Being Beautiful: Learning to Treasure the REAL You

By Tony Cuckson

You are a treasure beyond price. You are a unique wonder tale that you alone are here to tell. You are a gift to be given to the world expressing from the Eternal Giftgiver. Using the Celtic folklore The Four Treasures of the Tuatha De Danaan Irish storyteller Tony Cuckson takes you on a magical journey to discover the REAL you.

On this journey you discover the treasures that align body, mind, will and heart. You claim the treasures that are:-

The Stone of Destiny - Follow your true Call to Adventure.
The Sword of Nuada - Make the Right Choices.
The Spear of Lugh - Claim the Power of Focus.
The Cauldron of Plenty - Find Fulfilment from Within.

This is a practical journey for living a life of true fulfilment and meaning. It includes:-

3 Levels of Mind that bring Peace of Mind.
7 Stages of Feeling that allow you to live at Ease.
20 Steps to unfolding the Wonder Tale you are.
12 Practices for following your Destiny.

This includes a recording of the Celtic wonder tale The Four Treasures of the Tuatha De Danaan that you can download for FREE. Listen and invite yourself to find true fulfilment in discovering the REAL You and the treasure you already are.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tony Cuckson
• Release date: Nov 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9780995767652

Tony Cuckson

Tony Cuckson is a Writer, a Transformational Storyteller and Folk singer who invites awakening of the heart to your one wild and precious life.He uses a unique combination of storytelling, poetry, song lyrics, movies and foundational practices that invite you to•Find meaning and purpose•Discover real peace of mind•Understand the four foundations of heart health•Learn why you must do the hard work and the heart work•How you are required to live your REAL life story•Understand the levels of LoveHe is the author of Awakening the Heart: 21 Ways to Follow Love’s Messenger. He is currently writing Being Beautiful - Learning to Treasure the REAL YOU based upon the Irish myth of the beautiful people called the Tuatha dé Danaan. He is founder of The Yeats Experience Academy promoting the invitation to spiritual awakening through storytelling, poetry and song.

Book preview

Being Beautiful

Learning to Treasure the REAL YOU

Tony Cuckson

The Yeats Experience Academy

Corrogue Dowra, Co. Cavan, Ireland

Copyright © 2016 by Tony Cuckson.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

Tony Cuckson

Street Address

Corrogue, Dowra, Co. Cavan, Republic of Ireland HP41 YY24

www.tonycuckson.com

Being Beautiful – Learning to Treasure the REAL YOU

Tony Cuckson. —1st edition.

ISBN 978-0-9957676-5-2

Table of Contents

Being Beautiful

Preface

How to Use this Book

Beginning of Learning

Levels of the Mind

The Way of Ease

Listening to the Story

Unfolding the Story

The Practices

The Way of Beauty

Conclusion

Other Books

About the Author

Teach only love, for that is

what you are."

A Course In Miracles

Preface

People of Orphalese,

beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.

But you are life and you are the veil.

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

But you are eternity and you are the mirror.

- The Prophet - Khalil Gibran

What does it mean to be beautiful? Does it mean having the right kind of face and body, wearing the right clothes and portraying the right image? All of these may express a certain kind of culturally determined kind of beauty but this is not what it means to live as someone who knows and feels their ‘being’ as beautiful and thus knows beauty to be an essential attribute of who they are.

Authentic beauty, which is beyond image, arises from Being. You are made in the image of God. God is Love. Thus you are the beautiful creation of Love’s imagination. You are also a human being. The word ‘human’ is ‘hu’ and ‘man.’ The word ‘hu’ means The sound of God. You are thus already a resounding success because you are a unique expression of Creation. To feel this unique connection is to know what authentic beauty feels like. You know yourself, not simply as a beautiful person, but as the Presence of Beauty in form beyond the personal.

Being beautiful is not something you do so much as realize. You can of course make yourself look more beautiful but if that is not felt to be who you feel yourself to be then it will not last. To ask, What does it feel like to be beautiful? is like asking a Zen Koan. A Zen koan is a question such as, What is the sound of one hand clapping? This kind of question is experiential and existential. These kind of questions takes you on a kind of vision quest. Each in their own way answers the essential question, Who am I. In realising the answer you know that you are beauty in form even if that form you experience as your body is not culturally affirmed as being beautiful.

