You do know by now that happiness and unhappiness reside within you. You adopt one or the other at a given moment. Ups and downs in life are temporary. Your happiness and unhappiness have to do with your belief in time as real.

The awareness that you call happiness or unhappiness has no one name. Temperature has hot and cold, but to what term do happiness and unhappiness belong? Mood may not be quite right, for mood is so flighty. State of Being is not the right term, for your State of Being is solid and underlying no matter how far a-field your perception of it is. Perhaps we can call happiness and unhappiness states of perception.

Certainly, the world hands you occasions for your perception. Certainly, the world leaves packages on your doorstep, and some you call happiness-bearing, and some you call devastating. Nevertheless, your state of perception is not singularly dependent upon what life may expand or constrict you with at a particular moment.

You may have no reason to be unhappy, and yet you feel unhappiness. You perceive it. You well know that there are people around you who have greater reason than you to be unhappy, and yet they have their happiness, yet, on this day or that, you notice that you do not feel happy.

You know that sometimes you have every reason to be happy, and yet, somehow, happiness has lost its thrill for you. Yesterday you felt happy. Today you don't. You changed. You may feel unhappy for no reason at all.

Your life is not to be evaluated according to your sense of happiness. That is a rocky foundation. Your perception is often inaccurate. You have an underlying river that your life depends on, an underlying river that is pure energy, pure love, pure joyousness. And yet you get distracted from this river and look at the little impediments that float upon it and see them as big obstacles, blocking you from your rightful inheritance.

Your perception is mighty. It can cause havoc. It can depress you. Everything in your life is how you see it, how you greet it, how you interpret it.

The purpose of your life isn't happiness. Happiness has its nobility, and yet it is not the purpose of your life. Happiness is too limited a purpose. To give happiness is more like it. Giving happiness expands your boundaries and does not make you the center of your life.

You may have specific purposes in your life, and those specific purposes lead you to greater happiness. You may have a purpose to sail the seas or weave beauty on a loom or climb mountains or grow flowers or be an artist of one kind or another or to sole shoes.

The greater purpose that all share is to come closer to Me. I invite you. Closer to Me is closer to yourself. I reach out My hand to you to raise you to Heaven while you exist on Earth. I invite you to find Truth and to live it.

Perhaps We can say that now you live in the basement. It shelters you. It definitely has its good points. Yet there is a stairway from the basement that will take you to the palace above where sunlight rushes in and where there is room after room of unsurpassed beauty and treasure beyond your imagination.

Although I am with you wherever you are, I am notably with you upstairs in the golden palace. I wait for you to come upstairs and sit with Me.

My metaphor falls short because I am your foundation, so I could say, "Come down to Me," but, of course, I am not your basement. Nor am I your attic.

What are you, and what am I until We become One?