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!”

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.

Prelude

The Duty to be Happy

‘I’ and ‘You’

Love

Wealth and Poverty

Money

Optimism

Conclusion

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 mankind forever 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 paralyzed 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 practice 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…

The few who knew these laws since gray primeval days and lived accordingly had been prevented for long enough from passing on their knowledge to anyone other than their tried and tested pupils on earth. In the course of the millennia they found most plentiful opportunities to search these spiritual laws, on which this book is based, for all their ultimate ramifications, testing out their efficacy on themselves and in their own lives.

You may entrust yourself with good reason to this guidance; if you desire to know more about its nature, my subsequent books will enlighten you fully: ‘On the Living God’, ‘On The Life Beyond’, ‘On Man’, ‘Of The Royal Art’ and ‘Of Dialogues’.

I shall finish this ‘Book on Happiness’ here with the fervent wish that it might show you ways by which you shall become the creator of your happiness. –

There is so much that could be said about the different types of happiness you can create on this earth, but I hope you will not think that I have deliberately overlooked any kind of human happiness because it is not mentioned in this book…

If you are able to read properly you will find teaching which can be applied to every kind of happiness on this earth. –

I wanted to tell you here in the most concise manner about all the essentials you should observe with all forms of human happiness. I have only chosen some elements of human happiness on this earth which clearly demonstrate what this teaching has to say about happiness. It was not always possible to avoid repetition; to do so would have been at the cost of clarity.

On the other hand I was concerned with being as concise as possible whilst dealing with all the points which seemed to me important for gaining clear insight into the matter.

I would not like my books to be read like stories which are put aside as soon as one has reached the last page, perhaps never to be picked up again in life.

I already know of many for whom my books are constant companions in their lives; I hope there might be many others.

Yet if I write every one of my books with the intention of providing my readers with a constant adviser, I would especially wish that this ‘Book on Happiness’ should never disappear from my readers’ sight and reach. For while I deal in other books with things which are often far removed from daily life, I think that I have had much to say here which offers a daily opportunity to pick up this book again in order to become thoroughly acquainted with its teaching.

In every event this will certainly not be to your disadvantage; it may perhaps – however much you are predisposed today still to a pessimistic frame of mind – in the course of time make you into – – a happy optimist, despite all the external adversity surrounding you…

You must not be led astray by those people who would prove to you from their own ‘experience of life’ that happiness takes flight from so many on their path of life, despite their continual efforts to meet it.

Let those who experience life in this way rather ask what mistake caused them to obstruct the path on which happiness intended to meet them!...

Let them ask whether their own ‘assiduity’ did not cause happiness to flee from their side? –

Truly, all earthly happiness wills your act of creation. Yet the silent activity of the creator is very far removed from that restless solicitude which is always anxiously concerned that ‘nothing is neglected’ and thereby neglects the best of all things, the peace of mind without which happiness on this earth can never be obtained. – – – – –

Create within yourself a cheerful faith in your entitlement to happiness, and never allow yourself to be derailed by any setbacks from the secure track of your well-founded faith!

Be convinced that forces and powers are always working to help you from the moment you want to secure your own happiness and you do not merely demand happiness through impotent wishes! – – –

Walk calmly on the earthly path assigned to you, always keeping your inner peace, however much the ‘blows of fate’ may rain down upon you from outside.

If you allow yourself to be torn from your calmness, you are certainly lost. Yet never will the forces which create misery on earth be truly able to defeat you however much they rage if, in a state of perpetual, certain quietude, you trust in your happiness and in the helping powers at your side. – – –

With endurance you will be able to create your happiness, even if you might still be surrounded at this hour by ‘unhappiness’ of every imaginable kind. –

Do not believe the tales other doctrines might tell you regarding the remote possibility of finding happiness on this earth!

Rather believe in your right and your duty to attain happiness; seek in cheerful certainty, creating your happiness with trust and strength of will, so that one day you may be numbered amongst the happy ones on this earthly orb.

The End

The Book on Happiness -- Part 1

The Book on Happiness -- Part 2

The Book on Happiness -- Part 3

The Book on Happiness -- Part 4

The Book on Happiness -- Part 5

The Book on Happiness -- Part 6

The Book on Happiness -- Part 7