Most of us have experienced a few fleeting moments of bliss in our lives, often at completely unexpected moments. In “Eat, Pray, Love,” Elizabeth Gilbert describes her release at finally achieving such a state, after years of crippling depression, during a long group meditation at an ashram in India. In Chapter 1 of “Man Seeks God,” former NPR correspondent Eric Weiner describes one such moment of bliss that he had filed away in a drawer of his memory for years, and nearly forgotten:
“Waves of bliss broke over me, inside me. Tears rolled down my cheeks. My body trembled, almost like a seizure, and on my lips came these words: ‘I didn’t know, I didn’t know.’ I didn’t know such joy was possible.”
When Eckhart Tolle had a similar sort of seizure after thinking suicidal thoughts, he awoke to a state of bliss so powerful that he walked around the streets and parks of Vancouver B.C. in blissfulness for two years without coming down from it. Talk about a “natural high!” In “The Power of Now,” Tolle describes how many of us experience such moments, but only fleetingly. He goes on to explain that the chief obstacle to a more sustained experience of bliss is our egos, which cut us off from it by refusing to let us be fully present in the moment. The tick, tick, tick of our thoughts is like a clock that imprisons our minds in the future and the past, preventing us from experiencing the only true reality, which is the present moment. The remedy is to practice experiencing the present moment until one can forget oneself in the “now.”
As Eric Weiner expresses it in his chapter on Sufism, sadness and depression can be viewed as a form of grief that the human soul experiences, due to a feeling of being cut off and separated from the divine. This grief is the dark night of the soul, the clock that traps us in the future and the past. It is the obstacle to experiencing bliss, but it is also the catalyst for finding one’s way back to bliss, or to what both Hinduism and Buddhism call “awakening.” In Christianity, the Fall of man is an allegory for the grief of separation from the divine, in which man and woman feel overwhelmingly self-conscious and alone in their expulsion from our natural union with God in the Garden of Eden. In almost any religion, the life of a man can be described as a path of first developing an individual ego so that one can function in the world of human society, and then of shedding one’s ego, which is the embodiment of the concept of a separate identity, so that one may become re-united with God.
Many if not all religions, or at least the mystical orders within the religions, encourage people to find their way back to a sustained state of bliss. The conversion of St. Paul, the ecstacies of St. Theresa of Avila, the meditations of St. Francis, the transcendent state of whirling dervishes, the awakening of the Buddha – all are examples of this. Experiencing bliss may not be the same as attaining enlightenment, especially if it is not actively sustained over time, but it is certainly a significant signpost along the way.
One interesting difference between the religions is whether or not bliss-consciousness is directly associated with God. Sufism and Hinduism clearly interpret blissfulness as issuing from God. For example, in his “Autobiography of a Yogi,” Yogananda describes the purpose of meditation as being the attainment of “samadhi,” or state of union with God. He called his organization in America the “Self-Realization Fellowship,” in which “Self” refers to the ‘Higher Self,’ which is capable of re-unifying with God. However, Buddhism differs from this interpretation. In Buddhism, the bliss-consciousness which the Buddha achieved is an attribute of enlightenment, but enlightenment is not thought to be a state of union with God. Instead, the leading Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh defines nirvana as the “extinction of ideas and concepts and of suffering based on ideas and concepts; the ultimate dimension of reality.” Since the word “God” is only one more human idea or concept, it needs to be extinguished along with all the other constructs.
If the extinction of ideas and concepts is in fact the ultimate dimension of reality, it is “reality” that exists, not God. One could say that in Buddhism, “reality” is the ultimate value, instead of God. The difference may be semantic, because those of us who believe in God could just as easily choose to call God “Reality,” as those who believe in “Reality” could choose to call it “God.” Either way, these are concepts that need to be annihilated, because any concept is merely a symbol blocking our perception of the actual Reality or God. While the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron warns her followers against veering into “theistic” thinking, I believe it would be wrong to characterize Buddhists as atheists. Unlike the gauntlet thrown down by Christopher Hitchens, that atheism is the true ‘Reality,’ Buddhists would be much more likely to say that atheism is merely another concept that needs to be annihilated.
Bird of Spirit 