Good News from an Alternate Universe
A Goddess Bible: Part One

From joy all beings have come.
In joy all beings are sustained.
To joy all beings return.
This is the highest teaching.
This is the highest teaching.

–The Upanishads

The Lady’s Book of Joy

The wise and playful people in a universe I dream of have created – and continuously keep creating – an all-encompassing feminine power embracing complete Being.

She helps to welcome, nurture, and instruct the young; she serves as guide and interpreter of life experience, and facilitates healing, restoration, even transformation, in the course of life.  Her most playful aspect (of many) is A Lady of Sheer Joy.

In Her universe, creation comes from joy, wild, ebullient joy.  Anyone seeking to be creative, or simply to live happily, imbibes, studies and practices joy.  She describes Joy as the original component within and behind creation.  For a creator, therefore, Joy is the essential element from which to design and mold new forms of life and beauty.

This Lady of Joy recognizes the panoply of experience in creation – including, even in Her worlds, loss, sorrow, grief, suffering, pain, anguish, anxiety, distress, even depression, even anger, fury, rage, war.  Her people are not unlike us.  There is only this difference: the recognition of joy as the foundational condition of life.  She does not expect or want anyone to deny any possible emotion, or pretend to feel joy in a simple-minded way.

But Her people know, down below the bone level, that joy is.  Unfailing.

Her universe is next door to ours, and She feels compassion for us, caught as we are in sticky webs of pain, unable to free ourselves from that daunting reality as we see it.  She offers a teaching about the practice of Joy as an invitation to us to lighten up. The purpose of this practice is to come face to face with the Reality that is Joy.

She provides these teachings as a lens to review our spiritual DNA, and to understand that Joy is the fundamental underlying strand that permeates and transmutes its wonders throughout the Lineages of the Rose, the Lotus, and the Wild.

This practice may be experienced as a Path, though one can begin at any place on the path and find that it opens doors to all the other steps and stages:

Step One:
Seeking the Sources of Our Joy
Step Two:
Clarifying My Beliefs about Joy
Step Three:
Becoming Aware of Joy
Step Four:
Accepting Joy, Acknowledging Joy
Step Five:
Realizing the Presence of Joy
Step Six:
Maintaining Joyful Dedication
Step Seven:
Engaging Joyful Remembrance
Step Eight:
Experiencing Joyful Transformation
Step Nine:
Sharing Joy, Serving with Joy