Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

23. Love on a Mountaintop!

‘We are not at home in the world, and this homelessness is a deep truth about our condition.’

Roger Scruton

Joy is the word used for the emotion behind pleasure and happiness. As an emotion, joy is embodied. And joy is also the word we use for something more profound — perhaps we could call it lasting happiness, or unshakeable happiness, or contentment. Joy is also an aspiration — it’s finding our true pleasures, it’s being enchanted with the world, it’s recognising our own meanings and purposes. The meanings we ascribe to the word joy are almost a mirror of the different ways that we have discussed about the derivation of human values. One version of the profound sense of joy is what’s sometimes described as the ‘mountaintop experience’.

There are a great many ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ experiences reported by people of all faiths and none. The mountaintop experience is arguably amongst them. Steve Taylor (Spiritual Science) describes what I have called a mountaintop experience as an ‘awakening experience’. He explains the experience’s three most common

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