Joy without Object – Bliss and beatitude in the wisdom of the heart

Joy without Object – Bliss and beatitude in the wisdom of the heart

What is joy? What is this fundamental joy that is called by some “joy without object”?

Objectless joy, has it any meaning in today’s life with our obsessive search of pleasure and well-being? Can joy exist in the constant pursuit of pleasure…? Can we experience bliss and beatitude without falling back into the sufferings of the ego?

Joy: The Hidden Guru

According to Sri Aurobindo, the world is a manifestation of joy, of supreme bliss or Ānanda. This explains the instinctive yearning for joy that every creature feels, even the ecstasy in the flower stretching towards the sunlight. Without delight and joy, the world would cease to be; it would disintegrate into the dust of non-being.

In every being, joy, the primal principle of manifestation, is unconscious — i.e. it is taken for granted, for to exist means to rejoice, and not to rejoice is to suffer! Therefore, life without joy is inconceivable. All our movements, even the smallest, instinctively tend towards satisfaction or well-being. No one aspires to live a neutral existence, which resembles death rather than life. Joy is natural, and its opposite, suffering, is perceived as a contrary-to-nature experience.

“An aspiration, a demand for the supreme and total delight of existence is there secretly in the whole make of our being, …” Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p.989, vol.19 (SABCL, 1970).

However, in our ignorance of ourselves and of the laws of manifestation, we are cut off from this source of inherent joy. This explains why we seek it in external things or objects. But in doing so, we externalise it! Thus, pure joy, the essence of our being, is translated on the surface of our existence into a sense of lack that gives rise to greed, coveting, and craving for things and people. This feeling of lack—which is the movement of dissatisfaction in the pursuit of pleasure and sensations—is the motivating force that drives the world.

There is a whole hierarchy of pleasures corresponding to the different parts of our physical, vital, and mental natures. Each part of our being experiences a specific pleasure proper to its own domain. The pleasures of sex, food, comfort and well-being belong to the joys of the body and physical consciousness. Adventure, action, ambition, passion are the expressions of our vital nature, while reflective thought, inquiry, and creativity are the joys of the awakened mind. The whole being leans towards pleasure, towards innate joy. Every single one of us has a spontaneous surge towards this infinite possibility of vibrating as intensely as one can. Nonetheless, most of us live a joyless life in boredom and routine, and hence our need for escape into sensations.

Sensation is both captivating and liberating. It is simultaneously what attaches us to things, beings, and ideas, and the key that opens the door to liberation, exalted in the enjoyment of the manifold contact with objects in the unity of universal life.The ego is born from the identification of the sensation of pleasure in contact with an object which turns into desire. Consequently, desire is the ego. This sticky identification removes us from the dynamic movement of universal life. Only sensation that is not identified— i.e. free from possessive attachment and from the interference of thought—becomes pure joy in contact with the myriad objects of the world. It is only if we live and die simultaneously from moment to moment that sensation, freed from the “me”, becomes a source of pure, independent joy, unlike pleasure, which always depends on an object.

Sri Aurobindo explains that the supreme reality, whose essence is Ānanda (bliss), has involved itself into manifestation and it is the reason why each formhas an unconscious nostalgic feeling of the bliss of its divine origin and isinstinctively driven to recover it through union (yoga). This is surely the genesisof the pursuit of sensations and pleasure, which unconsciously enslaves humanbeings. Having, through this descent into the forms of matter, lost the vision ofthe One, the being naturally becomes enamoured of particular objects. Thisexclusive attraction removes us from the context of the wholeness of life andmakes us experience a moment of pleasure—an instant outside of our “me”. Thisinfatuation with a desired object will inevitably one day disappoint, for everyobject is but a representation, a limited expressive form of the Whole.Unconsciously, what we seek in the person or object is ultimate joy— but theonly true lasting fulfilment is union with the Whole.

“It is a living Soul to which the soul of the Bhakta yearns; for the source of all life is not an idea or a conception or a state of existence, but a real Being. Therefore, in the possession of the divine Beloved all the life of the soul is satisfied and all the relations by which it finds and in which it expresses itself, are wholly fulfilled; …He is sought within in the heart…; but he is also seen and loved everywhere where he manifests his being. All the beauty and joy of existence is seen as his joy and beauty; he is embraced by the spirit in all beings; the ecstasy of love enjoyed pours itself out in a universal love; all existence becomes a radiation of its delight and even in its very appearances is transformed into something other than its outward appearance. The world itself is experienced as a play of the divine Delight, a Līlā, and that in which the world loses itself is the heaven of beatitude of the eternal union.” (The Synthesis of Yoga, vol.21, p.551, SABCL,1971).

With these sublime words, Sri Aurobindo reconciles the spiritual réalisation of “objectless joy” with that of “joy with objects.” Joy without object is the bliss of fusion within the pure essence of Being where distinction no longer exists, whereas joy with objects is the feeling of ecstasy in universal radiance where all objects of existence coexist. This second form of joy celebrates the whole of creation, the entire range of the infinite forms of existence—from a stone to a rose, to a bee, a bird, a cloud, a child, a man or a woman. It is the joy of being in mutability, expressed through the various objects of manifestation, which are in a sense the differentiated emanations of that Being.

According to Sri Aurobindo, the universe and its source are not a metaphysical abstraction, but a living Being whose essence is Ānanda, supreme joy.

“The Divine is a Being and not an abstract existence or a status of pure timeless infinity;” (ibid, p.574.)

