Do you want to be normal or happy - Betz

Summary by Beleniel Anorhuin

Do you want to be normal or happy?

1. He is telling to see every new day as a presen t which is telling you: Make the best out of me for today. Dont waste me unconscious, unlived and unloved. I am only now, tomorrow Ill be gone. Live me now. Imagine every morning that the new day is telling you that. Can you really dare to make nothing out of that unwritten pages, that open up to you every morning? It is all in your hands, to live a boring everyday life or to make the best out of it and make it worth remembering. 2. He says that it is our own unconsciousness in thinking, speaking and acting that is the source of all our suffering which we think is not our fault, but the fault of other people or Life itself. But we have to understand that we are creators of our own Life and that we are responsible for what we experience in Life. It is fear, that leaves us leading an unwanted Life, a normal Life. A normal person is repressing feeling of fear, anger or sadness. He is even stating that humans are not dying of diseases but of a broken heart because they dont listen to it and dont act after what the heart is trying to tell them. Reminds me a little bit about Paulo Coelhos The Alchemist, which is also a great book to read but more allegoric. And I also found many aspects of the Kybalion, an old hermetic teaching, in Robert Betz book. 3. He says that as children we learn that one has to fulfill certain

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Do you want to be normal or happy - Betz

conditions to get attention, appreciation and love , which are nutrients for every human, especially children. And even if we manage to fulfill these conditions we get only small amounts of this nutrition. So we never psychologically grow up and get adults. And because that is repeated over and over with each generation, we are educated and brought up by adults who inside them themselves still are small, hurt and love-hungry children and not happy with the Life they are leading. So they cannot show us how to get happy, only how to become unhappy. But that is normal in our society. That is why inside us, a child is still alive who is yearning to live in a world of Love and Security, who wants to laugh, to play and to enjoy Life. But the adult we seem to be on the outside is telling the child to shut up, to do what has to be done, to work and not to dream of a better Life or even start doing something to get it. Although Freedom is trying to tell us: Just dare it, you have nothing to lose, only to gain. But we are only mouning and complaining about Life and other people and how hard or complicated it all is, but we are not realizing that we hold the key to transforming our Life into something better. Or we dont dare to do so. And instead of start loving ourselves if we dont get enough from the outside world, we deny ourselves every small bit of self-love and tell ourselves every day that we are not good enough, not successful enough, not wise enough, etc. Did you ever stay calm when you had to get to an important appointment and couldnt find your keys? Did you get angry towards yourself or did you say: Just relax, lets sit down and think about it together and we will remember where we put it. And I say we because We all have to be the best friend, the lover for ourselves. 4. Betz says that everytime we experience something negative , like losing our job or a friend or partner, Life is taking us aside to tell us: You didnt understand the topic yet, there is still something to learn and to do different. I think that is a beautiful picture and very helpful to deal with such situations. Because something you must have done wrong and that is nothing serious or bad, its just what it is. And here you have gotten another chance to try it again in a better or different way. 5. Life is fair! It is just giving you what you are expecting. If you think, Life is a neverending fight, you will create obstacles, conflicts and disappointments over and over to have something to fight. You have to take responsibility for what you think and feel , for what you thought and felt yesterday, because that is what makes your Life today. 6. Fear is the engine of the normal people . They got so used to that feeling that they cannot live without it anymore. They do everything, unconsciously of course, that their cells never have to be without their drug. But it is possible to learn how to transform them into happiness and trust if you understand that fear is nothing bad and for sure not fate. But therefore, you have to become more conscious about you thoughts because they create and increase our fears and we dont even recognize it because most of our thoughts are unconscious.

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Do you want to be normal or happy - Betz

Who is yearning for security and control is full of fears but he can learn to deal with them, to accept them and to transform them. Where fear is, there is lacking love, there is something unloved. The opposite of fear is not bravery, it is love. 7. Make peace with your past and you will be free . Watch your past, see every rejection, everytime you were left alone, every moment of disappointment, criticism and every moment where you were denied love. Every moment is saved in your brain and most dont want to remember it. But it is there and still guiding your Life because you didnt make peace with it, you are repressing it. And therefore you are repeating the experiences of your past over and over again in your relationships or at work. The past of most people is there, waiting to be resolved and transformed into peace. Treat your past with love and you will free yourself from it and be able to live in the present. 8. Another point normal people have to deal with ever day is the fact that we have learned to evaluate every possible negative reaction others towards ourselves and to avoid critics and harm and rejection. So, our Life mostly is ruled by the people around us. As long as we try to make everybody else happy to gain appreciation and love and to avoid rejection and critics we still are the small child who learned to behave like that to make the parents happy and dont get in conflict with them. As long as that wounds are not healed, living together with others will be painful and the wars will not stop. Not on the outside world and not inside each one of us. 9. If you are starting to change you Life and stop get out of the hamster wheel, if you stop complaning and instead understand that you are responsible for what is happening to you people will tell you that you are crazy and not normal because they are afraid of you, because you show them that there is another way. Take it as a compliment. You start to be not normal, you start to be something special And soon you will attract and find people who think and act and life like you. 10. Better talk of experiences instead of mistakes if you look back on your way. Its a different way to eveluate what you have done and what you have learned. Everything in Life makes sense, because its the principle of cause and consequence (one of the axioms in the Kybalion). If people dont love you, ask yourself how you treat yourself and if you love and respect yourself. If you break up with a partner, aks yourself, if you loved him like he is or if you tried to change him or to use him for your own needs. You have to lose, what you dont love (truly love in the right way, not in the childish way), because love is what holds everything together.

