 What we have here is essentially two mindsets. Two mindsets of one is happy, one is that inner critic, always a judgmental mindset. This one is much more accepting, more tolerant, more supportive. The question is, why do we spend so much time listening to this voice? Here we are, we're in the middle of this and you are going to make some, this is DM. You are a decision maker and the question I have for us here is, what is it? Or what does the critic, okay? What is it that the critic fears most of all? Our critic over here. And the answer to that question is very simple. It is choice. The inner critic is aware that as soon as you make a decision to be happy, you move directly into the happiness mindset. Therefore you must choose the critic. Now that seems pretty strange to us because nobody thinks that they consciously choose a mindset that's not going to serve them, that's going to make them feel small, that's going to make them feel weak and afraid. But yet we still do and the question is why? Well, it's afraid of choice. It's terrified of this whole situation. It's in fact terrified that you are even aware that happiness is a choice. Therefore it must make you feel like there's no choice at all. Now we know that the critic is afraid of choice because if we think of something like depression, okay? What are some of the characteristics that we associate with depression? Well, it's a feeling like I have no choice. It seems as if when we're depressed, nothing we choose is actually going to make any difference. Therefore choice is gone for me. We all know that helplessness, we feel helpless when we're depressed. Again, that's an indication that there is no choice. A word like coerced literally means to have no choice. Obligation is another word we associate with depression. Finally, another one that will come from having no choice is a feeling of resentment. All from when we are in this mindset, the belief that we have no choice at all. What we're beginning to see here is that when we're in this mindset, we're not even aware that happiness is an option at all. The inner critic has pulled off a pretty incredible feat and it's made us feel like it has no choice. Happiness is not a choice at all that can be made. There is many people that have talked about this in the past. One of them is Ralph Marsden. His quote was, happiness is a choice, not a result. Nothing will make you happy until you choose to be happy. And he was absolutely right about that. There's another book from Bonnie Ware where she talks about the top five regrets of the dying. And the fifth regret, the fifth most common regret that people have at the end of their lives is that I wish I had let myself be happier. Which again shows us when it boils down to it, people finally realize happiness is a choice. And if I can make that choice, it is possible, right? It is possible to do this. They begin to realize all I needed to do in my life was make the choice. So the inner critic has managed to pull something off here. It's made us convinced that we can't choose this option. How does it do that? And that's what this video is really all about. In other words, why on earth? Why don't we choose? And that is the question that many people have looked at. And I'm gonna show you right now. When we come down here, we still have our critic, but the critic convinces us that this has disappeared and it brings us down to a new place. And I want you to realize that where we're going here is almost like a game that the critic has managed to pull off an illusion that has managed to pull off. When you're in this mindset within the critic, okay? It's gonna be a lot of pain. There's gonna be a lot of suffering. Here, of course, we feel real, we feel happy, authentic. Now that's nowhere to be seen. How does it manage to make you stay in this mindset? It creates within itself, this is all the critic down here. It makes you feel like you have choice. And one of the best ways to understand this is Carl Jung's persona and shadow concept. Here's the shadow down here. We can make choices between the persona and the shadow for the rest of our lives, thinking we're choosing something better than the other, when in actuality, we're still here, okay? So this entire thing is contained within this mindset. When we talk about the persona, we're talking about making the choice to be seen as happy. A word might be to be popular. Another one might be to be successful. Another one could be attractive. Now, the problem is, we like to choose these things for a persona. It's all about becoming these things and attaining these things. And that's the choice we make. Because really within the shadow part of our mind, we secretly believe that we are ugly or we believe that we are fake or we believe that we are useless. We might believe that we are the jealous type. We don't like that about ourselves. And all this stuff gets hidden away in the bad room, we'll say, okay? It's hidden from conscious awareness. We hide that away. We wall that off and we don't wanna look at it. And we believe that we're making the choice for happiness in this persona. Now, this part of our mind, the shadow part, is flat out ugly and nasty. We're all aware of that. Nobody consciously chooses this part. That is pretty much a raw-naked ego. This side, however, is much more tricky and many, many more people are attracted to this part of their psyche. However, it's still the same nasty aspect of the mind. The only difference is this guy holds up a little mask and he wears a mask from time to time, okay? So his mask looks like, looks like this. It's pretty fake and it never leads to this. So if we're making decisions, if we're the decision maker on this level of consciousness, and we can go here, we can go in here from time to time, the result will always be pain and suffering. It will never lead to any real lasting happiness. So what we need to start to do is to bring all of this up to this level to where you can actually make a meaningful choice, okay? Start to choose against this and start to look at this. This is more of a truthful mindset. We bring this to the truth. It stands in front of a real choice between authentic happiness and all of this seems less appealing to us. We need to start to bring this to the truth, starting to do inquiry about beliefs about my mowgli, I'm fake, I'm useless, I'm jealous. And we also need to start questioning things like I need to be popular, I need to be successful, I need to be attractive. None of them will help, none of them work. This is the point. Shadow persona, shadow persona goes back and forth like that. One of the things about these things that we're trying to attain here within the persona is we need to not drop them. We do need to drop the shadow part, okay? We need to become aware of the shadow question and let it go. But we need to rather than drop these, we need a complete reinterpretation of what they mean. So you can still be a popular person, you can still be successful, you can still be attractive. But what does that mean? Does it mean that you're better than somebody else or worse than somebody else, right? You know, better than a worse than persona shadow. Or does it mean that you are those things on your own terms? What does success really mean? Maybe success now means more of authenticity about who it is you are as a person, okay? Attractiveness, I'm an attractive person. Every aspect of me is attractive. Not just one feature of my physical appearance or something like that, right? I have an attractive personality. In other words, it's much more accepting of who you are as a person. Features of this are truth, they are acceptance. Something else we might associate with this mindset is unconditional. And this is the real choice we need to start making. We need to start making the choice for authentic happiness. We get so caught up in this persona, you know, we learn this when we're very, very young. We see someone else's persona, oh my God, that's very attractive. I want to attain that for myself. That's what happiness will mean. Little do we know, anytime you pick up one of these or you're attracted to one of these, you are automatically attaching yourself to the shadow aspect of yourself, of your psyche. One comes with the other. You can't take one without the other. And in fact, the more we try to attain this, we are actually driving more energy into this all the time. That's why it never works. So to start making real choices, it's questioning all these aspects and attachments to every aspect within our persona and our shadow. And then we start to come into what do we come to at the end of that? We come to our authentic personality. And our authentic personality is who we are when we were born. Who we are when we're comfortable within our own skin, just the way we are. Still open to growth and everything else and experiencing your full potential as a human being, but you are enough to where you are. You don't have to become somebody else. So that's what we're talking about when we're talking about getting rid of the inner critic. And that's the work we're going to be doing in this course. We're going to start questioning this persona shadow dance because it's all fake. It's all within the same mindset. Authenticity is nowhere to be found within either of these two mindsets. This is not real. Any of the nasty things the inner critic says to you about yourself, I can guarantee you they're not real. But the things we strive towards because of these hidden feelings are equally unreal. And they actually are a pretty dysfunctional dance we get involved with. So I'll see you in the next video and food for thought. Take care.