Bliss
“One must be utterly abandoned to God; nothing matters but fulfilling His will. Otherwise all is folly and meaninglessness.” — Carl Jung
“There are two ways to lead your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” — Albert Einstein
You know when you are very cold and you draw a nice warm bath that is just right, and when you get in that perfectly warm bath you find yourself bathed in joy? You ooh and ah with glee as you begin to warm up. The coldness ekes out of you, dislodged by the warmth.
Imagine this as being bathed in Light as you come into balance with All That Is and realize It is within you and all around you. Your comfort level is sustained by Spirit—not too hot and not too cold. And what at first was a peak experience of ooh’s and ah’s as your body adjusted to the water, may seem temperate now because you are no longer dazzled by it; there is no longer a division between what you experienced as warmth and the warmth itself. You are not separate from it. Now extend this metaphor to a bath of Light with no tub; everything that exists is in the bath with you, and everything, including you, is this bath of Light– the Light of Divine Love expressing itself. (This is not just intellectually understood; it is experienced.)
This is the Bliss that is talked about in some spiritual literature. It is not the high emotional state with which we often associate it. You can’t will this state into being; it comes with grace (and has nothing to do with being worthy or unworthy). You experience a kinship of Spirit with all that is and no longer identify with duality. Separateness falls away as Divine Love envelops you and lives through you. Though you still grow and learn, you do so without struggle. (Peace is the side-effect of Divine Love.) Unshakeable in all things, you “flow with the river” and its current carries you. Information and thoughts come and go as you observe them but are not attached to them. Simply put, you are a witness to the passing parade at the same time as you exist and create within it. This continuous state of reverence brings contentment and joy.
We don’t become still to find God; we are still to become aware of God manifest within us.
There are those of us who try to avoid knowing our true Self; we are afraid of what we’ll find. Life has its ups and downs, we assume, and avoid responsibility and acknowledgment of our discontent through a constant distraction of television, clutter, chatter, and the like that robs us of ourselves as we invest our energy and emotions in the other. By this avoidance we shortchange our opportunity to invite balance into our lives and know our own Divinity.
And then there are those of us who become attached to the peaks, the ooh’s and ah’s when we first put our “cold body in the nice warm bath,” and grab onto that “high” as bliss, mistaking excitement for joy. We are afraid to let go and won’t trust and allow true, sustained Bliss to bubble-up from within. We seek to recreate another peak, and use our will and energy to try and “make it happen.” It becomes some kind of addiction like sex, food, the perfect body or image, money, possessions, work, gambling, alcohol, spiritual workshops and experiences, drugs, and so on. Because these emotional peaks are necessarily short-lived, we rush here and there to find more, creating instead a good deal of struggle for ourselves. Attached to the highs, we may assume the peaceful state described above to be boring, blah, a flat-line experience. But this is not so.
Bliss is the experience of being at One with All That Is, the culmination of the rebirth of Self and is without those high peaks (and their ever-present partner, valleys); yet it is full of wisdom and love, so deep, it is ever vibrant. Glowing with a pervasive sense of well-being, it does not participate in past reflection and regret, nor in the anxiety of what the future may bring. It lives in the moment—in the glistening vibrancy of Love that is nature, is each person and is every thing—and is full of Beauty and the boundless Knowledge that exists in All Time. It openly accepts this holiness present in all Life. In this calm state of sustained Bliss, your life is the prayer and blesses all creation.
© 2001 * Barbara Atkinson
