It cannot be said that the world is over here and the programme is over there. It’s impossible not to have time for the programme, when the programme is the method by which one lives in the world.
Thus the programme, proper, and the programme, as an applied practice in the world, constitutes a single, indivisible activity.
The joylessness of feeling that Step Eleven is a necessary chore before getting back to the world or vice versa stems from a failure to recognise this unity. The match is not much use without a candle. A candle: no use at all without a flame. They must be brought together.
Joyous performance of God’s will cannot, itself, be willed, but its precursors, attention and diligence, can be. These two virtues, applied consistently, in conscious fulfilment of the revealed will of God, bring self-forgetting, and self-forgetting releases innate joy.
A joyous state is not a natural state, but it is a regularly occurring state. The trick is not to try to treat it as a thing in itself, for it is an absence of something, cause by a blockage, the blockage being self. It is the self that casts the shadow in which one feels the cold. Joylessness is thus like darkness: an absence of light, not an entity. As light is the natural state, remove the blockage and the pre-existing light becomes readily apparent. Remove self and joy floods in.
The only answer to joylessness, therefore, is to do away with one’s self entirely.