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Do you want to be normal or happy - Betz

Do you want to be normal or happy Part II

In the second part of his book he talks about transforming the old, normal and unhappy Life into a new Life. The author, Robert Betz, believes in the Year 2012 as a year and time of changes. He says that the human being has experienced a era of separation and division and conviction and this will come to an end now. Now, we have to look for coherence and permanent Flow because that are the general criteria of Life itself. The outer Chaos we experience at the moment is nothing than a mirror of the chaos inside of us. He talks about the principle of synchronicity, which is also one of the principles of the Kybalion. 1. We are creating chaos through our unconscious thoughts and feelings, attitudes and doctrines and this creates in us a feeling of fear, anger and sorrow, which we try to suppress because it makes us feel uncomfortable. And that is why we get angry or sad or afraid if other people press our buttons, if they act in some way and we think the hurt us, but in fact we are hurting ourselves, because these feeling suppressed since we were young. All the chaos and pain in our Life are consequences of our unconsciousness, suppression and self-condemnation, of unpeaceful relationships to people in our past and hence created fear, anger or sorrow. 2. You yourself are responsible for your happiness, nobody except you can make you happy and nobody except you can make you unhappy. So, to love and accept yourself is the basis for being able to love other people. And the basis for Self-Love is giving attention to your inner life and and giving attention to your percepts of your physical body , the emotions of your emotional body , the thoughts of your mental body and the impulses of the heart of your spiritual body. Because giving attention to something is a first act of love because energy flows to where we are focused on. Give yourself time, space, attention and love. And by giving yourself love and joy, you will start to get it from other people, too. 3. We see our body as a independent unit, we have separated it from from the unity of soul-mind-body. But to heal ourself and our body, we have to unify it again and to understand that we are responsible if our body gets ill . If you suppress your anger and dont let it show the body will be affected by rising blood pressure, just as an example. Be thankful for your body and treat it lovingly. You will lose what you dont love, because love holds everything together so the best thing is to love your body and dont criticize it all over again and again, like most women do very often. 4. Love all of your emotions . For the soul there are no good and bad emotions or experiences. All emotions are interesting and valuable. But the human being suffers most of his own emotions. All emotions make sense and want to be felt, want to be understood and accepted. E-Motion means Energy in motion. So emotions have to be felt that they can move on and leave your body. If you suppress them, they cannot move on and will stay in your body as fear, you are afraid to feel them (again). Another point are your thoughts. Thoughts create our emotions. So watch your thoughts. In the end, there is
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Do you want to be normal or happy - Betz

to say that one through Acceptance and Awareness to the opposite feeling. Through sadness to joy, through fear to love, through anger to harmony and so on. So if you feel bad the next time, take some rest and sit down, close your eyes and tell your feelings that they are welcome, that you are ready to feel them consciously today. After feeling how that emotions makes you and your body feel let them go and make some light meditation or something like that, bring yourself into a positive state of mind. Make some Loving-Kindness Meditation. And everything will be better and the bad feeling, which was accepted and felt by you, will have moved on. 5. Stop all the negative enmeshments of your past , to the people in your past. Forgive, but forgive with your heart not just with your mind to free yourself from the effects these enmeshments still have on your todays Life. You need two people for war, but you need only one person for peace. And you can make this peace for yourself. See, that the other person wasnt able to behave in another way in that situation or time and that he or she tried to make it best as she or he could. Those difficult people are the most important people in our Life. They press our buttons and only provoke the negative emotions in us. Robert Betz says, that the partner who is breaking up with you is only showing you your fear of being lonely and abandoned, a fear you take with you since you were a child. And he is reminding you of how many times you have abandoned yourself. A person who is treating you unkind is only showing you how often you treat yourself unkind and a person who is trying to change you and is always criticizing you, requests you to take self-responsibility. The more we feel as a toy of our surrounding environment, the less we can walk straight and upright through our Life. Our brain is separating things which cannot be separated. Good and bad, offender and victim. It doesnt see the background where a certain behavior makes sense. There are no coincidences in Life. If something happens to you, it has a sense, which you might only be able to see with some distance of time. So, when somebody is pushing your buttons ask yourself the following questions: - Which emotion does the person trigger inside me with his behavior? - Where do I treat myself in the same way as this person treats me? - Did I forbid myself in the past to act like this person is acting? Is the person living something, I never wanted to live or was never allowed to live? - Is this person acting like other persons in my past? Did I never forgive that other person? - Did I always fear that something like that might happen to me? Did I think like I hope that I will never be that disappointed, hurt, etc. again? 6. Most of the times, there are no other people hurting you, you do it yourself. All day long you are talking to yourself, and most of the time its not in a loving kind of way. Mostly its self-criticism or -blaming. Tell yourself: I love you and you are the best I ever had. Great, that I am here and I am me! Start watching yourself and how often you withdraw yourself your own love, how often you treat yourself in a hurting and rude kind of way. How often you dont hear what your heart is telling you or what your body needs? How often are you telling yourself I should or I have to until these beliefs become automated? Stop hurting yourself now. Start to
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Do you want to be normal or happy - Betz

