Our Fallacies

Joy regulates the world. Joy shapes your life; you choose what gives you the most joy. All beings do that. Actually! Our world and our lives, however, reflect this inadequately. The reasons for this are manifold and we hardly believe we can do anything about it. It is time to honestly question our beliefs. What fears guide us? One of these fundamental misconceptions is that there is not enough for everyone. Not enough money, not enough time, not enough love, whatever. For this reason, we believe we have to be better than others in order to get a piece of the pie. If we don’t succeed so easily, we at least choose what causes us the least trouble – an insufficient starting position for joy.

Joy and Loss

Taken as a whole, we are talking here about the blessings of polarity or duality. The world we know consists of many different things and contexts that we can recognise as pairs of opposites or polarities. Poles are always two, dual also means two different things. Where there is joy, there is also suffering, where there is possession, there is also loss, etc. The attachment, the love of people and things, of the life we know, has to be let go of at some point, which is sometimes not easy at all. This gives rise to fear of loss and possessiveness, which can make our lives miserable. Sooner or later we will let go. But every loss, every change has the potential for something new, can even mean liberation. If we focus a little more on the possibilities that arise, we will never completely lose joy. Grief is a form of joy about experiences that are now gone.

The Essence of Duality

Joy is the driving force of life. It is the positive pole, the thesis opposite the negative pole of the antithesis of unhappiness. Joy makes life easy, unhappiness makes life hard. How does it work with opposites, why is the world so contradictory? The highest level of duality is that of existence and nothingness. If existence is to be all-encompassing, without limitations, then it must also include its opposite, nothingness. Otherwise it remains imperfect, incomplete and will collapse. Without nothingness, what is is not. If we negate the negative, we negate the whole. So also the positive. And so it is with all pairs of opposites. (The sign of Yin-Yang points to this connection by showing a small dot of the other colour in each of the two parts of the circle). Even the origin of everything accepts its opposite, its non-existence, without hesitation.

Joy and Unity

The dilemma of joy and suffering wants to be mastered in our lives. We have been asking ourselves since the beginning of time if there is a solution. Something that goes beyond duality? What could that be? If all the world has two sides that exist only in connection, doesn’t that point to unity? Chinese philosophy speaks of the void from which everything springs. The monotheistic approach says that God created the world. Materialists believe that there is nothing but matter that develops according to its inherent laws, the theory of evolution. However, no one can satisfactorily explain the beginning of existence without resorting to concepts such as eternity, intelligence and order. We can also call it mystery. In times of distress and difficulty, may we remember that beyond the challenging polarities there is an existence of pure joy: that of oneness with everything. Ultimately, this is the level where joy can come to us in all its fullness. This is the position that God holds. We do not need to argue about the question of the beginning. More productive is the approach of looking together for ways to improve the here and now.

Joy and Guilt

From the perspective of the spiritual world, we are in a virtual reality in the material world. We can believe we are a limited, physical, mortal being. We can believe we are dependent on money, possessions, status. All these ideas have meaning only as long as we believe in them. In reality, i.e. from the higher viewpoint of our eternal life, they are meaningless. Everything we experience on the material side of the world exists for the focused perception of our desire to learn. Our life here enables us to understand more deeply the aspects of reality, i.e. eternal truth, that we selected before entering the body. In soul contracts, blessed by God, we compose our learning experience in the physical world before incarnation, involving the beings incarnated together with us. Everything that happens is mutually agreed upon, even the things that then give us a headache. What we perceive here as mistakes are meaningful steps towards higher realisation of the truth. Guilt does not exist from God’s point of view, it is an earthly invention and has a controlling function here.

Joy and its Perversion

Some people find pleasure in things that are generally considered abhorrent. Is it justifiable to apply our own standards to them? Can we say with absolute certainty that we could never think such things ourselves, let alone do them? It is indeed the case that the complete potential for all kinds of attitudes is inherent in us. Whether we realise certain aspects of our fund of possibilities or not depends on a large number of factors. Our world is not only composed of complementary poles in harmonious coexistence, there also exist contradictory opposites that seem to cancel each other out. We judge these contradictions according to our understanding of values. We can accept some of them, but with others we build up rejection. Every society elevates its values as the only correct ones and condemns deviations from them with exclusion and persecution. We then speak of crime, abuse and violence.

With a conventional understanding of values, it is difficult for us to believe that everything that happens is also God’s will. We should therefore remind ourselves once again that our material world is in a certain sense a virtual reality. What happens here has no absolute effect. Ultimately, our spiritual substance cannot be affected. In the same way, however, it is permissible and sensible to protect each other from harm and to prosecute crimes. Our society cannot function if there is too much destructiveness in it. There arises a responsibility to ensure that we can all live in peace and freedom without worry. Analogously, we can easily understand that the existence of matter would be impossible if there were too much antimatter. The latter must remain the exception, just as destructive tendencies in society must be limited.

There are explanatory systems to the negative sides of life. In Hinduism, for example, there is Brahma, the god of creation, and Shiva, the god of destruction. Here, a constructive relationship is created to both aspects of reality. What begins to exist will also pass away. We can see how meaningful this is in the example of the resolution of symptoms of illness.

Joy and Forgiveness

When we face injustice in life, we may develop antipathy or even hatred. This challenge is particularly difficult to overcome. Joy seems unattainable and we make demands for punishment and compensation. Only forgiveness can enable us to find our way back to the original joy. As soon as we love our “enemies”, we are free, we are redeemed.