When I write a book I find it helps to give a definition that encapsulates what it is I am trying to invite. Here is the definition of Being Beautiful which will be unfolded through storytelling, poetry, lyrics and practices.

Being beautiful is knowing who you are as a unique expression of Love flowing through the form of the body willingly open to the emptiness that is forever full.

This is not the usual definition of beauty that you find in the latest beautiful people magazines that fill the shelves in the newspaper section of supermarkets and elsewhere. Here the focus is on image, celebrity and personality. It is not on the feeling connection to the Essence that you are and finding fulfillment through pouring that Essence into the world to bless yourself and others.

Being beautiful requires that your focus in life be reversed from the way in which Western culture programs you to feel and act in the world. It requires you to move from the mask of personality to the felt beauty of Presence. It requires you to know who you are beyond the intellect and information about yourself that you present to the world. It requires that you give up rags for riches. It requires that you take authority for awakening the Sleeping Beauty within you and to live happily ever after beyond the limitation that is having the time of your life.

Awakening to the Beauty of Being is not something you do although you have to commit to some form of daily practice that invites this kind of revelation. It is more a letting go and letting be. However, you need to be encouraged in feeling excited, feeling empowered so that you willingly let go into the knowing of your magnificence beyond the sense of the personal self. You have to let go of the story that you are other than beautiful and magnificent.

This story you are required to give up is the story of the personality or the mask that you present to the world in order to be seen as acceptable so that you might belong. In this story of the separate self, which is your personal story, there is always a sense of conditionality. You think, If they really knew who I was maybe they wouldn’t like me. Maybe no one would truly love me.

Being Beautiful is growing into the revelation of the emptiness that is forever full. This seems to be a scary invitation. It is to the ego which thinks that emptiness is a kind of nothingness into which it disappears. The ego is correct in its assumption. However, what disappears is your sense of limitation. You become open to the Boundlessness of Love. This is a paradoxical experience. You can only know true fulfillment through having the courage to be empty. There is no loss here although the ego feels that there is and feels threatened by the invitation. This experience is a process you journey into. It is the revelation of Being. It is a form of dying into life. As mystics from all traditions and no tradition often say, Die before you die so that you will know that you are the birthless and deathless One.

The people who know what it is to be beautiful are those who know the real story. These are those who know how to live the Impersonal Life and create a boundary for the boundless. These are the beautiful people who leave stories that point the way toward the knowing of beauty. These stories are wonder tales that invite you into the wondrous knowing of who you are. These are the stories of myth that override the intellect and speak to you in the language of symbol and meaning would that you be courageous enough to open your heart to receive their invitation. These stories are maps of the territory that take you out of the ordinary world of the separate sense of self into the extraordinary and boundless world of the true Self.

These mythological stories are treasure maps. However, they are written in a kind of foreign language. This is the language of the heart that the head does not understand and which thinks is nonsensical and confusing. It is the language of paradox, parable, riddle and mystery. It is the language of non-duality. It is the language of poetry and inspirational song writing. This is also a language of energy. It moves from the energy of encouragement to Essence. It is a language that invites, not belief, not knowledge but knowing. It takes you beyond belief.

In this book I will be sharing with you an Irish story entitled The Four Treasures of the Tuatha De Danaan. This is both a traditional and non-traditional story. Stories are not set in stone. They evolve according to the consciousness of the time in which they are told. I tell stories with one essential intention. This is to invite you to fall in love with who you are beyond the mask of personality so that you might know the beauty of living what the mystic writer Joseph Bremer called The Impersonal Life. Let me remind you again that there is no sense of loss here.

You are invited to expand into infinity (beyond form) and into eternity (beyond time). To invite this knowing of the boundless and the Timeless within you it is required that you surrender the idea of who you think you are to become the knowing of who you truly are. This is beyond intellectual knowledge. You are the one who is to know. You are the one who is to become the knower rather than the one who knows about. Knowledge is information. It can be useful but it is not knowing. It is not revelation. It is not insight. It is not insider seeing. Knowing about what it is to be beautiful is not knowing what it is to be beautiful. The question the reader is asked to explore is, Do I really want to be beautiful or do I simply want more information?

