Corresponding Text Section
Chapter 22: True Reason and the Final Question
8. Desiring Totally to Have Always (The Constancy of Joy)
The power of the desire of the Children of the Divine remains the proof that they are mistaken who perceive themselves as helpless. Desire what you truly will, and you will behold it, and know that it is real. Every thought has the power to bind or release. And none can leave the thinker’s mind, or leave them unaffected.
Are thoughts, then, dangerous? To bodies, yes. The thoughts that seem to kill are those that teach those thinking them that they can be killed. And so they seem to die because of what they learned. They go from apparent life to seeming death, the final proof that they valued the inconstant more than Constancy. Surely they thought they wanted Happiness. Yet they did not desire It because It was the Truth, and therefore must be constant.
The Constancy of Joy is a Condition quite alien to your current understanding. Yet if you could even imagine what It must be, you would desire It wholly although you do not understand It. The Constancy of Happiness has no exceptions, and no change of any kind. It is as unshakable as the Love of the Divine for Its Creation. As certain in Its Vision as Its Creator is in what It knows, It beholds Everything and sees that what is the same is the same. The Eternal remains forever eternal, and all that is temporal is gone, and with it all dreams and illusions, including those of beginnings and endings, and time and space. The Constancy of Happiness sees not the ephemeral, for It desires that Everything be like Itself, and sees It so. What is temporal and therefore not part of the Eternal is not real and so It sees it not. Nothing has power to confound Its Constancy, because Its Own Desire for Truth cannot be shaken.
The Constancy of Joy comes as surely unto those who see that the answer to the final question is necessary to truly answer the rest, as Peace must come to those who choose to heal and not to judge. Reason will tell you that you cannot ask for real Happiness inconstantly. For if what you desire you receive, and Happiness is constant, then you need truly ask for It only once to have It always. And if you do not have It always, being what It is, then you did not yet desire It wholly, and therefore did not ask for It truly. For everyone must eventually ask for what they desire if they believe their request holds some promise of the power of giving it or bringing it about. They may be wrong about what they ask for, where, and of what or whom. Yet they will ask because desire is a request, an asking for, and made by one whom the Divine Itself will never fail to answer.
The Divine has already given Its Children all that they wholly desire or will. But the Divine cannot give what Its Children are uncertain of. For they do not wholly desire it while they remain uncertain, and the Divine’s Giving would be incomplete if It were not received. You who complete Its Will and are Its Happiness, whose will is as powerful as Its – a Power that is not lost in your dreams and illusions – think carefully why it should be that you have not yet fully decided how you would answer the final question. Your answer to the other questions of sane perspective has made it possible to help you be at least partially sane. And yet it is the final question that asks if you are really willing to be wholly sane in your decision of perspective.
The Holy Instant is the Divine’s Appeal to you to recognize what It has already given you. Here is the great Appeal to Reason, the Awareness of what is always there to see, the Happiness that can be wholly yours. Here is the constant Peace you will experience forever. Here is revealed to you what denial had denied. For in the Real World and its entrance through the Holy Instant the final question is already answered, and what you truly ask for, given. Here is the future now, for time is powerless as a result of your total desire for what will never change. For in the Holy Instant you have asked that nothing stand between the holiness of your relationships and your awareness of their holiness.
