Book Report: Joy 24x7 - Is it really possible? Or allowed?

"Joy 24x7: Jeetendra Jain explores Joy with Sadhguru"

I picked it up as soon as I read the title, with a hundred questions racing in my head at once. Is it possible? Is he gonna share some magic spells? Are we ALLOWED to be joyful 24x7? Will he say the same generic stuff like relax or something?

Something about Sadhguru's practical approach to things always appealed to me. He usually makes a lot of sense in all his videos. So I bought the book to see if it lives up to his style. The results will blow your mind! Just kidding. They did completely change my approach to joy though, and these are some of my thoughts after reading the book.

The Unhappiness Epidemic

The number of people suffering with depression was already worse, when no thanks to the pandemic, it started increasing exponentially in the last couple of years. Why are so many people suffering from so many mental illnesses, regardless of their country, religion, sex, age, or ethnicity? Where are we collectively going wrong as a species?

If you just understand the fact that you're either joyful or miserable only by choice, the question is only whether you make your choices consciously or unconsciously.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Everything we do in life is in pursuit of happiness. Some of us are studying hard to get a great job so that we can live a happy life. Some of us are accumulating things like clothes, shoes, gold, or wealth to live a happy life. 'If I get into this college, that will be it!', 'If I get a job in this company, that will be it!', 'If I marry this person, that will be it!'. Sound familiar? If we create a timeline of our life, happiness seems to be the end goal that we're all constantly targeting.

I am not talking about Joy as the ultimate possibility in your life; I am talking about Joy as the 'A' of your life, not 'Z'.

External Stimulation

Our happiness also seems to always be dependent on external factors. We easily get upset, angry, frustrated, and demotivated. Someone has a better job than us, someone has better shoes than us, someone was mean/rude to us, something didn't happen like the way we wanted. Thanks to social media, it has become so easy to do this as we have a direct (filtered) window to other peoples' lives. If it was my first day on Earth, I would say we're just constantly looking for reasons and excuses to be unhappy.

Joyfulness doesn't happen because everything is perfect, but joyfulness happens because you are unwilling to subjugate your intelligence to what is happening around you.

Happy High

We all have a list of things that make us happy. Listening to music, drawing, reading a book, watching a TV show, going out for a walk, etc. It is normal to have such a list, isn't it? We do these things to 'unwind from a rough day' or to 'get away from reality'. It is very normal to hate our job and wait for the weekend to 'have fun'. We also have reached a point where we will become completely miserable if we don't get to do these things, the only things that supposedly 'bring' us joy. We're so addicted to those external moments/actions with which we have associated joy. Come on, all of us have waited for a horrible workday to be over, so we can turn off our office computer, and open our personal computer to watch that amazing tv show.

If you use an external activity to create an inner situation, you will naturally get enslaved to that activity. Because that is now the condition for your joy.

Joy - The Forbidden Fruit

It is fascinating how we all have collectively developed a similar perception of Joy. There is some sort of FEAR associated with Joy in all our heads; we're scared to be happy. What if it goes away? Then I'll miss it and be even sadder, so I better not get used to this, or enjoy this. We think we should be worthy of receiving happiness, or we must achieve or win some imaginary battle to be happy for a few minutes.

And I am not sure who started it, but all of us, at some point or the other, have believed, or still believe that we are all 'allotted' some quantity of joy for our lifetimes, and if we 'use it up' quickly then it will all be sadness and misery later. If everything we do in life is in pursuit of joy, why are we scared to receive it when presented with a chance? How are we developing this fear and mistrust? Again, if it was my first day on Earth, that would totally sound like an excuse.

Your intelligence is so deeply entangled with the social identification that you have taken on, your brains are not working in line with the life within you; it is working against your own life. That is the source of misery.

So can Joy exist 24x7?

As it turns out, ABSOLUTELY! Apparently, we don't need to 'do' anything to 'get' joy, it is the basis of our existence! And when we manage to learn to not tie it with external things, we can be joyful 24x7! It looks like joy is just a fundamental force of life, that just wants a little expression. Joyfulness is not an emotion, it is a way of living!

As you can see, the book was quite successful in shattering a lot of my beliefs about joy. It gives you a fresh perspective, one that can't be argued with. It is divided into 3 parts - What is Joy, Why no Joy, and The Path to Joy. And guess what! Most of what I mentioned in this article is less than a quarter of the book. So if I managed to make you even a little curious, let me assure you that it is definitely worth a read (or 20), and can easily be found here on Amazon. You can thank me later :D

If you're joyful, whatever you do, you'll do it to the hilt. Because you have nothing to lose, nothing to hold back, nothing to fear.

P.S. All quotations were directly from the book, in case that wasn't obvious. Thanks for reading!