"The Book on Happiness" by Bô Yin Râ--Part 4 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 accessibility and awareness among English-speaking audiences.
So let us proceed.
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 4 of 8
From the series 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
LOVE
We cannot speak of happiness without calling to mind the happiness which human beings can build for each other in love.
Here too one forgets all too easily that this happiness through love, like every form of happiness, needs to be created. – –
So many people carry on living in a continuous state of expectation for ‘happiness’ to come their way; amongst these are quite a few who seek no other happiness than the happiness of love between man and wife.
Some wait in vain their whole lives because the happiness they dream of escapes them on their life’s path.
Others believe one day that they have found happiness through love, but after a short time ‘disillusionment’ steps in and they despair of the possibility of being able to achieve permanent happiness through love. –
Foolish talk of the ‘battle of the sexes’ echoes in their ears and thereby completes the misery…
But those who are ‘disillusioned’ in this way are in reality far from being genuinely ‘deprived of their illusions’, that is, free of illusions, – but are merely subject to a new illusion. – – – – –
At first they believed that happiness through love was the gift of ‘chance’ and was to be found and secured without their participation.
Now apparently they are free of this illusion, but only in respect of their mutual choice; – they fall immediately into the new illusion by believing that all their lack of happiness results simply from their incorrect choice. – –
Alas, this is not so! – You who believed you were cheated out of your happiness through love – – your first impulse which brought you together will (in the great majority of cases) hardly have cheated you. But now you cheat yourselves because you cannot rid yourselves of the erroneous belief that all happiness through love must be found without your participation…
You still do not realize that you must first create your happiness for yourselves if it is to become your permanent possession and an enrichment of your life which cannot be lost! –
Your will to truly attain happiness was not yet pure!
Although you harbored the wish within you to find all the happiness through love, ‘wishes’ never have commanding force, and your will, which alone could have create your happiness, –you have fragmented into a thousand minuscule endeavors, instead of gathering it towards focusing on the single goal: creating your happiness! – – –
Whoever wants to find his happiness in love rather than just wishing for it, – he must want only his happiness and nothing besides.
He must not imagine secured from the start what he is yet to create. He must not, like one who dreams, want to enjoy the fruit before it is allowed to ripen: fruits, only shown to him in his dreams, he would painfully miss if by a sudden tapping of reality he awakes from his dreams. – –
From the first day of his love he must develop his will to happiness within himself and to it he must subordinate everything which is but his wishes’ object and yearning. – – –
Happiness through love can only be achieved if one wants with genuine ‘single-mindedness’ to be enduringly happy with the person one loves. –
One must not ‘entertain’ a second longer the thought that it – could ‘be achieved otherwise’. – – – – –
‘Happiness in love’ is, like all happiness, the happiness of the creator, – it is the satisfaction gained by work well done; it is ‘work’ and the might to perform work…
But the work of love sets out to make the beloved happy through us, and we feel our own happiness in the satisfaction that we can make our beloved happy. –
Yet whoever has the might within him to be able to make another person happy has likewise the might also to make him [or her] deeply unhappy. – –
If firm resolve does not fix in its sights each new day the goal of using its own might solely to make the beloved happy, then this might will become a slave to a demonic horde, the horde of a thousand small and larger ever changing wishes which everyday life calls into existence every hour…
If your love is genuine it may survive though suffering blows again and again; yet the happiness through love which you thought you possessed in weeks of rapture and dreams will soon flee from you instead of becoming your enduring possession. – – – –
You will both wonder and ask each other: “Why is it that we cannot understand each other, that we continuously cause our days to be spent in the deepest unhappiness, although our hearts tell us that we really do love each other – despite all the mutual torment!?!” –
But you will never find the only redeeming answer. In the good times you will constantly make fresh agreements only to break them in no time at all. You will irritate and wear each other down and – if you are lucky – you will finally lead a bearable co-existence in resignation, – – convinced that you are both victims of a cruel fate…
However, in the great majority of cases all this is nothing other than delusion; it is the consequence of an illusion which dreams up a kind of happiness hoped and wished for in dreams, instead of wanting and creating it with resolve. –
Still today you have not lost happiness through love if there remains just a spark of true love glowing deeply buried within you both, as soon as you want to open yourselves up to the recognition that you have not hitherto found your happiness in love, because you hoped to find it without creating it yourself, because you wanted to reap without sowing! – – –
Even now you can begin to learn to live the life of love genuinely; you can awaken from the dream which has led you into unhappiness and into renunciation heavy with self-denial!
