I’m experiencing a moment of bliss, which came up, I believe, because I just wrote an article on the subject of transformative love (love and bliss are in cahoots).

I’m reminded of scenes in movies where a mist comes over the moor.  Bliss seems to spread like that, blanketing everything and instantly leaving me wanting to focus on nothing else than welcoming it and breathing it in. Cats must know bliss.

Jesus called transformative love, “real love”:

“It is very easy … to forget about love – the weak faint image of real Love that is all that you can experience as a human.”  (1)

I think Jesus meant “all that you can experience as a third-dimensional human.”

If humans couldn’t experience transformative love at all, then we’d probably be discussing another topic (the masters don’t tend to discuss matters far, far beyond our purview).

Real love can be experienced but that experience is rare among the population and hard to have in a dense, third-dimensional, carbon-based tank … I mean, body.

When we have it even for a brief instant, we consider ourselves to have had a spiritual experience. Well, I do.

Jesus added on another occasion:

“I would like to impress upon you that loving from the soul is not emotional love.” (2)

I agree. First of all, consider that what Jesus calls the “soul” I see as the same as the “heart.” You could also call it the Christ, the Atman, the Self.

If one loves from the soul, then one is drawing from the endless well of love in the heart.

Ordinary love is also called chemistry, attraction, liking, caring, etc. What Jesus calls “real love” is much, much more intense and much more transformative.

Ordinary love is like a gentle rainfall; transformative love is like a monsoon. Ordinary love is like a pleasant wave; transformative love is like a tsunami.

The real tsunami of love will occur for us when we have a heart opening and the ocean of love pours in.

***

I found myself this morning trying to determine what I went after before early 2015 when my current journey into love began?

I went after a great deal of “being right.” Being right was a survival skill for me in my family. Being wrong got you the back of the hand.

Sexual pleasure and release. OK, OK, orgasm. A taste of delight, a moment of bliss.

Financial release or wealth. For what it could buy – security, gifting, satiation of desires.

Validation and affirmation.  Where is that Jim Carrey scene from The Mask? “You love me! You really love me!” he chirps.

The desire to be loved and admired, to feel self-important, is also extremely strong in many of us. So many people have a desperate need to feel important.

So much behavior seems bent on satisfying the need to feel important, before the arrival of transformative love and bliss turns everything around.

Why does it turn everything around?

Because we clearly see, as said above, that, when the two begin to flow, both (and all good things) can be seen to come from our very own heart. (3)

Major, major realization. I thought you gave me love. “You bring me love.” “Gotta have your love.” Etc.

Isn’t that why I’m doing all this – marriage, house, two cars, kids, retirement plan? Isn’t that why I’m walking on eggshells and saying, “Yes, dear. Yes, dear.” To get/win/keep your love?

All the while, have I not been sitting on the box that contained everything I needed, seeking donations from passers-by, as Eckhart Tolle would say? (See footnote 4) Is the box not the heart?

We wonder why spiritual seekers laugh when they achieve enlightenment. I can only say how much I laughed when I saw that I was looking in the wrong place for the treasure. And I was so convinced I was right!

I had a “better game” (we all think we do, don’t we?) to “win me love.” I’d played the game seriously and I was sure I had the winning formula.

So why was I lonely? Anxious? Low in self-esteem?

I don’t know how the exchange of love works. Maybe we can get love from another. Or maybe seeing and feeling their love ignites our recollection of our love.  I don’t know.

But the flow from another is nowhere near the flow from ourselves, from our own heart.

So, as it turns out, we don’t need to collect people and make sure we keep them around.

But where it really comes from is the treasure box we’re sitting on, that great and endless artesian well that is our very own heart.

Knowing this, we can now settle down and get down to lightwork, can we not?

Because we’ve now ensured our invaluable supply of love in a way we never did or could have before.

***

Let’s look again at what we went after before….

Being right now simply disappears as an issue. Conditioned behavior still arises but, if one consistently chooses bliss, one doesn’t “bite” when the mind throws up a self-righteous response to deliver from among our repertoire of self-serving lines.

The idea of “having sex” is now seen as a third-dimensional effort at generating bliss but, having bliss already, sex now gives us little lasting pleasure or satisfaction. It attracts us less and less.

