On Happiness and Sorrow

What is sorrow? What is happiness? What causes these feelings, and what constitutes the difference?

Happiness/Joy = Full/Whole/Complete:

• Achieving a desired pursuit, goal, or desire
• Complete, connected, united, content, fulfilled, satisfied, fullness

Sorrow/Grief = Anything less than full:

• Failing to complete, accomplish or achieve a desired pursuit, goal, or desire
• cut short, seperated, longing, incomplete, short-cutting, empty
• experienced individually or for another

Inside each of us at the core of our conscience and Light of Christ is an entity that informs us both before and after we make a choice if that choice will lead to greater completion, or greater in-completion and thus greater misery. 

Sins shortcut us in the moment and cause a loss of blessings that can never be re-given, and ultimately shortcut us of future blessings that could be ours. Sins are actions designed for immediate self-gratification that either lower another's happiness, or prohibit us from ever finding the fulfillment we are seeking for or both.

However, on the contrary, as we keep commandments we not only feel completion and satisfaction in the moment, but we also are given blessings and opportunities to become even more complete in the future.

Here are some examples of Completion, hence Joy, as well as In-completion, hence Misery:

Example 1)

• Intelligences were filled with joy upon being combined with spiritual element. We shouted for joy upon the proposal of becoming even more complete by being given temporal element in addition to our spiritual element. (Job 38:7)

Example 2)

• In the Spirit Prison the grief, torment and anguish that is experienced is the sorrow of the damned. Those who are damned are cut short of the blessings of freedom and completion available to those in Spirit Paradise. Their sorrow is the realization that they will never be able to be whole and complete until they mend their ways and accept Christ as their Saviour. It is also the torture of reliving their life of pleasure and disobedient deeds.

Example 3)

• A single man sleeps with a single woman. At first it appears that the man and the woman are complete and therefore happy and fulfilled. But come morning time the man goes his own way as does the woman. Now neither are complete. Yet a child is born to the woman in her incomplete stage. And because of this neither child, nor mother will experience a fullness of joy without a married husband and father in the home.

In the pre-mortal realm God set forth the terms and conditions for us to receive blessings and be filled with happiness. We agreed to these set laws by keeping our first estate. In this life when blessings are withheld it is because we have broken a law of Heaven and therefore God is not entitled to give us a blessing in our non-adherent state. (D&C 130:20-21).

God has also set in place covenants and contracts that we must enter into if we desire to have a fullness of blessings both now and hereafter. Covenants bring blessings now and 10-fold hereafter. Contracts bind us only temporally. But Covenants bind us both temporally and spiritually.

2 Nephi 2:25   We are here to experience joy, and be joyful

2 Nephi 27:3   Our soul continues to remain empty as we feed the natural man

Moses 7:28-29,37-41   God and the Heavens weep when the children of men reject Christ's suffering and thereby must suffer themselves

Moses 1:39   God's work and glory is for us to be happy

4 Nephi 1:44   Greatest sorrow experienced is for the sins of others (the sins of the world)

The Atonement is designed to bring about happiness, completion, fullness, perfection, satisfaction, and the prospect of being finished.