Physical Pleasure and Emotional Joy

You, as human beings, are multi-faceted things. Your lives are filled with many complexities. These complexities will fill your minds, your bodies and your lives. These complexities are truly your decision factors. Those decision factors become very important things that you must do. Very often, those things become so confusing to you that you do not truly know whether it is pleasurable, or joyful, or painful. You may find yourself in a life filled with “have-tos” and “if I only could haves.” It is with this unfocusing, in making your life quite that complex, that you very often lose sight of two things that are the magic aspects of you.

They are very simple aspects—simple parts of you—but they are the foundation by which all else follows. They are the things that truly drive your decision factors. They are the things that truly drive you to excel, and sometimes drive you to excess. They are things that move you.

One of these things is joy, and one of them is pleasure.

It is the two of these—joy and pleasure—and the thought process of how to get to them, that very often takes you to great lengths of distraction. Sometimes you see immediate joy or immediate pleasure to be the end of all things, and after you pass through that immediate joy or pleasure, you find out that there is a lot more to be done. And then it starts feeling like pain. So the demotivation that you have is due to something other than joy or pleasure. The things that hold you back are due to other things. You may say it is as plain as pain and displeasure.

So you have pain on one end and pleasure on the other. You have joy on one end and disharmony and non-joy on the other. We will play on the sides that have the joy and the pleasure.

Simply, all you have to do is to trust that it is impossible for you to make any decision that is not towards your greatest joy or your greatest pleasure. It is impossible.

Nothing you have ever truly done—no decision made has ever been towards anything other than your greatest pleasure and your greatest joy. For what was available to you in the moment that you looked at it to make the choice of decision, you never have chosen deliberately to receive pain. You have always chosen deliberately to receive the lesser of pain. Unfortunately, you very seldom have chosen to see that there is something beyond the pain or beyond the pleasure.

In the nature of you, let us play with knowing what joy is. Joy is an emotional activity. Joy in itself brings you nothing but the emotions of it. Joy is the hearing of the laughter of the child—the truly hearing of it. The sound itself may bring pleasure, but the interpretation of the sound is where the joy comes from. Joy is the thought, the anticipation of something pleasurable. Joy is a conceptual thing, and it belongs to the soul. That is most wondrous, is it not? Joy is how the soul creates. And it wants to create quickly and impeccably so that it can have that joy, which is its ultimate desire. And it does so because it can.

And each time that you feel an element of joy, it is you confirming to your soul that you have observed the creation. That is most wondrous, is it not? For in the moment that you have observed it—the moment you feel joy, joyful participation, joy for your own productivities, joy for your own creativities, joy for that of the creativities of other things around you, whatever it is that you feel joy with—you have just said to the Isness, which is all things: You are more than what you were. In that moment, you have just said to the
Isness it is more than what it was. You have just caused what used to be the Isness to cease to exist, and everything, every star, every sun, every galaxy, every leaf, every other human being, every other thing that has ever been, stops existing and becomes reborn simply because of your one moment of joy. That is a most wondrous thing, is it not? The entirety of God winks out of existence and comes back into existence as the new thing that it is because of your joy. That is an awful responsibility for you as hüman beings, is it not? You have the responsibility, as does every other thing, but you have the responsibility of making God new with each creation.

It happens to be that you can’t help but do it. So you don’t have to worry too much about doing it. It happens to be that it is going to happen whether you think about it or whether you don’t. It happens to be that because it is a forever thing  [your soul] that is causing that creation, you are along for the ride. And that is good. Because it allows you to have a separate feeling of yourself.

That separateness, that identity of you, gives back to the soul a picture of what it is. And that is what the soul wants—to know what it is. To perceive its capacity to create. So joy is a very non-tangible thing. It isn’t something that you can place your finger to and know it. It is something you suspect. It is something that you feel. It is something you perceive as the wholeness of you. Your fingers can’t feel joy—they can feel pleasure. Your heart can feel joy, but in a somewhat interpreted way. Your mind can feel joy. The entirety of your being could feel joy, except not physically. Physically, it feels pleasures and pains. Emotionally, you feel joy or lack of it. So you may say something as this: What do you have that is truly the opposite of joy in your thought processes for this thing you call language? What do you use for words? Fear. Anxiety. Boredom. Sadness, Depression. You have a lot of words, do you not?

What do you have that is truly the same as joy? Elation. Exuberance. Ecstacy. Which do you have more words for? Painful things? Which can tell you a most wondrous thing. The more words you have for something, the less truthful that thing is in terms of what you call appropriate activities. It is that way with joy.

Pleasure then belongs to the physical body. It is a thing that you may reserve yourself to see something is pleasurable because you perceive physically something is going to change, or something did. If you can feel pleasure, you are going to survive. If you don’t feel pleasure, things get boring. And if you feel pain, you are on the verge of survival. So you fight for survival. That is then given to the body to confirm its existence. Your body needs that confirmation of existence so that it will continue to be an active participant for the creative aspect of the soul. Physical pleasure tells you there will be another day.

The more you are willing to participate in your life, the more the untrue things are going to be seen by you as untrue.

You can get pleasure without participating, but you can’t get joy without participating.

You cannot create joy; your souls do it.

If you participate without a form attached, pleasure will happen, and so will joy. You can make pleasure happen, you can’t make joy happen.

You, as human beings, are most complex people. You’re complex simply because much of what you do you make complex. You make it complex because when you truly want the joy, you will settle simply for pleasure. And when you feel the pleasure, you believe you have to interpret that as an excuse for joy.

You have a perceptive quality that says you want it all, and you want it all now. And that thought process, “all” is almost always interpreted as pleasure. Physical things give you pleasure, but they don’t give it to you unless you accept it. Emotional things furnish you joy. And it doesn’t furnish it to you unless you discover it.

For you to receive pleasure, you must be involved with whatever is going to have the pleasure also, and for you to receive joy, you must be a participant with that.

Joy happens magically. You don’t even know the source of it. Pleasure you can accuse, joy you can’t tell. Joy happens because of your creations; it doesn’t happen because of someone else’s. Pleasure can happen because of someone else’s involvement. But it can’t be received unless you are involved also.

So in the form and nature, all you truly have to do is shift it a little bit. Think of it differently. If you want the joy and you’re staring at pleasure, then participate absolutely with the pleasure and the joy will develop. If you’re staring at joy but it doesn’t seem pleasurable, participate a little bit and the pleasure will come.