understand why you couldnt act in a different way in the past and take back all the judgments you made about yourself. 7. If you want to lead a life in joy and lightness , you need to ask yourself over and over again: Why am I doing what I am doing? Do I really want to do it? Do I do, what I love to do and do I love what I do? And in which way am I doing what I am doing. Because every minute you do something is a minute of your precious life. Its worth nothing to wait for better times to do something. There might not come better times, you might not live that long or you might get ill or something could happen which makes you unable to do it then, so do it now. Dont wait. Every moment of your life is precious, so try to make everything you do with love. Trust your heart with that, it shows you, what you like to do and what you dont like. Take responsibility for your own life. 8. Mind your own business. Because taking care of others often is just a distraction of your own problems and fears. A person who is thinking often about other people cannot think about herself at the same time. Every problem somebody has is at first his problem not ours. And trying to tell others what to do gives them the feeling that we dont trust them that they can manage it alone, so we make them weak. Every helping hand throws a shadow, a good friend of mine once told me. A crisis is a moment where we can grow and gain psychic strength. A true help can be a If you need help, I will be there, just call me or a I trust in you, you will make it!

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Do you want to be normal or happy - Betz

Do you want to be normal or happy Part III

First, he says, one has to accept the fact, that Life never stops, everything is always in a flow, always changing, inside and outside yourself thats a law of nature. And therefore, to gain trust and a feeling of security you have to understand that real security is only to be found inside yourself . If you want something new to develop , something old has to vanish . We are here to be happy now! Not tomorrow , not later now. A happy life with inner peace, happiness, joy, thankfulness and pleasure is not a matter of luck or coincidence. It is a matter of taking responsibility for ones own life and all the creations one has made until now. Heaven is nowhere to find than inside of oneself. And to find this heaven inside you, you have to start to really forgive everybody and everything in your past and to recognize that they all are on their way to love and happiness. To find this heaven inside you, you have to start to really accept and love your inner child, which is waiting to be loved and changed by you. Because we forgot to love ourselves while we were young, we still think that we cannot live and do what makes us happy and what are our own inner wishes. We still think we need love and appreciation from other people and this addiction makes us all trapped and illiberal people, which makes us angry at the same time. And mostly we get into an argument and fight with these people, by which we wish to be loved and accepted and afterwards we feel lonely, empty, hurt an abandoned. Stop to expect things from others which you cannot give yourself . And start to give yourself everything you expected from outside so far . You have everything inside of you to make yourself happy! And only who loves himself can recognize the love in and behind everything, only who loves himself can claim freedom and live freedom. Only because we dont respect and love each other, because we play with each other, because we compare, envy, exploit or even kill each other, we think we have found evidence of the evil nature of mankind. But all war has its root in our inner fights. Every human is good by its nature and his heart wishes nothing more than to love and be loved. So first start to learn to give that love to yourself, to accept and cherish yourself and in a few months time, after Robert Betz, you can manage to change your life from a normal one to a happy one. And therefore, he gives us some advice and instructions:

1. Take me for yourself and your way inside yourself

The changes you want to see in the outer world are the effects of your inner states, therefore to change something in the outer world you have to make the important changes inside yourself. So regularly take some time for yourself, about one hour a day, and work on your thoughts, feelings and your past. Take a half day on weekends and a weekend every month to be alone with yourself and get to know yourself better . Because you are the most important person in your life!

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Do you want to be normal or happy - Betz

2. Take responsibility for all your crea ons and leave your unconsciousness
Your condemning way of thinking about yourself and others made you the victim of others and your life and every condemnation strengthens this feeling of suffering. But the truth is, that it have been your thoughts about yourself and life, your words and actions that made you feel like a victim. Take responsibility now, for what you find in your life , for your body and feelings and relationships, your choices and the quality of your life. Be conscious and kind to yourself and take life in your own hands.

