From an early age, we have been taught that we need to fulfill certain conditions or behave in certain ways in order to receive our parents’ love and affection. If we didn’t behave the way our parents wanted us to, we knew the consequences.
In childhood, our relationship with our parents was one of the main 'causes' of joy, and if our parents were displeased with our behaviour or us in particular, our 'supply' of joy was cut off.
In this way, most of us learned that we first have to fulfill others’ expectations in order to deserve a small dose of joy. We placed conditions on our joy and made it dependent on outside events, and in doing so, we strayed from our 'true self', our true nature, and thus from our one and only unlimited source of true joy.
However, joy is not something we have to deserve; joy is not something we have to earn — joy is already within us. Joy is our true nature, and our job is to find our own best way to 'unlock' it and make it as real as possible in our daily reality. Joy does not have to be deserved or earned, but simply allowed to flow through our lives.
***Imagine you’re going to a bank where you own an account with a certain amount of money in it. The bank clerk tells you that you first have to please
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him if you want him to pay out your money — the money you already have in your account.
How would you feel, and what would you think of such a bank clerk?
You’d probably become very upset and ask yourself where he got the right to place conditions on access to your own money.
But why would you ask yourself this in the first place?
You’d ask because you are conscious of the fact that it’s your money, and that, apart from certain formalities that banks require when withdrawing money from an account, no one has the right to blackmail you in such a way. Something that’s yours belongs to you and you instinctively object every time someone tries to take it from you, or restrict your access to it without your permission.
Despite the fact that many people don’t think like that, I guarantee you that a similar situation is happening with the amount of joy present in your life. Each one of us has an unlimited amount of joy on his or her 'bank account', but due to a lack of consciousness of this fact, we allow all kinds of 'bank clerks' to ask us to please them on a daily basis before they give us something that’s already ours! We are even supposed to feel grateful about this.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. By becoming increasingly conscious of ourselves as beings whose true nature is precisely unlimited joy, we bring ourselves into a state from which we can more consciously steer our lives in the direction of the life we’ve always dreamed of. The Universe doesn’t play games with us, and will never give us dreams that we can’t fulfill. There are no exceptions to this.
*** “Inherent in every intention and desire iiiis the mechanics for its fulfillment”