When your joy (sense of wholeness) is shaken by some thoughts in the mind it’s just an indication that you are yet to come to a place of stability within you and are still, in some way, a prisoner to your mind’s movements. You can’t ever hope to control the mind/brain permanently, you can control it “momentarily” just like you can control your breath momentarily, but never for long, and people who are on the path of trying to secure some permanent control over their mind, by making it silent forcibly, are just treading the path of unnaturalness, mostly because they are afraid of their mind and they are trying to become free of it by getting “rid” of it. The reality is that whenever you try to get rid of something, you become even more strongly shackled to it, because your very fear of it keeps fueling its presence in your reality.

Conscious joy is a place you get to where you are not afraid of the mind’s movements and the mind basically just becomes an “entertainment” machine for you – it’s no longer a “serious” presence. You don’t take your mind seriously because you’ve seen through its antics and drama, you’ve seen through all its mechanisms/arguments to defend negativity, you’ve seen through its strategies to feel negative and most importantly you understand life’s inherent well-being. In this place you become more “open” to allowing the energy accumulated in your being, from your past negativity, to be released – thus dropping the baggage of the past negative momentum in you. In truth, if you feel negative about something it just means you are taken in by your mind’s narrow perspective on that situation, and hence have lost connection with the natural vibration of life which is always rooted in wholeness.

Going beyond the arguments of the mind

The mind will find several arguments to defend negativity – and it can be really tricky to see through them if you don’t have a strong stability in your awareness. But the mind is just a machine which is programmed in a certain way for it to give you a “physical” experience – to be afraid of the mind is like being afraid of your computer. All minds have a fear dimension as a part of their natural wiring, and this dimension has the capacity to defend fears and to generate fearful thoughts. If you have a weak awareness, you just get pulled into believing these thoughts and hence take on a vibration of fear. However, when you have a strong awareness you see through this “pattern” in the mind and hence are no longer taken in by it. In fact, you bring this same awareness to all the dimensions in your mind – joy, fear, hatred, love, boredom and sexuality, and hence are not imbalanced in any of these dimensions, rather you learn to enjoy them without being held prisoner by any of them.

The pre-requisite for conscious joy is a strong “consciousness” – the less conscious you are the more likely you are to fall for the negativity, the more conscious you are the less likely you are to fuel negativity. When you reach a place of strong consciousness, you feel unshakeable in your being, you feel self-sustained, you don’t sense a need for emotional support from outside, neither are you seeking guidance from outside – you are fully confident in your own guidance, in your own being, and this is what allows for a sense of conscious joy. If anything can hold your joy hostage, it means you are not fully conscious as yet and you have more waking up to do.

Moving from unconsciousness to conscious joy

It’s like when someone wakes you up in the morning, when you’ve been in deep sleep, for a while you almost hate it – you hate being woken up and you try to get back to sleep. However, once you’ve been woken up and you see your real reality, it’s not easy to just get back to dreams again – nevertheless, you do try for while to stay asleep. Soon you find that it’s not possible to go back to sleep again and hence you start waking up more consciously, though you are still uncomfortable about it. For a while you are really groggy and inefficient, getting oriented to the light of the morning, getting oriented to the real reality outside your dream state. However, within 15-20 minutes you become quite awake, and by the time you’ve had a shower you are wide awake, looking forward to the “awake” experience – if someone asked you to go back to sleep you wouldn’t be interested now that you are fully awake.

When you are awake you are not at the mercy of spontaneous dreams of your mind, you have much awareness to know the difference between dreams/delusions and reality. The dreams/nightmares you had (that you took very seriously during your sleep) are no longer serious to you, in fact you know them to be totally irrelevant to your present state of awake-ness. This is what it means to have a strong consciousness.

Look at this analogy in terms of the phases of awakening (discussed in the post Awakening, transcendence and the return of focus) – when you are asleep you are in phase1, when you are being woken up you are in phase 2, when you are getting oriented with the wakeful state you are in phase 3 and when you are fully awake you are in phase 4. Phase 1 can have some unconscious joy like how kids are joyful but deeply ignorant of reality, but Phase 4 is when you are consciously joyful, you are fully aware of reality (you are not in hiding, in denial, or in ignorance of reality) and are free of the hold of negativity. Unconscious joy can easily turn into negativity at any moment because it’s at the mercy of the outside and at the mercy of the mind’s interpretations – when you are unconscious, one event can take you from joy into deep depression, this is how volatile it can be. When you are fully conscious you become unshakeable in your wholeness because you’ve see through the physical realm in a clear manner and have come to a place of inner stability in this full awareness – in this place nothing has the power to shake your sense of wholeness.