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God in Drag
For me the distinction between sedative happiness and exhilarating joy matters. In their book Militant Joy Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery draw the distinction thus: “Joy remakes people through combat with forces of subjection [i.e., subjugation]. Joy is a desubjectifying process, an unfixing, an intensification of life itself. It is a process of coming alive and coming apart. Whereas happiness is used as a numbing anesthetic that induces dependence, joy is the growth of people’s capacity to do and feel new things, in ways that can break this dependence.
It’s striking how joyless the Republican ticket is — two sour resentful men eager to strip others of their safety and well-being, whether they’re pregnant women, immigrants, trans kids, and constantly insisting that we’re in the midst of carnage and collapse.
~ Rebecca Solnit
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Interestingly enough, Hinduism, with its introspective research tool known as meditation, was able to penetrate into the mystery of the vastness of the Universe and our part in it and it came up with its experiential realization which, in Sanskrit, is stated as such: “Tat Tvam Asi,” which can be translated as: “That which you have been in search of (Enlightenment, God, the Source of the Universe, etc.), you ALREADY are.”