Thus, in the manifested world that expresses a universe of diversified forms, pure joy is differentiated and unfolds into an infinity of nuances within a dynamic present, varied among forms and beings. It is the joy of contact with all the objects of creation, in which the spiritual individual delights. This joy is spontaneous, organic, growing, and evolutionary, for it is in direct contact with universal nature, which itself is in constant becoming, in ceaseless creative pulsation and renewal. It is Love, where the lover and the Beloved maintain a non-dual distance in order to better delight in one another, while at the same time remain fused in the ecstasy of the One. And yet, in this state of fusion, the individual still exists at the very heart of that union:

“And even when our personality seems to disappear into unity with it, it may still be—and really is—the individual divine who is melting to the universal or the supreme by a union in which love and lover and loved are forgotten in a fusing experience of ecstasy, but are still there latent in the oneness and subconsciently persisting in it.” (ibid, p.573.)

In descending into the separating—or at least ego-centred—consciousness of man, love and the pure joy of spiritual consciousness degenerate into pleasure. For the common person, pure joy without an object is an abstract and tasteless notion, and the joy of all objects in the universality of Being is at best a distant ideal, far removed from the present reality of the ego’s exclusive desire for things, where attraction, repulsion, and indifference are instinctive and reign in a fragmented world.

Sensations, pleasure, desire, objects and the ego are closely bound together. Understanding their genesis and their mode of functioning is therefore essential on the spiritual path. In fact, this self-knowledge is unavoidable if we are to reach the higher mode of spiritual being, where life and all its objects are perceived within a single unified field of existence. The arduous labour when treading the spiritual path consists in unveiling what is hidden, layer after layer.

However, this knowledge of the workings of our intimate self is only a first step. Without it, we would remain subjected to the lower mode of Nature (Prakriti). At that stage, we are nothing but puppets of Nature, driven by our fears and desires. Once liberated from this ego-self, we are ready to explore the deeper laws of universal nature, the laws of energies that govern our cosmos and ourselves. This exploration, cosmic or holistic in scope, leads us to discover the transcendental source responsible for the universe, which at the same time, is immanent within us. This crescendo ascent in the knowledge of the self, the world, the universe, and their transcendental source brings an ever-widening consciousness, in which joy becomes purified, deepened, amplified, and multiplied at every stage. In truth, joy is the true guide of our lives: it leads us into all sorts of experiences, of unfathomable depth.

Sri Aurobindo’s integral Joy reveals to our mind a bliss of unsuspected richness. Even to pure thought and the higher reason that follows an exclusive impersonal knowledge in the search of the One (Vidya), there is a distinction to be made between joy which is the outcome of the mind and joy of the heart. It is evident that in the realm of joy, the joy of the heart and the joy of the mind are not of the same nature. Each vibrates in a unique fashion and not with the same intensity, even though at a higher level of reality, they are complementary and mutually enrich one another. In fact, in unison the heart and mind give rise to an enriched and broader spectrum of joy which prevents the natural tendency of exclusiveness and narrowness when each principle acts separately.

“A transcendent Bliss, unimaginable and inexpressible by the mind and speech, is the nature of the Ineffable. That broods immanent and secret in the whole universe and in everything in the universe. Its presence is described as a secret ether of the bliss of being, of which the Scripture says that, if this were not, none could for a moment breathe or live. And this spiritual bliss is here also in our hearts. It is hidden in from the toil of the surface mind, which catches only at weak and flawed translations of it into various mental, vital and physical forms of the joy of existence.” (ibid, p.568.)

But when our mind, our life and our body open themselves to the spiritual dimension of existence, they too experience pure joy within their own domain. This adds an infinite richness of variations to the total range of joy. The body, liberated from the grip of the ego, feels its own joy, where inspiration and expiration become an ecstatic rhythm, the cadenced movements of our limbs freed from egotistic sclerosis. In truth, the mind, our vital nature, and the body—freed from the coarseness of the ego—become subtle, refined, purified, and turn into instruments of the soul receptive to a higher spiritual reality. Once awakened into a spiritual existence, all parts of our being share divine joy and universal life.

We must learn to distinguish between the emotion of pleasure from pure joy. One belongs to egotistic consciousness and is self-centred; the other leads to spiritual life, exalted by the beauty of the world. As our understanding of their distinct nature deepens, our consciousness undergoes a spiritual transformation. There is however no miracle: we cannot leap from pleasure to pure objectless joy. For this to occur, our consciousness must not only expand universally (no more flags, no more elitism), but above all let go of everything it clings to. It is in this letting go, with deep understanding of the reason why, that our consciousness becomes open and receptive to the spiritual ether omnipresent in the universe, which infuses our entire being, down to the very pores and cells of our body.

However, the pursuit of pleasure—which is merely the degeneration of pure joy—is part of a necessary growth for our being. For example, exclusivism and possessiveness in a confined relationship whether it be within a couple, between a circle of friends, a political party or a sect, over time becomes limited and a feeling of suffocation arises which triggers the need to symbolically open the window in order to breathe the fresh air of pure life without these limited boundaries. The ego is solidified by its possessions, intensified by this identification it is ironically alienated from the wholeness of life and from the essence of pure Being. Nonetheless, this intensification and identification will one day overflow into a beneficial alienation, where suddenly the entire foundation of our existence collapses and makes way for pure joy, freed from all objects and, above all, from oneself! This is the awakening and liberation of life in joy… The pleasures of the ego and the joys of the spiritual being are the alpha and omega of the mystery of Ānanda, whose extremes coexist within a single, reconciling essence of being. In my view, the spiritual Path is the discovery of the nuances of joy, which are the unique and infinitely diverse expressions of the suprême Ānanda.

To embrace the Whole and yet being, at the same time, each individual thing—without seeking to profit from it or to appropriate it—is to enter the divine līlā of the cosmic dance, where exclusive pleasure undergoes an alchemical transformation and becomes pure, unsullied Joy, with or without an object.