Pleasure, joy and delight are three steps to the recovery of greater and greater degrees of Bliss that has gone into the origin of creation.
Pleasure is the lowest of all and completely object dependent. It needs an active contact of the mind with an outer object, through the senses, directly or, indirectly through the mind’s imagination of the objects of desire. The result is transient pleasure followed by pain.
Joy is a more subjective state wherein the mind enjoys itself within without sensory contact such as remembering something beautiful, thinking or reading something beautiful, creating something beautiful. It endures longer simply because it is always accessible and within reach but also brings its opposite recoil of sorrow of the lost, bygone moment, loss of the subtle reward such as honour and fame, loss of love.
Delight is self existent truth of the Divine. It is independent of the object or the subject. It depends only on contact with the Divine who is everywhere and in everything. Though not always easy to find, once discovered it stays always as a permanent stream behind which one can access anytime anywhere. Once found all objective contacts and subjective states change their dual value into a single unity of Delight.
Naturally since we can focus only on one thing at a time, it depends upon what we chose to dwell upon. It is this inner shift that really matters. Once our focus is on the Divine Presence in us then we don’t need to leave anything or anyone externally. We have to only stop dealing with people and objects as if they were meant to provide pleasure or joy to oneself. Instead we have to regard them as belonging to the Divine and ourselves also belonging to the Divine. Once this inner change is affected replacing our ego bound desire based relation to a Divine basis then pleasure and pain change into pure delight.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
