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

7/28/2019 Do You Want to Be Normal or Happy - Robert Betz - Book Summary

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Summary by Beleniel Anorhuin

Do you want to be normal or happy?

1. He is telling to see every new day as a present 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 menow. Imagine every morning that the new day is telling you that. Can youreally dare to make nothing out of that unwritten pages, that open up to youevery morning? It is all in your hands, to live a boring everyday life or tomake the best out of it and make it worth remembering.

2. He says that it is our own unconsciousness in thinking, speaking andacting that is the source of all our suffering which we think is not ourfault, but the fault of other people or Life itself. But we have to understandthat we are creators of our own Life and that we are responsible for what weexperience in Life. It is fear, that leaves us leading an unwanted Life, anormal 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 brokenheart because they dont listen to it and dont act after what the heart istrying to tell them.

Reminds me a little bit about Paulo Coelhos The Alchemist, which is also agreat 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 childrenwe learn that one has to fulfill certain

Do you want to be normal or happy - Betz

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conditions to get attention, appreciation and love, which are nutrientsfor every human, especially children. And even if we manage to fulfill theseconditions we get only small amounts of this nutrition. So we neverpsychologically grow up and get adults. And because that is repeated overand over with each generation, we are educated and brought up by adultswho 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 gethappy, only how to become unhappy. But that is normal in our society. That iswhy inside us, a child is still alive who is yearning to live in a world of Loveand Security, who wants to laugh, to play and to enjoy Life. But the adult weseem to be on the outside is telling the child to shut up, to do what has to bedone, to work and not to dream of a better Life or even start doing somethingto get it. Although Freedom is trying to tell us: Just dare it, you havenothing 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 thekey 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 outsideworld, we deny ourselves every small bit of self-love and tell ourselves everyday 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 appointmentand couldnt find your keys? Did you get angry towards yourself or did yousay: Just relax, lets sit down and think about it together and we willremember where we put it. And I say we because We all have to be the bestfriend, the lover for ourselves.

4. Betz says that everytime we experience something negative, likelosing our job or a friend or partner, Life is taking us aside to tell us:Youdidnt understand the topic yet, there is still something to learn andto do different. I think that is a beautiful picture and very helpful to dealwith such situations. Because something you must have done wrong and thatis nothing serious or bad, its just what it is. And here you have gottenanother 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, Lifeis a neverending fight, you will create obstacles, conflicts and

disappointments over and over to have something to fight. You have to takeresponsibility for what you think and feel, for what you thought and feltyesterday, because that is what makes your Life today.

6. Fear is the engine of the normal people . They got so used to thatfeeling 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 andtrust 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 itbecause most of our thoughts are unconscious.


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Who isyearning for security and control is full of fears but he can learnto 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 isnot 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 ofdisappointment, 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 withit, 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 ofmost 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 livein the present.

8. Another point normal people have to deal with ever day is the fact that wehave learned to evaluate every possible negative reaction others towardsourselves and to avoid critics and harm and rejection. So, our Life mostly isruled by the people around us.As long as we try to make everybody elsehappy to gain appreciation and love and to avoid rejection and critics

we still are the small child who learned to behave like that to makethe parents happyand dont get in conflict with them. As long as thatwounds are not healed, living together with others will be painful and thewars 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 areresponsible for what is happening to you people will tell you that you arecrazy and not normal because they are afraid of you, because you showthem that there is another way. Take it as a compliment. You start to be notnormal, you start to be something special And soon you will attract andfind people who think and act and life like you.

10. Better talk of experiences instead of mistakes if you look back onyour way. Its a different way to eveluate what you have done and what youhave learned. Everything in Life makes sense, because its the principle of

cause and consequence (one of the axioms in the Kybalion). If people dontlove you, ask yourself how you treat yourself and if you love and respectyourself. If you break up with a partner, aks yourself, if you loved him like heis or if you tried to change him or to use him for your own needs. You have tolose, 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 Part II

In the second part of his book he talks about transforming the old, normaland 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 willcome to an end now. Now, we have to look for coherence and permanentFlow because that are the general criteria of Life itself. The outer Chaos weexperience 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 theprinciples 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 andsorrow, 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 ourbuttons, if they act in some way and we think the hurt us, but in fact we arehurting ourselves, because these feeling suppressed since we were young. Allthe chaos and pain in our Life are consequences of ourunconsciousness, suppression and self-condemnation, of unpeacefulrelationships to people in our past and hence created fear, anger or sorrow.

