Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Happiness, which may be defined as the satisfaction resulting from the harmonious gratification of all the powers and faculties of the soul, is a spiritual healthfulness, and, by a necessary law of cause and effect, this state of the mind will ultimate itself in the outside circumference of our being, or what we call the body. Its echo will be heard there and recorded in the physical organism. Fichte affirms that life is itself, and in itself, blessedness, — that the two cannot be distinguished, but merge into one. Happiness is an essential and inseparable property of all true life. Swedenborg more than a century ago gave utterance to one of the profoundest axioms of a spiritual science when he declared in his philosophical work. Divine Love and Wisdom, that life is love, — an idea which may be made evident to anyone who will give to it any earnest and patient thought and attention. Love is of itself a state of blessedness, — satisfaction with itself, joy in itself; and therefore love and happiness are one and the same, and consequently all true life must be blessed, since life is love. Thus life, love, and blessedness, and, we may add, by necessary inference, health, are intimately connected, and are identical and always go together, so that one cannot exist without the others. All delight, or emotional bliss, arises from love, that is, from life. It is an ebullition and overflowing of vitality. The man who is not happy, who has not attained to blessedness, does not in reality live. He only appears to live. His existence is only a seeming and not a Divine reality. It is an undesired, unwelcome, and unsatisfactory state, which is endured rather than enjoyed. Ills highest enjoyment is a negation of misery, which he attains only in sleep, the image of death.
A religion, whose central principle is fear, cannot make the soul happy, and does not hear the seal and impress of Divinity. God’s infinite Life is love, and love is blessedness in itself. To consciously live in God, to share his Life, to he made one with Him, and thus be made a partaker of the Divine nature, is to live in the order of our creation, and to move in the element in which we were made to exist and to act, and out of which there is no real life and blessedness. Let it be remembered that happiness and health are most intimately, if not indissolubly, associated. 3’he man who is happy, not by transient gleams of spiritual sunshine, not by a casual gay surface-coloring of his existence, but by a blessedness all through his being, is not, in the proper sense of the word, diseased. The radical idea of the term disease — without ease — is inconsistent with this state. Let us remember that life, blessedness, and health are one. He who is not blessed, who is not happy, docs not really live. He does not realize the full idea of what we call life. The wheels of life move, if they move at all, with friction, and labor, and effort. All action in the line of duty is an up-hill exertion, and not a spontaneous vivacity. An unhappy man cannot in the full sense of the word be a healthy man. Much of what physicians treat as physical disease is only a mental unhappiness. It follows from this that the best physician is he who blesses others, who makes other souls happy by the Divine sunshine of his words and presence. The sphere of his beneficent life is a contagious peacefulness and undisturbed tranquility. He ministers to minds diseased, calms their fears, allays their anxieties, solves their doubts, quiets their forebodings, removes the gloom of despair, supplants their self-condemnation by a sense of pardon, and aims to pluck from the heart every rooted sorrow. Such was Jesus the Christ, who came to comfort those that mourned, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. The good physician is a doctor or teacher. His first inquiry is not what ails the body, but what are the more real and interior needs of the soul. By attending to the body alone, he would only work at the circumference of our being; by giving his attention to the mental and spiritual state, he begins the curative process at the center of our existence, and, according to an established law of Divine order, works from within outward. The spiritual disturbance, the mental abnormality, has priority in time, and is first in importance, for the reason that in the mind is found the cause of all bodily changes. We should then search for the spiritual symptoms first, and look at the tongue, feel the pulse, and examine the excretions afterwards. The divinest and most Christ-like man in human society is the good physician, — he who, from the overflowing stores of his spiritual intelligence and goodness, is governed by an irrepressible impulse to impart life, health, and peace to others. He is God’s messenger, God’s prophet of good, an inspired herald to announce and inaugurate the good time coming to the sorrowing and suffering. He follows more closely in the footsteps of Jesus the Christ, the Divine Man, than does he who clothes himself with the spirit of an imaginary, priestly dignity to give his solemn sanction and official seal to a soul’s salvation.
God is supremely happy, because He is a boundless, changeless, irrepressible, and everlasting Love. But love is life, and love in us is the life of God in the soul of man. It is an exalted blessedness to lay the hand on the heart and feel it warm with the vital flame of heaven. But it is a supreme bliss of the soul to be the organ of its communication to others. We then become partakers of the Infinite tranquility, — the peace of God that passeth understanding,— and the soul in unruffled serenity floats on the waveless, stormless ocean of the immeasurable Life of God.
The final end of man’s creation was to share the bliss of God Even our sorrows serve to fit us for this.
“Here grief and joy be suddenly unite That anguish serves to sublimate delight.”
Our sorrows are usually only transient moods that are succeeded by heightened joys, as beneath the warming sun the vapors vanish and leave a lucid sky.
“Catch rich, grand thoughts from fountains pure above,
Then pour them out with thine own thoughts in love.
Mark every place with flowers where thou hast trod.
And let thy path lead always towards thy God.”
Hypochondria, which consists in melancholia, and the consequent dyspepsia accompanied with gloomy ideas of life, dejection of spirits, a loss of faith that blurs the bright picture that hope paints on the canvas of the future, like clouds obscuring the glories of sunrise, and all this accompanied by an indisposition to activity, is a more general characteristic of disease than physicians have recognized. For all this class of ailments, an hour of supreme bliss, or even the slightest taste of the soul’s summum honum, or highest good, is the specific remedy. Under its influence, with a magical efficiency and Divine celerity, the bodily disease vanishes and becomes a nihility or nothingness. It passes into the realm of oblivescence, or forgetfulness, and is annihilated by ceasing to be an object of thought.
This text above is Part 2, Chapter 13, from the book The Divine Law of Cure by Warren Felt Evans. You can find the book in the links below:
