Angela Deutschmann

Experience Truth

A Deeper Definition of Joy

Group Channelling

Johannesburg
Sunday 2 March 2008

The significance of the date
We are aware, if we can begin in this manner, of what we will call the significance of the day. Perhaps you have had some understanding already, some development of knowledge, around the implication of numbers. In many spheres that is called numerology. Our understanding of it is slightly different, slightly more developed than perhaps what is available in most bookstores, yet, yet, it is accurate to sense that there is a significance to numbers. [And] that the arrangement of numbers, such as to be found in dates, but not only dates, also times, not only times, but also numbering or quantity, has a significance, or a symbolism within it.

And so we begin here by marking if you like, the way you would mark on a calendar an event, we begin here by marking the day. There is a significance around the date, not only for the ones of you who are here, but also for a slightly wider human path. But it is not only the date, it is too reductive and too simplistic to try to understand the symbolism of numbers by looking only at the date. It’s a combination of - let’s put it this way - the numerical energy of a moment. And the numerical energy of a moment indeed has to do with the date, but it also has to do with the time, as we have said, it also has to do with the quantity of what’s around. Numbers, like sound, like emotion, like colour are simply a reflection of an energy. So all they do (it’s nothing particularly complicated or mystical) is reflect for you an essence that is within a moment. And we are suggesting that there is a significance that you will find if you look at the numbers around this particular date. But we are becoming very eager for what we are going to call here collections, or groups, of people that are displaying collective intent.

Getting clear about your intentions
Oh, more than ever, life is encouraging - and sometimes in some cases encouraging might be a bit of a euphemism - in many areas of the world at the moment life is encouraging you to become clear, both individually and collectively about your intent. That is all. So many of the decision points that are coming forward for you - and we are including here everyone that is around this table and many others also that aren’t - many of the decision points that are coming forward for you will have the base or the foundation of coaxing you or encouraging you to become clear about your intentions. The intentions of human beings are powerful beyond your understanding.

You cannot totally control life
That does not mean that everything that happens to you will be exactly in line with your intent, no matter how well you visualise, no matter how sophisticated your positive thinking becomes. You will not be able to avoid experience in life totally that you do not prefer. It’s not available yet, regardless of some of the current teaching, for human beings, to totally avoid that which they don’t like. We would yearn for you to liberate yourselves of the pressure of trying to do that. Trying to become so good at positive thinking and so profound at affirmation that when something occurs that you didn’t plan or don’t like that there is a consequent self-judgment, because possibly you think you didn’t visualise well enough or possibly you weren’t aligned enough. We are seeing that kind of guilt - we are calling it spiritual guilt - all over the place recently.

So to clarify, we are not suggesting that you should get clear on your intention because that would mean you can avoid experiencing anything you do not like. That is not so. With respect, we bring to you that one of the foundations of human living is duality. It is not required, but at this stage that is still the only method of experience. We call duality a method of experience. And that’s the only one that is available at this stage. So it is not that we are calling for clarity from you so that you may avoid pain, avoid disappointment, or avoid discomfort, not at all. But if we can give you a wonderful understanding here, it is possible to have both pain and disappointment and discomfort in the same moment as you are deeply joyful. And that is going to be the major point that we make here [see below], is around a clearer definition for you of joy, that you may recognise it when it is offered and so that you may receive it graciously when that is what is available.

Gathering for clarity
So we have greeted you here in a very quick manner. We are aware of the amount of energy that we have available to us and so we use it as efficiently as we can. We have begun by suggesting that the moment you are all in - and when we say moment we are talking about something longer than just a second on your clock, but more if you like, a phase of life – the moment you are all in, irrespective of who you are, is one where what you are intending is being edged onwards, edged onwards, edged onwards. That is what many, many of the life circumstances that you find yourselves in are calling for. That is what it is being called for. And that is how we begin here honouring these kind of gatherings that assist you to get more clarity on your collective intent. Any such arrangement of people - whether that is in the form of a channelling is irrelevant, it can be in the form of a talk, it can be in the form of a dance, it can be in the form of a party -but if the intent is to raise your collective sense of clarity, it is something that has got a great amount of support, or a great amount of energy if you like, or a great amount of strength, right at this moment. Oh, you are going to see it happening more and more over the next few years. You will see humanity needing to gather to ascertain their values. Humanity will need to gather to ascertain their values. The voting process is not sufficient. It is neither a sufficient nor an accurate indication of the values of human beings. And you will find you’ll start - it has already started - to develop mechanisms to ascertain group consciousness. That is what we are seeing. That you will start to develop more and more mechanisms, to ascertain group consciousness so that you can be certain you are in a group that suits you. That is even more important than being in a location that suits you.

The energy of geographical locations
And we are glad to address this, we are glad to raise the issue of location, and moving and geographical considerations here. Indeed, specific spots on the earth, on the planet, have got a particular energy, that is so. But is only because, that is a reflection of the group consciousness in that place, at that moment. So we find it much more significant for all of you to consider the kind of group consciousness that you wish to belong to and to join, and then to make your choices around that. There is no value to loyalty.

Questioning loyalty
If we may bring a startling statement to the table right away and blow something out of the water. We do not find loyalty a particularly useful concept at all. Other than if you are being loyal to your own joy. But even your own joy will evolve. Your own joy is dynamic. That is what evolution is. So staying loyal to a joy that was true for you at sixteen is not going to serve you when you are thirty-six or forty-six or whatever it is, let alone being loyal to a location or a city or a particular institution or even a family. We are dropping that in here and we understand that it is an explosive statement to make. And we know that you are taught - it is subliminal, it is embedded in just about every mythology and every myth that you get taught - to be loyal to your families, we are even raising that awareness for you. We do not find loyalty as an energy particularly useful at all. And so we raise that to allow you also some clarity - as we see this is a concern around the table - about the possibilities of movement. You are welcome, of course, to change your geographical location as often as you wish. We as, if you like, representatives of your higher-selves, do not have preference as to where you live, contrary to popular belief. Not at all. Yet we are alerting you to some of the ways in which you may make these choices and if you are making choices out of loyalty that is not a choice that is going to serve your highest interests. You are welcome to use loyalty as a value, but if you are here in order to raise your life to its highest spectrum or its highest possibility, loyalty and that life will not be able to go together. So we raise that.

What are you aligned with?
We have also said that the group consciousness within an environment is much more significant than considerations of place per se because a location is not going to yield the same result for everyone who lives there. It is so obvious when you look at it, but that remains outside of the logic of many people who are considering that a location is going to solve everything, or that a location is the cause of everything. It is not. It is far more useful for you to look at the group consciousness of a particular spot, and the many that are there. Look at the ones that you are choosing to align with. And, by the way, if you want to know what you are aligned with, it is that which you are supporting and that which you are hating. Both of those indicate an alignment to a group consciousness. And so if you are attached by something, by hatred or by love or support, it has the same impact. And so that is more of a significant angle of inquiry for you than necessarily looking at supposedly what a specific geographical location offers. Because people in the same geographical location can have a vastly different experience of life there. So that is also what we give here.

A deeper definition of joy –

(1) Joy is living as wholly as possible

But we have suggested that we also want to bring to you a deeper, a deeper understanding of joy. That is a concept that is abroad, let’s put it that way. What we mean by abroad is that we are seeing - and it is for us extremely wonderful and extremely exciting - that humanity is starting to re-value joy. There have been moments in the history of humanity where joy was all-important. Those have mostly happened in a most imbalanced fashion and also in an immature fashion, therefore they have not been sustainable. And it has been appropriate that humanity held other values as more important than joy, very appropriate. But that is the wave that is at the moment abroad as we have said. It is a movement towards joy. But let us bring to you, as we have heard some of you ask us, let us bring to you what we understand to be a more workable definition of joy. Because joy is not, as we have already intimated earlier, living a life that has got nothing in it that you don’t like, or that is unpleasant or challenging or brings you to tears. Not at all. That can possibly be happiness if you wish to define happiness as the absence of sadness or the absence of disappointment or the absence of challenge. That is happiness, or possibly comfort, or satisfaction, that is not joy. Joy is the experience that you have when you are living as wholly as possible. Joy is the experience you have when you are living as wholly as possible. That is why wholly is so closely related to holy. When you are bringing the whole of you into a moment, not matter what is going on in that moment, then you make joy available - even if you are divorcing someone in that moment, or leaving a location, or rising to a challenge that brings jitters down into the depth of your heart. That can be still be joyful.

