Love, Joy And The Pursuit Of Happiness

According to the United States Declaration of Independence “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are the inalienable birthrights of every human being given to us by our Creator, God, Source, the Divine.

Sadly, I find very few people to be successful in their pursuit of happiness. The same is true for finding love and joy. It seems many are merely stumbling through life trying to find it.

A teacher once told me life is like school. For some of us it’s like kindergarten – easy, uncomplicated, and lots of fun. For others it’s like graduate school with lots of difficulties and challenges to overcome.

Searching for joy, love and happiness does seem to be a ‘wild goose chase’ for many people. It truly is like chasing wild animals. The faster we run after it, the more it seems to flee. I don’t believe joy, love and happiness can be found. Well, at least not in the ways that many of us are hoping to find it.

Like happiness, the right to love is also the natural inheritance of every person. The well-known channeled text, A Course in Miracles, delves into the idea of love from a spiritual perspective. It states that it is impossible to teach love. Instead, the goal should be to remove the blockages or obstacles we have to allowing love’s presence in our lives.

I have seen repeated evidence of this in doing readings for many years now. Certain reading themes are repetitive and common themes are ‘finding love,’ or the ‘lack of love,’ or ‘loss of love.’ In all these readings one thing always becomes very clear: love itself is not an ‘out there’ thing. It is also not something that can be received from another person or thing.

In readings, Spirit will often say, “Love is not a feeling.” This one initially took me a while to understand myself, until I realized that love is in fact an intrinsic quality of being. It is already within each of us. We refer to it as the Higher Self, the Soul, or the Spirit. No one is ever separated from this innate love because it is an intrinsic aspect of our very being.

Spiritual love, derived from love intelligence, is nonconditional, nonpersonal benevolence. It is the love of being loving, with no strings attached, just for the sake of being what God wants us to be ~ Thomas Hora

The conclusion I’ve come to is that love itself is an unconditional acceptance of ourselves and of others, as we are and they are, without needing anyone to be different. Love is the ability to see the truth of ourselves and others without an overshadowing ego identity. Love is a universal experience.

Now, what we typically think of as ‘love’ is not love at all. This idea of ‘love’ should rather be called ‘like.’ To like something or someone. Liking someone is the emotional experience when a person is behaving the way we think they should be behaving.

Liking someone is typically associated with their appearance, their behavior, their status, or whatever we believe we can get from the other person. This is not what true love is seeking. Real love is to love for the sake of loving.

In certain religious and spiritual traditions one finds concepts like ‘love your neighbor as yourself,’ or ‘love your enemy.’ This the very reason I no longer view love as an emotion because it is impossible to have the emotional experience of ‘like’ toward an enemy, or an unpleasant neighbor! So, love must therefore be something different.

However, I do believe that love itself has some emotion attached to it. When love moves through human consciousness it is called joy. This is because true, unconditional love carries no baggage. It doesn’t require others to be a certain way.

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude  ~ Denis Waitley

Some people are afraid that if they love this way, they might lose something, which may be true in the short-term. For example, sometimes the most loving thing we can do is let go of something that is already struggling to get away.

In modern metaphysics we often talk about the Law of Attraction, which states that we attract our life experiences based on our state of consciousness. Therefore, if we are in a state of love, we cannot lose anything. Yes, we may have to release certain things, but only so that we can then attract something that is broader, more meaningful, and more significant.

So, where do we find love, joy and happiness? I believe it is found within. We must choose to look at our lives, and look at our personal stories, and make the choice to love, to be joyful and to be happy. Even if that choice means that we need to release certain things that no longer serve us.

It does not have to be extremely difficult or painful, but for some of us it will be. The lesson of true love does seem to come more easily for some, while it is much more challenging for others. Some of us are in kindergarten, while some of us are in grad school. No matter what your love scenario may be, know that it is your inalienable right. It is part of your spiritual being.