Kindle Notes & Highlights
“participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.”
It may be that we need a village to participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.
Carl Jung said that change requires three things: insight, endurance and action.
seeing,
The authors declare that “the true task in life is to uncover this primordial joy in oneself and then live from its peace, energy, radiant purpose and embodied passion.”
practice endurance, keeping this insight in front of us.
Joy is the power.
What is needed for all of us is to find the way back to what all spiritual traditions know as the essence of reality—the simple joy of being that is the indispensable foundation for all meaningful living and all truly effective action.
We live in a civilization that has lost the essential truth of reality as it has been known in all the mystical and indigenous traditions.
We live in a civilization that has lost the essential truth of reality as it has been known in all the mystical and indigenous traditions.
What is the difference between happiness and joy?
joy is the ultimate nature of reality.
joy is the ultimate nature of reality.
The joy of which we speak is not conditioned by shifts of fate or the play of emotions.
Knowing this makes clear to everyone that the true task of life is to uncover this primordial joy in oneself and then live from its peace, energy...
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the true task of life is to uncover this primordial joy in oneself and then live from its peace, energy, radian...
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lifetime com...
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lifetime com...
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Living in sacred joy not only reflects the truth of absolute reality but is the ultimate achievement a human being is capable of and the ultimate sign that someone has awoken to their fundamental divine nature and its responsibilities in the world.
This radiation of joy has nothing to do with our current banal understandings of happiness but has everything to do with a rigorous discipline of seeing through the illusions that govern and distort human behavior—and seeing through even the illusion of death, because what is revealed in awakening is the inner divine self that no defeat or ordeal or even death itself can touch or destroy.
What has to be undertaken is the challenging and demanding journey towards knowing this viscerally and beyond any doubt.
Horrific experiences need not annihilate your opportunities to live in joy. In fact in some human beings it can be the crucible in which a commitment to live in embodied joy is made final.
deepest
you are
begin with the quality of joy as offered in the mystical Hindu account of Bhrigu Varuni from the Taittiriya Upanishad.
we ask the reader to embrace the truth that joy is the ultimate reality,
Joy does not induce a craving for more, because it is enough.” 3
“flatline culture,” the word flatline synonymous with the reading on the medical heart monitor of a dead or dying patient.
suppression of emotion with which we have been socialized is deleterious to our emotional well-being:
Separation has been the scourge of Western culture, and all spiritual traditions have addressed this delusion throughout human history and into the present moment.
“relationship is the only reality.”
indigenous—is the notion of a separate (false) self that is diametrically opposed to the ancient wisdom of inter-relationship, or as many today are naming it, Interbeing.
Western culture is the ultimate masterpiece of the journey into separation. It celebrates all of the values that keep us partitioned and honors and rewards them luxuriantly.
fundamentalism takes, it limits our creativity, our sensitivity, and the realization of our deeper humanity.
One of the most ubiquitous and offensive fundamentalisms is “the corporate human,” and it has succeeded in enslaving the modern world with market values.
Public elementary and high schools in America have become jungles of crime, poverty, neglect, and ghastly illiteracy as masses of abused and neglected children become “wards” of overworked and underpaid teachers who are incessantly overwhelmed by societal nightmares too gargantuan to be addressed in the classroom.
Facing death directly is the gateway to radical gratitude, radical compassion, and radical love.
Yet another enemy of joy is our socially-enforced fascism of fun. Industrial civilization offers us an endless supply of bread and circuses—a continuous morphine drip of fun that is designed to keep us sufficiently entertained so as not to notice the depth of our inner distress and the extent of the destructiveness that our society is wreaking.
Mirroring the cultural scenario in ancient Rome in the waning days of its empire, we are invited to gorge on an unrelenting routine of bread and circuses which serve to distract, enthrall, hypnotize, and gratify the senses. We are invited to settle for the crumbs of pleasure rather than protesting the painful and formidable injustices foisted upon the Earth community by corporate culture.
By this Frankl meant that joy is the result of our willingness to be taught by suffering and then to translate that anguish into compassion and service in the world.
In this book, we wish to emphasize that alongside our commitment to Sacred Activism and the healing of our personal pain, as Sacred Activists we must embrace and embody radical joy. We also know from our own experiences and that of thousands of other individuals, that our willingness to work with the dark emotions dramatically facilitates our capacity to fully taste the joy that is our human birthright.
But in order to fully return to joy, we must courageously confront our own shadow and the collective shadow of joy’s enemies in our world.
sacred warriorship that perseveres in joy regardless of what the outcome may be.
seem to buy this denial and to continue to exist in a coma about what is really happening, the truth of our situation is that our unconscious is being besieged at all moments by the shadow of what is erupting. This produces in us depression, deep anxiety, despair, and a host of subtle forms of paralysis.
There is no point in pretending that this is not a dire situation, and yet, there remains, even in this, a way of living our innate joy nature. But this cannot be born from anything but the most complete commitment to shadow work.
However, cultivating authentic joy requires courage because it asks everything from us.
Radical joy is radical (a word meaning “going to the root”) because it ensues from the root of our being. It is hard won, not mindlessly acquired, as a result of a commitment to utilizing adversity as an advisor and being willing to live a far more expansive and passionate life than the one corporate culture offers us.
Joy is a subversive power, and the price of joy is relinquishing a life of pursuing happiness in exchange for a life of holding joy as the ultimate nature of reality in the cup of one’s heart.
