“Our happiness comes from changing our minds about the world.”
How hopeless it is to place your hope of happiness in the world. How cruelly history repeats itself. It is our wish that the world would work that makes it so difficult for us to see that the world has never brought us lasting joy. We have a vested interest in trying to get it to work because we chose it. We, the separated, special, unique, individuals that we think we are, think this is what we want – and that what we want will someday make us feel complete and whole. Undaunted by the fact that this has never been accomplished by anyone, ‘hope springs eternal’. All the while we remain clueless – that wanting the world to work is really an expression of our selfishness.
From the theology of ACIM it is perfectly clear that God did not create the world.
If God didn’t do it, guess who is left? Yeah, it’s us. As Possum famously stated in the Pogo cartoon strip: “We have met the enemy and he is us’n”. Within the metaphysics of the course, this is metaphorically expressed as the part of the mind that took ‘the tiny mad Idea’ of separation from God and His Creation seriously. It is a metaphor – because, in fact, the separation from God never really happened. The separation could not have happened because it is not God’s Will that His Creation be separate and sinful. What is not God’s will can not happen.
This begs the question then: Where is our hope of happiness if it is not from the world we see? Answer: Our happiness comes from changing our minds about the world. In practical terms, this means changing our purpose for the world… from trying to get the world to meet our ego needs, to using the world to learn the happy lessons of love. This is accomplished by our deliberate choice not to see our interest as apart from someone else’s. We can teach ourselves the joys of shared interest as opposed to experiencing the inevitable disappointments of indulging the ego’s desire for separate, selfish interest.