Well, love, as we said, takes many expressions. Many people are here out of the energy field of love, and what they do is energized by love. Joy is a different state. Joy goes beyond love and lovingness. Love and lovingness, you can live with all the time. It’s sort of an evenness that lights up everything. Joy is more intense. Joy is more exuberant, you might say. Its energy is more—sort of swamps you. Joy sort of takes you over. One can be prone to joy, prone to joy, without being in that state all the time. You can go from lovingness, unconditional lovingness, into joy, into ecstasy.
The ecstasy is beyond description and hard to handle if you’re around people. One time I went into a state of ecstasy and. . . . There’s a chapel over here, the Chapel of Something or Other. …At one o’clock in the morning, nobody was there. The candles were all lit, and there was this beautiful music playing. And ecstasy reached such a state that the body began to dance with ecstasy. I was a pretty good dancer. The only possible way to handle it was to give it physical expression. One sort of was danced by the ecstasy of the glory of God as revealed to your own awareness. Ecstatic. Ecstatic. So, one did that to express to God one’s joy and appreciation for Divinity. One’s joy is that one has been allowed to experience the quality of Divinity experientially within one’s own capacity to experience. So, the joy is almost like an exquisite thankfulness that one has been allowed to experience the Presence and one wishes to reflect back the thankfulness and the joy at the revelation, in whatever manner you’re able to express it.
New! Just released! Karma and Devotion: The Sacred Path to God Through the Heart, Ch. 2, Pgs. 73-74
This book contains the transcriptions from the September and October 2002 lectures by Dr. Hawkins.
