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.

My Review

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.

This was not always so.

In the past, I would become angry with someone or something they said, and I would 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 felt 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.

A Message

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 cannot find love but you can 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 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.