Lesson 103
God, being Love, is also happiness.
Happiness is an attribute of love. It cannot be apart from it. Nor can it be experienced where love is not. Love has no limits, being everywhere. And therefore joy is everywhere as well. Yet can the mind deny that this is so, believing there are gaps in love where sin can enter, bringing pain instead of joy. This strange belief would limit happiness by redefining love as limited, and introducing opposition in what has no limit and no opposite.
Fear is associated then with love, and its results become the heritage of minds that think what they have made is real. These images, with no reality in truth, bear witness to the fear of God, forgetting being Love, He must be joy. This basic error we will try again to bring to truth today, and teach ourselves:
God, being Love, is also happiness. To fear Him is to be afraid of joy.
Begin your periods of practicing today with this association, which corrects the false belief that God is fear. It also emphasizes happiness belongs to you, because of what He is.
Allow this one correction to be placed within your mind each waking hour today. Then welcome all the happiness it brings as truth replaces fear, and joy becomes what you expect to take the place of pain. God, being Love, it will be given you. Bolster this expectation frequently throughout the day, and quiet all your fears with this assurance, kind and wholly true:
God, being Love, is also happiness. And it is happiness I seek today. I cannot fail, because I seek the truth.
Journal
“Happiness is an attribute of love. It cannot be apart from it. Nor can it be experienced where love is not.”
When we fear love, which we will do if we allow the idea of sin to enter our minds, we will fear God. We must remember that God, Love, and happiness are a package deal. The small effort I put into choosing happiness last night has already been helpful. My freezer quit working and I had a few minutes of panic as I checked out the prices on new refrigerators.
Then I thought about it and realized that I could be happy or panicked and either way, my freezer would still not be working. May as well be happy. I texted my family and told them what happened and my daughter gave me the phone number of a repairman. Before I went to bed, I raised the temperature of the refrigerator thinking that it felt like it wasn’t as cold as it should be. This morning, everything was working. Strange, but cool. Ha ha. Unintentional joke.
In every instance when I was tempted to be anything but happy, I did the same thing. I reminded myself of the foolishness of giving up my happiness just because something unexpected happened, or I had a memory of something that used to bother me. I chose to be happy instead. I know that decision is very powerful, but it was good to see that power at work. I am motivated to continue this practice, highly motivated.
This morning, I got dressed and looked in the mirror. Yep, still pretty chubby. No overnight miracle. ~smile~ I tried out my new attitude and said to myself that I love my body. I was surprised to realize that I meant it. I am still going to watch my diet and walk and expect to lose weight, but that doesn’t stop me from loving my body right now. Every little chubby bit of me seems to be quite happy this morning.
I fell asleep listening to The Untethered Soul last night and it played in my dreams. I woke up once thinking that this was just too hard, though I don’t remember what that was. I thought about turning the darn thing off but decided to keep listening. I dreamed of success. I guess I will have to listen while awake to figure out what I was struggling to do in my dream. Whatever work I did in my sleep seemed to have given me a boost.
Regina’s Tip
“Sin” is that which should not be. It is impossible to be happy with something if we judge that it should not be. This judgment, which is the fundamental judgment and the root of all judgments, is what we need to learn to let go of. There isn’t one circumstance that we can withhold from our love, our happiness, our forgiveness, because if there is any circumstance that we withhold from love, we have deemed that to be separate from love. Metaphysically, we withhold healing from anything that we withhold love from. We also withhold healing from ourselves in the same instant.
The decision not to love something, not to be happy with something, not to forgive something, is the cause of all suffering everywhere in the world.
My Thoughts
As Regina goes on to point out, Love is the only healing power. I have known this and even taught it myself. Right now, though, combining the Lessons with these tips, I see it much more clearly. I see how important it is that I stop rejecting and start loving. I see how it keeps me separate from remembering my place in God.
