Happy people

September 16, 2022 | 18 comments

It is not happy people who are thankful. It is thankful people who are happy.

~ Unknown

18 thoughts on “Happy people”

    1. Hi Cláudia , Thank you for commenting. I’ve recently moved to Portugal from Los Angeles and would love to connect with a fellow CSer. 914.113.226 is my number (Nesit Botica) if you want to connect on WhatsApp.

  1. It has sure worked in my long life when I’m not happy and things don’t seem to be going well, to just sit down and think about what I am grateful for, really does lead to peace and joy!

  2. Happiness is the attitude of gratitude! So grateful for the inspiration, comments and articles that come from SpiritView. “Love reflected in love.” Thank you Evan and all. 🙂

  3. I agree. Gratitude opens up thought wide to see more of reality, God’s reality for us. When I feel stuck in a mortal viewpoint, feeling off or having a sense of lacking joy or being disturbed and distracted by dark thoughts, the world seems small and dim. It seems hard to feel grateful at those times, But so worth it to take that leap back into God’s arms (not that we can ever be out of His arms, only seemingly so).

    Hymns are very helpful to return me to a natural sense of joy and gratitude. Nothing on the outside has to change, just the shift in awareness. This was from Sunday’s online service of the Mother Church from the solo by Rebecca Minor called, Faith As A Mustard Seed:
    “Oh! So open wide and let faith pour in.
    God will furnish the strength within
    To bar up your doors against bold intrusions.
    For faith as a mustard seed will dispel life’s illusions.”

    1. Thank you for your comments Rose, and appreciate you sharing words from the solo. I sometimes struggle with the phrase having “faith as a grain of mustard seed” so this was very helpful. An article, “Evil exposed and dissolved” by Heike Arneth also talks about this. She adds “Christ Jesus told his disciples, “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you” (Matthew 17:20). Is it perhaps our dispositions and perspectives that are these mountains to be removed? If our faith is sufficient to make us want to leave material views more and more willingly, and to do so in order to take more spiritual views, then we will understand more clearly the insubstantiality of seemingly frightening situations on the road of our lives.” Heike also mentions that “we have to lift thought above matter, rather than trying to see the truth from the old landmark.”
      https://journal.christianscience.com/shared/view/2n1dz2weby8

      1. Excellent article for this topic , so thank you J. I’ve saved it for further reading as I begin a weeks holiday . Thank you Evan for inspiring us again. Much appreciated …( and necessary for me .)

  4. By sheer coincidence my wife and I watched a wonderful travelogue film last evening entitled “Happy People”. It covers a year in the life of the mere 300 people who inhabit a small village in the Siberian wilderness reachable only by helicopter & boat. They are a society untouched by modernity, daily routines hardly untouched over the centuries. My takeaway is “they are truly thankful people who are happy”! Check it out……we borrowed the film from our local library.

  5. When I taught a class on Deployment for COMPASS (a spouse-to-spouse mentoring program for Navy spouses) depression, confusion and just plain missing your loved one is a common feeling. I came up with a little saying: “Gratitude is the attitude that gives you altitude.” I received many thanks for it. I knew from experience that gratitude brings healing and true happiness.

  6. The following thought came to me: Gratitude is a healing aspect And Gratitude for a healing and for all the Good God gives us every moment make us really happy!
    Thank you very much dear Evan for this lively SpiritView Blog !♡

  7. .
    .. back in 1980 a Canadian gentleman, Geoffrey Barratt, was Editor of the Christian Science periodicals and I’ve just discovered that I’d saved his own editorial of October 27 in that year, titled “,,,beyond mentalizing matter.” His opening lines read: “The basis of Christian Science Mind healing is clearly defined in the writings of Mary Baker Eddy. An understanding of God as infinite Mind, Spirit, Love, is fundamental, and the methods of Christian Science are spiritual and Christly. This teaching goes beyond simply rearranging or reshaping mortal human thought. It requires putting off so-called human thought and accepting the one infinite divine Mind as the only Mind here and now.

    “The mystic, or philosopher, or human mind healer may attempt to merely mentalize existence. He may go as far as believing that thoughts and things don’t belong to two different unconnected territories: the mental (activity going on in the brain) and the physical (existence outside the mental). On that basis, he may advocate one form or another of thought manipulation as a means of improving outward conditions. But being, in the Christianly scientifically view, isn’t mortal at all, either mentally or physically so. Existence isn’t broken up into notions and beliefs on the one side, and material objects on the other. This is Mrs. Eddy’s statement of the bedrock spiritual fact that is demonstrated in Christian Science healing: “All that really exists is the divine Mind and its idea, and in this Mind the entire being is found harmonious and eternal.” (S&H 151:26-28). This truth is the one and only conscious being going on here and now.”

    Meanwhile John Hargreaves in the U.K. had become a listed CS practitioner just the year before in 1979, and had been writing for all the periodicals since the early 60’s. There are also two published volumes of his correspondence with students worldwide over the years. Here is his response to a correspondent in 2001: “You are never trying to get rid of something you have never been. Your divinity is the only fact here, and has never included any sort of mortal sense. Personal sense, being non-sense (without entity), does not drop something and find something else. Your Mind never thought in these terms. That which has always lived as the One divine ‘I’ never knew something to dissolve or change.”

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