Happiness is temporary, Bliss is eternal.

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Happiness is temporary, Bliss is eternal

Happiness for most people begins with the thought: “This is how things ought to be!†Suffering comes with the opposite thought: “Things ought not to be as they areâ€.

However, we tend to fall into the habit of thinking that we know already how things ought to be or ought not to be. We identify happiness with fixity instead of accepting life’s natural flow. We become “psychological antiques†— wanting nothing moved, nothing changed, nothing even improved. The stability comes to mean permanence. Permanence, however, is something the soul can have only in God.

Happiness is bliss outwardly directed towards the senses and their world of relativity and change. Bliss is eternal, but happiness is man’s attempt to project bliss into a fleeting and alien environment. In that projection, he forms attachments to things temporal. Happiness, in its pretence of permanence, becomes simply another counterfeit, like pleasure.

People’s search for outward stability is often visualised by them as a fixed place on earth, a home of their own. Imagine that place as they often conceive it: a picturesque cottage by the sea, its entrance graced by a rose trellis, its wellmanicured lawn bordered by colourful flowers, the garden enlivened by gay song birds. The interior of the cottage is cosily furnished with good books, paintings, furniture. ‘Wee Nook’ we’ll call it; countless “dream cottages†bear that quaint, if somewhat cloying, name! This is a place for putting down one’s roots.

Now, visualise the dream lasting... and lasting... and lasting! No matter how pleasant, might it not last too long? Ten years might already be overdoing it — but eternity? Any happiness you find at Wee Nook would certainly become stale, eventually; your “fulfillment†might well become more a burden than a joy. Someday you’d surely find yourself crying out in desperation, “Somebody — something: Please knock me on the head to convince me I’m still alive!†Boredom is a very different condition, certainly, from bliss!

What everyone really wants is bliss.. Happiness is a counterfeit: too much of it diffuses one’s very concept of bliss. To a mind full of attachments, bliss seems almost a threat. A cottage by the sea is something the ego, at least, can handle without effort. But bliss? Bliss requires total absorption. Few people are ready to be all that happy! They need suffering, to spur them towards ever higher aspiration.

A bird, after 20 years of living in a cage, would be afraid to leave it. Were the cage door opened, the bird would cower at the back, dreading the flight that is perfectly natural for it. Man, at the thought of absorption in bliss, faces two major challenges. First, to his mind, bliss implies a need for exerting high energy. Second, the concept of absolute consciousness seems to him overwhelming.

If you have attained a certain degree of refinement, you would be unwilling to return to living like others who limit their pleasures to the table, their barroom, and the bedroom. Creatures at every stage of evolution cling to what is familiar to them. Familiarity gives them their sense of security. And so, they may meet the call to higher awareness with stout resistance.

The principal challenge bliss presents is the demand that one’s ego be abandoned. Human beings define themselves in terms of their bodies. They think of themselves as having a specific age, name, nationality, sex and social position. These do not, however, truly define us at all. In infinite consciousness, not even self-awareness, ultimately, is lost; it is simply transformed. Nothing, in essence, can be either created or destroyed.

(By Swami Kriyananda)