Joy and the Reactive Emotions: A Personal Illustration

An attentive reader pointed out that in my previous blog post I wrote about joy as if it were somehow different from other emotions. I am happy to have a chance to write about this again, and hopefully to make it more clear.

First, a review of the levels of existence it is possible to pay attention to from gross to subtle:

outside world / body / emotions / thoughts / joy

Given the alternatives, that inner "joy" is a pretty tantalizing option.

In the continuum, "emotions" refers to feelings we experience as a result of having desires. When I get what I want I experience feelings I like. Hooray! When I do not get what I want I experience feelings I do not like. Nertz!

"Joy" refers to the feeling of life itself. Whether the outside world is dishing up what we want, or it is dishing up what we do not want, we have the option to give our attention to the pure joy of being.

Here is my experience. I do not always talk about my experience, because I have had some disappointments in life, and I do not want to make you sad. However, I want to give you a real life example to wrap your understanding around. At the end, you will understand what I am saying, whether or not you agree with it.

I tried to become a mother for many years. I did not believe there was anything that could stand in my way. I was open-minded, and determined. I started looking into adoption when I was unmarried at 33. A trusted confidante urged me to table adoption and focus on marriage, and I did table adoption for awhile. I met my husband when I was 36. I chose a man who wanted to be a father. We happily planned names and dreamed futures for our family. After a couple of years: doctors, since we were already not young. Then we were back on the adoption path. It took a few years and many thousands of dollars to bring us to Thailand and a son who was ours for less than 48 hours. I did not get what I wanted. It was out-of-body level devastating to watch the case worker walk out the door of our hotel with my little son, knowing that I would not ever see him again.

Never more than during that experience did my knowledge of the levels of my being come to my aid and bring me solace. I recalled my yoga teacher, Nishit Patel, teaching me that all of our desires can be categorized into desires to eat, reproduce, sleep, and survive. It helped me have compassion for the degree of pain I was in, seeing the 25% of humanity in me, the desire to reproduce, crushed in an instant.

But that was also when I noticed the amazing thing. By choosing to think myself into the place of the compassionate observer within myself, what I felt in addition to crushing devastation was utter amazement at the force of my own aliveness. In that amazement was acceptance, and in that acceptance was something like a thrill of life, a joy. I experienced myself on many levels during that disappointment.

At the time, I recalled this story of profound acceptance, and it gave me permission to be resilient when something else within me told me I should be inconsolable:

In a buddhist village a young girl got pregnant out of wedlock. She protected her boyfriend by telling her parents that a monk had raped her. The parents took out their disappointment on the monk, who said only, "Is that so?" And when the child was born, they took him to the monk, whose life had already been ruined by this rumor of being quite a bad guy.

"Here is your son," the parents told the monk.
"Is that so?" the monk answered, accepting the child.

The monk and the child lived together happily for five years. They ate and laughed and loved together day after day.

Then, the girl who was the child's mother got jealous. She saw what a wonderful child was hers, and she wanted it back, so she told the truth about her boyfriend, who was now more mature and employed. And the family went back to the monk, and apologized.

"It is not your child after all," the parents told the monk.
"Is that so?" the monk answered handing over the child.

Whether we judge our experience to be good or bad, or right or wrong, there is a joy of love and aliveness that exists within us. We are not beholden to pain, misery, and bondage. We can feel joy whether or not we get what we want in this ever-changing world.

I find the wisdom that this joy exists reflected in many places. It appears in popular music, like the song "Happy" by Pharrell Williams:

[Verse 2:]
Here come bad news talking this and that, yeah,
Well, give me all you got, and don’t hold back, yeah,
Well, I should probably warn you I’ll be just fine, yeah,
No offense to you, don’t waste your time
Here’s why
Because I'm happy.

The wisdom that this joy exists appears in meditation lectures such as this excerpt from a lecture by Swami Rama [1925 to 1996]

From "How to Tread the Path of Superconscious Meditation" about 19:45 to 22:06

What is the goal of life?
If you do not know what the goal of life is, meditation, contemplation will be not useful.
You should know what the goal of life is.
You all say the goal of life is to attain God; that's not true. This is hearsay. You have heard it. You have read the book.
The goal of life is not to attain God.

The goal of life is to be free from all pains, and miseries, and bondages. A state which is free from all pains, bondages, and miseries, that is the goal of life.
To remain constantly in a state of happiness is the goal of life. To be happy and full of love is the goal of life. 

Now, if you are not happy and you attain God, you see God, and you know God, it is of no use. If you are with God all the time and you are not happy, that is not a sign of seeing God.

