We are indeed fortunate to have the Collected Works online. In my search for K’s talks on the Kingdom of Happiness I am very surprised at all that is available today.
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Hey! in the first lines of “Kingdom of Happiness” he says that in order to create there must be struggle and discontent.
Which happens to be Nick Cave’s main gripe against artists using chatGPT.
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I once heard K answer a questioner when asked where one should begin with his teachings, he said to start the latest and then work backwards to the earliest. These are links to some of the earliest. Here’s what K said to a group before 1927 (Kingdom of Happiness p.20), “I do not want anything more in my life than to have the capacity to lose the sense of the separate self. Because then I am able to forget the ‘I’ and identify myself with the rest of the world–with every kingdom, vegetable, animal and human; I am then nearer the Truth, nearer that perfection.”
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Rather than ‘become’ something grander, to enhance the self, he wanted to be ‘nothing’ and in being nothing, to be everything?
His later statement ‘I am the world’ might be said to be a continuation of this perception.
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As well as the ‘observer is the observed’. Because one page earlier in this Kingdom of Happiness talk, K said to this group, “And then I lay down in a garden–in imagination–and was looking at a blade of grass. You know how grass, when it first springs up, grows absolutely tight in a sheath, and a little while after, it divides into two or three blades. I felt myself to be that grass which had not yet divided into separate blades. Then I could feel the grass pushing through from under the earth, the sap rising in it and the blades separating, and I was myself each blade.”
–in imagination– is imagination (or visualization) a portal to this expansiveness? Does it unlock the doors of perception?
I think a lot of imagination and “intuition” created theosophy. I’m glad K found the courage to break free. He had something else to offer. I appreciate today’s research into happiness, though the Kingdom of Happiness, as described, may have been a state of being. The Science of Happiness continues to advance in today’s world.