#12  Joy

                If we ground our thinking in our lives and our bodies, what would be the outcome?  What state of consciousness would we be able to attain?  My answer to that is Joy.

                Before explaining that I first want to make it clear that I’m not talking about the kind of joy that most people would conjure up at the mention of that word.  We’ve created this Christian view of joy that is the absence of pain or suffering or anything we might consider negative.  We’ve created, to steal a line from Corso, a “cotton candy heaven of the poor” version of joy.  This kind of joy melts away at the first sign of trouble or rough weather.  It is a version of joy driven by desire, one that serves our ego’s need for a pure and perfect happiness.  It’s an illusion.

                The kind of joy I’m trying to write about isn’t the absence of suffering and pain but the assimilation and resolution of suffering and pain.  Joy arises not because we desire it, but because we have stopped desiring it.  It doesn’t come from resisting ‘bad’ things, but from avoiding labeling things as either ‘good’ or ‘bad.’   Being able to attain a state of Joy doesn’t mean I am happy, it means that I’ve stopped trying to be happy.  Joy is empty; it is the result of no longer focusing on my emotional connection to events.

                Joy allows us to be fully present and not distracted by the trajectory of events we hope will happen.  Like Zen landscape artists, we are looking at all the possible unfoldings of existence, not just the ones that are central to the moment or confirmed by others.  It seems to me that real knowing must somehow and eventually get to this state.  We have to get out of the many entanglements of the body and the mind to ‘know’ what it means to exist.  Joy is the other side of enlightenment and wisdom, a lightness of being that releases us from the greedy needs of the ego.

                Epistemology is not knowledge about an exterior or objective world. Epistemology is more essentially about knowing ourselves and the limits of what that self can know.  Joy is, to me, the ability to face that limit and that potential without flinching.