If there is a helpful secret to studying and practicing A Course in Miracles, it is this: Jesus is happy; the Holy Spirit is happy. And their happiness is blessed by God, happily.
All Jesus and the Holy Spirit want is to share their happiness with you, because their happiness is God's happiness, and so it is your happiness as well.
Somewhat paradoxically, the way we remember this happiness is by sharing it with others. God "gives" love to us by giving love to others through us. As the course teaches: "to heal is to make happy" (T-5.in.1:1).
Happiness is our reality now. It is not a condition we attain in the future; it's not on hold until we've finished the ACIM Workbook. We don't have to correct past errors and mistakes.
A natural, serious and non-dramatic happiness is our inheritance now. It is a fact now.
All we have to do is want it more than we want what we've made to take its place.
Whenever we feel anything other than happiness it is because we have forgotten that the Holy Spirit is happy, and its whole function is to make us happy, too. Unhappiness means we have chosen to listen not the Holy Spirit but to our false self, the ego, which does not know what happiness is and thus hates it.
We make the ego in order to avoid our responsibility for remembering happiness. This is why A Course in Miracles says that "the secret of salvation is but this: you are doing this to yourself" (T-27.VIII.10:1).
We made the ego; it lives in the light of our attention. We imposed on ourselves a sentence of death after a lifetime of suffering. We did that. We are doing that.
Without our careful nurture, our total devotion and worship, the ego would disappear. If we withdraw our support from it then it will instantly be revealed as a bad dream from which we are right now awakening.
Ego is exactly as real as the pink elephant you picture when you are asked to picture a pink elephant. It is an unrealistic image that comes and goes and has no power to cause anything. We let it go by seeing there is nothing to hold onto in the first place.
When we stop giving attention to ego, and ego naturally disappears, what remains?
The Holy Spirit remains.
We don't have to learn what the Holy Spirit is in order to experience the clarity and helpfulness of its still, small voice. We don't need to master ACIM's interpretation of Christian spirituality. We don't need to drop acid or do more yoga or anything.
We just have to recognize ego and let ego go. The Holy Spirit will be there when we do, and it will be impossible not to recognize it as such (regardless of what we call it).
The Holy Spirit is our still mind; it is the pure energy of attention and awareness; it is utterly perfectly happy.
The Holy Spirit is happy because God is Love, and God is its home. It knows that when ego is gone, all that remains is it, the Holy Spirit, which means all that remains is God. The Holy Spirit longs to return wholly unto God.
You long for this. We all do.
Therefore, study happiness - here and now, in a body in the world - and make its realization your only hope and the whole of your practice.
Body and world are simply an ego story in which you hid happines, so long ago that you not only forgot where you hid it, you also forgot that you hid it at all.
Jesus and the Holy Spirit will remind that you hid it, and they will show you where you hid it. How can they do this? Because they are not separate from you; they are one with you. Their happiness is yours.
Therefore, they will teach you happiness by making others happy through you. All we need to do is get out of their way.
Love,
Sean