Past Entry
How odd it is that Jesus saw the need to give us a series of happiness lessons. We have to be convinced that we should be happy all the time. For most people, there is strong resistance to this idea. For some, happiness is unexpected and short lived. For others, happiness is common, but certainly not constant. And yet, Jesus relates happiness to God and therefore unlimited. It is available to us at all times in every circumstance, part of our very nature as children of God.
So why does this appear not to be true? We deliberately choose unhappiness. It is the only way it could occur. We do this with the thoughts we choose to believe. I can be very happy and suddenly I will remember something sad or something frightening, and I am not happy anymore. Does anyone else do this? Probably so, I would think. Ego thoughts come into the mind but we don’t have to infuse them with the power to affect us unless we want to. So unhappiness is a choice. Even when something is actually occurring, we have a choice as to how we want to perceive it.
Once I started noticing this phenomenon, I was amazed to realize how often I do this. Here is an example. I would spend an hour with a student talking about the Course, about how it affects our lives, how we use it and how we can use it more consistently. When we hung up, I would be genuinely happy. Then maybe I would have a thought that I should have said something differently, or that I should not have said something. Suddenly, I am not happy. I just chose to believe the one thing that was guaranteed to dampen my happiness in this situation.
Jesus says that God is Love and Love is happiness, so I think that if I avoid happiness, I must be avoiding Love, avoiding God. I would only do this if I were afraid of Him, so unhappiness is fear of God. I have often thought that I am no longer afraid of God, and yet, I keep seeing effects of my fear of God such as unhappiness. Being aware of this, I can change my mind. I can choose to allow Love to be what It is.
This doesn’t mean that I try to control my thoughts, chase away the dark ones or pretend to be happy when I am not. What I do instead is to notice this strange and destructive thinking and remind myself that it is not true and that God loves me and wants only my happiness. These happiness lessons are meant to help us form a new habit.
If your present habit is to follow the ego thoughts to unhappiness, here is a new habit to replace that one. Give those dark thoughts to the Holy Spirit and let the truth flow into your mind. “God, being Love, is also happiness. And it is happiness I seek today. I cannot fail, because I seek the truth.” It is what I am going to do, and I am not going to wait until I need the correction. I am going to remind myself all through the day that the images of unhappiness in my mind are an illusion. I am going to remind myself that the only truth is that God loves me dearly and wants me to be happy.
I had to laugh Myron when you said, “Does anyone else do this?” I assume that was rhetorical but I felt like putting my hand up in a classroom and saying, “Yes, I do that all the time and so does my friend and her friend and her friend too.” LOL The ego is so similar to everyone. I was trying to explain ego the other day and I said it’s kind of like a blanket of clouds hovering over the planet and we are all under that blanket that is full chock full of negative energy that we feel as unworthiness, self hatred and pain. I liked that analogy. My analogy tells me that cloud passes through over our mind if we let it, and if we practice mindfulness meditation as Myron does now, we can pop up above that cloud by listening for Holy Spirit instead. We in the Course are learning how to pop up above the dense cloud for short periods of time because that blanket is so thick, so dense and it weighs us down because we agree with it and we agree it’s there and it’s the dense fence that stand between us and God. That dense blanket of clouds/fog/pain is the barrier that creates the separation between us and God. That dense blanket is made up of beliefs such as we are not Sons and Daughters of God. So we are on the right track I think to thinning out the denseness of the cloud by practicing the course and in the quantum field others are benefitting from our persistence and Love. We may not be perfect at it yet but we are the pioneers at removing the blanket so others coming up behind us will have an easier time of it until one of them is the exact spark needed to remove it. and that’s my opinion today. 🙂 When we can consistently pop up and see above the blanket we feel God’s Love and experience that as real happiness as the lesson says today. We just need a new belief system to thin out the dense bank of clouds to see the Sun. Thank you Holy Spirit. Thank you Myron for your honesty and generosity in sharing daily with us so we can help thin out that dense blank of clouds that blocks the Light of God.
I AM Removing that blanket of clouds now . The sun is shining & u feel nothing but happiness.