Bliss surpasses sexual pleasure. Orgasm is just a momentary taste of bliss.

If the land is flooded, Krishna said, there’s no use for the irrigation channels. When bliss floods the land, one loses interest in orgasm in and of itself.

Before you ask, “What? No sex?” “making love” is an order of magnitude better than having sex.

Making love – which for me is a synonym for sharing transformative love – is … I’ve used the word “volcanic” before to describe it.  Transformative love seems to erupt from within one in the course of making love.

Making love is giving love.  It isn’t getting it from another or from the titillation of the sexual act.  It’s being in a surplus of love, having love to give away.  Love flows from us.

The difference is between seeing a video of Bali and being there on the warm, sandy beach. Along with other advantages, in transformative love, one is present and alive to love-making.

Back to the rest of the list: Wealth interests me less (ironically) because, among the things we ordinarily buy, not many of them interest a person in bliss.

If you really look closely, we buy a lot of things because we think they’ll bring us bliss – fast car, nice house, fancy vacation. We buy that trip to Hawaii for the “magic moment” of bliss we think it’ll bring.

When we’re in bliss, all those desires fall away. They only brought us what many spiritual teachers called “false bliss” or “counterfeit bliss” anyways. As Ammachi noted:

“The happiness that we get from worldly objects is only an infinitesimal fraction of the bliss that we get from within.” (5)

That is so true.

I find what Sri Ramakrishna said to be true as well, although he’s probably speaking of a point a lot further down the road:

“If a man enjoys the Bliss of God, he doesn’t enjoy the world. Having tasted divine bliss, he finds the world insipid. … Can worldly pleasures and sex pleasures be compared to the bliss of God? If a man once tastes that bliss, he runs after it ever afterwards. It matters very little to him then whether the world remains or disappears.” (6)

Once we’ve tasted bliss, we never want to go back to our desires. Fast cars won’t do it for us any more. Sex, movies, travel – all the usual pastimes and entertainments – do not satisfy after one has tasted real love and bliss.

Having seen the divine plan in 1987, I spent the intervening years running after it. Now having tasted real love and bliss, I’m spending these years running after them. One can only be humble in the face of having been touched – if even so slightly – by the divine:  One is captivated thereafter.

The presence of desires militates against bliss. Bliss lies under them. We experience bliss not when we obtain the object of desire but when obtaining it results in a brief cessation of desire. Ego and desire (or “I want”) are what stand between us and realizing who we are at a far deeper level than ordinarily. Like so many other things, desire dissolves in the sea of bliss.

So I’m spoiled for the life I used to live. But I don’t care. All cares of that kind disappear immediately, when bliss arises again.

Footnotes

(1) Jesus through John Smallman, March 22, 2015, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2015/03/22/jesus-via-john-smallman-forgetting-love-is-not-possible/

(2) “Jeshua: Teaching Your Parents,” channeled by Pamela Kribbe, August 6, 2013 at https://www.jeshua.net.

(3) I know the following three things at a realized level of knowledge: (1) I am not the body – 1977; (2) Enlightenment is the purpose of life – 1987; and (3) Love and bliss flow from  the heart – 2015. That’s it. Everything else is conjecture.

(4) Eckhart tells this story:

A beggar had been sitting by the side of a road for over thirty years. One day a stranger walked by. “Spare some change?” mumbled the beggar, mechanically holding out his old baseball cap.

“I have nothing to give you,” said the stranger. Then he asked: “What’s that you are sitting on?”

“Nothing,” replied the beggar. “Just an old box. I have been sitting on it for as long as I can remember.”

“Ever looked inside?” asked the stranger.

“No,” said the beggar. “What’s the point? There’s nothing in there.”

“Have a look inside,” insisted the stranger

The beggar managed to pry open the lid. With astonishment, disbelief, and elation, he saw that the box was filled with gold. (Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now. Downloaded from https://www.inner-growth.info/power_of_now_tolle/eckhart_tolle_chapter1.htm)

(5) Mata Amritanandamayi, Awaken, Children! Vallicakavu, India: Mata Amritanandamayi Mission Trust, 1, 8.

(6) Paramahansa Ramakrishna in Swami Nikhilananda, trans., The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1978; c1942, 756-7.  He’s probably referring to at least spiritual awakening