Mark Kumara - Author of The Joy of Being

THE JOY OF BEING
This is a book "For those who dare to believe that God is within themselves, as themselves."
It is a new and timely message of hope for the world.

Mark Kumara is a spiritual teacher who lives in Denmark, on the south coast of Western
Australia.

You can order THE JOY OF BEING from www.trafford.com
(click on the bookstore tab in the top right hand corner and type in the author’s name, or title
of the book. Have your credit card ready. You will, in most cases, receive the book within two
weeks)

This is a very comprehensive easy to read book of practical down-to-earth spiritual teaching
of ten chapters and 285 pages, written with humour and compassion by an undoubted
spiritual master. It covers such subjects as the Purpose of your life on earth, Relationships,
Marriage and Children, Evil and Suffering, Sex, Religions and Science, Healing and
Nourishment, Government, Death, Rebirth and Purpose, and Meditation.

Questions to Mark Kumara can be sent to markumara@gmail.com

Joy is the outer expression of peace,
Peace is the inner origin of Joy,
Love is everything in between. (MARK KUMARA)

(Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God. Teilhard de Chardin).

Below are some excerpts taken from Mark Kumara's book THE JOY OF BEING, a book of
inspiration, of healing and teaching.

Excerpts

The time of the great awakening is upon the world and you who have sensed it are becoming
very aware that there is no possibility of you being separate either from the challenge or from
the fruits of this awakening.

At every age a new vision is given to humanity that follows on from
all that was best in the age gone by.

This new vision reveals a new quality of divinity for aspiring humanity
to embody in the age that follows.

Love was the quality of divinity introduced to the world by Jesus. The quality of divinity for this
coming age is to be JOY!

This new quality is now being revealed by those who are bringing in the new vision. They can
only reveal it to the extent that they themselves can embody it within themselves and express
it through their own natural living - and being.

You are the joy of the world. We are the joy of the world. Together we are the joy of the
Universe.

God is joy. The Oneness is joy. We are it!

Joy is a quality associated with the vibrancy of being alive and knowing you are part of a greater
unfolding purpose. Joy is the celebration of life for no other reason than for the sheer joy of
being alive and revelling in it.

Joy is the new quality of divinity to be embodied.

Like love, joy has always been here, but there has been little recognition of its power or its
beauty or its rightness in the divine scheme of things. Solemnity has more often been the
accepted norm in the world's religions.

Have the courage to be free and create your own joyful reality!

The kingdom of heaven is in the present moment. It is an inner reality with an outer
significance.

The earth is a part of heaven, not apart from heaven. You are just not seeing it yet. The earth is
a part of the Oneness and therefore has to be heaven for there is nothing other than the
Oneness.

Joy, love and peace exist as the very nature of the Oneness and humanity has a very real
purpose to wake up and find this out.

Joy has as its value the one sure indication that we are living in wholeness. If you are not feeling
joy in your life you are not living from your essence, which is the experience of being directly
connected to spirit. Instead you are living out of the conditioned ego where joy remains an
illogical dream and happiness is, at best, temporary and elusive.

In essence there is no difference between a spark of the fire and the fire itself. Only in size and
power is there a difference. So it is with you in the Oneness. All is of the same quality and the
one essence. You and I together with all the creatures in the universe, together with all that is
non-sentient, have this essence in common.

It is called LIFE. Its spirit is JOY. It is the joy in all being.

You cannot work at being joyful. You cannot plan joy in advance. Joy is not something you can
switch on and off when it suits you. Joy arises when there is surrender to what is there. It arises
out of nowhere that you can pin point. It is a child of spontaneity and arises, not from trying nor
from discipline, but from relaxing and surrendering.

