By Cathy Eck

Joy

Last night I watched an interview of a popular author and speaker, who said, “People’s greatest fear is joy.”   Fear and joy aren’t connected; so I wondered why she would say such a thing.  She said that when people feel joy, they immediately think the other shoe is going to drop or sadness is coming.  She was suffering from level confusion — confusing happiness and excitement with joy.

Remember, we’re using words here to describe something intangible that can only be felt.  It ain’t perfect.  But words can point to the truth, and they’re all we’ve got.

Also, please don’t think that all we need to do is change our language and use the word joy instead of happiness.  We’ve got enough inspirational speakers and preachers doing that and creating massive level confusion between the True and false selves.

When I use the term joy, I’m using one facet of its definition that fits the True Self.  Any True Self quality is win-win — everyone would want to experience it.  It has no opposite.

Happy and sad, on the other hand, are bottom of the triangle opposites.  So when we feel happy, we could also say that we’re not sad.  The two potentials arise together as a unit. Most people are happy when they get what they want and sad when they don’t.

Happiness and Excitement 

Excitement comes with happiness; and grief with sadness.  Both conditions have an emotional component.  Emotion is the nervous agitation that warns us that we’re in the illusion — we’re thinking a belief.  We’re not moving toward our True Self.  Usually, happiness comes from fulfilling a false desire or getting something we think we lack, such as approval, love, or winning over another.

That’s not the same joy we get from unconditionally loving another, resolving a problem in a win-win way, or creating something unique. Joy is independent of others; it’s simply who we are at our core — our True Self.

When we’re happy, it’s natural for us to feel emotion because it is only a matter of time before sadness will rear its ugly head.  The emotion is saying that our mind is split in a win-lose way.  The other shoe does drop in happiness because the sadness will work its way into our experience.

The only way to avoid the inevitable sadness is to stay in a male authoritarian role and consistently project the sadness on to those who submit to you.  Some people are real good at this; they appear to remain happy, positive, and unemotional all the time.  But they are not.

The Other Shoe and Joy?

But what this author described is level confusion at its best.  She said that joy brings up the fear of the other shoe dropping — not possible.  Joy is a True Self quality.  The True Self has no opposite; but those who invented the illusion created an opposite to the True Self by creating Satan to oppose God.  The True God is creative energy; only the false Old-Man-In-The-Sky God has an opposite.  This is where the confusion began — two distinct versions of God were combined into one holy shit unit.

If people recognized that a thought that carried emotion wasn’t true, no one would believe in the false God or Satan.  Religion would collapse.  That is why this information was kept secret. Confusing the false God with the True God creates what is known as psychological reversal.  We honor the false self (false God) and then actually resist our True Self creating a life of suffering, disease, and hard work.  This is the engine of the illusion.  When we get this right, our escape is assured.  We just have to keep letting go.

The emotion we feel in a moment of joy is not related at all to the joy.  It’s always completely related to the belief that is arising that wants to pull us back into the illusion.  The false God in our mind is losing a minion, and it wants us back.  If we can see that the belief causing the emotion is false, we let it go and keep going toward the joy.

People are so afraid of the false God, but I’ve been calling him a liar for years.  He’s an illusion — a story character.  He doesn’t exist except in our false mind.  He’s actually like the hologram of the Wizard of Oz; in real life he’s a little wimpy man.

See the joy for what it is — notice that it’s win-win for everyone in the world if you are joyful.  Watch your mind and you’ll see that what’s causing the emotion is the belief that’s trying to pull you back into the false world.  The belief is unrelated to the joy.  It says someone will get hurt, someone will die, we’ll lose what we’ve acquired, we don’t deserve this, it won’t last, or we’ll get punished.  The belief is what is causing the emotion.  There as many stupid beliefs that stop us from our joy as there are people on this planet.  We have to get damn good at discriminating if we truly want freedom.

The author mentioned above presented this situation as a fact of life as if joy and fear are conjoined twins.  She’s very wrong about that.  She said that this condition stops people and felt we needed to learn to feel the emotion, and do it anyway.  Her advice pushes away the illusion for awhile.  It won’t win today, but it will win.  We still believed it’s lie.  Letting go of the belief is the only answer that ends the emotion forever.

So don’t fall for the trap of thinking that joy causes fear. Recognize that your beliefs cause your emotions — your fear.  Let the beliefs go, and your joy will last much longer — at least until the next belief arises.  Sadly, every exit has a trap; but when we let them all go, we’re truly free.  Nobody can trick us ever again.