Do You Want to Be Normal or Happy - Robert Betz - Book Summary

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 present presen t which is telling you: “Make the best out of me for today. Don’t waste me unconscious, unlived and unloved. I am only now, tomorrow I’ll be gone. Live me .” Imagine every morning that the new day is telling you that. Can you now .” 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, fear, that leaves us leading an unwanted Life, L ife, a normal Life. A normal person p erson is repressing feeling of fear, fear, anger or sadness. He is even stating that humans are not dying of diseases but of a broken heart because they don’t listen to it and don’t act after what the heart is trying to tell them. Reminds me a little bit about Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist”, which is also a great book to read but more allegoric. And I also found many aspects of the “Kybalion”, “Kybalion”, an old hermetic teaching, in Robert Betz’ book. 3. He says that as children children we we learn that that one has to fulfill certain

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03/06/2013 23:01

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conditions to get attention, attention, appreciation and love, 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, 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.” 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. better. Or we don’t dare to do so. And instead of start loving ourselves if we don’t get enough from 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 couldn’t 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”, “negative” , like losing our job or a friend or partner, partner, Life is taking us aside to tell us: Y us: You ou didn’t understand the topic yet, there is still something to learn and to do different”. 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, it’s just what it is. And here you have gotten another chance to try it again in a better b etter or different way. 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 responsibility for what you think and feel, feel , for what you thought and felt yesterday, yesterday, because that is what makes your Life today. 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.






Who is yearning is yearning for security 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. love. 7. Make peace with your past and you will be free. 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 don’t want to remember it. But it is there and still guiding your Life because you didn’t 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. 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 us. As long as as we try to make everybody else happy to gain appreciation and love and to avoid rejection and critics we still are the the small child child who learned learned to behave behave like that to make make the parents happy and happy and don’t 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. way. It’s a different way to eveluate what you have done and what you have learned. Everything in Life makes sense, because it’s the principle of cause and consequence (one of the axioms in the Kybalion). If people don’t love you, ask yourself how you treat yourself and if you love and respect yourself. If you break up with a partner, 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 don’t love (truly love in the right way, way, not in the childish way), because love is what holds everything together t ogether..






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, author, Robert Betz, believes in the Year 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, synchronicity, which is also one of the principles of the Kybalion. 1. We We are creating chaos through our unconscious thoughts and feelings, attitudes and doctrines and this t his creates in us a feeling of fear, fear, anger and sorrow, sorrow, which we try to suppress because it makes us feel uncomfortable. And that is why we get angry or sad or afraid 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 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 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 body. Because giving attention to impulses of the heart of your spiritual body. 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, joy, you will start to get it from other people, p eople, too. 3. We We see our body as a independent unit, we have separated it from from the unity of soul-mind-body. soul-mind-body. But to heal ourself and our body, 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 don’t let it show the body will be affected affected by rising blood pressure, just as an example. Be thankful for your body and treat it lovingly . You will lose what you don’t love, because love holds everything together – so the best thing is to love your body and don’t criticize it all over again and again, like most women do very often. 4. Love all of your emotions. 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






to say that one through Acceptance and Awareness to the opposite feeling. Through sadness to joy, 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. 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 enmeshments of your past, 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 still have on your today’s Life. You You need two people for war, war, but you need only one person for peace. And you can make this peace for yourself. yourself. See, that the other person wasn’t 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. self-responsibility. The more m ore 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 doesn’t see the background where a certain 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 So, when somebody somebody is pushing pushing your your buttons ask yourself the following questions: - Which emotion emotion does the person trigger inside trigger inside me with his behavior? - Where do I treat myself in the the same way as 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 the time it’s not in a loving lo ving kind of way. way. Mostly it’s i t’s self-criticism or -blaming. Tell yourself: “I “I love you and you are the best I ever had. Great, that I am here and I






understand why you couldn’t 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, lightness , you need to ask yourself over and over again: Why again: Why am I doing doing what I am doing? 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. It’s 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. now. Don’t 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 don’t 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 t hinking 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 don’t trust them that they can manage it alone, so we make them weak. Every helping hand throws a shadow, 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!”








Do you want to be normal or happy – Part III First, he says, one has to accept the fact, that Life never stops, stops, everything is always in a flow , always changing, inside and outside yourself – that’s 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 you want something We something new to develop, develop, something old has to vanish. vanish . We are here to be happy – now! Not tomorrow , not later – now. A happy life with inner peace, happiness, joy, joy, thankfulness and pleasure is not a matter of luck or coincidence. It is a matter of taking responsibility for one’s own life and all the creations one has made until now. 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 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 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 You have everything inside everything you expected from outside so far . You 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 don’t respect and love each other, other, because we play with each e ach other, other, because we compare, envy, envy, exploit or even kill each other, other, we think we have found fo und 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,






2. Take responsibility for all your crea ons and leave your unconsciousness Your 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 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 appreciate everything you ﬁnd in your Life at present Say YES to everything that is happening in our life, 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. now.

4. Become an observer of what is happening in your Life Start to observe what is happening in your life, life , what you are thinking deep inside of you about your life, your body, body, your relationships, your feelings, about sex, money, 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: “It’s interesting, what’s happing here, isn’t 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 ans wer the following questions: What are you thinking about about yourself?






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, 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 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.” now.” This thought produces shame and inferiority. 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. It’s not about changing yourself, it’s about changing changing your unkind and condemning way of treating yourself. Forgive yourself by yourself by knowing that every time in your life, you made the best you could do in that situation. The he¨art, 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 couldn’t give him because they have been broken children themselves. This accepting feeling is the decisive element of tranformation. Your Your inner child is craving for somebody who will love it unconditionally, unconditionally, who will give him Love, Encouragement and security. security. Be the one for your inner child and you will feel the change.






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 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 it’s true. We attract what we oppose. Therefore it is better to free yourself from these old vows vows and be open open for anything anything that happens in life.

11. Consciously take a new choice Finally, Finally, ask yourself these questions the next days day s or weeks: What a person person do I want want to be in my life? How do I want to treat myself in myself in everyday life? What shall be the most important in my life? Whereupon Whereupon do I want want to focus in 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.

Do You Want to Be Normal or Happy - Robert Betz - Book Summary

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