May 25, 2010
Why "Enjoyn"?

Personally, what I want most in life is joy. Often I sign letters after a penultimate "Enjoy." It's an active word. To enjoy is to create one's experience of joy, to be joy, to bring joyousness to one's world.

Part if it is "joyn", a creative spelling of "join." When I was a kid, I experienced extreme separateness (despite loving parents and three ever-present brothers.) I was miserable about it, but accepted the world I was experiencing. As a teen I started connecting with others but there were limits. A big part of joy was being joined with others, but wherever I was, that experience of separation persisted- there was something just "wrong". For instance, I met a number of wonderful young women in college and fell in love a number of times. But I knew I wasn't ready. I couldn't commit until the "wrongness" of life was solved.

At age 28, in 1985, in a course called The Forum, I discovered that I had, at a very young age, accidentally created the view that I was separated. And from then on, I experienced the separateness created by my view. Since that revelation, I have increasingly experienced connection. Then with the help of Siddha Yoga, I was able to see my whole life, my "ego" as a creation. What opened up was a new ability to see myself anywhere on the spectrum of a separate human object to being the one universal self, and the bliss that accompanies this perspective.

With the wrongness of the universe far behind me, I married in 1990 and we bought a condo. My son were born in 1992. We bought a house in 1994, my second son was born in 1995 and we remodeled in 1998. My enlightenment became a place to escape to, while most of life was a demanding drama of work, marriage and kids. We finished the remodel and I experienced 6 months of depression as the huge outlay of money and effort seemed to give me no respite from life's demands. A friend's Buddhist reminder that "life is suffering" gave me pause. "If life is suffering," I thought, "then perhaps I can find joy in simple pleasures, the sun, nature, a walk." That afternoon, the depression lifted and I realized that I had become increasingly enmeshed in my mortal life. I had become unhappy and had lost hope of regaining happiness. Rediscovering simple day to day joys, hope for day-to-day happiness returned.

The new millennium brought a new struggle of unemployment during the tech bust. I worked my way back over a number of years and finally working steadily again, found myself stuck anew in my marriage. I sought help from a therapist, and received reassurance that I had a healthy attitude in an area that almost everyone finds difficult at times. In 2008 I found myself at a new job. In a conversation with a new co-worker, it occurred to me The Forum might be useful to him, and suggested it. He declined, but I realized I was stuck in a project and Landmark is legendary at getting people unstuck, so I signed up for a seminar.

In the first week, I got unstuck. In the second, I gave up 15 years of accumulated resentments against my wife and my experience of family life was transformed. Over the next 15 months (each seminar lasts 3-4 months, meeting once every week or two) I cleared up many areas of unhappiness and finally was able to fully integrate my enlightenment into my life. I also retook The Forum and was astounded at the progress they've made with it, and then took The Advanced Course, which exposes one to many of the wonders of enlightenment which I had studied in Yoga.

For the last year, I've been blissfully happy. Part of it has been creating feelings of being intimately intertwined with hundreds of people (with little change in my circumstances), and several times daily experience the joy of experiencing unity-consciousness. I expect it sounds egocentric (the antithesis of enlightened) to say it, but I can no longer deny it- I'm enlightened.

I can still complain at times, but after just a moment or two I realize it's all a myth. Yes, the planet may be dying due to global warming. Yes, the popular Republican leaders Reagan and both Bushes brought the largest increases in our government and debt, and the Democrat leaders have not been very effective. Earthquakes, tidal waves, droughts, wars, debilitating drugs and repressive reactions to them, dictators, religious extremists and organized crime persists. And at the same time, people create joy and beauty and song and daily acts of creation, heroism and love.

And it all means nothing about the experience of life. Yes, the world is as it is and is not as it's not, just as each person is what they are and are not what they're not. But all of that defies our simplified views. Each one of us has a choice of what to do with all this, what to do next with each day. Each one of us has the choice about whether to create our selves and our futures, or be a reaction to the world that appears to rise out of our view of life. Each one of us has the choice to complain, or love life. I choose love, and experience joy.

My key to transforming my experience has been to see how I created what I was experiencing. I used the Landmark courses to distinguish my actual experiences from my stories about life. I used them to take full responsibility for the way life seemed, and seems.

Though I try to explain it, I doubt the explanation makes a difference. I love explanations and they have helped me a lot, but it helped only because I studied the explanations as I studied life from many points along the 25-year journey.

"Enjoyn" is also a misspelling of enjoin, "to prescribe (a course of action) with authority or emphasis." The course of action? Create a life of joy, happiness, love, peace and freedom.

Enlightenment is available. Unity consciousness, God-consciousness, bliss and unconditional love for life is available. I enjoin you not to settle for a life without them.

With Love and Joy,
-Randy