Happiness and Love

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The wonderful thing about happiness is that it can grow in any soil, exist under any condition. Like Truth, it defies environment and conditions, for it abides in spiritual sense. This God-given joy is steadfast, because it depends upon Principle and not upon persons. It is only the joy of the Christ which makes our joy full. As thought is freed from self-love and self-will, we find happiness surpassing anything of which we have hitherto dreamed. One might possess everything materially tangible in the world and still not be happy. Happiness does not depend upon having, but upon being; not on possessing, but on enjoying.

Man is protected by divine Love, informed by infinite Mind, enveloped in the radiant joyousness of Soul, and governed by immutable Principle. He is maintained eternally by divine Life. Joy is a fine art, to be cultivated as assiduously as any other virtue. The art of being glad consists in part in the ability to be happy at all times, even when there seems to be no occasion for rejoicing. If we love, joy is inevitable, and there can be no real joy unless one loves. And the more one loves, the greater and more expansive will be his happiness. Many a patient has been healed by simply learning to be glad, by learning to be grateful. It isn’t reasonable to expect God to dwell with us unless we can offer Him a dwelling place, so to speak, freed from ingratitude and unhappiness.

The joy that accompanies spiritual understanding knows enough to give thanks for what eye hath not seen. That is why no one can take our joy away from us. The Master said this because he knew joy as a thing of consciousness which cannot be discovered, located or interfered with by that which seeks to make us unhappy.

There can be no question that health and gratitude go hand in hand. Mankind must finally learn that unceasing gratitude is truly essential if one would walk close to God. What an extraordinary change would take place in the world today if we would all endeavor to be grateful for everything now! A truly honest expression of gratitude on the part of anyone is unmistakable proof that he is communing with God. So let us be happy, now and forever!

One cannot love God objectively. One loves God only as one reflects Love, or as one loves man and creation as God loves them. Reverence is like God, never an emotional sense about God. We express the Love that is God in loving, and we don’t know the meaning of Love if we are not loving. The only way we can know Love, it goes without saying, is by loving our fellow being. This Love which is God must be manifest or our gracious words are as sounding brass. We know Love by loving, just as we know Life by living. That is its only value. We must have a present God or we haven’t any God at all. And the God who is Love can only be present as Love. As our book puts it, “Love is reflected in love.” (S&H)

Are you Love? Yes! Yes, of course you are! The fact of the matter is you are divine Mind manifested. You love as Love itself. You exist in life as Life itself. You are the presence or expression of divine Mind, and you can never for a moment be anything else. “I shall be satisfied when I awake in Thy likeness,” as we read in Psalms. The whole object of our endeavors here is that we may learn to be Love, to be Mind, to be Life. Nothing less. To think of ourselves as anything less is to dishonor God.




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