Joy and the Path of Suffering

By David Spangler

When I was twenty years old, I was invited to give a series of lectures on spirituality at a metaphysical center in Los Angeles. The details of how this came about are unimportant to my story here, but if you’re interested, you can find them in my book, Apprenticed to Spirit.

I had only been lecturing for a couple of weeks, though I’d had some public speaking experiences in high school and in college. For my subject matter, I was drawing on some of my subtle world encounters. These contacts were notable for the depth of love and joy they brought. They frequently expressed a desire that we embodied humans learn to recognize the vivifying power of the joy at the heart of life.

As a consequence, on that evening I was exploring this theme of joy and its importance in our lives. I was abruptly interrupted by a woman who sprang to her feet, pointed a trembling finger at me and said, “Blasphemy! You are the Antichrist! Life is about suffering, not joy! You are the Antichrist, giving false teachings!” At which point, she stomped out of the lecture room. I watched her go, a bit stunned, and then, not knowing what else to do, went on with my talk.

Obviously, this event imprinted itself on my memory since I can vividly recall it fifty-five years later. For one thing, it was the first (though not the last) time anyone had called me the Antichrist, and in the spiritual teacher business, you always remember the first time this happens! More seriously, though, it made me wonder what had happened in her life to orient her so fully towards suffering that she would deny the reality of joy. One of the people in the audience who knew her later told me that she had indeed known a lot of unhappiness and suffering in her life, so much so that she took it as a badge of honor that God would test her, like Job, with so much misery. She had become proud in her suffering and identified with it. No wonder, I realized, she had reacted as she did.

By contrast, a couple of years later, a woman who was in one of my classes asked if she could come talk with me. She said she was troubled about her spiritual life and was wondering if she were doing something wrong. When I asked her to explain, she said, “I’m happy all the time. My life is filled with joy, and I find joy in everything I do. I have a wonderful marriage, great children, and I love my job. If I’m on a spiritual path, shouldn’t I be suffering?” Her name, appropriately, was Joy, and she truly radiated it.

For me, the spiritual path is life itself: how we engage with it, what we draw from it, and the effect we have on others for better or worse. For some, understanding, strength, and compassion come from dealing with difficult issues, with pain and suffering. For others, development comes from being and holding a presence of joy within a challenging world. For me, there is no “Path of Suffering” or “Path of Light and Joy.” There is only the unique path that each soul trods in its own way, encountering whatever life brings and using it as the means for its development. Given the nature of the world these days, it is likely that this will mean dealing with both joyful and difficult times. What really defines the nature of the soul’s “Path” is how it resolves its encounter with either one.

We tend to think in terms of absolutes and extremes, but few, if any of us, live lives that are all one thing or another. I’m sure that the woman in my lecture fifty-five years ago had known happy times, and Joy, my student, met challenges and difficulties. Life presents itself to us as a complex melody, but we can choose to hear only one or two notes within it. The woman in my lecture was insisting, at least to me that evening, that there was only one note that had value, and that was the note of suffering. Joy, on the other hand, came to see me because she didn’t want the note of joy that was so strong in her life to overpower her ability to hear and understand other, sadder notes when she needed to do so.

Through my experiences with the subtle worlds, I have come to understand that joy is a radiant quality that enhances and empowers life. It vivifies. It is like a metabolic enhancer. What it is not is a synonym for happiness. We regularly confuse the two, but the difference between them is important. I am happy about something; that is, it is an emotion caused by something: I get a raise at work, I get an extra piece of chocolate cake, I hear that my candidate has been elected, and so on. Joy is deeper than this; it is its own cause, a presence that in turn causes other things.

My metaphor for this is the sun. Sunlight makes life possible on our earth; it is the energy source that everything depends upon. Remove the sun and its light and there is no life. But life itself needs both light and dark. The seed germinates deep in the darkness of the soil where sunlight doesn’t reach it. The darkness of the night enables us to sleep (and also to see the stars). The cool shadows of shade refresh us on hot days. Our lives move through cycles, experiencing both light and dark, but the sun is always there, holding the earth in its energy.

For me, Joy is like this. I can know happiness and sadness, pain and relief from pain, but Joy is a constant underneath all of them. It is the life-giving energy that allows me to draw from each experience that which will enable me to grow and deepen and become more whole. It doesn’t deny me light and shadow, but it enables me to benefit from both.

