Happiness and Sorrow

    To be happy is an elementary yearning of every human being. But every man and woman has certainly experienced that the moments of happiness are fleeting, even as we would so gladly have it otherwise. He or she who observes the world, discovers everywhere short-term happiness and long lasting sorrow. In cruel, awful wars, brother kills brother.

    In the first half of our enlightened century, approximately seventy million people were killed through war violence. Through abuse of power and the ensuing violence, an unbroken stream of terrible sorrow was poured out over humanity. Inner and external conflicts produce an immeasurable increase of fear and despair.

    To better enable acceptance of this situation, many people announce with conviction that sorrow is a necessary and even valuable aspect of life; that sharing others' sorrows means compassion. And he who himself is suffering sees this as a sign that God has turned to him, for: The Lord disciplines him whom he loves! (Hebr.12:6).

   He or she who also becomes absorbed in the great mysteries and tries to investigate the motives of the human heart, discovers that there are two types of sorrow and two types of happiness. There is on the one hand the sorrow that originates through the cruelty, crises and injustice of the world, and through the inability to cope with it. In contrast there is the happiness that forms from the sense of security and sympathy as well as the happiness arising out of interpersonal relationships and the feeling therefrom that one should strive for these as a life goal. These forms of happiness and sorrow belong to the process of earthly life. They result out of the natural aspects of the mortal personality with his/her urges and desires.

Divine happiness and anguish

    There are, however, happiness and a sorrow that originate out of a totally different source. We experience them more or less clearly in the eternal nucleus in the heart. Whoever receives and experiences something of these eternal forces, feels an intense happiness but, simultaneously, a great pain.

   These experiences can appear again and again and each time enmesh themselves more deeply within our being. The result is that our mode of life either brings us nearer to God or drives us further away. These experiences express themselves in a deeply felt anguish of being separated from the original divine Life. But there is also the constantly returning feeling of happiness that a person experiences when, in the middle of the loneliness and cruelty and senselessness of this world, the Call of Eternity is allowed to be experienced from within.

   It is of earthly happiness and earthly suffering that earthly man's life testifies. Out of the happiness and the anguish produced by being attuned to the Divine Spirit nucleus, arises the recognition of a new life possibility: the life that develops itself on the basis of the immortal Spirit centre in the human heart.

Re-ordering values

    If happiness and sorrow are seen in this light, a new set of values arises. Therein lies a great opportunity, a task and, above all, a promise. If a person stays imprisoned in the sorrow with which mankind has been confronted since the beginning of time, he must eventually surrender in exhaustion. He stays then trapped in a cycle that always leads anew to a fight that cannot be won. For the struggle for the happiness and the fight against the sorrow of this world produce no positive results in the long run. Whoever can see this clearly will come to a completely new perspective. He will see things in a new light. Where he once evaluated his sorrows solely on an earthly scale, there now awakens in him the certain knowledge that the earthly personality is always inclined to ignore his divine nucleus and is thus forced to experience sorrow.

True happiness

    He who learns to acknowledge his divine nucleus and give it priority, enabling this nucleus to live and grow, will discover that through this totally different mode of life much sorrow can be softened and even prevented. He will not experience sorrow as a scourge but rather as a help and a mercy on his path. It will become for him as a staircase on which he will enter the Divine World, the World of true Happiness.

    Why a staircase? Because he realises more and more that all sorrow is caused through his I-centrality and that this ‘I’ must gradually step back and die, so that the Original Man can rise from the dead.

   Thus every victory over the ‘I’ - which is usually accompanied by loss of face and sorrow - will now be as a step on a staircase that leads to eternity. He who experiences and comprehends this, will accept this suffering, and not hesitate to climb one step after the other, finally to enter divine bliss.

 © Lectorium Rosicrucianum 1997

Article from Pentagram Vol 19 No 2, 1997