And if you are happy, you don't need God. You see.

So, what do you mean by God?
God means that state of attainment where you are free from all miseries, pains, and bondages.
Yes, I am not Non-believer of God. But, if I believe in God and have full faith in God, then I should be free from all pains, miseries and bondages. And if I am still in the clutches of pains and bondages and miseries then I do not know much about God.

My story is not one of a "constant state of happiness," or attaining "the goal of life."  It is a glimmer of joy in a time of profound disappointment. Over the years, it has given me a lot of hope.

Focusing on Strengths Is an Exercise in Choosing Your Thoughts

We are all living in two worlds. One is a world of things. The other is a world of thoughts. The world of things is material, physical. The world of thoughts is immaterial, subtle. Each world has its own pleasures and miseries.

I like to think of life as a zip-line I can ride from the material to the immaterial when the going gets tough. I also ride my zip line out to the material when my thinking process needs taming. (Smell of coffee, taste of dried fish, finger tips on keyboard--thumb, forefinger, middle finger, ring finger, pinky finger, fingertips are especially reassuring body spots--sound of running water, light of the computer screen. Okay. All is well here.) The idea of a zip-line adds a little whee to a subject that I worry will put you to sleep before I've had a chance to explain how it is possible to find a reliable happiness within us.

Attention can travel into increasing subtlety from the things outside us, to our body, emotions, and thoughts. Thought-choosing activities, such as focusing on strengths, zip us along that line in the direction of the subtle. When we choose our thoughts, we dis-identify with them. Choosing what to think, and dis-identifying from our thoughts, is inherently joyful.

Here is a little exercise to try. I want you to have an experience that will more clearly communicate what I mean when I say "inherently joyful."

First, ask yourself: What am I thinking?
Notice what you are thinking, and find words to label or describe your thoughts.

Then, ask yourself: What am I not thinking?
See what comes to mind.
Notice that now you are thinking it.

Choose a thought you particularly like, and think it.

Notice how it feels to choose what to think. This is not the admonishment to whistle a happy tune. It is an invitation to notice the feeling of choosing a happy tune. I am also interested in experiments choosing to whistle unhappy tunes. Feel free to write and let me know how that goes. My guess is that the choosing is the important part.

The Taittriya Upanishad provides a model that shows why thought choosing has the tendency to delight. It describes a five-layered model of human being called the Kosha Model. By choosing our thoughts, we realize that we are not our thoughts, and this realization lands us, identity-wise, in that silence that lies between thoughts. The Kosha Model calls this place the ananda-maya kosha, the joy layer. If we view ourselves as being comprised of layers, like an onion, the outermost  layer is the world our senses perceive, then the body, the emotions, the thoughts, and there, more subtle than thoughts, we find the layer of joy. This joy has a somewhat different flavor from the joys we experience engaging the world around us.

In the outside world of things, we are pleased when we get what we want. We are displeased when we do not get what we want. The outside world is a fleeting thing, full of loss. Stuff breaks; people die. And tend to be in it for themselves.

I do not remember where I read that "getting what we want" in the world is about a 50/50 proposition. I suspect it was The Art of Joyful Living by Swami Rama. The chapter "The Game of Black and White" in Alan Watts' The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are takes on this topic, too.  The idea is that the mind constantly balances our perception of dualities such as pain and pleasure, success and failure, winning and losing.

So, when we succeed, the mind moves the bar to keep us at a 50/50 ratio of success and failure. If a game is too easy, the mind loses interest in it.  I am recalling reading that the mind actually creates our experience of "reality" out of these perceived contrasts. This is a little bit different from the advice to seek balance. This is saying, well, you are going to have it anyway. This is saying, statistically, no matter what you do, the world will disappoint you half of the time. It is a normal thing to reach for success, and pleasure, and cool doohickeys. However, if we are investing all our happy chits in fame and doohickeys, we end up running in place.

So, here's what to do when your doohickey breaks, when your buddy moves far away, when someone else gets the girl.

Focusing on strengths is a more fully engaging thought-choosing exercise than the quickie I gave you above. Here again is basic strengths focusing:

1. Recall an experience that you would describe as good, one that you are proud of.

2. Ask yourself, "What positive trait did I bring to this experience?" Or ask yourself, "What is good about me that this experience shows?" Take your time finding the right words.

For many of us, thinking of our strengths is unfamiliar and takes some effort. That is good! It will pull our attention more to the task, and we will be landed more firmly in that happy place, the ananda-maya kosha. That happy place of identity that is more subtle than thoughts.

Notice how it feels to choose what to think.

Happy zipping!