Optimism




For those who are determined to create their own happiness exists no longer the ‘greyness of everyday life’, no longer fear and no longer worry!

They know of a power within them which conquers everything desolate and menacing.

They will give no thought today to what ‘tomorrow’ may bring; yet each day they live will prepare them in the best way possible for the following day.

They will be able to learn how to live in the present and, as creators, to give form to the present-day.

They will be the sculptors of their own lives, and, through example, teach those who are near to them the art of making life worth living.

Although they will not regard all that many as their disciples, every one taught by their example will be ‘healed’ by this teaching and will in his turn ‘heal’ others thus helping to reduce the sick cells within the total  organism of humanity.

 

Truly, it is necessary for the ‘sick cells’ in the  spiritual body of humanity to heal, and every  individual has a duty here to make his contribution to their healing.

Everyone bears the guilt of aeons within him which needs to be paid off, and for whatever remains sick and imperfect in the body of humanity as a whole every individual is indebted through the ‘initial dissociation’ when mankind separated itself from its Godhead…

The whole unending cosmos could be a garden of ineffable bliss if that initial dissociation, which only aeons can remedy once more, had never  taken place.

But even today, on our journey through these  aeons, it is possible for the earth to witness greater happiness than humanity can imagine or is willing to believe in, even though in this world cycle it will certainly not be possible to achieve ‘heavenly’ life on earth.

It is not a question of creating new social forms in the external life of nations and countries, if the fullness of earthly happiness which can exist is to become living reality.

All external forms of social life are but a stopgap which a faint sense of our unity within the spiritual human organism advises us to construct, lest we completely lose consciousness of our unity within the spirit.

An ‘awareness of belonging’ is all that is preserved through the ‘building of states’, ‘nations’ and ‘popular custom’. Yet  for those who do not succeed in experiencing themselves as part and centre point of the whole spiritual body of humanity the awareness of  belonging to a part of this spiritual body may suffice, lest they become separated completely from all unity and from all the fluid of life of mankind’s wholeness. – – – – –

However, all hatred and contempt by one of these parts of mankind towards another is folly and amounts to self-defilement!

It is – the odour of corruption, which spreads with the hatred of these individual parts of  mankind…

It always manifests decay and putrefaction in its individual cells!

It is also often the poisonous stench of a pestilential sore, the rank smell of a purulent abscess  feeding on the sick part and threatening to plunder the marrow of his life. – – – – –

 

“Whoever shows no honour to a stranger and a man of a different tribe is not worthy of being called the son of a noble people”, is a saying found in the profoundest wisdom of the east which, with supreme knowledge, was anxious to teach its own people to respect itself …

You can only achieve real respect for yourself if you know your responsibility; you cannot know your responsibility if you do not know that, as part of the spiritual totality of mankind, you owe  responsibility not only to yourself but also to this totality. – – –

If you are a creator of your happiness you shall increase the amount of happiness on this earth and thereby give greater service to the whole of  mankind than if you sought to realise the most  utopian theories in the external world. –

 

Meng-tse said: “Doing the right thing involves doing the obvious; yet everyone seeks it in the extraordinary. Doing the right thing is doing what is easily accomplished; yet everyone seeks it in what is achievable with difficulty.” – – –

Perhaps you too seek in this way, deluded that you must do ‘great things’ and seeking those things which are ‘difficult to achieve’, – you seek high goals external to yourself, whilst your highest goal is so near to you as it is only to be found within  yourself. – – – –

 

Educate yourself, and through your example you will become an educator of mankind, without assuming rights that no man has conferred upon you! –

Create your own happiness and you will create happy people around you; you will prepare a passage for ‘the happiness of mankind’! –

You must, however, in order to create your own happiness, fight with unshakeable energy for your faith in the victorious power of all that is good,  despite all evil and despite all the bad things you may meet.

You must never lose courage however black the clouds gather menacingly above your head! – –

 

If you are ill, use your faith to make yourself well again; if your body can still be saved, the doctors to whom you entrusted yourself will be grateful to you for the help you have given in the recovery!  However, if your body cannot be saved, than you have created a supply of energy through your faith which will be of use to your spiritual body as soon as you have shed this body belonging to the visible earth which brought you agony.

 If you are in material need, use your faith to bring yourself material help; do not stop keeping your faith alive and effective with all the means at your disposal until help has arrived. Meanwhile, continue in all quietude along the paths from which you might, normally speaking, expect help without the magic of your faith.

The magical power of faith will perhaps attach  itself to these paths; perhaps help will come to you from a source you certainly did not expect.

