[SAND DUNES OF NAMIBIA]
“Those who would see the witnesses to truth instead of to illusion merely ask that they might see a purpose in the world that gives it sense and makes it meaningful. Without your special function has this world no meaning for you. Yet it can become a treasure house as rich and limitless as Heaven itself.” ACIM 26-1
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“God said: …What I am suggesting is that you start to measure time in Eternity. Eternity does not take long. Eternity is this one second that We share whatever life may bring. Whatever your feelings about life this second, you don’t have to feel the same way the next second.
How can forever last only a second, you wonder. Eternity is timeless. It does not last even a second. There are not even seconds in Eternity. No time, no seconds. Yet, as you move forward in life, there is no past for, like time itself, the past is only a concept. Change your concept. Renew your joy in joy. In this very so-called second of non-time, We are Everything, and We have Everything at the same non-time that We require nothing, nothing at all but the love in Our hearts, and what more joy is there than that? ” HL 4267
Does Happiness have any object?
It is fascinating to think that we are happy or unhappy because we have a reason to be happy or unhappy. The verb TO BE seems conditional or subordinated to the verb TO HAVE. Was God unhappy, lonely, lacking something before He had (created) the Universe? Did He start being happy only when He thought HE had the Creation? And after He created the human being in His Image and gave Him free will, was He unhappy with the results? Did He think He would need to create something else, something new to regain His happiness? A new car, a new Universe?
Well, it seems that it is how human beings perceive happiness. Happiness is circumstantial. It seems to lie on what they perceive they have or don’t have. Before the Creation, did God Have Nothing? For God, Nothing means No-Thing, that is no thing, in particular, no thing specific, which is equivalent to Everything. Everything does not oppose to Nothing. It is synonymous in the sense that nothing or everything does not belong to the verb to have but to the verb to be.
To have everything we need to Be everything. What we want to have in the relative world is some thing, many things but we are incapable of conceiving Everything or conceiving to have everything. One less ambiguous way to express the relation between to be and to have is to say that God HAS EVERYTHING BECAUSE HE IS EVERYTHING. God is happy because He is. But there is no real causality in the word “be-cause (cause of)”. Aren’t we happy just because we are? Do we think that just because of the fact that WE ARE (I AM) we should be eternally happy? … 🙂
We don’t like, as relative earthly humans, to think of something that we could never have. At the same time and paradoxically, can we honestly conceive a God that would want happiness for us that would depend on what we could never have?
Happiness requires an undoing of our way of thinking: we have to cease to be only “human beings”.
Does our propensity for unhappiness or our unstableness in happiness reside in our denying some facts that we cannot change but that require our acceptance?
There are two kinds of happiness, as there are two kinds of love. The first kind is based on fear, more precisely on the fear to lose. Nothing seems permanent on Earth, and so it seems to go with happiness and love. It seems to come and go according to the circumstances. It seems also to follow a very elementary arithmetical law: if you give, you lose. If you have ten dollars in your pocket and you give five dollars away, you have lost five dollars. And we consider this type of law as based on provable “facts”, at least for accountants.
Happiness and love that are based on the fear to lose are only dreams based on judgments. Relatively speaking, we like to establish a scale in unhappiness (and in happiness as well). According to what happens in our life or in the life of others, we judge that we or the others must be unhappier or happier always according to “outside” events or circumstances. But in reality, you are happy or you are not happy. There are no degrees of happiness or unhappiness. These evaluations or judgments have absolutely no meaning. They are only beliefs. Why do we try to build our happiness, our love on random circumstances of having or not having rather than on a solid basis of being?
And what could be a solid basis for being? This is the second kind of happiness and love, this kind where we are happy and we experience love without any outside objects, conditions, or requirements. Happiness, joy, love is the natural state of being. Whenever there is conflict in happiness and in love, this means that we are not experimenting real happiness or real love. In fact, we are experimenting fear. Fear is the belief in the reality of the outside world. And so it is with conflict. There is nothing to understand in conflicts because it is not understandable and it is meaningless. Everything that is understandable is based on appreciation. Appreciation necessarily leads the way to love and happiness.
God offers us inner joy and happiness on an eternal basis. Yet, we prefer to decide what will bring us temporary love, joy, and happiness in the outside world. But we have to acknowledge that it is not the perception of ourself that establishes what we are. We were created, we did not create ourselves. Our very being is the Being and the Knowledge of One, God. This is not a perception, it is a Real Fact, it is the Truth of what we are. We deny this very fundamental fact, we find it hard to accept because we like to think that there is something else “out there” that God missed or did not see and that might bring us a better love, a better joy, a manmade joy perhaps.
Our problem is really to accept the only fact that we cannot change. We cannot change what we really are. In reality, we don’t have a problem with the fact since we cannot do anything about it but we have a problem of understanding. What we are is not up to us to decide. Time and space only exist to give us “the time and the space” to accept the Truth. God is not impatient. Yet, He is not completely happy when His children are unhappy.
What, outside of Oneness, can give any meaning to happiness and love? And, outside happiness and love, what can give the world a purpose, a sense, a meaning? To accept and integrate Oneness in our human life is already a step to be more than human, and we are more than humans.
To see that purpose, we have to accept to see the Truth instead of running after illusions.
No matter if we choose unhappiness, fear, guilt, sense of lack, or happiness, fearlessness, innocence, sense of wholeness, it always comes from a decision made from a belief. Do we want to believe in happiness or unhappiness?
Happiness and the no-time no-space zone
We are starting to realize that the moments of real inner happiness we experience always happen in a no-time zone and no-space zone, hence in a no-specific-object zone. Circumstances might trigger our basic essence of happiness but happiness resides in Being not having. Having is constantly changing. It is mutable. Truth cannot be based on what changes. Time and space always tear us apart between the past and the future but never set us in the Present. When we believe that happiness and love are time- and space-related, we can experience only loss and fear of loss, which is basically unhappiness. Happiness MUST BE out of time and space. The Present does not belong to time and space and it has no object. How can you be happy when you are split between the past and the future?
It is impossible to find happiness in time and space because what time and space do is to separate us constantly from the Present. Time and space are just a rapid succession of images or frames like in the movies, 24 frames per second. If our eye could be fast enough to catch the interval between two space and time frames (1/24 of a second), we could see the Present and “start to measure time in Eternity. The Present is Eternity and Eternity is the Present… Eternity is timeless. It does not last even a second. There are not even seconds in Eternity. No time, no seconds.”
What belongs to time and space belongs to the world of forms. The world of forms is also the world of preferences. Happiness and love don’t belong to time and space because they don’t belong to the world of form nor to preferences: “It is not necessary to love this one and that one. That is too finite. Just love.” Love can only love the formless, the timeless, and the spaceless. Otherwise, it could not be One.
Since happiness is paradoxically so natural and so seemingly inaccessible for us, it seems a better way for us to rediscover happiness by removing the obstacles we created to hide it and forget it. Let’s start thinking that we already have all because we already ARE all. But let’s proceed by what we are not: we are more used to that thinking process. What if we would really dig this assertion that we are unhappy because we know deep inside that unhappiness is meaningless. How can meaninglessness generate unhappiness? It is a logical suicide, unless meaninglessness as a meaning…
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