Happiness or Joy: Your Choice

What’s the difference between happiness and joy? This may seem like a niggling little word game, but it’s actually a very important question whose answer can make a world of difference in your life.

Happiness is an emotion based on external events. If I get what I want for Christmas, I am happy. If I don’t, I am unhappy. If I win the argument, I am happy. If I don’t, I am unhappy. In short, if my demands on reality are met, I am happy, and if they are not met, I am not happy.

The word “emotion” comes from the Latin root meaning “to agitate.” There is no good agitation! We are used to living by our emotions, letting them dictate our lives, but there is something better.

Joy is an example of that something better. Joy is a state of being. It is completely independent of whatever’s happening around you. It has nothing to do with your expectations and demands on reality. David Alsobrook writes in You Can Be Free From Yourself, “Love, joy and peace are not positive emotions, as is often believed. They are deeper than emotions. They are states of being.”

I’m sure that at least one Bible verse comes to mind when you think of joy, like:

“The joy of the LORD is your strength.”

“Be joyful always, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.”

“Count it all joy, brothers, when you face trials of many kinds…”

Just in these few representative verses—because there are many more in both the Old and New Testaments—we see that joy is good and is expected. Joy makes you strong. Joy is God’s will for you. Clearly, God wants you to have joy. He models joy for us, as well. In one of my favorite verses, God “rejoices over you with singing.”

Why, then, are we so often devoid of this intended state? Cue the personality. As I’ve said before, the personality does the best that it can, but it just can’t compare to essence. The mind forms the personality as a person slips further away from essence in the early development process. The mind creates a facsimile of our true nature, but it’s an imperfect one. Unable to see the big picture, it gives the human it belongs to a small picture of joy: happiness. And it tells the human what happiness is – that is, the external circumstances that must be in place in order for happiness to occur.

Each Enneagram Type has its own “happiness marching orders.” Riso & Hudson refer to them as the Superego message. Each starts with the phrase, “You are good or okay if…”:

One – you do what is right.

Two – you are loved by others and are close to them.

Three – you are successful and others think well of you.

Four – you are true to yourself.

Five – you have mastered something.

Six – you do what is expected of you.

Seven – you get what you need.

Eight – you are strong and in control of your situation.

Nine – those around you are good or okay.

Unless you have done years of inner work—and maybe even still then—you are ruled by one of these messages. You don’t hear the actual message; it get clothed in so many other guises and assumptions that you don’t hear those specific words. But a self-forgetting One, for instance, cannot be happy unless he is doing what is right. An essence-starved Five cannot be happy unless she is becoming an expert in some (usually obscure) field.

These are the limitations the personality offers. It cannot do otherwise. It is built upon a deep sense of inner lack and cannot know the definition of joy. It is a false premise and, as such, unwittingly lies to us all day long about what will make us truly happy.

Writing this post has made me a bit sad, because it reminds me of all the precious human beings who will never know—or only glimpse—joy on this Earth. Instead, they will do their best to follow their Superego messages in pursuit of a happiness that can never satisfy like the joy God intended for us. When all is said and done, we will have been loved exactly the same by God, but our Earth experience will have been greatly diminished if we have not broken free of our personality structure.

The Enneagram is the most powerful, accurate and compassionate tool I know of to help in that breaking free. I hope that if you haven’t begun your Enneagram journey to your true self that you will do it now. Here are some resources to get you started:

The Enneagram Institute website

The Wisdom of the Enneagram book

Enneagram Worldwide website

PLEASE SHARE