(2) Joy can co-exist with sadness or challenge
Joy co-exists with sadness, but it is deeper. It is perfectly possible - and many of you have had that experience - to be in a funeral, for example, and actually to be feeling a kind of joy. It is not that joy wants to always make you jump up and down and dance and clap. Sometimes joy is much quieter than that.

(3) Joy makes you want to say ‘thank you’
Mostly joy wants to make you bow your head and make you say “Thank you”. That is for us a far more typical response to a feeling of joy than necessarily elation or feeling extremely high over a long period of time. So we are redefining joy for you to allow you better directional tools. It is as if we are giving you here a navigational system, as if we are giving you a global positioning system of your own to be able to ascertain whether this movement is in line with joy, or whether it is in line with fear, or any of the other things that are masks. They are not wrong, they are just masks. So that is one aspect that we raise about a deeper definition of joy for you. Sometimes when you are saying ‘no’ to someone your being is ecstatic, because you are grounded. You are standing up for yourself. You are trusting yourself enough to say “No”. That’s not a pleasant experience, but it is joyful. It’s not an easy experience, but it is joyful. It might not be a harmonious experience, but it is joyful.

(4) Joy can rock the boat
So many spiritual people are waiting for their joy, and they are waiting for something that doesn’t rock the boat. They are waiting for a path or a partner or a job or a new location that comes easily, that brings only harmony, that is very, very much flowing as we hear it. And we are giving a slightly different take. Because joy is always the step that is bringing you to a closer state of wholeness, as we have said. And sometimes to get into a greater degree of connections with your own wholeness it is required to experience discomfort. Or it is part of letting go and a sadness is there. So that is the first expression of joy that we raise. That it is more about wholeness than it is about happiness. Sometimes joy leaves you feeling ecstatic. Oh it has that impact sometimes, in fact many times. But it is not required. What we are saying is that it is not required to be ecstatic, for everything to be exactly as you like it, in order for you to experience joy. In fact, and this is our next point around joy, in fact joy is not conditional upon what is going on. Not at all.

(5) Joy is independent of circumstance
The search for a spiritual path that brings you joy, or the life purpose or the career that brings you joy, or a partner that brings you joy or a location that brings you joy is an exhausting one. Because it is not a search that will ever find fulfillment. Joy is unconditional. It is independent of the external environment. It is a choice that you make. It’s the manner of your being within an environment that creates either an experience of joy or not. And we have said it is much more about wholeness than about happiness. So it is much more for us that your chances of reaching your own joy and expressing that are much greater if you are bringing the fullness of you to a moment, than if you are ignoring things and trying to be happy. That is a very common spiritual approach at the moment that we see people taking - ignoring things and trying to be happy. Ignoring things and being positive. Ignoring things and saying affirmations. It’s not going to ever reach for you the state that you desire and that you know is your birth right. Because that comes from wholeness, as we have suggested. So our first two major understandings that we bring forward about joy are, firstly, that it is about wholeness and not happiness and secondly that it is an experience independent of circumstance, independent of circumstance.

(6) Joy is about a question instead of an answer / formula
So we would suggest for you, instead of focusing on what it is - what path it is, what job it is, and so on - that is going to reap for you joy, we suggest that you allow yourself instead to ask this question. We give you a question that you can use a lot of times in many occasions in your life, throughout your life. And it is this: ”How do I use this to experience joy?” ”How do I use this to experience joy?” The answer to that will be different for each one of you. The path that that opens up will be different for each one of you. There is not one formula for joy. There might be certain teachers at the moment that are trying to sell one formula for joy. They are saying that if you eat in this kind of way, oh that’s the only way that you will have joy. Or if you visualise in this kind of way, that is the only way you will have joy, or if you don’t do this, and so on, and so on. We are suggesting that life is far more textured than that. There is no one formula for joy on the planet. There is no secret if you like. There is no one key that in every phase of every single human being’s development will allow for them what they want. Not at all. You are on individual journeys. It is not to say that you are not deeply connected - you are. In fact the significance of grouping - group work, group intent as we have said earlier - is going to become more and more and more important especially in the Western world where individualism has dominated for a long time. You are going to begin a return to group dynamic, group living, group parenting and so on and that is going to solve a lot of things that at the moment seem unsolvable. So we are not suggesting that you do not operate as a collective, but to try to package a method of joy that will work for everyone is disrespectful. So, instead of giving a solution, we give a question that will allow you to begin to feel the texture of your own joy. And you will be able to feel it. “How do I create joy from this experience?”

