from Amir Freinmann, Sept 7, 2024
Not the excitement of your horse winning the race
In a forthcoming book chapter I co-authored with Prof. Aviva Berkovich-Ohana, titled “Enlightened joy and love, selflessness and beyond” [1], we used the following excerpt to kick off the exploration. It is taken from an interview I did with one of the “spiritual exemplars” for “Living Transcendence: A Phenomenological Study of Spiritual Exemplars” [2]. When I asked that spiritual exemplar about her day-to-day experience, she said:
“What I find in myself is that my inner state is absolutely uniform… Every day is just whatever every day is, nothing special, but there’s always this uprising of joy or excitement, the excitement of being… But it’s not like the excitement of your horse winning the race, which is very thin and there’s always a payback. If you’re excited in your emotions, you can be sure you’re going to be depressed some time later. But this excitement doesn’t have an opposite. None of the things that I talked about – peace, love, joy – has an opposite. They just are there in their stability and constancy… And everything is always new. Because I’m not carrying around all my past experience with me and I’m not busy projecting forward. So life is exciting in the dullest way, from the dullest resources… It’s a delight out of nothing. And it’s always fresh.
But at the same time, of course, life is very challenging. My health is not great. I have challenges with my relationships and with money. I’m impacted whenever there’s a challenge. But the impact isn’t the only thing going on… it doesn’t take up the whole space. The whole space is already full of being, so the impact is cushioned in something greater.”
After adding to this excerpt related statements, that I heard from other spiritual exemplars, we summarized the findings by writing that “Enlightened joy and love are characterized by being stable and constant, intrinsic to or integrated into the experience of being and functioning in the world, subtle and inseparably intertwined with the other qualities of Living Transcendence.”
The manuscript will be published in the next few months as a chapter in the forthcoming book “Happiness and the Psychology of Enlightenment” [1].
[1] Freimann, A., & Berkovich-Ohana, A (forthcoming). Enlightened joy and love, selflessness and beyond. In Happiness and the Psychology of Enlightenment. Ed. Patrick Jones. IntechOpen. ISBN: 978-0-85014-861-9
[2] Freimann, A., Mayseless, O., Hart, T., & Johnson, A. (2024). Living transcendence: A phenomenological study of spiritual exemplars. The Humanistic Psychologist. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/hum0000359