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A COURSE IN MIRACLES

JOY

These are passages from the Course regarding Joy:

• When you have become willing to hide nothing, you will not only be willing to enter into communion but will also understand peace and joy.
• It still remains within you, however, to extend as God extended His Spirit to you. In reality this is your only choice, because your free will was given you for your joy in creating the perfect.
• The word “inevitable” is fearful to the ego, but joyous to the spirit. God is inevitable, and you cannot avoid Him any more than He can avoid you.
• The ego is afraid of the spirit’s joy, because once you have experienced it you will withdraw all protection from the ego, and become totally without investment in fear.
• When your mood tells you that you have chosen wrongly, and this is so whenever you are not joyous, then know this need not be.
• No one who learns from experience that one choice brings peace and joy while another brings chaos and disaster needs additional convincing.
• I am teaching you to associate misery with the ego and joy with the spirit. You have taught yourself the opposite.
• God, Who encompasses all being, created beings who have everything individually, but who want to share it to increase their joy.
• Divine Abstraction takes joy in sharing.
• God has kept your Kingdom for you, but He cannot share His joy with you until you know it with your whole mind.
• Every mind that is changed adds to this joy with its individual willingness to share in it.
• The truly helpful are God’s miracle workers, whom I direct until we are all united in the joy of the Kingdom.
• The light that belongs to you is the light of joy.
• There is no difference between love and joy.
• Only the healed mind can experience revelation with lasting effect, because revelation is an experience of pure joy. If you do not choose to be wholly joyous, your mind cannot have what it does not choose to be.
• The Holy Spirit will remain with the Sons of God, to bless their creations and keep them in the light of joy.
• The Holy Spirit is the spirit of joy.
• Our task is the joyous one of waking it to the Call for God.
• What is truly blessed is incapable of giving rise to guilt, and must give rise to joy.
• Guilt feelings are the preservers of time. They induce fears of retaliation or abandonment, and thus ensure that the future will be like the past. This is the ego’s continuity. It gives the ego a false sense of security by believing that you cannot escape from it. But you can and must. God offers you the continuity of eternity in exchange. When you choose to make this exchange, you will simultaneously exchange guilt for joy, viciousness for love, and pain for peace.
• Do you really believe you can plan for your safety and joy better than He can?
• Whenever you are not wholly joyous, it is because you have reacted with a lack of love to one of God’s creations.
• How else can you find joy in a joyless place except by realizing that you are not there?
• What God does know is that His communication channels are not open to Him, so that He cannot impart His joy and know that His children are wholly joyous. Giving His joy is an ongoing process, not in time but in eternity.
• A wise teacher teaches through approach, not avoidance. He does not emphasize what you must avoid to escape from harm, but what you need to learn to have joy.
• Remember, however, that what the Holy Spirit rejects the ego accepts. This is because they are in fundamental disagreement about everything, being in fundamental disagreement about what you are. The ego’s beliefs on this crucial issue vary, and that is why it promotes different moods. The Holy Spirit never varies on this point, and so the one mood He engenders is joy. He protects it by rejecting everything that does not foster joy, and so He alone can keep you wholly joyous.
• Only joy increases forever, since joy and eternity are inseparable.
• The eternal are in peace and joy forever.
• To think like God is to share His certainty of what you are, and to create like Him is to share the perfect Love He shares with you. To this the Holy Spirit leads you, that your joy may be complete because the Kingdom of God is whole.
• The whole glory and perfect joy that is the Kingdom lies in you to give.
• Your divided mind is blocking the extension of the Kingdom, and its extension is your joy.
• In this depressing state the Holy Spirit reminds you gently that you are sad because you are not fulfilling your function as co-creator with God, and are therefore depriving yourself of joy.
• Being a perfect accomplishment, the Sonship can only accomplish perfectly, extending the joy in which it was created, and identifying itself with both its Creator and its creations, knowing They are One.
• The ego’s whole thought system blocks extension, and thus blocks your only function. It therefore blocks your joy, so that you perceive yourself as unfulfilled.
• You do not know your joy because you do not know your own Self-fullness.
• Your Self-fullness is as boundless as God’s. Like His, It extends forever and in perfect peace. Its radiance is so intense that It creates in perfect joy, and only the whole can be born of Its Wholeness.
• You no more recognize what is painful than you know what is joyful, and are, in fact, very apt to confuse the two. The Holy Spirit’s main function is to teach you to tell them apart. What is joyful to you is painful to the ego, and as long as you are in doubt about what you are, you will be confused about joy and pain.
• His Voice will teach you how to distinguish between pain and joy, and will lead you out of the confusion you have made.
• Miracles are in accord with the Will of God, Whose Will you do not know because you are confused about what you will. This means that you are confused about what you are. If you are God’s Will and do not accept His Will, you are denying joy. The miracle is therefore a lesson in what joy is. Being a lesson in sharing it is a lesson in love, which is joy. Every miracle is thus a lesson in truth, and by offering truth you are learning the difference between pain and joy. The Holy Spirit will always guide you truly, because your joy is His. This is His Will for everyone because He speaks for the Kingdom of God, which is joy.
• Consider the kingdom you have made and judge its worth fairly. Is it worthy to be a home for a child of God? Does it protect his peace and shine love upon him? Does it keep his heart untouched by fear, and allow him to give always, without any sense of loss? Does it teach him that this giving is his joy, and that God Himself thanks him for his giving? That is the only environment in which you can be happy. You cannot make it, any more than you can make yourself. It has been created for you, as you were created for it. God watches over His children and denies them nothing. Yet when they deny Him they do not know this, because they deny themselves everything. You who could give the Love of God to everything you see and touch and remember, are literally denying Heaven to yourself.
• Learning is joyful if it leads you along your natural path, and facilitates the development of what you have. When you are taught against your nature, however, you will lose by your learning because your learning will imprison you. Your will is in your nature, and therefore cannot go against it.
• We have said that the Holy Spirit teaches you the difference between pain and joy. That is the same as saying He teaches you the difference between imprisonment and freedom.
• When you have learned that your will is God’s, you could no more will to be without Him than He could will to be without you. This is freedom and this is joy.
• To fulfill the Will of God perfectly is the only joy and peace that can be fully known, because it is the only function that can be fully experienced.
• Whenever you are with a brother, you are learning what you are because you are teaching what you are. He will respond either with pain or with joy, depending on which teacher you are following.
• If God’s Will for you is complete peace and joy, unless you experience only this you must be refusing to acknowledge His Will.
• Your mind is the means by which you determine your own condition, because mind is the mechanism of decision. It is the power by which you separate or join, and experience pain or joy accordingly.
• The miracles we do bear witness to the Will of the Father for His Son, and to our joy in uniting with His Will for us.
• No one created by God can find joy in anything except the eternal; not because he is deprived of anything else, but because nothing else is worthy of him.
• What God and His Sons create is eternal, and in this and this only is Their joy.
• Listen to the story of the prodigal son, and learn what God’s treasure is and yours: This son of a loving father left his home and thought he had squandered everything for nothing of any value, although he had not understood its worthlessness at the time. He was ashamed to return to his father, because he thought he had hurt him. Yet when he came home the father welcomed him with joy, because the son himself was his father’s treasure. He wanted nothing else.
• Can the creations of God Himself take joy in what is not real? And what is real except the creations of God and those that are created like His? Your creations love you as you love your Father for the gift of creation. There is no other gift that is eternal, and therefore there is no other gift that is true. How, then, can you accept anything else or give anything else, and expect joy in return? And what else but joy would you want?
• You made neither yourself nor your function. Your function is to add to God’s treasure by creating yours. His Will to you is His Will for you. He would not withhold creation from you because His joy is in it. You cannot find joy except as God does. His joy lay in creating you, and He extends His Fatherhood to you so that you can extend yourself as He did.
• Through our creations we extend our love, and thus increase the joy of the Holy Trinity
• The Holy Spirit’s curriculum is never depressing, because it is a curriculum of joy. Whenever the reaction to learning is depression, it is because the true goal of the curriculum has been lost sight of.
• The opposite of joy is depression. When your learning promotes depression instead of joy, you cannot be listening to God’s joyous Teacher and learning His lessons.
• To conceive of the body as a means of attack and to believe that joy could possibly result, is a clear-cut indication of a poor learner.
  