It’s a big question to ask. It’s so big that sometimes you will not even be able to ask the question. It takes far more guts and okayness to ask that question than to get the answer. The answer is the easy part. Letting yourself get to the point of being able to ask that question is the part that takes a tremendous amount of courage, a tremendous amount of maturity. Because you will have to let go of stories that you have told yourselves for generations and generations and generations. Stories about what joy is not. Stories about what joy definitely isn’t. Stories about what is allowed for you in terms of joy. Stories about your devotion to other people as opposed to your own joy and so on and so on. The difficulty is not in finding an answer. The difficulty is allowing yourself to ask the question. That is what takes, as we can see it, a tremendous amount of courage. If you can authentically raise that question in response to your life, then there is actually not a need for an answer. We know that is surprising. We know many of you have come here for an answer, and here we are suggesting that actually it is more about the question. But the question is what indicates to the Universe the consciousness that you are coming from at any moment. The question you are asking indicates the consciousness that you are coming from at any moment. So we find it far more significant to raise the quality of your questions and just to let those questions go. Just release them. Just hold them and let them go, rather than try to pin down answers because the question will travel. The question will take you down a path. The question is what takes you on the journey. The question is what leads you forward by the nose. Not the answer. An answer only seeks to keep you in the same place. But a question, a question is a journey. And so we raise that as a far more significant question than: “What is it that will bring me joy?” We switch it around somewhat.

(7) Joy can be a permanent state of experience
And the final aspect that we wish to raise around joy, before we move on to another indication or another conversation altogether, is around the permanence of joy. We have spoken of joy being independent of conditions in your life or things such as relationships and jobs and money and children and so on. And when that is so then joy can be a permanent state. Happiness, as we have talked about earlier, happiness within an environment of duality such as yours, happiness is always fleeting. And rightly so. Because if you were happy every single second of your life there would be no drive towards expansion. The drive to expansion does not come through satisfaction it comes through dissatisfaction. So, by design, happiness will not visit you forever. It takes residence for a while, and then it moves off and lets in another guest. But you can keep your joy. Because your joy is in your experience of your life, not in the circumstances of your life. So it is possible for joy to be permanent. In actual fact, joy is who you are, so it is not really even possible that you are separated from it for an instance, but your perception of your own joy and your experience of it can be permanent, as opposed to happiness. And we raise also that as we hear that as a question again and again and again. People suggesting to us ‘we are only human, we can’t be joyful all of the time’. Yes and no. It is so that you can’t be happy all of the time. As we have said, there is a built-in mechanism within life, it is an evolutionary mechanism, that means dissatisfaction to whatever degree will be there, to allow you to create new desires, to allow you to expand, to allow the universe to expand. But joy is something very different from that and therefore can be a permanent experience.

And so we begin by raising the notion of joy. It is by far the most significant concept, by far, that any of you can be working with and holding in your awareness at this stage, by far. We understand there to be, as we have said already, a tremendous movement abroad that is starting to recognise joy as a value, perhaps starting to recognise joy as the value of all values. And so within that it has become available to us to raise more and more and more awareness around this concept. But we bring it first because we do not find within this moment in time, we do not find a single concept more signification for you than the concept of your own joy - interrogating that, questioning that, getting to know that, committing to it. That, as we have said earlier, is the only valuable form of loyalty. If you wish to maintain a respect for loyalty, that is the only form of loyalty that will serve you is a commitment to your own joy, understanding though that because joy has got an evolutionary agenda it is also going to change its face over the course of your lifetime. So allow your loyalty to be fluid - have light loyalty to your own joy. So we begin with that and raise it as the first consideration here today.

