Emma Cox
I have always longed for happiness since I was a child. How can I be happy? Why am I not happy being alone? I’ve always compared myself to others and it seemed that everyone else is happy, but only I lived unhappily. One of my acquaintances told me about this book, Stop Living in This Land… by Woo Myung. I bought this book online and started reading it.
First off, I like the title of this book. The fact that the word happiness is in the title of the book aroused my interest. As I started reading it, I started to get answers to the questions that I had about what happiness is and where happiness is. The happiness – the happy world that I was looking for – is not somewhere out of the world. And happiness doesn’t come from material possessions, honor or the love that I seek out. Happiness can be felt when I empty my mind and find it within. In this book, teacher Woo Myung is able to answer all of these questions.
In my life, I thought that the words “happiness” and myself were far apart, and I kept comparing myself with others and thought I was only one who was unhappy, but the thought itself was wrong. Happiness is when I don’t have any mind about happiness, and as the Bible says, God is within me and heaven is within me, there is fortune when my mind is poor (or empty). I wasn’t happy because of my inferiority and because I constantly compared myself to others. It wasn’t because I didn’t have the same things as others.
Reading this book, I remembered studying theology in college. At that time, my professor showed us the Tora (original Hebrew Bible) and taught us the dictionary meaning of heaven. While reading this book it reminded me of what my professor taught me: even in the Hebrew dictionary, the definition of heaven is not a place but a state of one’s heart, and that when I have God in me, it is living in heaven and eternal happiness.
I was ashamed of myself, 20 years after I graduated from college, I totally forgot the theological knowledge that I’d learned. I was thinking that I was always unhappy, envious of others’ success, pessimistic about my own situation and chasing happiness. This book reminded me of that for the first time. I felt like going back to the times when I was young when I studied the Bible and hoped to fine Truth.
Reading this book, I experienced the message as if my mind turned to the mind of the truth. The contents of this book are stories about the truth and we often say that we read the Bible or scriptures, but each one of us has his own way of interpreting the message and no one seems to correctly interpret the Bible. Woo Myung really interprets the Bible’s meaning most accurately among the people with whom I’ve studied.
As I read this book, I spit out things like, “This book is wonderful, it’s amazing” constantly. Even now, after I’ve already finished reading this book, I still make time to read it over for about 10 minutes everyday. Whenever I read this book, I am happy and turn to the right mind about the truth without noticing it. It is a really interesting book.
Although this book is neither a Christian book nor a Buddhist book, I want to recommend this book to all religious people, those who really want to know the True meaning of the Bible. In this book, teacher Woo Myung gives clear answers to the questions we usually want to know such as where the world of happiness is, where God is, what is the definition of happiness and so on. It’s amazing, and you’re going to agree entirely with my opinion when you read this book. It’s a really amazing book, the content is quite interesting and I highly recommend it to anyone reading this review.
