It appears that a revelation has been slowly weaving itself into me for at least a couple of years, likely much longer. Here is one view of how it unfolded, blogpost by blogpost.
Several months ago, when totally engrossed in three different Great Courses Plus lecture series, I noticed that I love the experience of being fascinated and that I didn’t really care what got me there. I remembered, vaguely, something similar in some blogpost I wrote, found it and saw that this was not much different than what I’d written about then.
In that post, “Back to Basics” , early last year I said: I recently noticed that I was delighted in the experience of discovery itself. This delight occurred in the instant after the recognition that I had discovered something that was new to me. What came to mind was that maybe it does not matter at all what I was exploring, or had discovered, but that perhaps what I was seeking was simply delight. It also brought to mind that Freud’s “pleasure principle” – that entities seek pleasure and avoid pain – is visible in this pattern.
A year earlier, in the post “Family Traits” I wrote: If, to borrow a phrase, we were “made in the image and likeness of God,” then it makes sense that we still reflect the “likeness” of our parent energy, which some call god. It also makes sense, from a purely evolutionary point of view, that the essence of what we evolved from would still be embedded in us, much like the DNA in our bodies. 
And where those likenesses are most visible in a relatively undiluted form is in young children. Initially it takes time to bring their attention into our perceptual ranges, but as they do they are insatiably curious. They observe, then explore and enjoy. They investigate and try things out long before they have the use of language. Their behavior exhibits a pure “what is this?” – the true beginners mind – and “what can I do with it?” There is typically some level of delight or fear in discovery. I take that delight to be a form of appreciation, as are love, enjoyment, humor, laughter, and the like…
As my mind currently sees it, observation, curiosity, imagination, creativity (choice), and delight (appreciation) can present themselves with little distortion through the many layers of consciousness into our current levels of experience.
And now another part of “Back to Basics”: My guess is that the following are innate to all human beings, and perhaps other creatures as well: Observation, distinguishing, curiosity, imagination, creativity, discovery, wonder, awe, engagement, enjoyment (pleasure), sharing and play. Of these, I might say that wonder and awe may not be attributed to other animals, but most of these traits seem to at least show up in the juveniles of many mammals.
What I’m “wondering” is if these experiences are all, each in their own way, enjoyable. Discovery is a delightful experience – the “Oh Wow!” experience – creativity is fulfilling, imagination is expansive and freeing. There are innumerable ways that human beings use to arrive at these pleasures but it does seem, at least to me in this moment, that the pathways may ultimately be of little particular interest to us. Perhaps it is the longing for the experience itself that drives us to act as we do. The experience following a discovery, for example, and not the route to it, may be what is calling to us. We rationalize the particular path that we are invested in but in reality we may be just gravitating to common pleasurable experiences, which may differ only in the space from which we approach them.
Now I am back in this same dance, having forgotten that I have been here before. So again, it seems like there are certain common experiences that we tend to prefer, such that much of what we seek is not necessarily a wide range of particular “things” to experience, but that we explore numerous pathways towards certain types of experience, which we pursue solely for the sake of having that experience.
Here was my recent potential short list of things that most people seem to be attracted to in some manner and degree: Observation, Distinguishing, Curiosity, Imagination, Creativity, Discovery, Wonder, Awe, Joy/Delight, Sharing, Play, Humor, Love, Beauty and Goodness.
Moving along, in the post “The Experiences of Being” I wrote: What is emerging of late is that I have been getting “lost” in experience. It is reminiscent of “time flies when you’re having fun” except that it has been much more frequent and there has been a rapid oscillation between experience and then noticing that I was just lost in “it”. There appears to be no “I” in the experience. Rather, the experience is noticed after the fact and there is then a re-cognition of the lack of identity during the experience, which is really no surprise given the immediate nature of experiencing. But what is new is the sense that whatever it is that holds identity in place lets go and simply allows experience to occur. It feels like what life or consciousness desires is access to experience, here in this place, through portals such as us and that it uses every available avenue to do just that.
This points towards an inclination to go beyond just having an experience to BEING an experience, being lost in the moment, in the “Now”. And perhaps, on some deep level, we prefer BEING certain kinds of experiences.
Later in that same post I wrote: But in one case, it was not just me. I was doing a “What is present?” practice with someone and there was a mutual experience of free-flowing dancing in the expanse of imagination, one leading and one following. We experienced exchanging the roles of leader and follower, which began to accelerate back and forth so fast that, in an instant, leader and follower were merged. Both of us were gone. There was no I and no We. After the fact, it seemed that dance was simply occurring, as if consciousness had been set free to enjoy itself.
In a way, we are the experiences of Being, individually and collectively.
And more recently from “I Love Therefore I Am”: Bidirectional joy radiates at all times. This I/We is blended into the collective love that they are, in their web of loves, and we co-create ourselves in our joint oscillating resonances.
As we are joy’d by this inter-webbing, Being is joy’d in our recognition of, and active participation in, the ongoing joyful interplay of welcoming in and gifting out.
When I texted a friend with my thought of “Without those I love, I would not be,” his response was “So…..I love therefore I am?”. YES, that’s perfect.
I love, therefore I am
Following along this same stream in blogs over time, I come to my post from last month “Tell Us of Your Joy”:
The wise ones know. They allow each to find their own path, taste their own delights and gently nudge each soul when it fails to see love and joy in the many forms in which it manifests.
Go out and play, find love, taste delight, share what you find with others and then come home and tell us of your joy.
