Magic 501: The Joy of Being
Most of us aren’t walking around experiencing any particular joy in existing—in fact, it’s closer to say that most of us are looking for a way to be comfortably distracted from what’s happening in our existence. Not actively joyful, no enjoyment of existence, just something that feels nice in an otherwise tedious or even shit existence. Bills, jobs, relationships, the state of the world, and every other thing weighing the consciousness down until we are often thrilled to find something else to do.
We have given up on joy, settling for something that isn’t active misery. This is because most of us don’t know how joy is to be found, nor do we know what we must give to be joyful. An enjoyable distraction is much easier, much more available, and typically pretty cheap or affordable. We notice the diminishing returns on our distraction, and jump from habit to habit, from distraction to distraction, chasing that same feeling of distraction and enjoyment. Our craft supplies, our game libraries, our libraries are a graveyard, a place we mourn distraction and enjoyment’s inevitable disappearance.
Joy is not an enjoyable distraction. Joy is an energy and the domain of a lwa. It is also a state of being, and specifically a way of experiencing being. It might be invoked by something outside of you, but the conditions in you have to allow joy. Joy does not come from outside of you, even if the conditions outside you might invoke it. In fact, joy is something that is in you: a capacity you win from yourself.
That lack of joy is evidence of a divorce inside the person’s soul. A lack of joy is evidence that they are alienated from themselves. By trauma, by what they have been taught about themselves, by expectation and judgement, by the memory of others or by the conditions you may place on getting to experience joy. The impediments might have started outside you: in the things you’ve been told about yourself, for instance, but they are perpetuated in the consciousness with the help of the ego. The idea that you can feel joyful when you win, for instance, is a place where ego has put conditions on the experience of joy that the consciousness and person agrees with. Joy, but only if some outside condition is met.
If joy relies on something outside you to exist, you can easily be manipulated or coerced into doing things to get your ‘hit’ of joy. This is ideal for ego. Joy is also a lot more powerful than a temporary feeling of elation or a visceral pleasure in something, nor is joy simply happiness.
Joy will put you back on the rack—not because you need to suffer, nor because you trade pain for joy, but because you must peel off the obstacles to the joy that is already in you. Many of those obstacles are in the connection to ego, the consciousness’ tendency to try to categorize, and in the various ways that you may need healing. Those things rarely come off easily, nor do they come off without a fight. Every one you peel away clears another block from the flow of joy. That process is as painful as it sounds, but it is yourself you are clearing and you will fight yourself to get there.
We say, in vodou, that joy is hand-in-hand with freedom. To reach joy more consistently, you must clear the things which prevent you from inner freedom—this can mean the end of relationships, jobs, or any other outside condition, but those are symptoms of the changes to the self which clearing those obstacles represent. Freedom from the things you’ve been taught about yourself and their use to control your behavior, freedom from the ways you punish yourself for who you are, etc: when you are more free internally, the outside conditions are a lot less important to the experience of joy.
There is little better to control people than convincing them that joy is something they get from the outside, and that they don’t need to change anything in themselves to experience it. There is little worse for controlling people than their understanding that they have an inherent ability to enjoy their own company and existence, and that they are willing to change to reach that state.
Freedom and joy are a relationship with yourself which is characterized by the lack of obstacles, by the lack of self-punishment, by the lack of behaviors in which you hurt yourself to try and have a flash of temporary satisfaction. It is a way of experiencing existence which is deeply satisfying and enjoyable.
It is possible to experience joy in being, to come through the various obstacles and reach a place where you simply enjoy existing, where you enjoy what and who you are. It is not an easy place to reach, but it is a worthwhile fight.