About the Book

This is a rare, beautiful, book of profound spiritual guidance. It has a new and timely message of
hope for the world. Author, Mark Kumara, who lives in Western Australia and runs a meditation
centre, credits the book to Sanat Kumara, his higher self, who, he says, made himself known to
him in a vision, informing him he was a member of the Earth Council, and telling him to call
himself Kumara. Compassion, a sense of humour, and a healthy dose of common sense, shines
through this book. It addresses everything you might like to know about life on earth, its
meaning, its purpose, who you really are - and where you are going. Sanat Kumara unravels the
true meaning of love, and relationships, piercing not a few misconceptions along the way that
may startle you.
It has the rare distinction of being written in a way that Westerners can follow. The insights are
inspirational and there are simple exercises given to help you realise your own light within
yourself.
It unveils the truth behind all religions, revealing the mystery of God, in a clear and succinct
manner, without sentimentality and without cant. Sanat Kumara clearly states that death is a
total illusion and that joy is the reality of existence. His words pierce the fog surrounding the
longing of humanity for something greater that itself and the part religions have played. He gets
to grips with the paradox of the God within and the God without, with the Christian Trinity, and
new age teachers.
This is no mean achievement, giving this book an appeal to new age seekers as well as members
of established churches because it has much in it for both. Its message is universal. It pushes
back boundaries and powerfully enjoins the reader to examine his or her beliefs, whilst, at the
same time, honouring the fundamental truth of a loving universe.
Above all, this is a book for those who might dare to believe the God is within themselves, as
themselves. It is a book with a powerful message: reading it, you might find yourself tingling all
over. It has the ring of truth about it.

About the Author

Mark Kumara, born Mark Oliver in the south of England, lives in Western Australia where he
runs a meditation centre. He credits his book The Joy of Being to his higher self, Sanat Kumara,
who, he says, made himself known to him in a vision, informing him he was a member of the
Earth Council and telling him to call himself Kumara.

More Excerpts

Indeed, I say to you, your only purpose in being here on earth in physical bodies is to transform
these bodies into bodies of light. You may relax your anxieties concerning all other works. Is this
not a relief!
To all of you, who, at the dawning of another age, find yourselves embattled by a thousand
things to do, is this not an immense relief?

My beloveds, to help others discover their own joy within them is the best way to reveal your
own. This way, I tell you, is the swiftest and least painful way of reaching your goal, and, in the
meantime, is of great service to myself which is yourself in all our manifested forms.
I am a great economist of energy. I use it not wastefully or to deliberately prolong for you the
reaching of your goal. It is never in my consideration deliberately to make your path hard for
you or to put tests your way. On the contrary, I constantly am smoothing your path for you for
it is the nature of the human ego ever to seek difficulties where none exist but for it.
When you serve the life in others and set it free, you are freeing yourself. And, when you free
yourself, to that extent the other becomes free, also. Indeed, we are One.

Joy is a feeling of aliveness and happiness. It is a most misunderstood feeling because human
beings feel so guilty about feeling happy. There is an ingrained suspicion that happiness comes,
inevitably, at the expense somewhere down the line, of a balancing bout of misery.
Yet, happiness, truly, is joy when it is not tied to the vacillating mood swings of cause and effect,
when it is not, in other words, a result of ego reaction.

Little can be said of joy; so again I am trying to do the impossible; for joy is the very nature of
God and who can say anything of God? A god to be read about in a book, to be preached about,
to be theorised about, to be sacrificed to, to be prayed to, to be worshipped, is a god at arm's
length: a very poor sort of god to have about! But a god to feel, to love, to have as friend, to
experience within yourself as yourself: now, that's a god!

With this guidance from his Higher Self, known as Sanat Kumara, Mark has managed to
answer the eternal questions: How can we awaken joy, love, and spontaneity, and still be at
peace with ourselves and each other?

How, how can we, together, realize what we are and delight in what we are? How can we awaken
to joy and love and spontaneity, and be at peace with ourselves and each other? There are
seemingly so many problems; so many clouds obscure us from ourselves. Truly it was said; the
Christ shall come in the clouds. Our own clouds, being emotional and mental contamination,
obscure our Christ nature.

What are these clouds? These clouds are our very own thoughts, opin ions, ideas, justifications,
expectations, projections, rationalizations, concepts and philosophies, in other words all that is
unreal around us which suppresses – or, rather, hides the sun within us which is our Christ, this
Christ being none other than our higher self. Every one of us has our own Christ or Buddha or
Allah or Krishna, or Kumara, waiting there within us. It is of supreme indifference what race or
religion you belong to, or whether you are in perfect physical form, or crippled, in good health or
poor, or even mentally incapacitated. No matter, your whole self is there. It awaits your
realization.

