Joy is the solution to life, Goodness, Flourishing, Parenting, Optimal Experience, Personal trauma..... [species flourishing].....
40 years I've been living on the basis of this Theory. As an executive leader in the high-tech industry it was my guiding principle. As a parent. But not blindly, nothing blindly.
My initial base of information was observing my father who did this in my view, and through him the person Jesus, and Gandhi, and King, Teresa of Calcutta and many since.
To say that joy is the answer is to say that the cure for individual or Collective cancer has been found. This Theory may be incorrect but that is the import of what it asserts, far more important than the Cure of cancer which only kills the body.
Instrumentation is beginning to exist to prove or disprove this Theory within the human nervous system but what is lacking is scientists with their hands on these instruments that have any knowledge or experience of joy in their lives so the best I can hope is that they will slowly approximate and I'm afraid like George vaillant, spiritual Evolution, totally misinterpret and Missapply the results.
Were any of the individuals I just mentioned in on this conversation they would be saying, yes, James, the above is exactly right.
If I did anything right as a father it was realizing pretty much on the day of the first one's birth, that joy is what I wanted for that child and then the second one, more than anything else. And that therefore as a father I owed to that child more than anything else that there be joy in my life as my example would be the most powerful influence I would have on that child, those children. I was quite sure that was true then, all of my study, practice, experience, life everyday since has indicated that it was.
Where does Joy come from? It is the reward provided by the nervous system when it thinks we are devoting our very existence to do something really really important for others who are in dire need. The best formula I've come up with is serving the neediest from the soul in solidarity.
[It was the solution to species survival and flourishing, but it is too late for that. But it will always be the solution to the individual flourishing even on the sinking Titanic, every breath.]
Every breath that I am given my highest priority will be on substantiating the above for myself through exhaustive study of the most scholarly information, practice, and sharing that in how I live and in what I write as best I can.
The most substantiated book on psychology in this vein is George vaillant, spiritual evolution. I'm on my 5th reading and struggling to keep my head from exploding with how much he got wrong, but he got Nuggets right that the horrible insane field of psychology has gotten wrong for so long.
At his recommendation I'm also reading Karen Armstrong, the great transformation, which among other things brilliantly presents the history of the Great inventors throughout history for ways of being individually and collectively to optimize experience, so-called religions. They have been relative failures, but there is much much much much to be learned from what they have done so that some of us can figure out how to go beyond, how to invent what was really needed.
Suicide, drugs, mountains of material things, alcohol, marijuana, wallowing in regret for depression or guilt, sex addiction, do not occur with the individuals devoted to a life of joy, see
LSGIABeing.com. it doesn't happen. Inconceivable. People who are trying to be good? Yes, these things happen. But those pursuing Joy by whatever conception or none, no, it doesn't happen. These are the equivalent of the Buddhist ideal who have refused Nirvana to stay and serve.
