My happiness and my function are one.
* Happiness is knowing all will know GOD. My function is to forgive the belief in separation and its consequences.
1. You have surely noticed an emphasis throughout our recent lessons on the connection between fulfilling your function and achieving happiness.
²This is because you do not really see the connection.
³Yet there is more than just a connection between them; they are the same.
⁴Their forms are different, but their content is completely one.
* I find the use of these terms here interesting because they are both really ideas. I guess I had not thought of ideas as having form and yet, why not. An idea is what Jesus says God is and we are. Seeing them fluid and flowing one to another is the essence of FATHER and SON as I understand it today.
2. The ego does constant battle with the Holy Spirit on the fundamental question of what your function is.
²So does it do constant battle with the Holy Spirit about what your happiness is.
³It is not a two-way battle.
⁴The ego attacks and the Holy Spirit does not respond.
⁵He knows what your function is.
⁶He knows that it is your happiness. 
3. Today we will try to go past this wholly meaningless battle and arrive at the truth about your function.
²We will not engage in senseless arguments about what it is.
³We will not become hopelessly involved in defining happiness and determining the means for achieving it.
⁴We will not indulge the ego by listening to its attacks on truth.
⁵We will merely be glad that we can find out what truth is.
4. Our longer practice period today has as its purpose your acceptance of the fact that not only is there a very real connection between the function God gave you and your happiness, but that they are actually identical.
²God gives you only happiness.
³Therefore, the function He gave you must be happiness, even if it appears to be different.
⁴Today’s exercises are an attempt to go beyond these differences in appearance, and recognize a common content where it exists in truth.
* IF we could take this methodology and use it to see the common denominator in ALL THAT IS and every circumstance we might begin to have a fluid engagement with existence that embodies the Whole while not discounting the singular or individual.
5. Begin the ten-to-fifteen-minute practice period by reviewing these thoughts:
²God gives me only happiness.
³He has given my function to me.
⁴Therefore my function must be happiness.
* Do you HEAR IT?
* It is aligning with the Father AS His Son.
* Being willing to receive what HE WOULD IDENTIFY IS GIVEN instead of coming up with our own ideas of what must be real and valuable and what is not. Dividing and separating creation as if we were THE “god” ourselves.
⁵Try to see the logic in this sequence, even if you do not yet accept the conclusion.
⁶It is only if the first two thoughts are wrong that the conclusion could be false.
* THIS means that one must first accept that GOD IS. Then that HE HAS A VESTED RELATIONSHIP IN HIS SON.
⁷Let us, then, think about the premises for a while, as we are practicing.
6. The first premise is that God gives you only happiness.
* Oh dear! The FIRST premise has to be that God exists. But that is reasonable to just assume, you might say. Yet, the Course was taught for nearly 50 years as if God, the Son, and SPIRIT had NO EXISTENCE WHATSOEVER because it was so wrapped up in the metaphysical and esoteric that it obliterated itself.
* I am ALL FOR the first premise being God gives you only happiness as long as God is Allowed Existence in the mind of His Son. Sheesh!
²This could be false, of course, but in order to be false it is necessary to define God as something He is not.
³Love cannot give evil, and what is not happiness is evil.
⁴God cannot give what He does not have, and He cannot have what He is not.
⁵Unless God gives you only happiness, He must be evil.
⁶And it is this definition of Him you are believing if you do not accept the first premise.
* This is really worth the time it takes to grasp the meaning of. If you do not quite get it “put it on the back burner and ask Father to help you understand.” It will flow to you when you might be least expecting it.
7. The second premise is that God has given you your function.
²We have seen that there are only two parts of your mind.
³One is ruled by the ego, and is made up of illusions.
⁴The other is the home of the Holy (*WHOLE) Spirit, where truth abides.
⁵There are no other guides but these to choose between, and no other outcomes possible as a result of your choice but the fear that the ego always engenders, and the love that the Holy (*WHOLE) Spirit always offers to replace it.
8. Thus, it must be that your function is established by God through His Voice, or is made by the ego which you have made to replace Him.
²Which is true?