If you were as skilful at dispersing these clouds as you are at hiding behind them, this would
soon be a shining planet filled with enlightened minds. The masses would soon have, as their
only desire, the desire to be self realized as well. You fail to recognize who you are. And by this I
don't mean in terms of your human family, or in terms of your role in society, or in any spiritual
role, or in any role you may fancy you are to have in the new age; I am talking here about your
real spirit self (your higher self, your whole self). Yes, on occasion, it has been somewhat
protective. You have felt secure at times, even happy. But, it has been at cost; at the cost of joy.
For you have not known your being. And, to know the joy of your being is to know your
birthright. It is to know who you are. I assure you this time of cloudy forgetfulness is now
coming to an end. It has served its purpose.

Now, it is time for the butterfly to emerge and try its wings. Scary? Well, perhaps a little. Yes, it
takes courage. There will be fear there. But that is what you have your will for: to confront the
fear and see it fall away like the mist that it is. The choice is really simple: do you want
permanent happiness in your life or a dreary on-going state of pseudo happiness underpinned
by chronic stress? Stress slips its knife into you so fast, does it not, upon the movement of the
mind and the uncomfortable reaction of the emotional body? The question is: do you relate to
the world, to your friends, to your partner at home, at work, from your conditioned ego or from
your essence? I can hear so many of you saying: "Oh, that's not practical!" You are not being
asked to be practical. You are being asked to be permanently happy.

Is this not really being practical? You will be so happy, that your love and healing energy will
flow out all around you, with you actually having to do very little about it except to remain in the
awareness of your joy and your ‘I AM’ presence, and be present. You will have to do very little
to heal the dreadful afflictions of the world, for around you they will begin to heal themselves. In
the last analysis, is not everyone responsible for healing themselves anyway - or, rather,
regaining the awareness that they are already whole? Be a lover to your self. Be a joy to your
self. Be such a joy, that it is, indeed, a joy for you and your whole self to be together. And be this
uncompromisingly.

This is the simple key to the great gate of universal freedom. There is no other gate, though
many are the twisting paths that humans tread to attempt to reach it. Be a friend to your self.
Be your very best friend to your self. In these pages I am communicating to you, not as a
teacher to a disciple but as a friend to a friend. I am your friend who needs not your love but
who would enjoy your friendship. I would like you to give yourself permission to celebrate with
me the joy of being alive in a loving, joyful, universe on a stunningly beautiful planet. This earth.
When, within you, joy is happening – when you are feeling joy – love is there automatically. I
have to tell you that love – for which you all crave so much – is the automatic result of living in
joy. When joy is your all, love is both known and experienced to be your all, also. This is a
realized fact. Joy is forever prior. It is a causal frequency.

This is a new teaching to take you into a new age. It is the key to the future of this planet. Joy
first, then love. Not the other way round: because in the attempt to love first, in the trying to
love, there is effort, yet joy is effortless. This does not diminish love. Jesus was absolutely
correct. The Oneness (God) is love and love is all. But joy is also the Oneness, and joy is also all.
In fact, this knowledge elevates love to its rightful and truly glorious frequency.

When joy is put first there is aliveness, there is energy and there is, in that very moment, no
desire other than the grand feeling that you are at one with a creator and a glorious plan of
thrilling life. Life is there in its essence, independent of the need to love, independent of the need
to feel secure, or of the need to hide fears, or of the need to explore guilty feelings of not being
loving enough. Or, of the need to do your duty as ordained by some temporal authority. Love is
freed of all these distortions. Love becomes crowned on the wings of joy. Other ideas of love,
such as dutiful love, are not love, merely ideas. They are a shabby imitation and lead not to
freedom and peace.

I understand how well meaning these ideas are and the goodwill inherent behind them, but it is
time to take a quantum leap into freedom and not be afraid. Look through the dark clouds of
your feelings and look at the heavy thoughts you have of your responsibility for others which tie
you to the murky clouds of guilt and resentment; and find out what ideas you-are-holding on to
that stop-you-from living in joy.

I am uncompromising. I ask for the best in you. Would you have it any other way? Would you
prefer it if I asked you to hedge your bets, keep a foot in both camps, and live a life of mediocre
satisfaction pitted with frustration? I know who you are. I see the best in you. It is only a matter
of time. The crown you shall wear is indeed one of love, lifted up by your very own personal
discovery that life is joy.

This is an extract from his widely acclaimed book: The Joy of Being. Enjoy!

You can order THE JOY OF BEING from www.trafford.com
(click on the bookstore tab in the top right hand corner, then type in the author’s name, or title
of the book)