Going through numerous surgeries for cancer, I found myself confronted with more pain than I had ever imagined. It was not momentary but went on for days and weeks and months as I dealt with the aftermath of these surgeries. During this time, I learned to make friends with the pain and allowed it to teach me and deepen me, opening up new resources of resilience and strength. I learned that although parts of my body were suffering, other parts were healthy and going about their business as if all was right with the world. I experienced more deeply what I already knew, that wholeness can embrace both suffering and health, darkness and light, pain and calm. Wholeness was saying “both/and” to life so that my consciousness could embrace and know all the parts of what I was dealing with and not identifying with just one or the other.

It was joy that enabled me to do this. I would have been happy—deliriously so—not to be in pain, and being in pain meant I was not happy. But I was joyous. This was not automatic. It was a choice.

These days, with the prevalence of COVID-19 in the air, we are asked to wear masks, and many of us do. The role of a mask is not to protect ourselves as much as it is to protect others. As we can be infected before we show any symptoms of the disease (or while never showing symptoms) and thus spreading the coronavirus without realizing it, the mask keeps us from adding dangerous viral content into the air that others are breathing,

As someone sensitive to the subtle energies around us in our environment, tapping into Joy was like putting on a mask. It didn’t take away my own suffering; I still felt pain, and I still didn’t like it! I wasn’t “happy.” But just as sunlight isn’t really about darkness and light but about energizing life, making a choice to hold Joy in my consciousness was about ensuring the subtle energies I was radiating into my environment weren’t carrying the “virus” of my own suffering but would energize the life and well-being of those around me who had to “breathe” my subtle energetic influence. I used the practical tools of Incarnational Spirituality not to deny my pain or avoid suffering but to ensure as best I could that the nurses and doctors and people around me could feel my love and my appreciation for them. I wanted them to feel empowered because they were facing energetic atmospheres of fear, suffering, anger, loss, grief, and pain every day in order to serve and help and heal. I was their patient, but I could also be their ally in subtle energetic ways.

There is no spiritual merit to avoiding suffering, though it’s a natural thing for any organism to do; we’re built to avoid pain when we can. Likewise, there is no spiritual merit in seeking out suffering for its own sake. It’s what we do with our times of suffering and not-suffering that counts. It’s how we use these times to learn something and to grow. If I fetishize either suffering or happiness, holding either on a pedestal as being “the meaning of life,” I limit my ability to experience and benefit from life in its wholeness. I also limit my understanding of Joy as an energetic source that transcends either suffering or happiness.

There is a lot in this world about which we should be unhappy. It’s a far from perfect place. Millions suffer everyday in ways that could be alleviated or eliminated if collectively we chose to do so. Just taking incarnation on Earth could be seen as a “Path of Suffering,” whether directly in our personal lives or indirectly by sharing a world filled with the pain of others, both human and non-human.

The calling of Incarnational Spirituality is really a simple one: to affirm and bolster a sense of joy in being incarnated, a sense of love for the embodied earth and all upon it, and a realization of our generative, sacred nature as a foundation for engaging the world in new ways, based on the 'More" of who we are, not the "Less" of who we are. It is a calling of liberation and empowerment, and Joy is a key element within it.

My belief and my experience is that Joy is not a turning away from the suffering of the world, not a “spiritual bypass,” but rather the source of the very energy that can enable us to honor life, support life, cherish life, protect life, nourish life, and make the choices that will bring about change. To be in Joy is the most powerful thing we can do if we are serious about remaking the world in wholeness. It is like being the sun so that life can thrive.


David Spangler, MCS is the Director of Research in the Lorian Association. He is a mystic, writer and educator in the integration of spiritual values, energy and presence into everyday life. He was co-director of the Findhorn Community and has taught extensively for over 40 years. Since 1965, David has worked clairvoyantly with a group of spiritual beings whose purpose was to explore and develop a spiritual teaching around the process of incarnation. David is the author of many books, including Apprenticed to Spirit: The Education of a Soul * and Working with Subtle Energies*.

*These titles are available through Amazon. If you order by clicking on the links above, Lorian will receive a portion of the proceeds. Thank you for your support!