"Joy has something expansive that allows to a certain extent to free oneself from a story. When you meet your new lover and you are very happy with him, there are a few moments where you are without history, where you are without lover, where you are without yourself there is only contentment. Then, of course, you attribute that to history.
Joy has this capacity to momentarily break history. That’s why in some traditions, such as Northern Indian Tantra, the focus has sometimes been on the sensory experience of joy, because it can to some extent explode the image. At that time, we ask in the experience to realize that there is no object, that there is no experience of joy, that there is only joy. It’s a very complex, very sophisticated, and very misunderstood technique. It’s a razor-wire technique that’s very dangerous.
In the experience of joy, one turns one’s head and one frees oneself in the instant of the experience, one keeps the expansion without its apparent origin.
On the physiological level, joy is more favorable than sadness. It brings more health than sadness, regardless of the origin. We should not, intellectually, want to free ourselves from joy as we free ourselves from sadness. When you have the joy of a very good champagne, you have to give yourself to that.
A sadness too. Momentarily, we can suggest a sensory approach to sadness, but sooner or later, when there is sadness, we really have to take advantage of it. When there is suffering, you really have to go with it. But it already requires some form of integration.
At first, when a person is depressed, he must learn to live with depression, but later, we will no longer say that: we will say to totally make one with depression. There is no difference with joy.
All emotion refers to the central emotion; there is only one emotion, it is the emotion of being. Joy, sadness, fear are extensions.
That’s why, in the theatre, you see two people cutting their throats, cutting their heads off, and so on. And you come out of there and you think it’s a very beautiful play. One is not bound to the anecdote; beauty is beyond the event. In all operas, it is always dramatic, but it is deeply happy.
That is why in the statuary of the East, we see only death, because death is profoundly happy. Indian music is essentially the râga of separation, jealousy, fear. That of separation is the most important.
All Indian painting is based on separation, because it points to the essence of things. We find the tantric approach, where emotion is the essence of things.
So, if we give ourselves deeply to any emotion, we find the essence of what is behind the emotion. But there has to be a certain orientation, otherwise it is not possible.
Eric Baret
(The Coronation of the Green Dragon)
Le Sacre du Dragon Vert
Almora Editions
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