"The Book on Happiness" by Bô Yin Râ--Part 1 of 8

Richard C. Cook, Editor, Three Sages: For the past year, Three Sages has included in its publishing agenda articles about German spiritual master Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken 1876-1943), along with excerpts from his works. This included a series of articles on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ that we recently published during Holy Week, leading up to Easter Sunday. We have had a strong and positive reception among English-speaking readers from the US, Europe, and elsewhere in the world, so have been encouraged to continue. Most recently we published the complete text of one of Bô Yin Râ’s major books; namely, “The Book on the Beyond,” the subject of which is the human afterlife.

We are now moving ahead with publishing another complete text of one of Bô Yin Râ’s books, this one entitled “The Book on Happiness.” Reader may justifiably ask what relevance such a book may have at this time of world crisis? How can one possibly seek happiness, and succeed in that search, with so much discord, exploitation, and violence going on around us? Our answer is simply that the troubles the world is facing make it more important than ever before that humans stay in touch with their spiritual core which we all know to some degree is the source of genuine, lasting happiness while we inhabit this mortal form. How to do this is the question.

We are also pleased to announce our partnership with Books to Light, a new publishing platform headquartered in the US and dedicated to bringing the texts and teachings of Bô Yin Râ to greater awareness among English-speaking audiences.

So let us proceed as we listen closely to what a genuine spiritual teacher has to say.

Note: Another excellent translation entitled The Book on Happiness is published by The Kober Press. But while reading any translation, readers should also be advised of Bô Yin Râ’s advice to study his works in the original German. Accordingly, any translation must be viewed as transitional, with a second edition of the translation contained herein now being planned by Books to Light.

Finally, when reading and studying Bô Yin Râ, it is well to bear in mind this liberating thought:

“If it were not a millennia-old superstition which believed that spiritual reality had to be discovered through the mechanism of proper logical thought, the reality to which I give witness here would have been discovered a long time ago and removed from all doubt!”

The Book on Happiness—Part 1 of 8

Third book of the Hortus Conclusus: the standard-translation© of the Hortus Conclusus (The Enclosed Garden), encompassing the spiritual teachings in thirty-two books by Bô Yin Râ. (Bô Yin Râ is the spiritual name of Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken 1876-1943.) All rights, copyrights included, reserved by Posthumus Projects Amsterdam, 2014. Posthumus Projects Amsterdam is responsible for this standard-translation©. Posthumus Projects Amsterdam has provided general permission for reprinting and transmission of its publications with attribution.

Contents:

Prelude

The Duty to be Happy

‘I’ and ‘You’

Love

Wealth and Poverty

Money

Optimism

Conclusion

Prelude

Have you ever seen a child building a sand castle clap his hands in joy when he has completed his work? – –

You who are seeking happiness have found your teacher here…

Here is someone who has found happiness; if you do not seek for your own like this child, it will be in vain that you suffer torment and thirst in your search for happiness.

All the happiness of this earth, and this is all we speak of in this book, is the happiness of the creator – – be it that he creates the royal kingdom of love within himself, be it that he creates a work of the spirit, be it that material values give physical shape to his creative will. – – –

Only the joy of the creator in his work is happiness; all other things you are likely to call by this name will surely, if you entrust yourself to them, – deceive you of your true happiness, inasmuch as this earth can bestow it…

You who love and find happiness in your love alone, tell me, what is your love if not the joy of the creator!? – –

Feelings are your creative powers, and if you are truly ‘happy’ in your love, you have built yourself a temple in the kingdom of the emotions. No one apart from you can enter it; its holy of holies contains the divine image to which, as the priest of your love, you willingly give service and sacrifice.

Perhaps you have never realized that here you are a creator, – you feel dominated by feelings which are leading you, often against your will, – you believe you are bound by fetters where you gladly wear fetters, and live the delusion that all this came from outside acting freely upon you according to laws embedded in this earthly life?? –

You obscure the light yourself in thinking like this! – – –

Certainly you are following an eternally unconquerable law when your soul opens itself to that stream of love which flows through the universe, drawing together with mysterious power souls and bodies. But this merely results in the promise of happiness, for your love will not lead you to your happiness unless it awakens the creator in you. – –

What makes you really ‘happy’ is your own work, – creating from the chaos of feelings, and its result: – the harmony of the soul perfecting itself when offering itself to another soul. –

Even that sensual pleasure which is called ‘love’ by men who know no higher desire than animal instinct, nevertheless compels basest feelings to create and construct an illusory castle in which they erect an idol to their lecherous dreams as slaves of their short-lived ‘happiness’.

You who love, however, you who would in your love become truly ‘happy’, will have to seek another form of happiness, and if you are truly one who loves, then the happiness of physical experience can never be separated from the happiness of the communion of the soul. –

Only as a creator can you find this happiness of the soul! – – –

Yet you still allow yourself to be easily deceived and you wait every day for happiness to approach you from without. –

For some it is the love of a beloved; for others, it is work they would see accomplished; for yet others it appears only as liberation from the needs and worries of the body.

