I've got work to do

Just started reading Paramhansa's How to be Happy all the time. I love this guy, and what he has to say. Except what he says about joking, I don't buy that. Making fun of other people is wrong, but finding humor in the self and in everyday situations seems somewhat divine to me.

One great quote from page 56-

Give both the good and the bad that you do to God. Of course, that means you should not deliberately do things that are bad, but when you cannot help yourself because of too-strong habits, feel that God is acting through you. Make Him responsible. He likes that! For He wants you to realize that it is He who is dreaming this experience.

As long as you are making the effort, God will never let you down!

I think this goes back to the Indigo Girls' concept of "fault". We are all Gods that have placed a shard of our consciousness here on earth so that all of our divine knowledge won't cause preconceptions about all that we can learn while embodied here on earth. We all planned likely probabilities for our lives before birth from this God-state. Upon death we reconnect with the temporarily forgotten parts of ourselves, and are able to look back at our lives in perfect honesty with no regrets, and reflect on how everything went.

There is no "good" or "bad", just forward and backward. And going backward merely means extra forward, nothing else. So we must never feel bad about what we do now or in a past life, because feeling bad has only one outcome- more feeling bad, more going backward. Happiness is an internal choice made completely independent of outside influences. In fact, it can never come from without, only fleeting pleasure results, never the building blocks of true joy.