2. You yourself are responsible for your happiness, nobody except you canmake you happy and nobody except you can make you unhappy. So, tolove and accept yourselfis 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 emotionsof your emotional body, the thoughts of your mental body and theimpulses of the heart of your spiritual body. Because giving attention tosomething is a first act of love because energy flows to where we are focusedon. Give yourself time, space, attention and love. And by giving yourself loveand 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 theunity of soul-mind-body. But to heal ourself and our body, we have to unify itagain 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 byrising blood pressure, just as an example. Be thankful for your body andtreat it lovingly. You will lose what you dont love, because love holdseverything together so the best thing is to love your body and dont criticizeit 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 bademotions or experiences. All emotions are interesting and valuable. But thehuman being suffers most of his own emotions. All emotions make sense andwant to be felt, want to be understood and accepted. E-Motion means Energyin motion. So emotions have to be felt that they can move on and leave yourbody. If you suppress them, they cannot move on and will stay in your body asfear, you are afraid to feel them (again). Another point are your thoughts.Thoughts create our emotions. Sowatch your thoughts. In the end, there is


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to say that one through Acceptance and Awareness to the opposite feeling.Through sadness to joy, through fear to love, through anger to harmony andso 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 tofeel 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-KindnessMeditation. And everything will be better and the bad feeling, which wasaccepted and felt by you, will have moved on.

5. Stop all the negative enmeshments of your past, to the people in yourpast. 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. Andyou can make this peace for yourself. See, that the other person wasnt ableto 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 importantpeople in our Life. They press our buttons and only provoke the negativeemotions 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 youtake with you since you were a child. And he is reminding you of how manytimes you have abandoned yourself. A person who is treating you unkind isonly showing you how often you treat yourself unkind and a person who istrying to change you and is always criticizing you, requests you to takeself-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 isseparating 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 asense, which you might only be able to see with some distance of time.

So,when somebody is pushing your buttons ask yourself the followingquestions:-Which emotion does the person triggerinside me with his behavior?-Where do I treat myself in the same wayas this person treats me?- Did I forbid myself in the past to act like this person is acting? Is theperson 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 forgivethat other person?- Did I always fear that something like that might happen to me? Did Ithink 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 ityourself. All day long you are talking to yourself, and most of the time its notin a loving kind of way. Mostly its self-criticism or -blaming. Tell yourself: Ilove you and you are the best I ever had. Great, that I am here and Iam me! Start watching yourself and how often you withdraw yourself yourown 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 bodyneeds? How often are you telling yourself I should or I have to untilthese beliefs become automated? Stop hurting yourself now. Start to


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understand why you couldnt act in a different way in the past and take backall the judgments you made about yourself.

7. If you want to lead a life in joy and lightness, you need to ask yourselfover and over again:Why am I doing what I am doing?Do I really wantto 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 aminute of your precious life. Its worth nothing to wait for better times to dosomething. There might not come better times, you might not live that longor you might get ill or something could happen which makes you unable to doit then, so do it now. Dont wait. Every moment of your life is precious, so tryto 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 yourown life.

8. Mind your own business. Because taking care of others often is just adistraction of your own problems and fears. Aperson who is thinkingoften about other people cannot think about herselfat the same time.Every problem somebody has is at first his problem not ours. And trying totell others what to do gives them the feeling that we dont trust them thatthey can manage it alone, so we make them weak. Every helping hand throwsa shadow, a good friend of mine once told me. A crisis is a moment where wecan grow and gain psychic strength. A true help can be a If you need help, Iwill 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 Part III

First, he says, one has to accept the fact, that Life never stops, everythingis always in a flow, always changing, inside and outside yourself thats alaw 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. Ifyouwant something new to develop, something old has to vanish. Weare here to be happy now! Not tomorrow, not later now. A happy lifewith inner peace, happiness, joy, thankfulness and pleasure is not a matter ofluck or coincidence. It is a matter of taking responsibility for ones own lifeand all the creations one has made until now.

