Quote of the Week: September 4th, 2011
My Happiness and My Function are One: The ego does constant battle with the Holy Spirit on the fundamental question of what your function is. So does it do constant battle with the Holy Spirit about what your happiness is. It is not a two-way battle. The ego attacks and the Holy Spirit does not respond. He knows what your function is. He knows that it is your happiness.
Acim Lesson 66,2
Knowing one’s true Self or identity is the basis for knowing one’s true function. Since God is the soul source of our identity, and our function is based on our identity, it follows that God is also the sole source of our function, and furthermore, both our identity and function must be in accordance with what God is. So what is God’s nature, essence, or character? We have conceptualized the nature of God as being that of perfect Love, Joy, Peace, Freedom, etc. We can think of an infinite number of essential attributes, but for brevity, we can condense all other attributes of God into some variant of these. Now since the source, course, and goal of all these attributes is happiness, and by extension we can conclude the same for any other attribute, I posit that happiness is what God must be in His essential nature.
What God gives must be based on what God is. We can then conclude that happiness is all that God gives, and can give, and since God created us, happiness must therefore be our essential nature also. It would be inconceivable for God to give anything not in accord with what He is, i.e., happiness, for it would contradict his essential nature. God cannot, for instance, give evil, so, following our logic, we can define evil as anything that is not happiness. Furthermore, if God could give us anything other than happiness, it follow that He would be evil. It becomes critically important that we understand the logic here, for to believe that God could or would give us anything other than happiness directly contradicts our notions of God as happiness. This logic is also verified in our everyday experience where we observe that animals and plants produce offspring, fruit and seed in accord with what they are, in accord with their nature; its in the DNA you might say.
The nature of anything must be in accord with the nature of its source. Since God is the single source of all that is, and God is happiness, it follows that the nature of the holy children of God, as well as all that exists in creation, must also be happiness. This bring us to a huge revelation, so hold on to you seats: If the holy children of God and all else that exists in creation are essentially happiness, appearances notwithstanding, it must mean that, we the children of God must be God’s only creation*; we are the creation; we are the world; we and the world are one! Woooohooo, ponder that for awhile!
To know that our true nature, the true nature of God, and the true nature of all that exists is one and the same, is the basis from which we can look past the apparent diversity and see the unity that we are. We differ only in our awareness of this truth, and superficially in appearance; we seem to be many, but we are really one. To borrow a colorful phrase, “a pig with lipstick is still a pig!” Knowing that our true nature is happiness gives us clarity about our function, and what else could be the function of happiness but to be happy! Our single function then, is simply to be ourselves, to be what we already are, by knowing, remembering, and being conscious of our true nature: ‘My happiness and my function are one.’ To remember this is to remember who we really are, and remembering who we really are is the key to fulfilling our function.
The converse of the truth that happiness is both our essential nature and our function is also true, which means that whenever we don’t feel happy, then we are not fulfilling our God-given function. Happiness is our essential nature so we can never be completely without some joy**; we cannot ever cease to be who we really are. Happiness is the scale on which we exist, and while we cannot choose to be off this scale, we can choose to be anywhere we wish along it, from very little happiness at the low end, to estatic joy and eternal bliss at the high end. This is our freedom and our function, so choose wisely the degree of happiness you wish to experience.
* If A = B and B = C, then A = C, or if the children of God is happiness and all else in creation is happiness, then the children of God and all else in creation must be the same single creation.
** The Taittiriya Upanishad 3.6.1 declares that “Out of bliss these being are born; In bliss they are sustained, and to Bliss they go and merge again.”
