True Happiness, The Immortal Man - James Allen

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The sun shining birds are singing and all feels right in the world.

Until the season changes and suddenly you lose your motivation to get out of bed.

In fact, one in five people experience some form of depression no matter the season or

time of year.

At the American Psychiatric Association Foundation, our vision is to build a mentally healthy

nation for all because we want you to live your best life and be your best you all year

round.

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We cannot alter external things, nor shape other people to our liking, nor mold the

world to our wishes, but we can alter internal things, our desires, passions, thoughts.

We can shape our liking to other people, and we can mold the inner world of our own mind

in accordance with wisdom, and so reconcile it to the outer world of men and things.

The turmoil of the world we cannot avoid, but the disturbances of mine we can overcome.

The duties and difficulties of life claim our attention.

But we can give rise above all anxiety concerning them.

Despite by noise, we can yet have a quiet mind involved in responsibilities.

The heart can be at rest in the midst of strife.

We can know the abiding peace.

The twenty pieces which comprise this book, unrelated as some of them are in the letter,

will be found to be harmonious in the spirit, in that they point the reader towards those

heights of self-knowledge and self-conquest, which rising above the turbulence of the

world, lift their peaks where the heavenly silence reigns.

James Alan

Chapter 1 True Happiness

To maintain an unchangeable sweetness of disposition, to think only thoughts that are

pure and gentle, and to be happy under all circumstances.

Such blessed conditions and such beauty of character in life should be the aim of all,

and particularly so of those who wish to lessen the misery of the world.

If anyone has failed to lift himself above ungentleness, impurity and unhappiness, he

is greatly deluded, if he imagines he can make the world happier by the propagation of

any theory or theology.

He who is daily living in harshness, impurity or unhappiness, is day by day adding to the

sum of the world's misery, whereas he who continually lives in good will and does not

depart from happiness, is day by day increasing the sum of the world's happiness, and this

independently of any religious beliefs which these may or may not hold.

He who has not learned how to be gentle or giving, loving and happy, has learned very

little, great though his book learning and profound his acquaintance which the letter of

Scripture may be.

For it is in the process of becoming gentle, pure and happy, that the deep real and enduring

lessons of life are learned.

Unbroken sweetness of conduct in the face of all outward antagonism, is the infallible

indication of a self-conquered soul, the witness of wisdom, and the proof of the possession

of truth.

A sweet and happy soul is the ripe and fruit of experience and wisdom, and it sheds

abroad the invisible yet powerful aroma of its influence, gladding the hearts of others

and purifying the world.

And all who will and who have not yet commenced may begin this day if they will so resolve

to live sweetly and happily, as becomes the dignity of a true manhood or womanhood.

Do not say that your surroundings are against you.

A man's surroundings are never against him, they are there to aid him, and all those

outward occurrences over which you lose sweetness and peace of mind are the very conditions

necessary to your development, and it is only by meeting and overcoming them that you

can learn and grow and ripen.

The fault is in yourself.

Pure happiness is the rightful and healthy condition of the soul, and all may possess

it if they will live purely and unselfish.

Have good will to all that lives, letting unkindness die, and greed and wrath so that your

lives be made, like soft air is passing by.

Is this too difficult for you?

When unrest and happiness will continue to dwell with you, your belief and aspiration

and resolve are all that are necessary to make it easy, to render it in the near future

a thing accomplished, a blessed state realized.

Dispondency, irritability, anxiety and complaining, condemning and grumbling, all these are thought

cankers, mind diseases.

They are the indications of a wrong mental condition, and those who suffer they are from,

would do well to remedy their thinking and conduct.

It is true there is much sin and misery in the world, so that all our love and compassion

are needed, but our misery is not needed.

There is already too much of that.

Know it is our cheerfulness and happiness that are needed, for there is too little of that.

We can give nothing better to the world than beauty of life and character.

Without this all other things are vain.

This is pre-eminently excellent.

It is enduring, real, and not to be overthrown, and it includes all joy and blessedness.

Seize to dwell pessimistically upon the wrongs around you.

