3-8. Limitless Joy is your original Mind. You have not lost it. You have merely layered illusions over your Joy. Release all illusions and Joy will return.
For your ego, joy is a temporary occurrence, one that arises only periodically and always in association with any particular event, person or “gain”, such as a new purchase or other fortune received. This is not at all the essence of Joy, for all that is of this world is fleeting at best and flatly irrelevant at worst, at least from the perspective of the ego. The ego will not be sated. In Truth, the ego cannot be sated. The ego desires ever more - more acquisitions, more resources, more satisfaction and more accomplishments. The ego cannot be fulfilled, satisfied, exhausted, content, appreciative or willing to simply rest in acceptance of all that is now manifest in your life. The ego knows nothing of these simple concepts, for the ego forever strives for more and the ego does not understand that it is its constantly growing hunger that quite literally defines the ego’s continuing existence as an energetic black hole of nothingness that will consume all that is offered to it without remorse, satisfaction, appreciation or even recognition of all that is cast into its darkness, never to be known within the Light of Love for the ego is darkness and the Light is All that has ever been Real. To understand that the ego is not Real is not even sufficient, in Truth, for understanding falls far short of the Experience of Love, so very short indeed that to even attempt to classify understanding as a vehicle for Experience is a woeful error, one that will endlessly befuddle your mind. To try to understand that which can only be Experienced will lead to great confusion and unnecessary pain, for understanding is always abstract, as much as it may not seem to be to you at this time. Understanding is a concept used to attempt to encapsulate a series of other concepts, accepted so wholly that they are never questioned - they are simply relied upon as the basis of a life lived in an unconscious willingness to presume that you are able to capture and accurately summarize all that is Real within a framework that you have created, one that certainly has value, but one that can never even begin to approach the Glory that is the Experience of Love in its true expression. Why might this be? Or more importantly, do you even wish to ask yourself why it might be that all that you believe yourself able to understand at this exact moment in your progression though all of the stages of understanding that have been your life so far might be representative of an abstract collection of partial experiences, so verily assembled by your mind into what you attempt to believe is a truly cohesive whole? To even ask this question of yourself - to embark upon this line of inquiry, this darkened quest for reason that will extend far beyond all of the fragmentary assembly that you desire to believe must have a singular existence, is to ask of your mind what it cannot give you, for your mind was Created to be a perceptual framework and although your mind is infinite, there exists much more beyond all that can be known. What extends beyond knowledge or perception in any form is Experience, yet it is not even Experience as you will ever have understood it before, for this is not a recounting of events that transpired or situations experienced and then remembered in partial and abstract form. For indeed, all that you think that you have experienced within this world has been but a conglomeration of expectations fulfilled or not, joys desired or lost, knowledge gained and then forgotten and connections to others that were always predicated upon what you believed them to be or not to be, rather than simply accepted as they occurred and then released as soon as they were concluded. Your mind is infinite. You can imagine anything. Yet you cannot imagine the Glory and the Peace that will accompany a complete surrender to the present moment and the Joy that will arise when you no longer wish to imprint upon this world any expectations, desiring instead to not desire at all, but rather to allow all that occurs to unfold however it will, regardless of your beliefs of what is “right” or “proper”. Layers upon layers of illusions have you generated, a great many occurring unconsciously, for this is what you were taught from the moment you arrived in this world as a gestating germ cell of unfolding expansion, transforming first into a single zygote and then into a fully formed infant, now ready to emerge from the safety and comfort of your mother’s protective womb so that you could be born - physically born - into this world, although your experiences of this world began to create memories long before you were expelled from the beautifully peaceful waters of your mother’s amniotic fluid. This world has but one purpose. It is a perfectly imperfect place in which you can Remember the Perfection that was your Creation. This many seem contradictory. How could any place that is imperfect be Perfect for learning of any kind? Indeed though, it can be for to learn of the imperfection of your perceptions can occur in any place that is not wholly and directly reflective of the Perfection of Creation, for while much that exists in this world that can serve as indicators and guides towards the Perfection that Created the myriad systems and alignments that underlie much that occurs here, such as the “laws of nature” or the great beauty of mathematics and all of the symmetrical structures of Creation that its formulas and theorems describe, even these alignments with Creation are partial, at best. Acceptance frees you from all that you thought this world to be so that you can move beyond it, allowing all that was placed upon Truth to be gently dissolved, although even such a word is imprecise as nothing that is not Real can actually change or be removed, for it never existed at all. Yet this is what is asked of you, though it involves no genuine alteration or transformation at all. Release all that you have projected upon this world as what you believed must represent its genuine function or purpose, for this world is not imbued with any these attributes of Creation. This world is neutral. And it will remain forever so. There is nothing to genuinely learn here, for learning is an accumulation of representative structures that provide insight into the organizational pattern of Creation, yet these structures are represented only partially in this world and they should not be relied upon to be wholly reflective of the Perfection of Creation. Through genuine acceptance and complete surrender to Love, you can Experience the Joy that is your right and your privilege to take up again in the place of the ego’s endless hunger for more - more resources, more experiences and more knowledge, for what is there that you could possibly present as a genuine need when you are ready to accept that just to be - to be as you are, now and forever, is quite sufficient to allow you to experience the eternal Joy of Creation?