Joy and suffering can coexist on different levels of our being. Assagioli’s joy meditation opens with the case for cultivating joy as a spiritual discipline, even inside pain.
By Roberto Assagioli
Assagioli Archive, Florence
Original title: LA GIOIA – Proemio Per Una Meditazione
Translated by Gordon Symons
Editorial Note
The abstract and contextual subtitle in this online edition have been added by the editor, Kenneth Sørensen, to support readability, navigation, and archival consistency. The original wording has not been altered.
See also Assagioli’s article Spiritual Joy.
Abstract
In this brief introduction, Roberto Assagioli makes the case for joy as a discipline — not an absence of pain, but a quality that can be cultivated and can coexist with suffering on different levels of being. He frames joy as the defining quality of the dawning Aquarian Age, draws on the light-joy relationship in esoteric tradition, and closes by inviting the reader into the meditation that follows.
One of the essential aspects of spiritual consciousness, which we must evoke in ourselves always, but above all in every spiritual recurrence, in every “Feast of the Spirit”, is the sense or quality of joy.
Joy is not only an essential quality of spiritual consciousness, but it will be the quality of the new two-thousand-year Aquarian Age that is now beginning. The feature of the previous Piscean Age of the past two thousand years has been pain, suffering, sacrifice. Pain has had or has a great spiritual function: purification, detachment, liberation from forms. But now the function of joy, of the triumphant affirmation of the Spirit on and in matter, will increasingly take over. Joy can and should be cultivated and developed. One Instructor called it a discipline:
“Just as there is a discipline of suffering and pain, there can also be a discipline of joy and fulfillment. Today men need to learn this new truth, and its perception will greatly change human consciousness “.
The objection can be raised that in many cases physical or mental suffering cannot be eliminated. Well, there is no need to do it: joy or suffering can coexist on different levels of our being. We must always remember the complexity of human nature, of our internal structure. We live at various levels and we can indeed say that there are various “subpersonalities” in us. We have numerous testimonies of the coexistence between pain and joy. A great modern mystic, Sister Elizabeth of the Trinity, says: “If you know how to put joy into pain, what a delightful peace!”. And Hermann Keyserling: “Joy is achieved through accepted suffering”. Tommaso Campanella put it synthetically in his verse:
“In saddened flesh, but with a cheerful soul”.
Another point is the relationship between light and joy. It is intuitive, but it can and must become increasingly conscious. It has been said that light and joy are synonymous. It has been recommended to sometimes replace “light” with “joy”. Thus, in pronouncing the Great Invocation one can sometimes say: “From the point of joy in the mind of God Let joy flow into the minds of men Let joy descend on Earth. “
Where there is joy there can be no emotional clouding or illusion; joy drives away illusion. There is also a close relationship between spiritual love and joy. In his well-known verses, Dante celebrated the synthesis of light, love and joy:
“Intellectual light, full of love;
love of the true good, full of gladness.
joy that transcends every pain”.
Now, we can happily do our meditation, invocational and receptive.