You will certainly have much to forgive each other, things which are hard to forgive; – many words spoken in anger will require an effort to expunge them from your soul, – but if you were ever united in true love, even just for hours, you will soon see in great clarity that you had succumbed to self-deception; everything you will have to forgive had once been hurled by both of you against a phantom, created by yourselves in your bitterness. You believed in this phantom, and probably still do so now, for it became the model for the one you once loved to shape himself on…
First and foremost, you must want to see each other differently now, if your love is still to heal – if you want to create the happiness of your love henceforth in genuine ‘dis-illusionment’ or: free from illusions! –
It may not be easy for you at first to overcome that mistrust, that ‘missing trust’, which is literally seeking to discover whether the one once loved, and now perhaps almost hated for a long time, still carries the phantom image in his [or her] heart…
But if by the day and by the hour, despite all initial setbacks, that single-minded will is renewed to exert might which you both possess over each other just to make each other genuinely happy, then you will surely soon learn to create your happiness. – – –
Perhaps you will say to me: “What is the use, if I have the best of wills to make both of us happy, yet my partner does not have the same will? – –”
As long as you ask this sort of question, you have still not understood what it means: – creating one’s happiness!
You always want to see yourself limited by external circumstances and are not willing to risk standing on your own two feet.
You still have no confidence in yourself, and you are a long way from really wanting to use your will. –
As soon as you really have the will to create your happiness through love, it should be of little concern to you whether your beloved ‘meets’ your wishes ‘halfway’ or indeed obstructs them. –
You must bring your own desires to complete rest, so that they can no longer disrupt your will!
You must will to do nothing other than successfully use your might to bring happiness to the person you love. –
Enjoying your success will bring happiness to you!
Here you must learn self-control if you are to guide yourself to success. – – – – – – – –
You will have to fight against inclinations, gain control of surging emotions, you will have to learn to suppress your wishes hour by hour, – but all this will become a source to you of self-delight. You will feel the happiness you are already creating for yourself through mastering yourself where perhaps today you still cannot even sense the extent of your bondage to all those things which – are not your own self…
Perhaps today you still get upset when you see the person you love taking a completely wrong view of something you know to be correct; when you see that he [or she] has a preference for things you detest; or when his [or her] ‘taste’ causes him [or her] to love some things you regard as ‘unbearably tasteless’. – –
What are all these things compared to the happiness of love!?!
How ridiculously trivial are all these things compared to the happiness that two lovers can bestow upon each other!
It does not matter at all which of the two of you may be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in these matters. What counts is to establish happiness through love!
It is merely the foulest craving for surrogate power for you always to insist that the person you love sees things the way you see them, whether you are really ‘right’ or, by only imagining yourself to be right, you are completely ‘wrong’. –
When you see that your might to make the person you love happy is successful, you will also observe with astonishment how the diametrically opposed ways you used to see things – suddenly merge into one. – – –
In shame you will then have to confess to yourself that all your earlier quarreling about trifles, which seemed so ‘important’ to you, was – but vain folly. –
Then you will recognize that you were seeking in vain to unite your ‘points of view’ while you were still disunited yourselves. – –
Happiness through love must be created before it can form from you that ‘unity by two’ which mocks all separation and all division, uniting you in all your thoughts and feelings. – – –
In your love too, my friends, you have a duty – to be happy; – – all your ‘unhappiness’ is only – neglect of duty!!
End of Part 4
The Book on Happiness -- Part 1