You create your world with your mind. It is by examining how you do this that you discover who you are. Happiness is a journey to self discovery.

When we were children, the adults around us directed our attention to the things that interested them. They interpreted the world to us.
Now, as adults, we have developed some of our own interpretations. But, we still rely on what our elders taught us as children.

Our five senses give us the physical information about our surroundings, our world, but it is our mind that gives it meaning. Reality can be thought of as the physical information presented to our five senses.

Of the many million bits of information that come into the range of your senses at any moment what is it that catches your immediate attention?

It is by evaluating those attention catching bits that you begin to realize that where you focus your attention determines how you will react to what you observe. You will simply respond with same patterns of behavior you developed in the past. But, you can choose to respond differently. You can choose to have a stack of different responses to similar situations.

For example, when you are talking to someone do you focus on their words, on their tone of voice, the way they move there hands, how they hold there body? Or do you focus on your internal dialog, planning what you are going to say next?

Try focusing on something other than what you normally do. Look at how they stand, how expressive their facial movements are, how they use their hands. Does what you observe improve the communications or does it cloud it?

Realizing that you too have a model of the world in mind will free you to recognize reality as the sensations of your five senses before they are censored by your mind. Though each moment is a new one to your life, you choose to interpret it based on similar moments in your past.

Each and every person that you meet is in exactly the same position. Each of us interprets the world in a very personal manner.

If people around the globe recognized that their model of the world is totally individual, I believe there would be less conflict, less religious intolerance and less bigotry.

The journey to self discovery begins by examining your personal model of the world.