3. Approve and appreciate everything you nd in your Life at present

Say YES to everything that is happening in our life , its an act of humility for the life, that is never unfair or unjust. Everything is happening because it had to happen, because something else was happening before, because everything is a sequence of events. Say YES to what is happening now and you open the door for change. Drop the vicious circle of condemnation and refusal now.

4. Become an observer of what is happening in your Life

Start to observe what is happening in your life , what you are thinking deep inside of you about your life, your body, your relationships, your feelings, about sex, money, work, everything and start to write it down so you get more conscious about it. That might help you gain and keep a healthy distance to everything that is happening both inside and outside of you. The observer is thinking: Its interesting, whats happing here, isnt it? And it might help you to recognize repeating patterns and might help you to stop them. Before you can change something important, you have to understand how you experience it in the present.

5. Take inventory of your most important Thoughts and Beliefs

Take some time to answer the following questions: What are you thinking about yourself? What are you thinking about life in general? What are you thinking about your fellow men , about the people around you? What are you thinking about Dying and Death ? Can you be sure? Are these thoughts are true? How is your body reacting to these thoughts? Because the body is a high sensitive energy system which can tell you what is wrong and what is right for you to think and believe. Good and true thoughts give you a good feeling, your body feels relaxed and light and wide. Bad or wrong thoughts and feelings make your body feel tense and tightened.

6. Open up for a new Thinking and Loving regarding yourself

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Do you want to be normal or happy - Betz

Remember how you have felt as a young child : curious, free, playful, dreaming, open-hearted without prejudices against others or yourself? That is your real nature. You can start to become like this person again , because you can decide what and how you think about yourself and others and how you want to treat yourself and others. Loving Kindness is the key (and here comes the Buddhism again). Nobody can stop you from loving yourself and the more you love yourself, the more the problems in your life will fade.

7. Forgive yourself and correct your condemna ons

The general thought of normal people sounds like: I am not okay the way I am, I have to change and become a better person in order to be loved, because I am not worthy to be loved like I am now. This thought produces shame and inferiority. All the times you thought something like I am not good/beautiful/intelligent/etc. enough you have hurt yourself. So this is the first step, to take these thoughts back and stop them. Its not about changing yourself, its about changing your unkind and condemning way of treating yourself. Forgive yourself by knowing that every time in your life, you made the best you could do in that situation. The heart, the love, is never blaming or punishing or condemning. Nothing happens without any sense. Forgiving yourself is a attitude, not an act. Start changing your attitude in that way.

8. Transform your inner child

It is not the grown up person that is afraid of being abandoned or that is afraid to fail, it is the inner child you had to leave behind while you were growing up and while you had to learn to adjust to other people. This fear of being left alone, being abandoned is the biggest wound every human has inside of him which is waiting for being healed and only you can work on that task. Change your inner child into a happy child, that can finally find all the Acceptance, Love and Appreciation its parents couldnt give him because they have been broken children themselves. This accepting feeling is the decisive element of tranformation. Your inner child is craving for somebody who will love it unconditionally, who will give him Love, Encouragement and security. Be the one for your inner child and you will feel the change.

9. Transform unpleasant feelings by arma ve feeling

When we are suffering, most of the times its because of feelings of Fear, Anger, Sadness, Greed, Jealousy, Shame or Guilt. Normal people do pretty much to distract themselves from these feelings, but these feelings want to be felt that they can move on. It doesnt matter who awakes these fellings in you, go to a quiet place and take your time, close your eyes and tell yourself: This feeling is allowed to be here, I am ready to feel it. Feel your body and where the feeling is situated. A feeling is called feeling because you have to feel it. And when you have felt it, it can leave your body and will go away.

10. Free yourself from old vows, oaths and self-commitments

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Do you want to be normal or happy - Betz

How often in your life did you say things like I will never again it is like a inner vow and can work a whole life long. You remember telling yourself I will never trust anyone again or I will never depend on anyone again or I will never become like my mother/father? Such sentences are obstacles in all your relationships, in which you are craving for being able to trust, to love, to be dependent. And you will react angry if your partner is telling you You are exactly like your mother, but the more uncomfortable you feel, the more its true. We attract what we oppose. Therefore it is better to free yourself from these old vows and be open for anything that happens in life.

11. Consciously take a new choice

Finally, ask yourself these questions the next days or weeks: What a person do I want to be in my life? How do I want to treat myself in everyday life? What shall be the most important in my life? Whereupon do I want to focus in my everyday life? Take your time to find the answers, because something important is happening in that moment: You start a process of change.

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