You can only find the treasure you are by becoming the treasure you are. This is a great paradox that you alone can allow yourself to know. No one can reveal it to you. They can only point the way. In the lines from the poem The Bright Field by R.S. Thomas you are told that you have to be willing to give everything to possess it. Rather you allow this beauty to possess you.

Awakening begins when a man realizes that he is going nowhere and does not know where to go.

~ Georges Gurdjieff

To become beautiful you are required to become nobody, a nowhere man or woman. See how challenging it is to be one who walks this world in beauty. You are required to willingly become as nothing so that the boundlessness of NO-THING can flow through you. This is true fulfillment. Nothing is lost. Please note that giving up everything does not mean that you are required to take a vow of poverty. It means you allow nothing to possess you other than the fullness of the Divine revelation which you then pour away into the world for the highest good of all.

This way of Being Beautiful is a different kind of story. It is the story of Love’s eternal becoming. You are a part of this story but never in reality ever apart from it. You have been told other stories. Essentially the old story you have been told is the story of the separate sense of self. You have eaten of a poisoned apple that has put you to sleep. You are asleep to your Essence. You are asleep to seeing and living from your true origin and your original face.

Stories are pointers to the path that has stages and steps. This path is both unique and common to all those who have walked it. These are the beautiful people who want you to be the knowing of beauty in form that is Love’s Message flowing through an open mind and heart. Will you walk with me now and invite the treasure you are to be known to you? Will you listen a while to the story of The Four Treasures of the Tuatha De Danaan.

While this is an Irish story it is also a universal story. It is your story. This story ends where you are invited to begin. You are invited to know the Beauty that in so many hearts has been driven underground. You are invited to courageously claim the treasure that Creation knows you to be. You are invited to know and radiate the beauty of Being and walk this world Being Beautiful and be so well informed by Love. Are you so willing?

This book is a coming together of many strands of my life in terms of family, community and ancestry. I want to say thank you to many people.

And the absolutely final, final blessing to all the poets, storytellers and heart song singers, especially Hafiz of Shiraz. Hafiz has one wish. It is my wish also. He says, I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.

Tony Cuckson

Corrogue Dowra

Co. Cavan Ireland

How to Use this Book

Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.

― Kahlil Gibran

The subtitle of Being Beautiful is Learning to Treasure the REAL YOU. This is a different kind of learning. To be more accurate it is really a process of unlearning. You do not need to learn how to be beautiful. You need to learn how to change your mind in order to reveal the essential you. You learn to see and live from what Zen Buddhists refer to as, Your original face.

To invite this revelation of beauty you are required to adopt certain attitudes. These are required in order that you learn what the German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher Eric Fromm called The Art of Loving. Once you begin this learning process, supported by correct attitudes, you will further be supported by practices. These practices ground you in being available to the revelation of beauty that you are.

Central to this book is the story entitled The Four Treasures of the Tuatha De Danaan. This story is recorded in order that you can listen to it at your leisure. It is available for download at:-

http://tonycuckson.com/four-treasures-tuatha-de-danaan/

Following the invitation to learning, and the cultivation of attitudes that invite the revelation of beauty, I will unfold the story of The Four Treasures of the Tuatha De Danaan and make this story relevant to your everyday living. The penultimate part of this book will share with you practices that invite the experience of the treasure that is the REAL YOU.  This is the invitation I call The Will to Love.

In this book Being Beautiful I make numerous references to the Bible and other religious texts. There will also be references to lines from poems and song lyrics that inspire me. There is no intention to promote any specific religious teaching. The intention is that you learn how to fall in love with the inner teacher who invites you into the Light and into the delight (meaning of the light) that is the REAL YOU.

The intention is to make this book a practical guide for living a life you love and loving the life you live. In the words of a lyric from Van Morrison, When to live the life you love you get the blessing from above. You are invited in the words of the poet W. B. Yeats to companion your greatness. You are invited to be kind to yourself and to honor the gift that only you are here to present to the world as the unique overflow of your Y.E.S. - your energy system.

The Preparation

Chapter 1

Beginning of Learning

Education is not the filling of a pail

But the lighting of a fire.

W. B. Yeats

Learning to be beautiful is a journey in time to a Timeless