INTERCONNECTEDNESS: RESTORING SANITY

The Joy of Interbeing²⁰

In the pursuit of happiness, we estrange ourselves from joy.

Once you’ve known joy, you are no longer confused about the difference. Joy is a sensation of your entire being, difficult to describe in words but similarly known by anyone who’s experienced it. The experience of joy often feels the same as sadness.

In my own experience, joy and sadness are the same—my being feels embraced and alive. I am present with energy beyond what my physical body can contain yet it does. I am laughing. I am crying. It doesn’t matter which.

I know joy to be the experience of connection, communion, presence, grace, as it is.

My own experiences have helped me understand what others describe as their most joyful moments: the birth of a baby, your own or a child’s wedding, working in a natural disaster or a situation of great human suffering.

How can joy be available in moments of great suffering? All around you lives are threatened, unstoppable destructive forces are at work, everyone is stretched beyond physical limits to help, rescue, save. For the rest of their lives, people will recall the intensity and horror. And the joy.

The presence of joy even in the worst experiences is explained in this biblical promise: “Whenever two or more are gathered, there will I be also.” Joy arises from self-transcendence. We transcend the limits of self. We transcend our needs for personal safety or caution. We discover new powers, new ways of being.

Joy is a reliable consequence of self-transcendence. In the worst conditions, our most noble human qualities are right there, offering us the capacity to help, to strengthen, to love, to console. Joy is an experience of what scientists are struggling to understand: the dance of energies never separated celebrating this as true.

Beyond this tiny, puny self we’ve been protecting, we enter sacred world, the bundle of belonging, returned to one another by being fully present for one another.

The mystical traditions of all spiritual faiths describe the experience—again beyond words—of oneness or, as a Buddhist teacher said, of zeroness. In the mystical state, there is a self, but not. There is experience that “I” am having, but it’s not “I.” There is vastness, luminosity, evenness, bliss, peace—but it’s impossible to locate who is experiencing it.

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service.

I acted and behold, service was joy.

Rabindranath Tagore

The Universe has revealed itself in mystical experiences to human ancestors long before we sapiens took over. Now we seem locked into our version of sapien-ness, exploring the sacred world with our analytic science. I don’t see how scientists can ever understand their experimental findings and models until they honor the fact that humans have been exploring the same questions for hundreds of thousands of years and arrived at different ways of knowing. Their answers cannot be dismissed as magic. In truth, our present culture is the one engaged in magical thinking, believing we’re going to find a way out of this mess with technology and science.

I am not interested in romanticizing indigenous wisdom. Like all humans, their civilizations took the same reliable path to collapse. What I am interested in is to enlarge our understanding of how this world works. We’re only the latest manifestation of humans asking that question and our arrogance is astonishing.

Linda Hogan, of the Chickasaw people, describes our Western ways as “primitive.” We don’t understand how the world works, this web of life rich in species beyond number, each using their intelligence to find their place as neighbors.

We Live by Different Stories

What finally turned me back toward the older traditions

of my own [Chickasaw] and other Native peoples was the

inhumanity of the Western world, the places—both inside

and out—where the culture’s knowledge and language

don’t go, and the despair, even desperation, it has spawned.

We live, I see now, by different stories, the Western mind

and the indigenous. In the older, more mature cultures

where people still live within the kinship circles of animals

and human beings there is a connection with animals,

not only as food, but as ‘powers,’ a word which can be

taken to mean states of being, gifts, or capabilities.

Linda Hogan, “First People”²¹