Fear – a mask for Joy
We are also feeling quite a number of questions and so we wish to allow scope for that. But before we do we are going to raise another aspect. Perhaps it seems like the opposite of joy. Instead of the opposite of joy we prefer to call it a mask, a mask of joy. So you can see that we are not of the opinion that some emotions are negative and some are positive – that joy is positive but others, for example anger, are negative. Not at all. Neither do we feel that so-called negative emotions are not useful to you and need to be worked out of your system as fast as possible. Not at all. Everything is your divinity. Everything. There is not a human emotion that is not divine and doesn’t alight on your heart for very good reason. We prefer for you to bless your emotions and to respect them rather than to attempt to remove them with positive thinking or any other kind of system. So we raise as our second point here today what we are calling a mask of joy, not an opposite. Not an opposition, not an enemy. And we are talking about fear. Fear is another aspect. As humanity aligns itself bit by bit with joy, there is also - and we know it sounds paradoxical and strange and counterintuitive, but it is not - a move at the same time to encounter more and more fear. How can it be, you ask, that in moving closer to joy we are also moving closer to fear? Absolutely. Because joy is masked by many things, but one of the masks that joy wears is fear.

We know we are giving a strange way of understanding it. But let us talk to you in practical terms and let us ask you if it would be easier for you to work with your fear by thinking of it as an enemy to your joy, something you have to work through, something you have to let go of, or if it would be easier and more workable for you to think that possibly your fear is masking a joy? Because it is so. A fear will not arise for you unless something that is deeply significant for you is perceived to be threatened. You will not have fear unless something that’s deeply important to you is perceived to be threatened. When something that you value deeply - in other words something that is aligned with your joy - is threatened or you perceive it to be threatened, that’s when fear, that’s when fear is experienced. So fear is a mask, it is a mask of your joy. If you didn’t value something deeply then you would not fear for what might happen to it. And here we are mostly talking of fear about what might happen to you, because that’s the deepest source of fear, is “What might happen to me?” And that fear is a mask for your own joy. So rather than berate yourself for feeling fear - and there is lots of fear around at the moment, you can know we find it very predictable that as you take forward steps into a closer alignment with your own joy that you are also getting closer to your own fear. It is so, it is so. When you are not in touch with your fear in any way, then you are very much numbed also to your own joy. So there is relation between them - and rather than berate yourself for being fearful, for being part of a fearful mentality, rather than trying to make your fear go away and positive think or positive talk yourself out of fear, we ask you instead to say to your fear: “Hello. I see you. I understand that you’re a mask, you’re not truth. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t look at you, acknowledge you. I don’t want you to stay. I don’t want to live life behind my mask. At the same time I’m interested in you. I want to look at what the mask says about the underneath.”


Interview your fear
You will know, many of you from playing dress-up games or going to dress-up balls that you always choose a mask that reflects an aspect of who you are, usually an unexpressed aspect of who you are. Either because you are too scared to play that role in everyday life, or a bit timid, or you don’t feel confident enough. But always you choose a mask that gives some sense of who you are behind that mask. Always. Which also suggests that, if we are calling fear a mask, it’s giving you clues, it’s giving you wonderful aspects of yourself that maybe you have not wanted to look at. So, we are not blessing fear in the sense that we wish for you to live with it, not at all. But while you are at the masked ball, while you are at the masked ball, which means while you are having an experience of fear, the more profound way to work with it, as we understand it, is to, what we are calling, interrogate, or interview your fear. Interview your fear rather than lambaste it, try to cut it away, try to pretend it isn’t there, try to sweet talk yourself out of it.

(1) Disassociate from your fear
In practical application what that means is to, firstly, disassociate your fear from you. The first important way to deal with fear is to be very clear that it’s a mask. It’s not me, I see that. One of the very tangible ways that you can disassociate yourself from a fear is by expressing it. When you express a fear, either by talking about it to somebody, or by writing it down, you have put the fear outside of your own consciousness, your own thoughts. And immediately you dissociate a little bit from it. There is the common saying that a problem shared is a problem halved. This is what we are saying. But it doesn’t have to be shared with anyone else at all. It can just be written down. The psychological, or consciousness, shift that takes place is that if a fear is in your head only, if it’s your deep dark secret, if you are carrying it around internally only, you are more closely associated with it, than if you express it, which immediately makes some distance. So that’s the first thing we suggest, in interviewing or interrogating your fear, separate it from you, either by talking about it or writing it down or drawing a drawing. It doesn’t matter to us. We have no preference about the form of expression, but express it. That’s the first thing.

