Lesson 117: Review: “God, being Love, is also happiness.”  “I seek what belongs to me in truth.”

This lesson says, “Let me remember love is happiness, and nothing else brings me joy.”

The world gives us a warped idea of what happiness is. 

We always think it is outside of us, and we simply adhere to the belief that happiness is temporary and sporadic.

The world says that happiness is in the cheeseburger we had for lunch.   The world thinks that things are the essence of what has the capacity to make us happy.  Things seem like a quick solution to our lifelong problem of how we can maintain some continuity of our happiness.  Things, we see and feel, and we easily learn to believe they have the power to bring us a light moment in our minds when we gaze at or examine the things.

Our happiness is brief at best when we look to the world for the ending of this terrible longing to sustain a level of happiness within.

The world is full of false hope because it is always promising that when we get just one more thing or finally the right relationship or a more prosperous occupation, then we will finally get to a place where we feel more happiness or light moments when we have all this.  But the world never comes through.  Or when we get things we always have a battle with them because we judge them and blame them for not giving us lasting happiness.  We do exactly the same with people and with religion or anything that appears to be an aspect of our lives from which the ego aims to to give us some sense of joy about.

The world gives us nothing but nightmares and empty hopes because nothing in the world lasts for any longer than just a second.

Then we get upset because we can’t look to things to give us that joy that we expect from them when we lose track of putting God as our number one priority.

The world is not the place we can find peace because it is not meant to come there. 

It never has been and it never will be.  The ego just likes to focus on itself and what the ego’s world might seem to give us.  The ego never has the answer to what will give us peace.  Our error was that we forgot that God is the only one with the magic wand that brings immeasurable and blooming peace no matter what.

The Course is just teaching us to simply let the world be a place we live temporarily so we can find our way back to God.  We use all the physical and worldly things to get us back to the identifying as God’s children in the most immediate moment that we can manage.  The world is not the place to find peace.

The Course says we don’t have to feel guilty for being wrong about the world.

God isn’t angry that we are wasting our time when we look to the world for some kind of joy.  God forgives us.

The Course also says that God actually never forgives us because nothing like that bothers God and thus, forgiveness is simply unnecessary. 

We waste our own time in the world when we look for peace there.  God in no way gets angry about this because God knows we make mistakes.

This is the beauty of our relationship with God.  He loves us so much that He never blames us or gets resentful or angry.

God just reminds us ever so gently. 

God loves us so much, He simply wants us to realize what we are doing when we look to the world for peace or joy.  God wants us to just realize we are mistaken because God cares deeply about how happy we are.  God makes it so easy for us to connect with this joy when we simply realize that God is our only source of real joy and that this is always available in infinite amounts.

We learn in the Course just to look in the right place. 

When we are being clear that we choose God, our happiness is off the charts.