Listener: What is joy?
Speaker: It is an absence. Absence of everything. It an absence of both pleasure and pain, nothing that excites the mind. Joy is not something that you can think of as something wonderful. Joy is nothing that you can conceptualize as being pleasurable. Joy is just an absence, nothing special; very ordinary, very blank, very empty. So, joy is nothing that you can aspire for. Joy cannot be an aspiration, an achievement, something gettable. Joy cannot be gotten. You cannot act and obtain joy. It is not something that you can bring in from somewhere. It is a cessation, a full stop or at least a comma. Don’t abuse this word. Enjoyment must be a very sacred word, a divine word, must be used very carefully.
You are having one of those weekend parties, and then they say, what joy, they are abusing the word. Joy is not sensual. You cannot look at a mountain or river and say, joyful, even that is just sensual pleasure. Alright, it is a pleasure of may be a higher nature, it brings you closer to yourself, but it is still not joy. It is only sensual pleasure. You look at a woman and you feel good, you look at a river and you feel good. These two are still coming to you through the senses, through eyes. Without eyes, will you ever say that I am liking the river, the mountains, or the snow capped peaks? You will not say that. It is still sensual, still coming to you through the eyes. Joy is not even that. Many of us are habituated to this thing. I stood there awestruck in front of the mighty Himalayas. The cool breeze, the clear air, and then I felt joy emanating from my very core. Rubbish. It may sound very profound and very divine statement, but it is essentially rubbish. ‘The fountainhead of joy arising from my very heart, breaking through layers of conditioning, and exposing divine love to me’. This might be good to impress a prospective groom but it is not the truth. Go ahead and put it on your blog, nice. Put it as a twitter feed, nice. He will be impressed but this is not joy. Joy is not something that happens for a reason. You cannot go somewhere and say that looking at a mountain, I experienced joy. Joy is something which is always there, obfuscated; hence it is the absence of obfuscation. Sky is always there, but clouded, so what is the sky? It is the absence of clouds. Joy is sky, and empty, and vast, just an absence of the clouds. In Upanishadic parlance, what you call as ‘Panchkosh’, there Joy is the highest kosh. You call it the ‘Anandmaya Kosh’. It is also something that scriptures say that you experience in dreamless sleep. Now, of course, you don’t experience anything in dreamless sleep and there is joy; the subtlest point of the mind. There is nothing, no vibration at all, no movement at all, that is joy. Krishnamurti will call it consciousness without content. No content, an absence of content. What is the content of consciousness? Thought.