Heaven is nowhere to find than inside of oneself. And to find this heaveninside 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 acceptand 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 thatwe cannot live and do what makes us happy and what are our own innerwishes. We still think we need love and appreciation from other peopleand this addiction makes us all trapped and illiberal people, whichmakes us angry at the same time. And mostly we get into an argument andfight with these people, by which we wish to be loved and accepted andafterwards we feel lonely, empty, hurt an abandoned. Stop to expect thingsfrom others which you cannot give yourself. And start to give yourselfeverything you expected from outside so far. You have everything insideof 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 wedont respect and love each other, because we play with each other, becausewe compare, envy, exploit or even kill each other, we think we have foundevidence of the evil nature of mankind. But all war has its root in our innerfights. Every human is good by its nature and his heart wishes nothing morethan 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 yourselfThe changes you want to see in the outer world are the effects of your innerstates, therefore to change something in the outer world you have to makethe important changes inside yourself. So regularly take some time for

yourself, about one hour a day, and work on your thoughts, feelings and yourpast. 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 themost important person in your life!


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2. Take responsibility for all your creaons and leave your

unconsciousnessYour condemning way of thinking about yourself and others made you thevictim of others and your life and every condemnation strengthens thisfeeling 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 andfeelings and relationships, your choices and the quality of your life. Beconscious and kind to yourself and take life in your own hands.

3. Approve and appreciate everything you find in your Life at

presentSay YES to everything that is happening in our life, its an act of humilityfor the life, that is never unfair or unjust. Everything is happening because it

had to happen, because something else was happening before, becauseeverything 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 andrefusal now.

4. Become an observer of what is happening in your LifeStart to observe what is happening in your life, what you are thinkingdeep inside of you about your life, your body, your relationships, yourfeelings, about sex, money, work, everything and start to write it down so youget 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. Theobserver is thinking: Its interesting, whats happing here, isnt it?

And it might help you to recognize repeating patterns and might help you tostop them. Before you can change something important, you have tounderstand how you experience it in the present.

5. Take inventory of your most important Thoughts and BeliefsTake 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 peoplearound 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 iswrong and what is right for you to think and believe. Good and true thoughtsgive you a good feeling, your body feels relaxed and light and wide. Bad orwrong 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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Remember how you have felt as a young child: curious, free, playful,dreaming, open-hearted without prejudices against others or yourself? Thatis your real nature. You can start to become like this person again,because you can decide what and how you think about yourself and othersand 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 lifewill fade.

7. Forgive yourself and correct your condemnaonsThe general thought of normal people sounds like: I am not okay the way Iam, 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 producesshame and inferiority. All the times you thought something like I am notgood/beautiful/intelligent/etc. enough you have hurt yourself. So this is thefirst step, to take these thoughts back and stop them. Its not about changing

yourself, its about changing your unkind and condemning way of treatingyourself. Forgive yourselfby knowing that every time in your life, youmade the best you could do in that situation. The heart, the love, is neverblaming or punishing or condemning. Nothing happens without any sense.Forgiving yourself is a attitude, not an act. Start changing your attitude inthat way.

8. Transform your inner childIt is not the grown up person that is afraid of being abandoned or thatis 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 ofbeing left alone, being abandoned is the biggest wound every humanhas inside of him which is waiting for being healed and only you can workon that task. Change your inner child into a happy child, that can finally findall the Acceptance, Love and Appreciation its parents couldnt give himbecause they have been broken children themselves. This accepting feeling isthe decisive element of tranformation. Your inner child is craving forsomebody who will love it unconditionally, who will give him Love,Encouragement and security. Be the one for your inner child and you will feelthe change.

9. Transform unpleasant feelings by affirmave feelingWhen we are suffering, most of the times its because of feelings ofFear,

Anger, Sadness, Greed, Jealousy, Shame or Guilt. Normal people dopretty much to distract themselves from these feelings, but these feelingswant to be felt that they can move on. It doesnt matter who awakes thesefellings in you, go to a quiet place and take your time, close your eyes andtell 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 feelingbecause 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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How often in your life did you say things like I will never again it is likea inner vow and can work a whole life long. You remember telling yourself Iwill never trust anyone again or I will never depend on anyone again or Iwill never become like my mother/father? Such sentences are obstacles inall your relationships, in which you are craving for being able to trust, tolove, 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, themore 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 inlife.

11. Consciously take a new choiceFinally, 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 myselfin 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 ishappening in that moment: You start a process of change.


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

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