Lessons With Joy in the title

• LESSON 93. Light and joy and peace abide in me.
• LESSON 105. God’s peace and joy are mine.
• LESSON 190. I choose the joy of God instead of pain.
  And so again we make the only choice that ever can be made; we choose between illusions and the truth, or pain and joy, or hell and Heaven. Let our gratitude unto our Teacher fill our hearts, as we are free to choose our joy instead of pain, our holiness in place of sin, the peace of God instead of conflict, and the light of Heaven for the darkness of the world.
• LESSON 355. There is no end to all the peace and joy, And all the miracles that I will give, When I accept God’s Word. Why not today?
• LESSON 359. God’s answer is some form of peace. All pain Is healed; all misery replaced with joy. All prison doors are opened. And all sin Is understood as merely a mistake.

From the Workbook for Teachers:

Joy is the inevitable result of gentleness. Gentleness means that fear is now impossible, and what could come to interfere with joy? The open hands of gentleness are always filled. The gentle have no pain. They cannot suffer. Why would they not be joyous? They are sure they are beloved and must be safe. Joy goes with gentleness as surely as grief attends attack. God’s teachers trust in Him. And they are sure His Teacher goes before them, making sure no harm can come to them. They hold His gifts and follow in His way, because God’s Voice directs them in all things. Joy is their song of thanks. And Christ looks down on them in thanks as well. His need of them is just as great as theirs of Him. How joyous it is to share the purpose of salvation!