ABOUT THE PRESS

JOY

One has joy because the spirit has graced them. Inside joy, love and warmth live in silent expansion. But it is not just human beings that experience joy. We would like the reader to know that joy is a property of angels also. We say property as speaking of the properties of a metal. For joy is a property of all pure being, and as such, it is most fully experienced when one is awake to themselves in the deepest sense. The angels differentiate joy from ordinary human happiness then. For joy is experienced in the immediacy of ones’ knowledge that they are actually alive. To know that one is alive requires conscious participation with others, so that each individual may be reflected back to themselves by those around them. As such, joy is gift. It does not judge, it does not fear. It is the heart’s expression of delight in finding that the world itself has a heart that is willing to come to meet it, to commingle.

Joy is like light then. It is quick. It darts into shadows and illuminates them. It finds laughter where other finds pathos, yet it is great respecter of pathos. It is a great respecter of all of life’s moods. Without joyous experience, human beings would die. For what lives in life as the expansive, ever effervescent illuminations of light, animates the very blood of every individual—and blood is the home of the “I” as it finds and enlightens the heart. The angels would like all who read this book to think on joy as that communion with the spirit which brings deep understanding. It is like a fine rain in sunlight. It cleans, and freshens. It purifies . it is a quality of the well-lived life. For in joy there is something that consumes the one who experiences it. Not as thinking consumes one, not as deep pain consumes one, but as an alchemical tincture is created out of light and the elements. The air around a joyous person is lighter , cleaner, sweeter. The atmosphere is one in which silence is permeated with a quiet aspiration that seems to rise into the sky, as both an illumination, and a greeting.

We say these things about joy to remind the reader of something they may not have felt in some time. For it is true that real joy is harder to find in the current time than it was in time’s past. To a certain extent this is because joy, in the past, was aligned with nature. A certain equilibrium between mankind and nature allowed for a man or woman to be buoyed by nature, to be penetrated by the qualities and essences of nature in such a way that its essences moved in the soul and illuminated it. In the current century however, joy of this kind has been replaced by activity. And activity is all too often a distraction than a living experience of life itself.It was at the time that cities came, that joy began to fade. We do not mean to say here that one cannot find joy in a city. But we do mean to say that is more difficult. One must align one’s self, not with what would naturally enter through an experience of city life, but with the spirit itself. One must read the great books! One must study the great thinkers! One must look past the daily motion of traffic and business for a time, and move into silence, and wait for that silence to be permeated by the joy of the spirit itself. For more and more it will be necessary to be permeated by the spirit, (whether one lives in the city or the country) in order to experience joy.

One must be open to the world inside the world.When joy comes in this way, one may then turn around and infuse one’s daily activities with a sense of joy. Every movement one makes, every activity one undertakes, will be suffused with a sense of the experience of joy, and the absolute knowledge and certainty that the spirit is the life of human beings. So when the spirit lights up consciously in a man or a woman, there is joy, When the spirit enlivens and awakens the heart there is joy. It is in this spirit that the story of the Prodigal son becomes a celebration. For the Prodigal comes home to himself , and in so doing, is present to his spiritual family.

Now, we would like to say the following with reference to the phenomenon of joy: It is ,an experience that is timeless. That is to say, that when one is in real joy one is able to sense that time is neither present nor absent. Time is , instead, illuminated. It is possible, in real joy, which is the presence of the spirit in its immediacy and it’s eternality, to experience one’s self as inside the beings of time. As such, it is further possible to experience the movement of the currents of time. And it is possible to experience the future as that which has never been touched by human failings. There is, then a newness in joy, a kind of familiar unfamiliarity. And it is also possible, when the future is illuminated in this way, to experience the past as that which holds the future’s potential inside it, untouched. Time then, becomes an intimate part of one’s experience when one is in joy. But not as an observer from outside, rather as an active participant. And the essential joyousness of time’s promise is in the palpable sense of it as a promise fulfilled.

Now we do not say that everyone has all of these experiences when they are in joy. But we say that they are all possible experiences as one hones one’s sensing capacities through spiritual work. We also say that every human being has, at some time or other in their life , perhaps for many it is in childhood, an experience which is of this kind, and from which they derive an idea of what is later referred to as “happiness.” Unfortunately, earthly happiness is only the palest shadow of spiritual joy. And the failure of human beings to differentiate between these two has led to extraordinary difficulties for many, many people, perhaps most people. Earthly happiness simply does not contain the sense of fulfillment that spiritual joy does. It is this schism between joy and earthly pursuits of happiness that plays into many of the illnesses of modern humanity. We speak here of drug addiction, of drinking, of sexuality without intimacy, and more. We understand that these things are inevitable in a culture which is split from its own origins, but we would like it very much if humanity could come to understand that what they are actually hoping to experience when they pursue these things, is the joy of knowing themselves as a spiritual reality, commingled with the most high and sublime spiritual beings. These beings have such a profound love to pour into each person, that it would change the world if only a small number were able to become fully conscious of it.

We would like to help you understand too that joy is not without its component of grief. That is to say that in every moment of joy, there is, as it were, a drop of grief that suffuses the experience. This must be so. Without this grief , which gives a sober quality to what one is feeling, a person experiencing joy would leave the earth and not return. And joy is, in its deepest reality, an experience of communion, an experience of love, taking form inside the “I” as it experiences its true relationship to the world .