About fifteen years ago, I traveled to Salt Lake City, Utah, on business.

After a full day of meetings, I returned to my hotel room, pulled out a DVD I had brought with me, and pressed play. It was Concert for George, a musical tribute to George Harrison filmed at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

Anoushka Shankar—the gifted daughter of George’s friend and collaborator, Pandit Ravi Shankar—was there, playing the sitar. Eric Clapton performed, along with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Tom Petty, and George’s son, Dhani. They sang some of my favorite Harrison songs: Something, Give Me Love, If I Needed Someone, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Here Comes the Sun, and My Sweet Lord.

There was such an outpouring of love in the Albert Hall that night. Everyone was touched by George’s spirit, as was I, watching it in my hotel room.

At one point, my desire to meditate began competing with my impulse to replay the concert. By then, I had been practicing the meditation techniques I’d learned from Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship lessons for eight years. Part of me longed to interiorize my consciousness—to go into my spine and center in my heart, as these techniques have taught me. Another part wanted to bathe in Harrison’s music, carried so beautifully by his circle of admirers.

So I told myself, See if you can do both.

I set the DVD to loop my favorite songs from the Concert, closed my eyes, drew my attention inward to the heart, and began listening from there.

Waves upon waves of deep feelings rose within me.

Then suddenly, without warning, tears began to stream down my face.

What is making you cry, Hitendra? I asked myself, surprised, moved, and a bit confused. What is this rich flow of feeling?

There was love—love for George, for the Creative Force in the universe, for humanity itself. And there was yearning—yearning for peace, for purity, for the shedding of every imperfection I carried, for a sense of oneness with all of space and time, and then a deeper yearning still, to go beyond space and time into pure, unmanifested Spirit.

But most of all, there was joy. Pure joy. A joy that bubbled forth from my heart. I felt as though the hotel room was aglow with it.

The blessing of experiencing joy in meditation was by then not new to me. But this time, it felt different. There was another layer to the joy that I couldn’t fully fathom. 

Have you had moments where you feel something real, something powerful, but can’t yet give it a name?

All I could call it was “joy, and more.”

The next day found me sitting in a cafe in Salt Lake City, quietly appreciating the simple, beautiful qualities I was experiencing in the people of this land. There was a peaceability to them, a groundedness, a harmonious coexistence of old and new. 

Rufus Wainwright’s rendition of the Beatles’ Across the Universe started to play in the cafe. I felt a pull to turn within again and listen from my heart-center, so I closed my eyes.

Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my open mind, possessing and caressing me…

Limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns and calls me on and on across the universe…

Once again, that “joy, and more” feeling returned, and the tears quietly flowed. I returned to the question, You are not simply experiencing joy, but something more. There is another layer to it, a meta-layer. What is that?

It took me ten years to finally discover what that “joy, and more” feeling was. I have to thank Jacques Lusseyran.

Jacques was a Frenchman who was blinded early in his life and lived a beautifully rich life, both on the outside and the inside. In the year 2020, I wrote an essay on Jacques’s remarkable, inspiring life. Here it is.

In researching Jacques’s story, I came across this period of his life during World War II, where he was in a concentration camp in Buchenwald. There, Jacques encountered an old man, Jeremy, known in the camp as “Socrates.”

I was expecting an eloquent reasoner, a clever metaphysician, some sort of triumphant moral philosopher. That is not at all what I found… He was a simple welder from a small village at the foot of the Jura mountains…

I heard Jeremy speak of men who did not come to his shop just for their horses and their wagons but for themselves. They came so as to go home all steeled and new, to take home a little of the life they were lacking and which they found overflowing, shining and gentle at the forge of father Jeremy.

One went to Jeremy as toward a spring. One didn’t ask oneself why. One didn’t think about it. In this ocean of rage and suffering there was this little island: a man who didn’t shout, who asked no one for help, who was sufficient unto himself…Jeremy found joy in the midst of [the camp]. He found it during moments of the day where we found only fear. And he found it in such great abundance that when he was present we felt it rise in us. Inexplicable sensation, incredible even, there where we were: joy was going to fill us.

I knew this state through Jeremy. Others knew it too, I am sure. The joy of discovering that joy exists, that it is in us, just exactly as life is, without conditions and which no condition, even the worst, can kill… He had touched the very depth of himself and liberated… the essential, that which does not depend on any circumstance, which can exist in all places and at any time, in pain as in pleasure. He had encountered the very source of life…

The act of Jeremy sums up to me the religious act itself: the discovery that God is there, in each person, to the same degree, completely in each moment, and a return can be made toward Him… I have spoken of him as a living prayer.

Something in my consciousness cracked open when I read these words. Salt Lake City came rushing back to me.

Ah, Hitendra, this is what you experienced! That “joy, and more” was actually “the joy of discovering that joy exists, without condition and with no condition, in all places and at any time, in pain as in pleasure… the joy of discovering that God is there, in each person, to the same degree, completely in each moment, and a return can be made toward Him.”

I had, even as a child, been in the pursuit of joy. Not because I lacked something, but because I intuitively felt there was a path out there to infinite, everlasting joy. Yogananda wrote:

When external objects of sense pleasure are destroyed, the happiness they give is destroyed with them. But the ever new joy of God inherent in the soul is indestructible. So also, its expression in the mind can never be destroyed if one knows how to hold on to it…

Seek the unconditioned, indestructible pure Bliss within yourself, and you will have found the ever-existing, ever-conscious, ever-new Joy… this joy is not an abstract quality of mind; it is the conscious, self-born, self-expressing quality of Spirit.

For years, this was simply an idea to me—a beautiful idea. Finally, in my thirties, through Kriya Yoga meditation, the idea started to become an experience.

And in Salt Lake City, that experience blossomed into a full-fledged realization, just like it had for Jacques. That there is, indeed, unconditioned, indestructible, pure Bliss present within us.

My “joy, and more” was that layer on top of the joy—the joy of discovering that joy exists. The joy of discovering that each of us carries within us, as Yogananda would call it, a portable paradise. And of discovering that this is the reward that awaits any mind that trains itself to dwell on the Divine Light within.

The tears, I now realized, were tears of exhilaration, of liberation, of knowing that pure joy is ever-present, always within mind and heart’s reach. Yogananda would have said, “All we have to do is improve our knowing.”

What a poignant irony, that Jacques found this truth amid the horrors of Buchenwald, and I found it in the gentle surroundings of Salt Lake City.

In what moments have you felt a free, untethered joy—a joy radiating from within, completely independent of your outer circumstances?

What does it reveal to you about the portable heaven within?

What daily practice helps you go knock, knock, knocking on this heaven’s door?

With joy,
Hitendra

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