Joy comes as a result, as an effect of standing in the light where the creation could exist. You reach the place where joy can be perceived by taking steps of purpose and intention.
It is quite possible for you as human beings to never have a second best. To never have to settle for second best. If you never have to settle for second best you might get a lot more joy out of things. We will give small example. You have these things that you know to be grocery stores. You know of them? Where it is that you have the opportunity to expend your labor and by your labor being expended, trade some little markers of paper and metal, to get enough food. The perceptive quality that you have is that there some special forms that you like best. They are decisions that you make. Is that not so?
What do you know of that which is the element and place of this where it is that you buy grain food that are made into things that you perceive you are only supposed to consume at the time of morning? You know them to be breakfast cereals. It is most wondrous then in this that you will look upon all of these things.
I have one small question for you as human beings. Is it not a little confusing to you how many different ways you can prepare wheat? Rice? Corn? And it is a perceptive quality that in all of these things there is some special thing with each one of them — some special element so it is they decorate these things in all different forms and you make a lot of different decisions.
Each time that you hold one of these things and try to make a decision about it you are thinking about the pleasure that you will feel or the lack of it that you will have if you don’t get exactly the right one. And having selected exactly the right one, you then take it to you house with the perceptive quality that you are going to have a great amount of pleasure by having it and you sample it.
If indeed there is a certain amount of pleasure you may feel the joy of having selected the right one. The next element becomes “what do you do when you are empty of that one?” You don’t want to make the same decision again. So you go and you simply don’t make decisions, you get a box of the same thing until you have tired yourself out with it and decide to experiment again. Then you go looking again to find another.
But yet the reality of it is the true value of any of these things is almost identically the same to you. Your body doesn’t know the difference between whether it is flat or round or square. Your body doesn’t know the true difference of whether it has one gram of extra sodium in it or it doesn’t. That is such a minute difference that the body doesn’t even notice it happened. You turn into your shark self when you are eating it anyway so it doesn’t really matter.
So some of these things in true value to your physical body, the box might be better but yet you make of it a life-threatening decision. It isn’t because use it truly is a life- threatening decision. It is because you have been taught that it should be. And very often what you are taught you should be doing becomes the focus of why you become me involved in something. Something taught you you should be involved in this particular way. So you are trying your very best to gain a little pleasure and a little joy by that involvement.
The reality is there may not be joy and pleasure in that involvement. So it is that you may address it and be too joyous or too focused upon receiving joy and feeling depression because you didn’t. You may see it as the source of something participating. You can’t get joy without participating. For you to truly feel alive and something other than an animal in your own being you need both.