* Doesn’t it seem bizarre that the majority of the millions who have been aware of this over 50 years have not given Father “the time of day?” Or it they have they sluffed it off as something to mysterious to understand?
³Unless God gave your function to you, it must be the gift of the ego.
⁴Does the ego really have gifts to give, being itself an illusion and offering only the illusion of gifts?
9. Think about this during the longer practice period today.
²Think also about the many forms the illusion of your function has taken in your mind, and the many ways in which you tried to find salvation under the ego’s guidance.
³Did you find it?
⁴Were you happy?
⁵Did they bring you peace?
⁶We need great honesty today.
⁷Remember the outcomes fairly, and consider also whether it was ever reasonable to expect happiness from anything the ego ever proposed.
⁸Yet the ego is the only alternative to the Holy (*WHOLE) Spirit’s Voice.
10. You will listen to madness or hear the truth.
²Try to make this choice as you think about the premises on which our conclusion rests.
³We can share in this conclusion, but in no other.
⁴For God Himself shares it with us.
⁵Today’s idea is another giant stride in the perception of the same as the same, and the different as different.
⁶On one side stand all illusions.
⁷All truth stands on the other.
⁸Let us try today to realize that only the truth is true.
11. In the shorter practice periods, which would be most helpful today if undertaken twice an hour, this form of the application is suggested:
²My happiness and function are one, because God has given me both.
³It will not take more than a minute, and probably less, to repeat these words slowly and think about them a little while as you say them.
* Again, our function is to forgive. “My happiness and my function are one.”
* Happiness is knowing all will know GOD. My function is to forgive the belief in separation and its consequences.
* The happiness factor is “sticking better” in my mind.
* I suppose that is really why I am not able to maintain company with my fella because happiness does not include bashing others all the time or being ignored as a person with feelings and a brain.
* To forgive does not mean “TO PUT UP WITH.”
* This has been a major misrepresentation of the teachings of Jesus.
* Can you see how that has appealed to the ego and kept us in bondage?
* I AM ALLOWED TO BE HAPPY. (Whatever form I am in. 
) And that means that I feel safe and loved and accepted as an individual.
* In the past I understood forgiveness to be necessary BECAUSE of the presence of SIN. And since I knew I sinned (or made mistakes) it made sense that God’s Love would be shown by forgiving others of their sins.
* Which, if you think about it would not be necessary ~ our sharing God’s Love, I mean ~ because God’s Love was ALL WRAPPED UP in HIS SON’s DEATH on the Cross and His Miraculous Resurrection. So, why would I think I needed to show God’s Love???
* It was MY love I thought I was showing by forgiving his sin since I sinned as well.
* Hmm. Once I had decided that the ONE TRUTH I HAD TO KNOW WAS REAL WAS THAT GOD IS and I was willing to do without a “me” in the equation if that was called for, SPIRIT became allowed to show me who God was and how He was everywhere, as well as the relationship between the Father and the Son.
* The Son is the OBSERVER, FATHER IS THE POWER AND STRENGTH AND EVERYTHING ELSE.
* This is so lengthy here because I am receiving information from SPIRIT that I am seeking to integrate in my current awareness. Bringing this understanding to the forefront so that I release the warped manipulations of the ego.
* It is difficult to explain but I am starting to see me clearer while at the same time understanding that “I” am not here. (I will admit that this may have been what Ken was teaching and that I did not understand.) The thing is, as less real the ego’s thinking becomes the “more real” both myself and Father appear to me. I am not sure what to make of it. Or how to express it. And I still feel confident that we are meant to embrace all that the life of a form we are living offers and share it with another but that could be satisfactory only if the other has eyes to see the Father and the Son as well.
Hmm. So, this may be another exercise to allow me to release the idea that somebody out there can bring me the happiness that I think I will find in sharing existence.
Within me I share the WHOLE of existence with Father and It Is Good. That’s all that I know.
(ACIM, W-66.1:1–11:3)
To Father be ALL Glory and Praise Given AS His Son, debi.
Freedom Principles; At-One-Meant Now 
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