I believe I’m correct in saying, as an axiom, that anything knowable is ultimately finite.

Given that my life is an experiment, let me take the next step and hypothesize that love is unknowable.

God is unknowable.  Whether Father God or Mother God.  Whether God as formless or in form. Whether God as still or active. Ultimately God cannot be known.

God knows us, every one of us.  But we cannot know God.

***

Since love is everything, love must be forming itself into what we call bliss and joy. Therefore they too, I hypothesize, cannot be known. Ask me about them and I’d have to describe their impact, their effects on me.

If you ask me to describe bliss, I’d say, I feel elevated, inspired, uplifted. I’m satisfied, complete, satiated. I want nothing.

I simply want to sit in one spot and experience it.

Is it chocolate? Or jasmine? Or silky-soft?  It itself has no sensible features. I only know how I feel in the face of it.

***

Same with joy. Joy carries me outward with explosive and boisterous goodwill to all. But what joy itself feels like, I don’t know.

That’s not the same with what – for lack of a better term to distinguish it – we might call “love in the form of love.”  Unfortunately, we use the same name for the class of feelings and the individual feeling. (1)

Love in the form of love (sacred love) has me want to rush outdoors and hug everyone. I want to smile and ask everyone how they are. An outbreak of real, sacred love in the world and we’d soon solve the world’s problems.

Evidently, states like love and bliss are child’s play, as the graphic above reveals. The less you know, the easier it seems to be.

We can remain intellectual with them and wrestle with matters like names or we can just enjoy the experience, in the face of which all questions disappear and the state eases itself in.

Personally I’m with Ramakrishna: I want to eat mangoes, not learn how to grow them.

***

I’m feeling uplifted at the moment, which suggests to me the presence of bliss. I acknowledge it and its spreads throughout my being.

My schedule gets put on hold. I run for the keyboard.

I rearrange everything to accommodate the arrival of this unexpected but welcome guest.  For the time bliss lasts, or I need to shower and get to my first appointment, I’m off in dreamland, not much use to anyone.

I challenge anyone to describe these states in and of themselves, rather than by their effects.  If they can, I’d love to see their description.

Footnotes

(1) Until now I’ve solved the problem by citing distinctions Jesus, Saul, the Mother, and others make. Love as a higher-dimensional phenomenon becomes sacred love, the Mother’s Love, real love, universal love, unitive love.  But that again is more types of love; it’s love as the one constituent of Reality that we lack a name for.

We can solve part of the problem by using awkward terms like “love as love,” “love as bliss,” and “love as joy.” But names like these still do not completely cover the territory.