Joy

Welcome back! This is Ahmed, this is POV Zero, and we are in episode nine. In this episode I’d like to talk about how to navigate the planet with this awareness of the zero — the nothingness of things, the isness of everything, and all the things we talked about in the past episodes.

Ahmed is navigating the planet, and that is often a challenge. You’re confronted with situations which trigger you, provoke negative feelings, do something with your nervous system, consume your thoughts and energy. That is all very human.

How do we integrate the knowledge of the essence — knowing it’s frictionless, unconditional love, infinite mercy, where everything collapses, no past, no future, nothing dragging us away from that point? But when we navigate the world of shapes and forms, the numbers game, we get constantly dragged into it, tempted to identify with the shapes and forms, especially with our own feelings. When we feel something, we become the feeling, and it consumes our thoughts and energy.

I’ve been doing some thinking. I’m really fascinated by this stuff, because it’s the first time in my life I feel this way — generally very light, very happy, very joyful. I’ve gained a sense of clarity I’ve never experienced before. And sitting in that spot, going about life, I ask myself: how does this interaction, this feeling, fit with this knowledge? How can I integrate it into my everyday?

One thing I was thinking about a lot is joy. Joy is more than happiness. Happiness is a more constant feeling. But joy is exuberant. Joy fills the space. Joy is what makes you laugh from deep within, uncontrollably. Joy is all-encompassing when it comes.

There are so many moments that procure joy in our everyday. If you’re lucky enough to have children, there are situations where they make you laugh, do incredibly cute things, say stuff that makes you almost melt away in delight. Or other things — maybe just a cup of coffee in the morning in the right spot, with the sun shining through the window after your workout. Often it’s very simple things.

What I realized is that I’ve always had a tendency to look critically at joy. The human mind is wired that way — we’re socialized to be skeptical of joy because we know it’s temporary. We also judge where it comes from. “That’s a silly thing to be joyful about.” “That’s not very productive.” We judge it, we don’t sit with it, and so it really becomes temporary.

But we could choose to sit with it, the same way we sit with negative feelings. Negative feelings — we take them in, roll them around in our mind, get consumed by them. They grow and grow and take up so much space. But with joy it’s the opposite. Joy comes and we say, “It has to be temporary anyway, let’s get back to the serious things.”

What if all you had to do in this world was find these moments of joy and stay with them? Stick to them. Savor them. Seek them again and again and make them the center of whatever you do, the center of your life. As long as these moments of joy are not produced by something inherently damaging — drugs, excessive alcohol, binge-watching, things that aren’t good for you in the long run — then stay with that feeling. The longer you stay with it, the more you sit with it, the greater it becomes and the longer it lasts. And if you have different moments of joy and they become longer, at some point they overlap and you remain in a state of pure joy.

So that’s one thing for navigating the planet: seek moments of joy, stay with them, don’t judge them, don’t undervalue them, don’t underappreciate them.

The second thing is judgment. As humans, we are wired to judge constantly. And judgment does not exist from the point of view of the zero. In the nothingness, there is only infinite mercy, and infinite mercy does not fit with judgment.

If you translate that to the human experience, you can make it a habit to identify whenever you’re judging — judging others, which might be easier to spot, and especially judging yourself. When you’re judging anything, you’re always saying, “This should not be this way.” And that sentence is contrary to accepting the isness of the moment.

If everything is perfect as it is, and nothing has to change from the point of view of the zero, then judgment doesn’t fit. Whenever you feel yourself judging, the first step is to spot it. Then go into it: what am I judging exactly? And who am I to judge? You know Tupac says “Only God can judge me”? It’s so true.

Don’t judge others. Don’t judge things. Don’t judge yourself. Even if you’re seeing bad behavior, cops killing citizens, humans hurting each other — you can judge it and feel like the job is done. Or you can observe it, describe it, feel the pain. That doesn’t require judgment. It requires observation, empathy — empathy with those affected and also with those perpetrating, because hurt people hurt people.

It doesn’t excuse or justify anything. But observe it, look at it, go into it, feel the pain, realize how much it is estranged from the essence. Let that sink in. That might produce a more powerful feeling of acting upon it. Because you can always act from the point of nothingness — it’s not that you become idle. You become detached from shapes and forms, from human ideals. From nothingness, you are fearless. Fearless to go about the causes you care about. As long as these causes are close to humanity, to equality, to the essence of justice — treating everybody the same, being kind and gentle and supportive — that is something we can perfectly fight for. And that fight from a point of nothingness, of detachment, can become more powerful. Because fearlessness gives a particular sense of power.

The third thing is worries. As humans we worry all the time — about health, finances, safety, whether we’ll achieve what we want, whether we’ll disappoint others. Worries always take us away from the present moment, into some future scenario where the outcome is not ideal. From the zero, there is no future. There’s just the now, and the now takes up everything.

When we catch ourselves worrying, it can be helpful to go into it and formulate it: “This is what I’m worried about, and it has to do with this or that.” The funny thing about worries is that they often relate to things we’re unable to change right now. Not only are we taking energy away from the present moment, we’re taking it to a place where we become completely passive and helpless.

If the worry is about something you can change, then change it now. Do the thing you can do right now. But if you can’t do anything about it, why worry? The moment will come when you have to deal with it, and when you do, deal with it wholeheartedly. Give it your entire attention, and then you won’t have to worry because you did all you could. Worries are a feature of human existence that really invite us to look closer, because they are very powerful in distracting us from the center.

Yesterday I was with my daughter in a canteen with a playground. Two tables away, a baby was sitting in a chair and started crying loudly. The next thing I noticed, the baby’s big brother — perhaps five years old, a really cute kid — went over. The moment he arrived, the baby stopped crying and started smiling. The older brother was so gentle, rubbing his head against the baby’s, holding it, talking to it, then explaining to his mother what the younger sibling felt.

That moment was filled with love. As I was looking at it, I was so moved I started crying on the spot. Tears of pure joy and gratitude at being allowed to witness that. In life, once we start looking at these things and giving them attention, we see them — because they’re happening all the time. Moments of kindness, moments where love is expressed, where humans help each other. We just need to remain open. And when they happen, stay with them. See what it does with the body, with the mind, with our feelings. The more we do that, the warmer and gentler we become. And then love and kindness and gentleness is all we do.

These are very practical things. In the end it doesn’t really matter whether you see the paradoxes of nothingness and everythingness. What really matters for our human interactions is that we are kind, gentle, loving, and caring. That is all that matters, because that is what the essence looks like in human expression. If we can do that and at the same time let go of worries, impatience, and judgment, we’re getting closer to the essence, moving through this planet in the way closest to who we truly are.

Sending you an abundance of unconditional love, of infinite mercy. Be gentle, be kind. That’s the best thing you can do on this planet. Peace out.