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Screwtape: And now for your blunders. On your own showing you first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends. In the second place, you allowed him to walk down to the old mill and have tea there — a walk through country he really likes, and taken alone. In other words you allowed him two real positive Pleasures. Were you so ignorant as not to see the danger of this?
 
Why is Screwtape appalled that Wormwood allowed his patient to enjoy himself?
 
Pure pleasure, Screwtape opines, is a “touchstone to reality.” In other words, when we enjoy ourselves, we are closest to an experience of divinity. The mystics agree! The Taitreya Upanishad:
 
From Joy we have come, in Joy we live and have our being, and in that sacred Joy we will one day melt again.
 
A cursory inquiry into enjoyment reveals preferences:
I enjoy this (a hot shower, a cup of tea).
I don’t enjoy that (reading the news, doing the dishes).
 
If enjoyment is conditional, i.e., based on conditions being fulfilled, then it seems reasonable to
pursue what one enjoys and
avoid what one doesn’t enjoy
if one wants to be happy.
 
But that approach doesn’t lead to happiness. It leads to suffering since we often
can’t have what we prefer or
can’t avoid what we don’t prefer.
 
And if we come to spiritual practice, we are met with “The Great Way isn’t difficult for those who have no preferences,” (Seng Tsan) which can set up the struggle to
eschew what we like and
enjoy what we dislike,
an approach that leads to even more suffering.
 
But fortunately, the instruction, as received by Teresa of Avila, is clear.
 
Just these two words He spoke
changed my life,
“Enjoy Me.”
What a burden I thought I was to carry –
a crucifix, as did He.
 
If applied, the clarity of the instruction can change a life. It implies we don’t have to struggle
to stop enjoying what we like,
or try to enjoy what we dislike.
As spiritual practitioners, we simply have to deepen our inquiry of enjoyment until we understand what it means to “Enjoy Me.”
 
If there is willingness to see past the belief in conditions and cause (enjoyment comes from drinking tea), there is freedom to trace the experience of enjoyment to its source. Mysteriously, this locus of enjoyment is discovered to be “internal experience.” It is
when “I am drinking tea” (something I like),
while “I am reading the news” (something I dislike).
 
What is this “It is”?
 
Michael James:
Happiness does not exist in any external object, but only in us, who are the consciousness that experiences happiness. Though we seem to derive happiness from external objects or experiences, the happiness that we thus enjoy in fact arises from within us.
 
Whatever turmoil our mind may be in, in the centre of our being there always exists a state of perfect peace and joy, like the calm in the eye of a storm. Desire and fear agitate our mind, and obscure from its vision the happiness that always exists within it. When a desire is satisfied, or the cause of a fear is removed, the surface agitation of our mind subsides, and in that temporary calm our mind enjoys a taste of its own innate happiness.
 
Is “Enjoy Me” pointing to dropping the burden of the mind’s turmoil and returning to the core of our being, an experience described in the Daily Recollection as “the joy of Intelligence knowing itself”?
 
Perhaps this is something to explore the next time we take a walk in nature or read a good book or participate in something we enjoy. For even Screwtape admits:
 
The human being who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two-pence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack.
 
Gasshō
ashwini