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Joy

  True happiness lies in the soul. Moving to that center and living the outer human life from that center will fill us with joy. Life can be graded by levels of joy. There are low situations that yield a little joy; others yield a higher quantum of joy, while at the top there are situations where great joy is possible.  

   Routine work does not bring joy, but a work that is interesting yields some joy. Cherished, long-awaited occasions burst forth with joy. If we can learn to do our daily work with greater joy, we can move permanently to levels of life where that intensity of joy is permanent.

  By learning to treat ordinary events as events of great joy, we can move to a life position where all events begin to yield intense joy, turning life into eternal happiness.

   If we look at ourselves, our daily actions, our inmost feelings, especially our motives from this point of view, we can know at once what we have to do. By being willing to make the necessary change, we can turn life from one of dull neutrality into one of intense joy.

   If we look at the most ordinary negative event, like a loud argument at home, it is easy to see that if we are good-mannered, the quarrel can be avoided. At the next level, we can take the act of serving a meal to our family. By an effort of expansive goodness bordering on generosity of selfless emotion, this flat moment can be made into an occasion for a rich interchange of intense emotions. Suppose we succeed here, it will soon be evident that with rich inner fullness, we lack the outer skill of polite manners and find it difficult to express the inner good in an outer act of goodness. The importance of that psychological skill will be self-evident. There is a talent in being genuinely pleasant to another. The capacity to be happy, to express that happiness and to make others happy are rare values. The lack of them will be sorely evident when we keenly analyze ourselves. If we create a fund of natural inner goodness, we can acquire the social skills that express it, the talent to handle the goodness of the heart so as to let it spread through the family and the capacity for inner generosity that is infectiously sweet. 

   These are endowments of the highest consciousness, and are sublime in content. They are found only in very noble characters. One who painstakingly acquires these traits in the humblest of circumstances will be elevated by virtue of them in his outer position to that of the noble characters.

   In principle, man in any position, however humble it is, can acquire the consciousness, character, and behavior of the very highest levels, even of the Transcendent. That entitles him to rise to that status over time.



story | by Dr. Radut