(2) Ask questions unemotionally
The second thing then to do is to allow yourself as far as possible to work with it unemotionally. We understand that fear raises emotion, fear itself is an emotion. Yet part of the benefit of the fear you are only to get if you are able to interview it. So, one of the ways you can do this, is to pretend that that fear belongs to somebody else, and then ask questions around that. Pretend if you like, it’s just a game, but pretend that the fear you have written down of being hurt, for example, belongs to somebody else and you are asking this person about that. Where does it comes from, where do you find it takes root in your body, how could it have formed, does it make you silent or does it make you shout and so on and so on. It will assist you to interview the fear intelligently if you are pretending it belongs to someone else. You will be able to have access to better questions. And we have talked already today about the value of questions. So that’s the second thing. First dissociate yourself from it and secondly interrogate it. And if you can’t get unemotional about the fear then pretend it belongs to someone else and pretend you are talking to them. That’s the second thing.

(3) What does the fear tell you about what you want?
Once you have allowed yourself to look at that it’s a very important question to start asking: “So what does this tell me about my own intentions or desires?” We have started off here by encouraging you to become clearer and clearer and clearer about your intents. It’s a dramatic movement, we are talking here dramatic. We are saying that things are happening in the world dramatically to encourage a better, deeper response to this particular question: “What is it?” “What is my intention?” So allow the fear experiences you are having to get you an answer to that question. So that is a third method of engaging with it – “what does this fear tell me about what I deeply want?” And for us, we are far more encouraging that kind of approach to fear than any other, than any other.

Fear will play out the meaning that you give it
It’s not that useful, by the way, to share fear with a kind of group that is not in the same space, or not in the same consciousness as you. Fear breeds, as maybe you have seen in mass hysteria, or even in cultures amongst families, or schools, or even countries. When fear is engaged with in the manner that we have suggested, when it is understood as a mask, when it’s respected in that way, that is useful. But if you are sharing your fear with another human being or in a group or with a forum electronically, whatever it may be, when that is not the response to fear, then you are going to find that fear breeds. You see fear has got a purpose, like everything else in existence. Its purpose is to allow you to be more whole, in order to allow you to experience the depths of who you are and your own joy within your own existence. Fear is also part of that agenda. And so if you respect it as having that kind of purpose it will play the role of a mask. It will be there one day and it won’t be there another day. But if fear is given another status, if fear is given a different meaning, well then it will rise up and play true to the meaning that you give it. That is the power of humanity. The meaning that you ascribe to something becomes true. So we are also giving just a sense of caution around the space in which you share your fear. Take care because fear spreads. Fear spreads and sometimes it is just a perception that spreads and not a true reflection of reality at all. But fear spreads very, very quickly. In fact, people are drawn to fear, they are attracted to fear in some cases. So we are suggesting that you respect it, but also that you take care about where, in which forum, you share your fear so that you may use it wisely, instead of allowing it to become viral, which at this moment it is doing.

Borrowing the fears of other people
It is useful that you engage with your fears, there’s no doubt, but some of what is going on at the moment is that you are borrowing the fears of other people. A lot of you, and you will find this if you start to interview your fear like we have suggested, a lot of you have taken upon you what other people are scared of, and you yourself are actually not. But you have been taught that you should be scared of that. That’s what’s going on with a lot of you that we see - that you feel that you should fear for that, and act on that, even though, if you were to be deeply honest, it’s not one of your own fears. So we are not suggesting to avoid conversations about fear, in fact we have advocated sharing it, but take care around the people with whom you choose to express that, take care that they are coming from the same place as you. Otherwise you are part of a viral spreading of fear that we are finding actually quite shallow. What it means when we are finding that fear is shallow, is that it doesn’t actually belong to the hearts of all of you. But you are taking it upon you because your culture has that fear at the moment, or says it should have that fear, or because the country is having that fear, or the media says you should have that fear, and so on. So we are asking to respect your fears, but the ones that are authentically yours, not the ones that you have borrowed or taken upon you from outside of your own truth. And so those are the aspects that we raise today and it is perhaps again strange to talk about both joy and fear in the same breath, but they are close friends in actual fact.

For reasons that have to do with length and privacy, I have not included the personal questions and answers that were raised after this reading.


This reading has been slightly edited by Angela to facilitate easy reading and understanding.
© Angela Deutschmann


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