Bliss

[Guest guest]

Hi, friends of the Ramakrishna Mailing List.

 

I received a kind invitation from Jay to share some of my views on 'bliss':

 

I once attended a lecture by an Indian swami (monk) and in the Q & A session

people kept asking him what reality would feel like after reaching

enlightenment. He answered sort of tongue-in-cheek: " Go get enlightened

first and then we'll talk " .

 

It made me think that he could be partly right, first go get it and then

worry about it - yet it is only so human to want to know about the place

where one intends to go, or there wouldn't be a use for tourism brochures,

right?

 

Bliss. Talking about this I have found that everyone has their own concept

of what bliss is. It would follow then that in order for it to be *real*,

bliss needs to be absolute, unrelated to any one cause or incentive.

 

The sage Patanjali wrote that bliss produced by someone or something

carries in itself the seed of its own sorrow, either for loss of the

coveted object or person, or merely by *fear* of losing it. So perhaps the

trick is to do what Vivekananda advises in his usual concise style:

" Become the object of your Meditation "

because the mind can only go around and around what is familiar to it, and

for this same reason cannot transcend conditioned knowledge.

 

I once stayed in a hotel in Acapulco Beach, where one of the pools is

always filled by ocean water. Watching from outside, it is plain and very

beautiful to see this effect of a little ocean and a large ocean. However,

when one is in the pool, the ocean cannot be seen. You would have every

right to doubt that there even exists such a thing as the open sea, right?

 

However, if by mere chance you tasted a little of the salty pool water, a

window of doubt, an opportunity to enlarge your knowledge, would flash in

your mind and lead you to want to know more about what is outside.

 

This takes us to half-awareness. The Bhagavad Gita says something worth

checking: " Mukti (liberation or enlightenment) is easy of attainment only

to the hero -- but not to the cowards. "

 

Now, going back to the original question, is this bliss a dynamic process

or a static mode? Do we need to know?

 

~ Om Shanti ~

Maria Esther