Happiness is our natural inheritance and always there in each moment. It is what we have been given by God and is therefore our true identity as His Son. Why don't we experience the peace and happiness that is ours all of the time? Because, according to this lesson, we are blocking it by seeing what is not there. In fact, we could say we are not seeing at all. What we are doing is hallucinating! We are no different than someone who is insane! We are projecting the thoughts in our minds and seeing them outside of us and believing in their reality, but they originate in our own minds. An outward picture is what we are seeing of our inward condition.

Our perceptions are all based on past associations. We are holding a thought system in our minds based on guilt from the past and now we fear punishment in the future. We are not in the present, which is where our happiness is. So we need the help of the Holy Spirit if we are to release the past and the future. We must do our part by bringing our wrong-minded thinking to awareness and asking for His interpretations to substitute for our own. Now we can see with Christ's vision rather than believing what our eyes show us. The eyes were made by the ego to bring back to us evidence that reinforces our belief in the reality of this world. We made this dream, but we can decide not to be misled by it "an instant longer." (W.290.1.5)
 

"What I perceive without God's Own Correction for the sight I made is frightening and painful to behold." (W.290.1.4) We see a world that is frightening and painful when we see it from the perspective of the ego. It is a world of suffering and pain. It consists of all the thoughts we "think we think." They are our dreams, our fantasies, our judgments, our wishes, our worries, and our individual stories and dramas. To free ourselves from this nightmare of despair and depression, based on the stories we tell ourselves, we must first recognize we are not deeply happy. When we come to this place of recognition, we seek another way. We start to question our lives and wonder what has happened and where we have gone off track.

With readiness, willingness and desire, everything we think we know can be translated by the Holy Spirit and seen differently. He translates everything for us, so what we saw as painful and distressing we now see beyond the limitations of our own perception and can remember the truth of who we are. In essence, we stop our investment in our own thinking mind. In other words, we lose interest in what the ego has to say about everything. We simply stop listening to it. We stop justifying its version of events. Instead we turn within to the Holy Spirit and rest in God. In the silence of our minds, truth shines forth. Our minds are now aligned with God. Instead of seeing others as sinful for their apparent attacks, we can now see their call for love and their innocence, and thus know our own call and our own innocence. "This day I seek my present happiness, and look on nothing else except the thing I seek." (W.290.1.6) This is simply to overlook what someone is saying or doing.
   

We can't do this alone. We need the help of the Holy Spirit---God's Own Correction. We do however, need to come to Him with our resolve to ask for His strength to hold us up and have the confidence He will hear and respond to our requests. This means we need to stay vigilant about where our thoughts go when we start rehearsing past issues or future dilemmas and plans. "Learn of His happiness, which is yours. But to accomplish this, all your dark lessons must be brought willingly to truth, and joyously laid down by hands open to receive, not closed to take. Every dark lesson that you bring to Him Who teaches light He will accept from you, because you do not want it." (T.14.XI.4.5-7)(ACIM OE T.14.VII.62)

Recently, I received a call from the nurse at the senior's residence that my 97 year-old mother was in great pain and it was imperative I get a certain kind of medication to alleviate the pain. When I called the doctor's office, I was told there was no way I could see him. Since he would not talk with me, I asked his assistant if she would please convey to him the urgency of my request. She did as I asked, but then indicated the doctor continued to deny access. My mind immediately went to other ways I might solve this problem. Then I was reminded the ego can never solve any problem without creating another one. I spent time in the quiet of my mind, releasing my grievance with the doctor. I continued with some daily activities in peace, and when I felt the guidance to check back with my mother, I learned she had turned a corner and the pain had subsided. It was another opportunity for me to recognize that reacting to perceived problems, without first finding the peace and guidance from the Holy Spirit, means I am relying on my limited wisdom.

Today we are reminded our goal is to see everyone through Christ's vision. What does this kind of seeing require? It requires that we take responsibility for our projections and release our judgments to the Holy Spirit. It is important we don't suppress our shadows, but own them. These may be parts of our self we are most afraid of accepting, yet these suppressed feelings need to be faced. Seeing is about looking within and forgiving ourselves for our judgments and attacks on ourselves as well as others. What we don't own owns us. As Jung says, we need to make the darkness conscious, which means looking at all we pretend not to be and all that brings shame and embarrassment. What we hate, resist, disown about ourselves takes on a life of its own. These feelings and thoughts try to emerge, but so often we push them back down, believing we need to live up to some kind of spiritual role, rather than being authentic with what is truly coming up for us. Healing requires we take responsibility for all of these parts of ourselves without blame or self-condemnation. Only then can we know our happiness. We do not need to seek for it because it is always there, obscured by our own thoughts.

When we no longer see through the past, all we see is our present happiness. With resolve and certainty, we come to Him and ask for His strength to hold us up. When we rely on our own strength, we will remain uncertain, confused and unhappy. As we read in "What is the Holy Spirit?" (W.PII.Q7) He is our bridge to happiness. He is the Call in our minds to allow Heaven to be restored to us. When our minds are restored, we realize the past is no longer there. The world we see has been replaced by the real world, which is our present state, free of sin and guilt. It is the end of our journey, where we have forgiven the world. The real world ends the fear of death, because we see life is all there is or ever was.