New Seasons of Happiness: The Ultimate Dimension of Life

By John Oxley

When you have finished reading this book

You will be awakened to a way of thinking most westerners never knew existed.

You will learn how to stop trying to get life's approval before you deserve happiness and success.

You will discover new meanings and a way to decipher the secrets of religio

• Language: English
• Publisher: LitPrime Solutions
• Release date: Mar 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9798887031705

John Oxley

John Oxley graduated with top honors from Temple University, where he studied religion, philosophy, and Zen. After teaching world religions for fifteen years, John began a quest to discern the meaning of faith for moderns. He is a featured author in Drama as a Meaning Maker and holds a Master's Degree in the Psychology of Learning. John's Doctoral work is in Creativity Studies.

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© 2023 John Oxley. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by LitPrime Solutions 03/13/2023

ISBN: 979-8-88703-168-2(sc)

ISBN: 979-8-88703-169-9(hc)

ISBN: 979-8-88703-170-5(e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023903167

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Contents

Preface

Preparing to Change

Walking Together

Being on Your Own Without Fear

Absolute Freedom to Learn

Becoming a Godly Citizen

Leaving the Old Behind

Knowing all the Players

To Be a Spiritual Rock

The Godly Family

Advanced Stations

From a Place of No Place

Becoming Invisible to Oneself

This book is dedicated to my wife Margie,

my children, my teachers, and my Lord Jesus Christ.

Preface

Readers can accept these ideas realizing that each person who reads this is different. Your critical wit and wisdom will depend on your courage to accept new ideas of optimism and joy. Happiness is freedom and synonymous of the love we have inside. Are we a generation finally ready to grow up, finally ready to love? Or are we millions of vain, greedy people who want to believe they’re in charge until they die? This book develops ideas that lead to realization and actualization of love. And the book reveals ways to combat fear, loneliness, and defeat. Although I believe that this book is Christian thought I employ techniques from other philosophical traditions especially Asian philosophy. Christians must learn a method to keep Christ in our moment to moment life experiences. Centuries have passed where people have sought to know Christ’s love outside of life and death; always apart from their daily encounters. This has not worked to enlighten us how to love in the midst of suffering, or how to find joy when life presents to us despair. Many Christians are still over eating, over drinking, getting divorced, and living with no personal thought of love daily. They do not realize that their condition is not their fault. Although Jesus is our link to all knowledge of God and He is love we do not actualize Jesus. We enter into a union with Him when we are love. God called Moses. But it is only through Jesus that we know God.

And as He passed by, He saw Levi, the son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax office, and said to him, ‘Follow me’ and he rose and followed Him.

Mark 2:14

The mind can be self-directed to interpret language, people, and events so that we can realize new meanings each moment, new realizations that are beyond logic. This process enables us to emerge as a final pure self or being that I call Godly instead of human. The experience often occurs when we hear a beautiful voice or feel blessed by God when we see awesome vistas in nature and hear the call of one who loves us. And while I reach for the joy of love, the joy is enhanced when God is with me. God is not restricted to knowing us the way we know others and ourselves with a past, present, and future. Rather, He knows the future before it occurs. I know God through His Resurrected Son Jesus. I have come to give my life to Him. This book gives examples that have brought me to Him in the hopes that it will bring you to a new season of joy. The life of Christ is a story that recalls new ideas in a manner that transcends normal thinking and logic. One of the highest forms of human thought is to be sympathetic to another. Every time we create through a tapestry of accusations, or critical comments a new persona for another person we are putting on them a crown of thorns.

Chapter 1

Preparing to Change

While I quietly worshipped God I realized that every vice is an addiction that creates an ongoing preoccupation to pile up thoughts on the future. How will I eat, play, drink? What will my day be like next week? Undoubtedly, by asking ourselves these questions we become the manufacturers of our own stress. Thinking about things like money, debt, cars, friends and lovers inevitably place our thoughts stressfully into the future.

As a result, I seek out and admire any experience wherein I become free to think one hundred percent on the here and now. Because behind each time we feel free events have their own special language. Imagine having a friendship, with an actor or celebrity, so intense it wipes out the ongoing thinking of the future and its worries. It excites me to sing a hymn in church with all my attention giving the song itself up to God, or being intimate (meaning spending one hundred percent of thought) with Jesus, or laughing. Just for now, imagine the experience of total relaxation in a moment of ecstasy that occurs in the crack of a home run, or hitting a golf chip from ninety yards out—the air is cool and the sun is orange and it is so quiet and still as you see the ball drop on the green, or the flash of skiing in a stealth curve for the first time. Imagine not only the wonderful clear ocean with its clean smell as you fly along in a beautiful sailboat, but the excitement you feel when your hot body plunges in the cool fresh water. You wait for the boat to come to that slow almost stopped, soft glide before you jump in. Imagine, as I especially can, that special moment when a man and a wife are in perfect harmony. Imagine being a young woman with no need for anyone to approve your personhood.

Then Jesus said to them, ‘Come after me, and I will make you become fishers of men.

Mark 1:17

Powerful, self-actualized writers show us how to divert one’s mind from stress. But the fun and joy one experiences from stress diversions is not the real happiness—it is not the true, lasting happiness. True happiness can only be experienced by the gift of Jesus Christ, of His love and death. Jesus is the Lord over all true love and being.

