I was faced with the task recently, on Don Murphy and Julien Wells’s Exploring the New Age radio show, to say what bliss was.
I’ve thought about this for a long time and I cannot say what bliss is. I can only say what it does. I can talk about bliss’s effects, but not about bliss itself.
The same with love. Probably the same with other states like trust and generosity: I can only know them by their effects.
A strawberry milkshake has a flavor that distinguishes it from a chocolate milkshake, but bliss has no flavor.
Lavender has a scent that distinguishes it from rose, but bliss has no scent.
Bliss and love are higher-dimensional states. They’re super-sensible and probably cannot be known in the terms of the lower dimension. So we can really only discuss their impact on us.
What bliss does for me is that it brings with it a feeling of total satisfaction, total satiation, total well-being. In bliss, all accounts are settled. There’s nothing that keeps us from being present.
Nothing is needed. Nothing is lacking. Nothing is wanted – but bliss itself. And that’s most fervently, unreservedly wanted.
Problems dissolve in the sea of bliss. All is well. We haven’t a care in the world.
What was a problem before is now seen simply as a situation. There are no unpleasant feelings like disappointment or resentment that go with examining it. And it matters not if we take Road 1 or Road 2. We have full confidence in ourselves reaching the destination. Well, in the case of bliss, the destination would be ever-deeper experiences of bliss anyways, ad infinitum.
If we get what we want while in bliss, well and good. If we don’t, well and good, because we’re already bathed in bliss. There’s nothing more to seek.
If we examine most things we want really deeply, we’ll see that what we’re really after boils down to bliss anyways. I’d imagine that, with the attainment of permanent bliss, desire itself would fall away.
Andrew Cohen once said that the reason we feel blissful when we buy a new car is not our new ownership but the cessation of the desire for a car. It’s the cessation of desire that allows bliss to arise. Bliss is always there but crowded out and overshadowed usually by our desires for worldly things.
Bliss is our nature, but we stray from it and go on what Archangel Michael might call “scenic detours.” Periodic tastes of bliss, like blips on a radar screen, remind us of what is truly worth finding … or perhaps uncovering.
Once we have a substantial taste of bliss, we want it ever after. Other desires and appetites pale before it and fall away.
(Concluded in Part 2, tomorrow.)