When the feeling of universal connections awakens in us as certainty, all worry and fear can fall away.
Once causeless joy has entered a person, he gains eternal life, for he is united with the ‘I’ that knows not death – he himself becomes eternal joy, even if he were born blind and crippled. (Gustav Meyrink)
My song is an eternal melody of joy. He who does not know joy – the pure, causeless joyful certainty, the causeless certainty: I am who I am, who I was and always will be – he is a sinner against the Holy Spirit.
The ghosts of darkness give way before the splendour of joy, which shines in the breast like a sun in the inner sky; the ghosts which accompany man as the shadows of committed and forgotten crimes of earlier lives and which entangle the threads of his destiny. He who hears and sings the song of joy annuls all consequences of guilt and never again heaps guilt upon guilt.
The sun has died in him who cannot rejoice. How could such a person spread light then? Even impure joy is closer to the light than dark, gloomy seriousness.
You ask: “Who am I? “Joy and the ‘I’ are the same. He who does not know joy does not know his ‘I’.
The innermost ‘I’ is the source of joy. Who does not worship it, he serves the hell.
Is it not written: “I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other gods before me? “
He who does not hear and sing the song of the nightingale has no self; he has become a dead mirror where strange demons come and go – a walking corpse like the moon in the sky with its extinguished fire.
Just try to rejoice!
Many a person who tries it asks, ‘What should I rejoice about?’ Joy needs no reason, it grows of itself, like God. Joy that needs a reason is not joy, but pleasure.
Some people want to feel joy, but they can’t; then they blame the world and fate. They fail to consider that a sun which has almost forgotten how to shine cannot drive away the ghosts of a thousand-year night with its faint twilight. The wrong that a man has done to himself all his life long cannot be made good in a single moment!
But once causeless joy has entered him, he gains eternal life, for he is united with the ‘I’ that knows not death – he himself becomes eternal joy, even if he were born blind and crippled. However, joy must be learned – it must be longed for. What people usually see as joy, is not joy, but the mere cause of joy. The cause of joy is what they crave.
How strange, mused the imperial physician, that my own self speaks to me from a complete stranger, of whom I do not even know who and what he is!
(From Gustav Meyrink, Walpurgisnacht. Chapter IV: In the Mirror)
Humour – The Seriousness of the Present
What can our real self be other than the sun within us, the essence, and if this sun has forgotten to shine and has become twilight, how can it drive away the ghosts of a thousand years of night? How could it have a purifying effect on our souls?
The person who becomes aware of the divine source within their heart, who connects with this light, allows gratitude, silent joy, and sometimes even clearly perceptible sparkling cheerfulness to radiate through them. Joy is the power of heaven within us; it is like a healing medicine for many a saddened heart, for many an erring heart searching for the right direction.
When the feeling of universal connections awakens in us as certainty, all worry and fear can fall away. This deep causelessness speaks from the heart as the GOOD NEWS: The Divine, the light of the infinite, lives in the centre of our being as a seed waiting to grow into a plant. Out of chaos, out of anarchy, the freshness of the flaming spirit will, indeed, must become something new. It is not for nothing that we know the words’ serene anarchy’ as a prerequisite for development (Paul Feyerabend). Is it not our task, as people who are becoming aware, first to understand and then no longer resist the fire that consumes, the fire that purifies, heals, and sanctifies?
That fire, uncovered in the depths of the heart, which is the source of joy, promise of freedom, awe-inspiring depth and power. Its light becomes a sparkling aura of benevolence and love. Nothing is more contagious than cheerfulness and goodwill of the heart.