Therefore, the good thinking would be to give your life to Christ so that thoughts on the future become His to own. Like thinking about a new season with wonder, humility and calm as you smell and feel the onslaught of autumn pushing summer back into its closet. You look about with a renewed alertness and sense of being re-centered. The truth is quiet, but rarely simple. It just seems to me that trying to control and construct in our minds how we want the next three weeks to be is both deluded thinking and the cause of our mental stress. Stress causes fatigue that leads to lack of exercise and a party mentality that says, life is short and I can’t get it my way so let’s overeat, smoke up and drink to be merry. So for that hour we are merry and have silenced the deluded thinking about the future or the past—until tomorrow.

Unless you are unconscious, dead or asleep, you are thinking, perceiving, taking it all in. But to be happily thinking (Jesus says to be like a child) is to see and feel events and experiences while accepting Jesus’ right to be our savior. The exciting news is that each person works hard and has the absolute right to sell a watch or to enjoy what they have earned—is it not your right? Why, then, do we not give Jesus His right to be our savior? He earned it by suffering and dying by what historians still say is one of the most horrid forms of execution—to be crucified by barbarians when you are absolutely pure, loving, and the one who will rise from the dead. Should I callously ignore Him and live my life denying Him what he has earned? As I move deeper and deeper into a search for happiness I found that He wanted to save me! He wants me to know that. He negotiated with God before I was born that I would be one He wanted as His son, brother, friend, with a love so Gentle that when I intimately give over my thinking to Him in every moment I begin to perceive the world like a child. Every person, in effect, becomes my enemy except those who also let Jesus into their daily lives. Because of their own ignorance, they are consumed with worry and fear, and they express themselves with bad language that blocks out the gentle love of Jesus for them and me. People ignoring love commit violent crimes of murder, rape or child abuse. worse yet, they abuse by taking advantage of a person in the child mind of Jesus’ love. Yet I now understand whom Jesus meant when He said, Love thine enemies. It takes complete faith to experience the rebirth of a person who says Jesus, you earned the right to be my savior, you own every moment of every person, every flower and the world. You have said, To you I am risen. I commit to you all my daily life experience. You take all the concern I had as I ignored you; all my worries—I will no longer lament over the next three weeks. I leave it up to you—I ask that you just take hold of my arm and let me be with you. I trust you with all and when deluded thoughts enter my mind I give them over. Long before you decide to give up, you must remind yourself over and over every day to submit to letting Jesus shepherd your moment to moment life! The result is that you begin to see the world like a child again, where everything is living and in a state of Love. This knowledge patiently embraces rather than instructs. It reconciles us to the necessary contradictions of worldly life by making the contradictions acceptable because we have become a sacrifice to Jesus. It is thought without agenda or worry, protected and free because there is no one left to worry. Ultimately my identity is called into question. I mentally give myself over to Christ. I love how a child looks innocently right into your eyes when you look at them face to face. Like the joy of a flower or perfume that stays with you, in silence yet so vivid. When love is in our mind people see something in our eyes that takes away all of their anxiety. The deluded thoughts plaguing them seem to melt away as they sense Jesus in us, and that our world view is pure and unstained, and owned by Christ. People that I meet in business (and I never got this response before) often begin to tell me what is hurting them before I even get to know them. But beware of the most callous people, who shut out love and respond to it with hate for what you have inside. These are codifiers, stratifiers, who, like spoiled children, protect themselves by acting friendly to anyone who can help them get ahead. They will befriend you, not for cause, or love, or your welfare, but for their own self-confirmation and gain. It has become normal to think that way. Because, you see, everywhere we go everyone is self-full and no one is self-less. But when we strive to create love relationships that let others in to love us our mind begins to emerge as true with good intentions each moment. So Jesus teaches us to call God Father, and to pray: Our Father who are in Heaven, hollowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, now and forever, Amen. Why that prayer? Contrary to Christian mass media’s insistence that we never question, why those words? Because think about it, when you say them they come together in such a way that even if the words are said in hope or in despair, your mind is completely given over to God. For that brief time, a person with any faith is at peace. The prayer is a way for you to open your heart so God can again call you to Himself. The words don’t ask for relief from a problem like Dear God, please take away my problem, because you and your problem are deluded thoughts to which you have attached yourself and manufactured. In reality, a friend dying, a terminal diagnosis, an unwanted child or the plights of loved ones are beyond our understanding. Their value would no longer be determined by our attachment to good outcomes. We must give them over to God. The logic of God absolutely transcends, and is therefore quietly absent, from what we can know. One time I went out in the backyard with tears in my eyes and I looked up to the clouds and I said to God, Just show me; show me! Just one time, it’s me, not someone callous. In all my love, it’s me, no one else is around, just show me somehow you are really real as I know in my heart and faith you are. Of course, nothing happened. But after giving each and every moment over to Jesus, I remembered that incident and I realized that through love and prayer I can know the ecstasy of God’s love. By having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and His gift of sustenance, living is not suffering. Children realize that they do not have the right play shoes or game clothes when they encounter others who have them. Finding insight into The Kingdom of God is like being lost in the