Yet your trust in the power of faith must never entice you into folding your hands idly in your lap; likewise you must not, in the event of sickness, turn away external help offered to you. –

The power of your faith would lose its vital nerve, when not at the same time all your other energies worked in the same direction. – If eventually help comes to you from a direction you never searched, even if it might seem that your external efforts were ‘completely superfluous’, do not be led  astray in a future case into disdaining the external means at your disposal.

You would regret it bitterly, for the power of your faith can never do without the exertion of all your energies, if it is to be effectual for you. – –

Without the exertion of all your other powers, the power of your faith will be as pliable as lead. – Only by activating, even externally, despite all your trust in the power of your faith, every source of energy found within yourself, in order to help yourself, will the power of your faith take on the resilience of steel. It will have the strength of a ‘Toledo’ blade which shatters not even against the hardest resistance and will eventually cut through the knots which otherwise cannot be loosened…

 

In every worry, in every kind of need, this way of acting applies equally if you wish to put to the test the magical powers of faith in your everyday life.

Most people do not understand how to use faith effectively because they once vainly tried on some occasion to force the magical power of faith to serve them. But they had omitted to use all their energies to attract help from without at the same time …

So now they make the opposite mistake and seek all help only from external sources; they labour and struggle with little success because they did not know how to make proper use of the greatest  power at their disposal and thus they no longer have any trust in the helping power of faith. –

Lack of insight into the ways spiritual powers take effect prevents most people building their earthly happiness according to the rules.

So they arrive at a situation where they see themselves as excluded from any possibility of happiness; and indeed, in this state of mind all happiness does escape them. – –

If you wish to establish your happiness on this earth, you must trust with unshakeable ‘optimism’ in your happiness and in your good right to happiness!

You must know that you are only fulfilling your duty when you strive with all rightful means for your earthly happiness, which truly can be more than the ‘happiness’ of the herd. –

From everything you encounter you must seek to extract even the tiniest particle of happiness; you must always seek to read your happiness in everything!

From morning till evening no event must pass you by, however insignificant, without your extracting some small element of happiness from it.

Everything your eyes behold, everything your ears hear, must leave behind a small something as a tribute to happiness; you must get accustomed to actually being pursued on all your paths by happiness, so that it will be ‘natural’ to you if one day great happiness meets you  there. – – –

Without being accustomed to wanting to encounter happiness on all your paths, in whatever way and even in the tiniest shape and size, you will not create the right atmosphere necessary to give shape to your full happiness on earth. –

You must become a magnet of happiness for yourself and others, if you would soon and without failure become the creator of your happiness. –

You must, as it were, learn to be happy passively before becoming the active creator of the form of happiness you want.

Thus you will bring about in yourself a state of mind which will allow you to intuit the secret spiritual laws which happiness obeys.

In this way you will definitely create your own happiness and you will know how to keep hold of it. But at the same time, you will increase the possibility for others to attain, like you, all the happiness that this earth has to impart, happiness which they do not find because they do not yet know that they themselves can alone become the creators of their own happiness…

 

No unhappiness in this world of abundant  unhappiness is so great that it can permanently  obstruct the way to happiness!

With every spark of happiness, however, which you experience in your consciousness as happiness, you drain one of the countless thousands of small sources of unhappiness on this earth. – When you have really created your happiness, you have liberated for ever mankind from one of the great swamps of unhappiness, created through the thoughtlessness and ignorance of millennia and only capable of being dried up by the suns of individual self-created happiness.

The more plentiful these truly happy individuals are on earth, the more will the power of chaos, which still causes so much misery, disappear from its surface. – – –

 

It is a never ending task to eradicate the misery on this earth by any other means, for happiness and unhappiness result only from the unending influence of spiritual laws. The occult powers effecting automatically within this universe everything we call ‘unhappiness’ will never be paralysed, unless the effects of the powers of happiness are fortified through continual conscious experience, just as coils of copper wire intensify electric current, so that they can tear the powers of unhappiness from their course and make them serve, just as automatically, creative building in the human world. – – –

 

Our earthly willpower is insufficient to steer all the ‘powers of unhappiness’ in the whole universe from their destructive course; man of this earth would still feel their influence, even if all the powers of unhappiness on this planet earth could be  mastered. – – –

Yet, on this earth, on this planet that carries him, every single man can work true ‘wonders’ through his will to attain happiness. The more people  practise to achieve this, the greater will be the number of the happy,  the bearers of happiness here on this earth. –

Since everything is inter-connected and linked by mysterious powers, increased happiness on  earth works ‘outwards’ onto the whole universe. No imagination, however fantastic, could ever match the reality if it sets to picture the effects that can be brought about in the farthest realms of space by a rapidly increased experience of happiness on earth…

 


Bô Yin Râ