. Balanced temperaments have scores that fall within the range of 9–16. “Overdeveloped” temperaments have scores greater than 16 while “underdeveloped” temperaments have scores less than 9. Participants construct a Personality Temperament Spectrum Chart that visually displays their personality temperament spectrum.
Personality Balance and Authentic Happiness
Most of us only develop one or two of our personality temperaments. However, Carl Jung believed that we should develop all four. According to Jung, balanced personality temperaments help a person make better decisions on whatever comes along in their life, leading to happier decisions. Participants in this program learn several highly practical ideas and suggestions on what they could do to increase their own personality temperament balance by “relaxing” their overdeveloped temperaments and “stretching” their underdeveloped ones. Learning how to balance your personality temperaments is a significant step along the path of Advanced Awareness to authentic happiness in your life.
The Seven Chakra Centers of Conscious Energy
The word “chakra” comes from the classical Sanskrit language of India meaning “spinning wheel” or “vortex”. According to Eastern medicine, chakras exist as “spinning wheels” of conscious energy in the human body centered at specific points along the spinal column from the base of the spine to the top of the head (see Figure 3). These seven “physical” chakras in the body are connected with seven “mental” chakras in the conscious brain. All of your senses, all of your perceptions, all of your states of awareness can be divided into these seven chakra centers of conscious energy. Chakras are thought to vitalize the body and are associated with interactions of both a physical and a mental nature.
The Seven Chakras
1–Ground Chakra – Conscious Energy Center of SURVIVAL & SECURITY:
Located in the base if the spine, the ground (or root) chakra represents being down-to-earth. It is related to our survival instincts and our connection with our bodies. It represents security, tradition and basic human potential.
2–Sacral Chakra – Conscious Energy Center of SEXUALITY & PLEASURE:
Located just beneath the navel, the sacral chakra is related to basic sexual and reproductive capacity as well as basic creativity. This chakra connects to others through desire, feelings, sensations and movement. It represents fluidity and grace, depth of feelings, sexuality and the ability to accept change.
3–Solar Plexus Chakra – Conscious Energy Center of ENERGY & PERSONAL POWER:
Located in the solar plexus, the “guts” chakra is the seat of our emotions. It represents personal power, will, effectiveness, stamina, spontaneity and energy. It is the source of our ability to remain centered and balanced when threatened.
4–Heart Chakra – Conscious Energy Center of LOVE & COMPASSION:
Located in the heart, this is the chakra of compassion, love, charity and is the door to spiritual development. A vital and open heart is the essence of relationships, love, marriage and parenthood. It also represents our ability to recover from life’s losses.
5–Voice Chakra – Conscious Energy Center of COMMUNICATION & TRUTH:
Located in the throat, the voice (or throat) chakra is tied to creativity, communication and growth. It represents our ability to speak openly and truthfully; listen intently and consciously; and interact with others without fear of what they may think. It is our center of being who we were meant to be and doing what we were meant to do in our life.
6–Mind Chakra – Conscious Energy Center of KNOWLEDGE AND INTUITION:
Located near the brain, the mind chakra (also called the third eye chakra) represents our ability to process and evaluate information. It is related to the act of seeing things clearly, both physically and intuitively. It is the center of our ability to think, learn, understand, write, discover, explore, imagine and see the “big picture”.
7–Crown Chakra – Conscious Energy Center of CONSCIOUSNESS & SPIRITUALITY:
Located above the head, like a halo or crown, this chakra connects us with the oneness of the universe. It represents our ability to transcend our ego-mind into higher consciousness, sometimes called “enlightenment”. It brings life purpose and meaning.
Chakra Balance Diagram
Eastern medicine teaches that health, happiness and meaning in life improves as the conscious energy in each of our seven chakras becomes more balanced. Out-of-balance chakras cause disharmony in how the body functions, leading to disharmony, stress, restlessness, pain, disease - and unhappiness.
Participants in this Advanced Awareness program complete a Chakra Self-Assessment to discover individual levels of conscious energy in each of their seven chakras. Using their results, participants construct a Chakra Balance Diagram that graphically displays which of their chakras are in balance, which are overdeveloped, and which are underdeveloped. Overdeveloped chakras indicate conscious energy centers that contain “too much” conscious energy and are depicted by three circles filled. Underdeveloped chakras indicate centers that contain “too little” conscious energy and are depicted by only the center circle filled. Balanced chakras contain just about the “right amount” of conscious energy.
Participants learn how to increase or decrease conscious energy in any of their chakras by either stretching or relaxing specific personality temperaments to bring more conscious energy balance into their out-of-balance chakras. As they consciously work on balancing their chakras more and more in their life, Eastern medicine teaches that they will naturally increase authentic happiness along the way.
The Spiritual Temperament of Higher Consciousness
There is no spiritual personality temperament in Jung’s Western model that represents our preference for spiritual thinking. By adding a new “spiritual temperament” to our individual personality temperament spectrum, we bring spirituality into Jung’s personality temperament model. This new “spiritual temperament” represents our ability to rise above our four ego-based personality preferences to implement spiritual values of Higher Consciousness in our life. Our new “spiritual temperament” contains spiritual values we would like to incorporate more into our daily life.
Higher Consciousness
When we choose to rise above our ego-based personality preferences into the state of Higher Consciousness, we enter the realm of our spiritual nature. It is our spiritual nature that overcomes anger, prejudice, manipulation, bias, ignorance, hatred, deception, resentment and other ego-based fears that come from the differences between people. It is our spiritual nature that allows us to live in conscious harmony with whatever is happening around us, no matter what the situation may be, in the absence of fear. It is our spiritual nature that chooses love over fear whenever we find our self in a difficult situation in our life. When we come from our spiritual nature, we bring the positive conscious energy of spiritual love into our thinking, our decision-making, our actions, and our interactions with others. The positive conscious energy of spiritual love is the energy of authentic happiness in life.
The Spiritual Journey
Consciously working on living more and more in Higher Consciousness is a lifetime journey of moving our consciousness from fear to love. This is the spiritual journey. It is a lifelong spiritual awakening that leads to understanding the true meaning of love. When we learn to consciously rise above our ego-based fears into the state of Higher Consciousness more and more in our everyday life, we see life’s journey as a series of energy processes in which we have a great deal of conscious control over. As we realize that our fears can always be diluted with love, we awaken to our spiritual nature. We discover our ability to bring the positive conscious energy of spiritual love more and more into our life. Spiritual love is the energy of authentic happiness.
Veeder South, PhD, President, Advanced Awareness
Dr. Veeder South is the author of The Path of Advanced Awareness to Conscious Relationships and is president of Advanced Awareness. Dr. South holds a PhD in Energy and Kinetics from UCLA and has been a professor and entrepreneur over the last 30 years. Dr. South founded Advanced Awareness with the mission of helping people develop personal happiness and meaning in whatever they choose to do in life.