Day 102: I share God's Will for happiness for me.

As we have learned in previous lessons, our sole function here is forgiveness, which is the same as our salvation.  Though we have mentioned this before, today A Course in Miracles confirms that Joy is our function - for it is one with Forgiveness and Love, and the means to our Salvation.

I share God's Will for happiness for me, and I accept it as my function now.

The concept of "share" conjoined with "happiness" in today's meditation reminded me of an important moral in one of my favorite films of 2007, Into the Wild.  At the end of the movie, the main character, based on the real-life Christopher McCandless, learns an important truth.  He writes in his book before dying alone in the abandoned camper where he had been sleeping, "Happiness only real when shared." 

Aha, I thought.  This is the reason for our creation.  As I noted in yesterday's blog post, our purpose here on earth is to experience Joy in as many facets as we possibly can.  This is because we are a conduit for God, an individuated Aspect of Divinity.  We are part of Him, and our existence is for the purpose of experiencing the infinite levels of Joy.  God, as the Origin of All, already knows this.  But it could not become Real, it could not be actualized, until He shared it.  In order to share his Sublime Happiness, He created us, His Children (or as A Course in Miracles refers to us, the Sonship).  To be sure the Sonship remained forever connected to Him, God created the Holy Spirit, entrusted with the duty to keep us joined to Him and to one another.  And so the Holy Trinity came to be.

In the same way God experiences Happiness by sharing it with us (and through us), we experience our highest degree of happiness by sharing it with others.  There is no greater joy than bringing joy to another.  By doing so, we actualize it, and we magnify our own inherent happiness within us.

But what do we do when we seem to be stuck in an unhappy situation?  How do we retain that feeling of joy, which is our function here?  Again, we must see the sadness, the loneliness, the anger and the fear for what it really is - an illusion.  There is a miracle if we have the will to join with God and look beyond what we initially perceive.  And in that miracle there awaits the gift of Joy.

The darkness will fall away in time.  That is one of the gifts the construct of time provides.  In Reality, there is no time.  But time is necessary in our world in order that we may extract as much and as many joyous experiences as possible.  Think about our memories.  Once we have "gotten over" a particularly negative situation (which is the same as having forgiven it), we no longer recall any emotion when revisiting it.  We can list off our past traumas as monotonously as we do a grocery list.  That is because their emotional value is not retained, because it has no value.  If we do get emotional when revisiting these old wounds, then we can consider it a message that we still have forgiveness to do in that area.

The memories that do incite emotion, no matter how much time has passed, are the joyous ones.  The reason for this is simple: Only Joy is Real.  Only emotions that spring from Love are eternal.  Once we have seen past the darkness of our illusory emotions, they can no longer haunt us.  We learn from them, and by doing so, we can access the Happiness that lies beyond.

Let us consider today's lesson yet another step in leading a completely happy life.  We are getting closer to understanding how it all works.  Let's get a head start and begin experiencing our God-given Joy by sharing our triumphs, our laughter and our smiles with all those around us.  And let us watch that happiness magnify ten times over, and even more until the whole world is singing with glee.

Until tomorrow,
Journeyman