Taylor Emily - The enlightenment quest and the art of happiness: mastering life through higher power

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Copyright 2015 by John Maxwell Taylor. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by
North Atlantic Books
P.O. Box 12327
Berkeley, California 94712

Cover and book design by Suzanne Albertson

The Enlightenment Quest and the Art of Happiness: Mastering Life through Higher Power is sponsored and published by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences (dba North Atlantic Books), an educational nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing, and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Taylor, John Maxwell, 1942

The enlightenment quest and the art of happiness : mastering life through higher power / John Maxwell Taylor; with Emily Taylor.

pages cm

eBook ISBN: 978-1-58394-919-1
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-58394-918-4
1. Spiritual life, I. Title.
BL624.T385 2015
204.4dc23
2014021825

v3.1

This book is dedicated to the memory
of Shattuck Hartwell ,
Emily Hartwell Taylors father and
John Maxwell Taylors friend .

Planet Pictures:

My husband and I have been on an enlightenment quest for many years. His began in earnest in 1967 and mine in 1995. When we met in 2004, neither of us had ever met anyone as devoted to God and to the truth of our beings as we were. Our connection was instant and powerful. After two years of long-distance love, he in Encinitas, California, and me in Cleveland, Ohio, we were married.

Since then, we have never stopped growing individually and together, both personally and spiritually. After we navigated our first bump in the road a couple of months after we met, our mantra has been Thank you for growing so beautifully with me. How delighted we are to discover that the happy bonus of our mutual desire and commitment for growth has been just that, happiness. The good news is that each and every human being is entitled to happiness: old, young, rich, poor, single or in relationship, healthy or ill. That happiness comes from deep within, from just being alive.

The enlightenment quest and the art of happiness go hand in hand. Doesnt it make sense that the more we seek, the more we find? That the deeper and more expansive we become, the more we will be given? Life is so rich and exciting because it is forever teaching us. We just have to be eager to learn for it to be the win-win proposition it was meant to be.

This book is us, our perceptions, our practices, our wisdom, our search . We want to share all that we know with anyone and everyone who wants to be really, truly, and deeply happy. And if you are reading these words that means YOU!

Imagine embarking on a journey to a place where you already are. Sounds paradoxical, doesnt it? Yet the truth we are all seeking, whether we know it or not, can only be found in paradox, that strange land between yes and no, right and wrong, within and without, male and female, the spiritual and the material, body and soul, heaven and earth. If it is true that we are spiritual beings in human form and are essentially divine, then we are already perfect at the deepest level. So why is it that we always seem to be looking for something that eludes us lasting happiness, a joy that does not fade with time and circumstance? This book has been created as a wide-ranging guide to help you find that happiness and make it irrevocably your own through an enlightened, experiential union of both your soul and your human self, the life of spirit and masterful patterns for living in our hyper-paced, ever-changing, sometimes crazy, modern world.

To survive and thrive, spiritually and materially, in the twenty-first century, it is imperative that we understand that seeking awareness of consciousness alone will not make us happy. Neither will ignoring our souls, while pursuing life and liberty at the expense of a happiness that can only be ours by living in harmony with the divine source of our being, while simultaneously engaging with life to the fullest.

For centuries, seekers have deprived their bodies, denied their sexuality, hidden away in caves, and performed all sorts of disciplines and austerities they hoped would lead them to enlightenment, while passing their days on Earth saying no to life. They failed to realize a simple truth. Being happy in the here and now is the ground base upon which higher perceptions must rise. Otherwise we will be erecting a superstructure of light on an unstable foundation. The greater our consciousness, the more power flows through us into the world. How important then that we be psychologically and emotionally stable, and physically healthy as possible and emotionally balanced. These three aspects of ourselvesthought, physicality, and feelingwork together best when all three are filled with happiness, for that is what most easily unites them into a fully functioning vehicle capable of the most complete expression of our souls. What good would enlightenment be if it did not contain happiness and enable us to enjoy life to the fullest? Therefore consciousness and personal stability, through happiness, must be brought together in our lives and melded into a permanent condition of who and what we are if we wish to access and live increasingly in and from a more enlightened state of consciousness.

The good news for enlightenment questers (consciousness and happiness seekers) is that our journey is not geographically far. It is an inner journey with an external effect, one in which we learn to trigger the inherent code of joy that is built into the trillions of cells that make up our bodies, and then radiate that happiness out into the world. The key that opens the floodgates of this enlightening power is a combination of self-unlocking processes. By applying a multiplicity of spiritual insights and disciplines upon both our interior lives and our external interactions with the world at large, we gradually start to embody a presence that compels time, place, and circumstance to serve our evolving self-realization. This combination of power, presence, and insight into ourselves awakens deep intuitive perceptions regarding what is going on in the world around us today. It enables us to stand unshaken amidst the crash of falling worlds and the tremendous difficulties our planet is currently facing. Because we can see beyond the delusive limitations of mass consciousness, we develop direct, living perceptions of the divine energetic reality that underlies creation and learn to use our connection with that power to order our lives according to its superior intelligence. Life becomes our servant, not our master.