But even if you have achieved all these things, in the end you will still have to admit to yourself that something further is missing from your happiness; you will restlessly continue to search in those very places where you imagined you had attained your highest goal. – –

You have no idea about the happiness life on this earth holds within it, and that this happiness is both the pledge and the fertile soil for all ‘eternal’ happiness! –

Existence on this earth will be pointless for you, becoming a chain of greater or lesser torments renewed every day, if you fail to find your earthly happiness here on this earth! –

Give no credence to bleak doctrines which hold out the prospect of ‘eternal happiness’ if you renounce happiness on this earth!

Here and now, in the very hour you are reading this, you are in the midst of eternity; whatever you are incapable of creating now for yourself, no God in all eternity will be able to create for you…

You have to learn to recognize that all happiness is but a result of using a talent you have within you, and that you can never be happy, now or in any other form of existence, if you fail to develop this talent, if you lethargically wait for your happiness to meet you, or if you believe it must be bestowed from outside as a ‘reward’ for your deeds, as a consequence of ‘divine justice’! – – –

You will only attain and enduringly retain your happiness as a creator!

Only what you bring about within yourself will grant you eternal satisfaction!

Only if you can create happiness for yourself will you come to your happiness in every form of life! – – – – – – –

The Duty to be Happy

Few on this earth truly know how to bind happiness to their days; these few would do well not to speak of their happiness lest envy becomes their insidious adversary.

Countless are those, however, who yearn for happiness without ever finding it, because they do not know that only they can become creators of their happiness themselves.

They strive for happiness as for forbidden fruit, because they would like to find it as a free gift, and yet dimly suspect that it can only be acquired at its proper price.

From their youth they have been told that all earthly happiness is but a gift bestowed by chance and that it is unseemly for the noble to strive for happiness.

They have never heard the teaching telling them of the duty to use life on this earth in the way that it becomes a source of continual happiness.

Of course, they would all like ‘to be happy’, and everyone tries to be so in a different way. Yet happiness is regarded as a bonus; a thousand other things are truly more important to them than their happiness.

But those who would attain happiness must strive alone for their happiness; everything else they would like to achieve must be subordinated to this striving and wisely woven into it. – –

No other desire must obstruct his will to create through his own free action, the greatest happiness this earth has to bestow.

No other task can be higher than the duty to attain the purest enduring happiness and to increase this earth’s happiness within oneself and thereby in others too.

Since the most ancient of days a wretched doctrine has held that happiness on earth can only be attained by the few, while all others are forever barred from achieving their happiness.

They do not suspect that this earth contains boundless possibilities of both happiness and unhappiness, and that man’s will – not his wishes! – – steers what will occur in both cases………

They think they are ‘strong in will’ – and yet are slaves to their wishes, which may on occasions be able to influence some small part of the will; modestly they find satisfaction in the effects, without ever aiming for more, since they believe they have long since reached the limits of the will’s influence.

If only they knew, however, what man’s will can truly bring about, one would soon find on this earth a number of happy people far greater than even the boldest dreamer could dare to hope for when believing that all chance of happiness depends on the triumph of his utopian ideas. – –

We are what we want to be!

We remain only the ‘toys of fate’ as long as we allow fate to play its games with us. – –

We remain only ‘pursued by unhappiness’ as long as we run away from unhappiness in order to escape it. – – –

We remain the ‘disinherited of happiness’ only as long as we refuse to recognize the obligation to strive for the highest happiness attainable on earth. – – – – –

It is a sin not to yearn for happiness, but it is an even greater sin not to want to create one’s happiness here on earth!

Sinful and a blasphemy against the omnipotence of the spirit is also the miserable modesty with which happiness is yearned for. –

For some happiness is already to be able to feed themselves and their families without any worries.

For others happiness would be living in palaces and driving around in coaches.

Still others seek fame and honor, status and dignity as their ‘happiness’.

Only a few know that neither wealth nor honor can bestow happiness; that happiness is a power which provides everyone with all the goods of this earth exactly to the extent he needs them for a happy existence – – no more, no less. –

Those who believe they can find happiness in the acquisition of certain earthly goods are just seeking these goods – not happiness!

Happiness is the satisfaction of the creator in his creation.

This creation is, however, never completed; its creator knows merely ‘days of rest’, – sabbaths of the soul which give him renewed strength for further creative acts.

The happy man is always a creator and never tires of creating.

Whatever he fashions in his act of creation is the fundament and condition of his happiness, – his happiness, however, is the might of the creator which directs towards him everything granting enduring satisfaction.

Not everyone needs the same things; yet everyone undertaking to create his own happiness will obtain everything he really needs for his happiness.

End of Part 1