Vol.
VIII, April 22, 1965
FORMULA FOR HEALTH,
WEALTH AND HAPPINESS
FORMULA FOR HAPPINESS
A man who does not love
Truth cannot recognize the correctness of knowledge, nor can he correlate it
for use. If we first love the Truth, we find within ourselves a standard by
which to "recognize" fact.
A man who loves the Truth
has already FOUND that which must be found first. In other words, he has the PERCEPTION with
which to identify the meaningfulness of all outer-knowledge. A person who has no understanding is never
able to know whether or not the knowledge exposed to him be true.
When we first seek the
Principle of God, ALL things are obtained, effortlessly, and as a matter of
course. Again if we do not FIRST LOVE
TRUTH, we shall be incapable of recognizing what we really need. Without
Truth, we shall never know what constitutes happiness.
Perhaps we shall labor
towards the goal of making our present existence more "lively" with
adventure and excitement; but as we become ACCUSTOMED to the excitement, we
are obliged to soup-up our way of life in even more unwise ways.
To live without purpose is
similar to having knowledge without understanding. You cannot compensate for the lack of
purpose by zestful-living; neither can
you hope to compensate for your ignorance through more and more
"rote" knowledge.
Most people, never having
sought, nor found, their true purpose in life, are dedicated to the goal of making
their existing life more exciting and pleasant. The pursuit of happiness
becomes the pursuit of increased SENSATION, which is incorrectly called
"happiness”. To exist for the sole purpose of survival is man's greatest
travail. It is not enough merely to
work, to eat, and to sleep. Our compensation
of "pleasure" is not enough.
Laboring in the pursuit of pleasure is also a very tiresome task, for
the body soon becomes accustomed to the substitute-thrills, and hungrily dependent
upon greater and greater amounts of pleasure.
Pleasure-oriented, instead
of purpose-bound, we are working away from the very quality that would give us
that which we seek. The
pleasure-pursuit is, in reality, a pursuit of greater PAIN, although we fail
to realize this. As our bodies become
adjusted to the sensation, they cease to feel the pleasure as pleasure; instead
the pleasure itself becomes a terrible pain. It becomes an agony, because the
PURSUIT OF PLEASURE itself is a labor away from purpose; therefore, we are
more distant from what is truly satisfying.
The pleasure of man, in
the form of new cars, boats, cameras and fur coats, becomes a milestone around
his neck, with increasing debts to be paid for all those objects that have no
real use or value. When we have
extracted the thrill, we are left with the enslavement to the object, and our
HATRED of it. Again we lunge forward
into the same cycle, in the hope of easing the pain of this purposeless
living.
