© 2021 James Woodward
© 2021 International Urantia Association (IUA)
Happiness and joy take origin in the inner life. You cannot experience real joy all by yourself. [UB 111:4.7]
There are two parts to this teaching, like two folds in the same cloth. The inner life vibrates to frequencies of psyche and spirit. Our bundle of spiritual attitudes (faith, self-forgetfulness, gratitude, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, etc.) determines our outlook and mood, and if we harmonize our psychic and spirit frequencies we vibrate with love.
Happiness and joy are the feeling fruits of loving relationships, the reward bestowed on real persons who desire to do real good for one another. And there are real spirit persons who wish to share in our inner lives, available to all of us according to our capacity for reception—our willingness to align our mindal frequencies and allow our thoughts to be spiritually adjusted. There is, after all, a divine pre-person dwelling in your inner life, a fragment of God bursting with a holy desire to do you good, to share the spiritual bounty of happiness and joy that resides (and resonates) in the circuitry of the divine.
The soul is pure. It is the divinely curated repository of one’s personally acquired truth, beauty, and goodness. No matter the accumulated dross and error of one’s material self, the immortal soul remains uncorrupted. It is the ember of love we cup in fragile hands; fearful it may be snuffed by the ill winds of adversity and betrayal. Not true! The Father of Lights beams that light into us; neither man nor any angel stands against the Almighty Power implanted in the soul. So, we relax in faith and trust, open wide the holy aperture, that the bright divinity may fertilize our growing soul and its radiant love may shine out upon our fellows.
The real happiness and joy we experience is always a shared experience. When we desire to do good for our spirit friends, we realize mutual love in our inner lives; when we desire to do good for our human friends, we likewise realize mutual love in our inner lives, and it then spills into our outer lives. Fill until you spill.