To gain the most from A Course in Miracles Lesson Insights, we recommend
that you read the corresponding lesson in the Workbook of the Second or
Third Edition of A Course in Miracles published by the Foundation for Inner Peace.
“God, being Love, is also happiness.”
My goal is to accept the truth. This means that my goal is to accept God. My goal is to accept happiness. My goal is to accept joy. When I think of it that way, the more I accept the truth, the happier I will be, the more joy I will feel in my heart.
The Course tells me that joy is everywhere. Happiness is everywhere, which means God is everywhere. I certainly have more work to do because I do not always feel God’s joy. This means that I am denying that God is everywhere. If I am not joyful, it is not because of something outside me, but my decision to deny God is the true cause.
So I use today as another day of thought reversal. I have been denying that joy is everywhere and now today I practice accepting God’s joy where it is — everywhere. This involves lifting the veil of denial, seeing past belief in sin and being willing to see the Christ beyond the body with everyone I meet or even think of today.
This is an ongoing practice. I see what I decide to see. I see through the ego’s eyes or I see through Holy Spirit’s eyes. This is my choice today. God, Love, joy, peace is everywhere. Am I willing to see it today? Or am I going to deny that it is there? Today is another day of practice in allowing myself to remember the truth that God indeed is everywhere. Am I willing to be happy today? It is my decision.
It’s interesting that happiness seems so tenuous. It seems that we can’t trust happiness to last. A common saying is, “It’s too good to last” or variations of that idea. When things are going badly we don’t hear people say, “it’s too bad to last.” It seems that we have been conditioned to believe that unhappiness is our normal state. We may get fleeting moments of happiness, but they cannot be trusted to last. In fact we are almost certain they won’t. What a sorry world we have made for ourselves.
This lesson is showing us that the world of unhappiness is a lie, an illusion that cannot be true because God, Who is Love, and everywhere, is also happiness. This lesson is a wonderful blessing. I am grateful to learn that I have been wrong in believing that the world must be an unhappy place, with pain and sorrow, devastation and death. Today I am willing to loosen my grip on that belief. I am willing to take each unhappy thought, each disappointment, each thought of impatience, each fear and each thought of guilt to the Holy Spirit. I am willing to let His Light show me that there is no cause for anything but happiness because the only real Cause is Love.
I do not need to walk through life expecting something to go wrong, expecting happiness to be temporary or limited in any way. The truth is I was created happy by Happiness. Experiencing anything less than perfect happiness means I am denying my Self and my Creator. One look at the many excuses I use for experiencing less than perfect happiness tells me that I have been denying my Self most of the time.
I am willing to take another step today towards letting go of that denial. I am willing to accept that God is Love and nothing else, and therefore He is happiness. I am willing to accept that I share His happiness. Thank you Jesus for bringing this happy message.
I was thinking that since God is Joy and God is everywhere, then it should be easy to feel joy. It should be unavoidable! So why am I not experiencing joy? It is not possible that God is failing to be Himself so it must be that I am blocking joy somehow. (I am not even going to get into why I am doing it.)
I imagined myself building a wall all around me with sandbags. This wall seems very solid and is blocking my sight of what is just outside it. The wall has been there for so long I’ve forgotten there is anything out there. I asked Holy Spirit to look at my wall with me.
I took each bag one at a time and examined it closely. Each one is made of some grievance. One is a grudge I am holding against my boss for something he did a while back. Another is a fear of something that hasn’t happened yet, but could. Another is a worry that my son is making a mistake in his life that he will come to regret. There are so many of these bags and they all seem to be about something that happened in the past or that hasn’t happened yet.
The thing about sandbags is that they seem very thick and solid and heavy. Very substantial. But as I give each one to Holy Spirit and ask Him to help me see this in a different way, I visualize them being emptied, the top being loosened and the sand pouring out. Nothing is left but an empty bag. As I give each bag to Holy Spirit and we look at the fear and guilt, the many grievances I used to block my awareness of Love, I start to dismantle the wall that kept me from seeing the joy that is all around me.
Today, I am going to continue this process. Every time I become aware of a grievance that is blocking my awareness of love and joy I am going to remember how insubstantial it really is and, with Holy Spirit, I am going to let it go. Removing those blocks is as easy as pouring the sand from a bag.
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