Dwell no more in complaints about and revolt against, the evil and others, and commence

to live free from all wrong and evil yourself.

Peace of mind, pure religion, and true or form lie this way.

If you would have others true, be true.

If you would have the world emancipated from misery and sin, emancipate yourself.

If you would have your home and your surroundings happy, be happy.

You can transform everything around you if you will transform yourself.

Don't be well and be moan.

Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad.

But chant the beauties of the good.

And this you will naturally and spontaneously do, as you realize the good in yourself.

Chapter 2

The Immortal Man

Immortality is here and now, and is not a speculative something beyond the grave.

It is the lucid state of consciousness, in which the sensations of the body, the varying

and unrestful states of mind, and the circumstances and events of life, are seen to be of a fleeting

and therefore of an illusory character.

Immortality does not belong to time, and never will be found in time.

It belongs to eternity, and just as time is here and now, so is eternity here and now,

and a man may find that eternity and establish in it, if he will overcome the self that

derives its life from the unsatisfying and perishable things of time.

Whilst a man remains immersed in sensation, desire, and the passing events of his day

by day existence, and regards those sensations, desires, and passing events, as of the essence

of himself, he can have no knowledge of immortality.

The thing which such a man desires, and which he mistakes for immortality, is persistence.

That is, a continuous succession of sensations and events in time.

Living in, loving and clinging to, the things which stimulate and minister to his immediate

gratification, and realizing no state of consciousness above and independent of this, he thirsts for

its continuance, and strives to banish the thought that he will at last have to part from

those earthly luxuries and delights to which he has become enslaved, and which he regards

as being inseparable from himself.

Persistence is the anti-thesis of immortality, and to be absorbed in it is spiritual death.

Its very nature is change, impermanence.

It is a continual living and dying.

The death of the body can never bestow upon a man immortality.

Spirits are not different from men, and live their little feverish life of broken consciousness,

and are still immersed in change and mortality.

The mortal man, he who thirsts for the persistence of his pleasure-loving personality, is still

mortal after death, and only lives another life with a beginning and an end, without memory

of the past, or knowledge of the future.

The immortal man is he who has detached himself from the things of time, by having ascended

into the state of consciousness, which is fixed and unvariable, and is not affected by

passing events and sensations.

Human life consists of an ever-moving process of events, and in this procession the mortal

man is immersed, and he is carried along with it.

Being so carried along, he has no knowledge of what is behind and before him.

The immortal man is he who has stepped out of this procession, and he stands by unmoved

and watches it.

And from his fixed place he sees both the before, the behind in the middle of the moving

thing called life.

No longer identifying himself with the sensations and fluctuations of the personality, or with

the outward changes which make up the life in time.

He has become the passionless spectator of his own destiny, and of the destinies of the

men and nations.

The mortal man also is one who has caught in a dream, and he neither knows that he was

formally awake, nor that he will awake again.

He is a dreamer without knowledge, nothing more.

The immortal man is as one who has awakened out of his dream, and he knows that his dream

was not an enduring reality, but a passing illusion.

He is a man with knowledge, the knowledge of both states, that of persistence and that

of immortality, and is in full possession of himself.

The mortal man lives in the time or world state of consciousness, which begins and ends.

The immortal man lives in the cosmic or heaven state of consciousness, in which there is

neither beginning nor end, but an eternal now.

Such a man remains poised instead fast, under all changes, and the death of his body will

not in any way interrupt the eternal consciousness in which he abides.

Of such a one it is said, he shall not taste of death, because he has stepped out of the

stream of mortality, and established himself in the abode of truth.

These personalities, nations and worlds pass away, but truth remains, and its glory is

undimmed by time.

The immortal man then is he who has conquered himself, who no longer identifies with the

self-seeking forces of the personality, but who has trained himself to direct those forces,

with the hand of a master, and so has brought them into harmony with the causal energy

and the source of all things.

The fret and fever of life has ceased, doubt and fear are cast out, and death is not for

him who has realized the fadeless splendor of that life of truth, by adjusting heart and

mind to the eternal and unchangeable varieties.