And now to the most recent puzzle piece, I was re-reading a book called “Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness” by Satprem a couple of weeks ago. Here are a few selections from one paragraph that really brought the pinnacle of joy into focus for me. “For such is the goal of our evolution in the end: joy…Whereas no one can imitate this joy: it is a child laughing in the sun, it loves, it wants to sweep everything along in its dance…The joy of being, of being totally, in all that is, all that has been, all that will be, here below, elsewhere, everywhere, as if honey could taste itself and all its drops together and all its drops could taste each other and each the whole honeycomb.”
And from the same book: “She hurls herself forth outside Him in a burst of joy, to play at finding Him again in Time – He and she, two in one.”
I read this book back in the 70’s and still think of Aurobindo as a truly transcendent soul. So in this particular “now”, I fully resonate with his expression and will say that it all comes down to joy, seeking to experience itself in as many forms that its delight might be able to create, feeding back on itself in a “Bidirectional joy [that] radiates at all times.” It seems to me that every person, thing and the environment itself represents a possible pathway to joy and is representative OF joy, slightly masked to our eyes but always in plain sight. My “short list”, at least in this moment, is down to one, Joy.
As we fellow travelers surrender our individual “selves” into the experience of joy, we find each other “in Time”, merging ourselves one-by-one into joy. Alan Watts said “…only there is no we that dances. There is just the dancing.” I lose my “self” in the dance, then, for a moment, I experience the joy of that dance. I lose my “self” in another, in our dance and then step out just a moment, and am joy’d by that dance.
I dance in joy, on joy’s path, moving always towards joy. I have become the path, I have become the destination, I am the joy, dancing towards myself.
Follow your bliss – Joseph Campbell
First, the art in this post is particularly well chosen to illustrate your points.
Second, I think you may be talking about one half of a polarity, since satisfaction can also come from suffering, if it’s for a good cause.
And third, you put me in mind of this quote from Tom Robbins i “Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates.”
“What is it,” Maestra had asked quite rhetorically, “that separates human beings from the so-called lower animals? Well, as I see it, it’s exactly one half-dozen significant things: Humor, Imagination, Eroticism—as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of glowworms or raccoons—Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an appreciation of beauty for its own sake.
“Now,” she’d gone on to say, “since those are the features that define a human being, it follows that the extent to which someone is lacking in those qualities is the extent to which he or she is less than human. Capisce? And in those cases where the defining qualities are virtually nonexistent, well, what we have are entities that are north of the animal kingdom but south of humanity, they fall somewhere in between, they’re our missing links.”
In his grandmother’s opinion, the missing link of scientific lore was neither extinct nor rare. “There’re more of them, in fact, than there are of us, and since they actually seem to be multiplying, Darwin’s theory of evolution is obviously wrong.” Maestra’s stand was that missing links ought to be treated as the equal of full human beings in the eyes of the law, that they should not suffer discrimination in any usual sense, but that their writings and utterances should be generally disregarded and that they should never, ever be placed in positions of authority.
“That could be problematic,” Switters had said, straining, at the age of twenty, to absorb this rant, “because only people who, you know, lack those six qualities seem to ever run for any sort of office.”
Maestra thoroughly agreed, although she was undecided whether it was because full-fledged humans simply had more interesting things to do with their lives than marinate them in the torpid waters of the public trough or if it was because only missing links, in the reassuring blandness of their banality, could expect to attract the votes of a missing link majority. In any event, of the six qualities that distinguished the human from the subhuman, both grandmother and grandson agreed that Imagination and Humor were probably the most crucial.”
I also came across imagination and humor as fundamental aspects or traits of consciousness. I didn’t think of satisfaction or suffering. I did note the possibility that: “It seems to me that every person, thing and the environment itself represents a possible pathway to Joy and is representative OF joy, slightly masked to our eyes but always in plain sight.” And Aurobindo says, in my words, that it does take effort to extract ourselves from the gravity our “conventions” or habits, which he considers the physical world to be a part of. He says “But the earthly diagram and all the ingredients we have so carefully and unchangeably codified, all our infallible formulas are simply a convention – the earthly ritual can change if, instead of being hypnotized by the effects, we go to the cause behind them, to the Magician’s side.” He believes that our physical bodies will, at some point, be transformed into something very different to what they are now as we let go of our conventions and “supramental consciousness” descends into our bodies.
It is my view, at this moment anyway, that joy is the parent of everything. It is the “evolutionary impulse” itself. That is in part because of my current experiences and the recognition of the progression of this particular moment’s revelation back over my recent history. But what gives me a bit more confidence that I’m not totally making this up is, in fact, my interpretations of Aurobindo, who I do revere.
“She hurls herself forth outside Him in a burst of joy, to play at finding Him again in Time – He and she, two in one.”
For the moment, let’s assume that the Big Bang theory is accurate. From there I will equate the notion of “…in a burst of joy…” with that moment. This origin does not invalidate our star, the Earth, any microbe or particle. (I would actually say that there are no “things” but just sub-ecosystems all interacting as a single ecosystem.) In the same view, you will not find Joy in your lineage on Ancestry.com, but all of its offspring are not invalidated because you cannot. It does feel like traits such as humor, wonder, imagination and the like, are simply closer to the parent, Joy, as are the hot plasma and incipient fundamental forces coming into existence immediately after the Big Bang. The quote says “…to play at finding Him again in Time.” Without the vast amount of differentiation, that we on this planet seem to be the current end product of, there would be no hide-and-seek to “play” at. Without that there would be no possibility of enJOYment. Polarities are no less real in our experience than other distinctions, like developmental theory, and can clearly loosen up Aurobindo’s “conventions” to reveal a layer of experience that is closer to their origins, that he calls Joy.