In this monologue, Mary Schiller reflects on an advertisement promising scientific methods to achieve happiness, recounting her own extensive but ultimately harmful attempts to treat PTSD, anxiety, and to cultivate happiness through various self‑help techniques. She critiques the commercial self‑help industry, arguing that such approaches mistakenly assume happiness must be engineered. Schiller then introduces the Three Principles perspective, asserting that innate well‑being, joy, and peace are our birthright and that we already possess the happiness we seek. She explains that stress and negative experiences arise from our thinking, which is neutral, and that recognizing rather than managing thoughts restores the natural state of happiness. The core message is that no techniques or external methods are needed—happiness is inherent and always available.
Chapters
Hi there, this is Mary. I was on Facebook a few minutes ago, and in my newsfeed was an ad for a company that claims to have the secrets to helping you be happier. And I'm not going to name the company, but basically it's a company that says it has designed several methods and games based on science and scientific evidence that will help you to overcome negative thoughts and get rid of stress and bring, you know, happiness into your life in this way. Now, in the past, I would have clicked on that jumped over to the website and probably at least signed up for some kind of free materials if there was such a place to do that. And I can tell you for sure that I spent a lot of time and a lot of money over the years on things that I thought would help me be happier. I tried every technique and tool that I could find to help dissolve the post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms I had, to help me cope with anxiety, and to basically just try to bring happiness into my life more often. Well, I have to tell you that I was completely wrong in doing all of those things, and in fact, I did myself more harm than good. The simple reason is because happiness is our birthright. It's literally what we are made of, if I can put a term on what we're made of, which is basically impossible to do. But if we're talking about it in terms of who we really are and literally what we're made of, is innate well-being, innate health, innate happiness, joy, wisdom, peace, all of those amazing feelings and qualities that so many of us are searching for all the time. We're looking for someone to point us in the direction of all of those things, and yet we don't realize that we already are where we want to be. We already have everything that we want to have. When I first came upon this part of the understanding of the Three Principles, I really didn't get it, and it took me a little while to have all of this sort of seep in to my consciousness. The idea that I am as free and happy and peaceful as the day I was born. The only thing that stands in my way of feeling that same level of peace all the time, no matter what's going on around me, is that I'm simply paying attention to these thoughts that are running through my head. And on this website that I mentioned a minute ago, it goes into some detail about how their methodology can help you to control negative thinking and manage stress. Believe me, I understand that that sounds completely logical, except in this conversation that you and I are having, because there is nothing to manage in terms of stress. The only thing to know about it is that it comes from stressful thinking. And in terms of negative thoughts, we really can see thoughts as neutral. They create certain sensations in us as they run through our minds, but negative and positive kind of really just don't apply. It's just, am I seeing that my thinking's creating this experience right now, or am I not? And those times when I am is when I get sort of plunged back into that beautiful bath of happiness. So as weird as it sounds, there really is nothing you need to do or learn or try or be or anything to be happy, because you already are. It's what you're made of. You're swimming in it, you're living in it, and that is just the most amazing revelation of this understanding. It's almost hard to express into words. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you again soon.
