Lesson 117

Lesson 117

(103) God, being Love, is also happiness.
Let me remember love is happiness, and nothing else 
brings joy. And so I choose to entertain no substitutes 
for love.

(104) I seek but what belongs to me in truth.
Love is my heritage and with it joy. These are the 
gifts my Father gave to me. I would accept all that is 
mine in truth.
On the hour:

God, being Love, is also happiness.
On the half hour:
I seek but what belongs to me in truth.

 

Journal

There is only love as there is only God. Everything else is an illusion. Knowing What Is brings joy, knowing what is not real brings temporary pleasure at best and suffering is a certainty. I have one foot in humanity, but that is not my reality. I have the strength of God in me because that is my reality. I can choose to live as if I am only human, or I can choose to live as close to my true nature as is possible.

I choose love in every moment and I am choosing happiness and I am moving closer to Who I Am. In seeking joy, I am seeking my own true nature. In this practice of deciding to be happy and deciding to love everything and to be love in every way possible, I am merely being my Self.

The self I thought I was could not make a decision for happiness because she thought that her feelings were out of her control. Because she believed this, she would not even try. But I have transcended that self at least enough to do this one thing, to decide for happiness regardless of circumstances.

I still have to choose and then choose again at times, but mostly, it only requires that one thought, I decide. Not only is my life better, but I am aware of myself in a different way now. I am not learning to control anything or to become something else, I am simply accepting what was mine and what I always have been.

Regina’s Tips

Regina shared an article called “How I Discovered Meditative Self-Inquiry” by Adyashanti

In this article he explains the steps he takes in contemplation. He begins with a question. He writes only what he knows then he stops and waits for more to come. He never writes a word he does not absolutely know to be true.  He starts out writing as if he were teaching and he would write until he had exhausted what he knew from his own experience on the subject.

He said: Sometimes I would sit right at that place for many minutes, sometimes half an hour, sometimes two hours … but I would not write the next word until I knew that it was true and it was accurate. What I found was that the only way to move was to hold still, right there at the edge of my knowledge, and feel into my mind and my body at that threshold. Not to think about the question. Not to go into a lot of philosophizing in mind. But literally to kinesthetically hold at that boundary between what I knew and what was beyond what I knew. And what I found was that by holding at that boundary … by feeling it, by sensing it, by knowing that I wanted to move beyond it … that eventually the next word or sentence would come. When it did, I would write it down. Sometimes I would write no more than half a sentence before I would know, right in the middle, that I had hit the boundary again. I would stop again and I would wait. I’d hold at the boundary.

He went on like this until he had his answer.

My Thoughts

This feels very familiar to me. This is similar to what I usually do. I begin by writing what I know and I try to stick to my experience of it because how do I know what is beyond my experience? If I don’t feel complete, I ask for clarity. My asking is directed at the Holy Spirit, or to say it differently, to my Higher Self.

I know that all understanding is available to us, but it is obscured if we are trying to use our thinking mind to access it. I think the difference between what I do and Adyashanti is that he is probably a lot more careful when he questions himself. I am looser about it, doing my best to write from within rather than to write from my thinking mind, but I am not sure I always succeed.

Past Entry

In the past, and occasionally even now, I become angry with someone or something they said, and I have a hard time letting it go. It ‘s hard to see how they could be right or how they could not be guilty, and I feel righteous indignation. I read something Hugh Prather wrote in one of his books, and I cannot quote it, but basically what he was saying is this: That little adrenaline rush you get from being right, enjoy that because that is all you get from it.

For a moment I can mistake the rush for happiness, but it quickly dies away unless I keep feeding it with manufactured anger. And when it does die away, I am left with unease, depression, anxiety. I know I made a mistake although I may not be willing to see what I did. The result is that I am miserable because I was looking for happiness where it cannot be found. I can only find happiness in love, not in being right or feeling less guilty than someone else.

Enjoying a good book, or being excited about being part of a group, having fun on an outing, the novelty of visiting other countries, none of these things are the perfect happiness that Jesus is talking about here. Perfect happiness, the happiness that is our inheritance, does not come and go. It does not end with the last page of the book or the return home from a trip. What we experience as happiness here is more like the absence of misery. I’m grateful for the respite and take advantage of them and enjoy them, but I can have so much more.

Like everyone else, when I became a Course student, I was confused about love. I didn’t know what it was. I most often confused love with neediness. I felt needy and looked for something that would fill that endless yearning. I fought for love and struggled with it, and all the time it was not love at all. Earlier in my studies, Spirit sent me a message about this.

Holy Spirit: Myron, the love you so desperately seek is within easy reach. It is in your mind. Remember there is only one problem and one solution, and that solution is in your mind. Love is that solution. You can not find love; you can only block it. In fact, you expend vast amounts of energy blocking love from your awareness. Your desire for love and only love will guarantee your success because love only waits for your assent. Love does not force itself or war with your resistance. It waits quietly and patiently for you to ask.

Me: It doesn’t feel like it is easy. Sometimes it seems like there is some magic key that I have to find or earn before I can experience the love of God. Then it feels like I am fighting myself and I am going to lose. This sounds insane even to the ego, which is itself insane. But that is how I experience it at times. I am willing to see this differently. I want to see it differently. The more I long for what I don’t seem to have, the further away I seem to be from it.

Holy Spirit: That is right, Myron. Love is not something to be fought for. Experiencing love is not a struggle. The experience of being in any way separate from love is your resistance to the love of God. Put down your weapons and your shields and love will simply flow into and through you in gentle never ending waves, and with no effort on your part. Love is not something to be sought for or earned; it is not something you do, and it is not something you have lost. Love is what you are.

I have finally realized at least what love is not. I have become willing to stop using people to get what I used to think of as love. I have even begun to think of God as Love, and the Source of all love. As a concept, I see that, with God as my Creator, I must be love, too. I am willing to know myself as love, and so I open to that experience. I seem to be in the process of letting go of the beliefs that block the love that I am and so is always available to me.

I see that if I am love, and I must be love if God is Love, the love must be mine, and it must be unending. Jesus says that love and happiness are the same things. I think about holding my child for the first time, and I come as close as I ever have to love as joy. So my mind opens to this truth, and I am willing to know it, not just as a concept that I understand, but as a felt experience, and eventually as my reality.

For now, I will meet each unloving thought with the truth, love is happiness, and it is mine because God gave it to me. I am like an injured person coming out of a profound amnesiac state. I am being told some very fundamental truths about the nature of my Self, and I must remind myself often of these truths until my memory fully returns.

God is Love.
Love is happiness.
I want to be happy, so I want God.
I can have God, and therefore I can be happy.

These are mine simply because they are in me, are me. Being what I am in truth, I am not separated from God, and so I cannot be separated from Love.

I am recovering from the traumatic experience of separation that brought on the amnesia, and I am beginning to accept the truth in my mind. My two-fold approach is working. I release the blocks to this truth, the anger, fear, and guilt, and secondly, I sit without resistance, resting in God. I allow Love to be Itself and I allow my self to experience It. Here I am God. Here I am.