The Problem with Temporary Bliss
Excerpt from The Fire of Freedom
Satsang with Papaji
Edited by David Godman
What comes and goes is a trap. It is a trap of the mind. Mind has created many traps for you, and these temporary bliss states are one of them. These experiences come from your own inner desires, your own ideas of what a spiritual experience should be. You want bliss because you think this is what ought to happen on the spiritual path. Your mind obliges you and produces some bliss for you to enjoy. It’s all a trap, and no one ever got enlightened by falling for these traps. If you know that they are traps, you will not walk into them. It is enough for you to know that anything that is temporary, anything that comes and goes, is a trap. With this knowledge you can acquire the discrimination that keeps you away from the transient. This rejection of what is impermanent, irrespective of how pleasant it might be, will work against the mind’s habits of looking for pleasure and bliss, and it will take you back to your natural state.
The mind likes to keep busy, you see. It will set up some goal for you, and then it will try to accomplish it. It will make these brief bliss states your goal, and then it will make you work hard to attain them. And then you will think that you have accomplished something good, something spiritual. This is just postponement. You are postponing enlightenment until next year, or your next life.
Question: What’s the difference between this kind of trap, this type of samadhi, and the bliss that you sometimes talk about, the bliss that is natural and automatic? When I am drawn inside, there is an automatic inwardness that pulls me in, and there the mind gets very peaceful. It feels very single-pointed and very calm. I know that everyone here experiences something like this in your presence, though not necessarily all the time. So my question is, ‘What is the difference between the samadhis of bliss that one strives for and the bliss and peace that we seem to feel quite naturally in your presence?’
Papaji: The peace that you feel is the result of not doing anything. That is the difference.
Question: That’s true. That’s right.
Papaji: By not doing anything, by not striving to attain anything. It’s the result of an instant, a moment, in which you decide to relieve yourself of all your activity. At that time, in that moment, you have peace and happiness. This is the moment that gives you happiness.
How does the feeling of happiness normally come to you? It comes in the moment that some particular desire has been fulfilled. You say, ‘I want the latest model Mercedes because my neighbour has just booked one. I also want a new apartment facing the beach. These are the things that will make me happy. I want them.’
You set to work to fulfil your desires. You get a loan from the bank and some help from your friends. Everyone joins in with your new enthusiasm. Your wife wants a new car; your children want a new car; everyone wants the new model car. By now you are convinced that you will never be happy with your old Ford. The new car eventually appears and you park it on the street where everyone can admire it. Everyone is happy when they see the new car in front of your house.
This process is the same one that yogis go through to attain bliss, except that the desires and the goals are different. There is a desire to experience a blissful state; they work hard to attain it through their various yogic practices; a blissful experience results, and when they come out of it, they feel very pleased with themselves because they have attained the object of their desire.
Now, where did this happiness come from? The experiencer remained the same before, during and after the experience. Nothing has changed there. The car is made of steel, rubber, and so on. There is no happiness that is built into the machine, a happiness that becomes yours when you buy all this metal and rubber. What has really happened? How did the acquisition of this new car produce a feeling of happiness within you?
In the beginning you were troubled by a desire to have a new car. This desire nagged at you and troubled you all the time you were working to collect the money to buy one. But when you took possession of the car, you suddenly felt happy. Why? It was because the desire to obtain a new car was no longer there. It was the sudden absence of desire that made you happy, not the acquisition of a new possession.
When desire is no longer there, you are happy. When desire has ceased to exist completely, you are happy all the time, and this is liberation. Liberation is not the result of your meditations, of your visits to pilgrimage places. It doesn’t come from going into caves in the mountains, from giving to charities, or from reading the sutras. So long as desire is there, samsara is there. So long as desire is there, suffering is there. Everyone can see this in his daily life.
Who is happy in the waking state? I believe the answer to that question is ‘no one’. The kings and the millionaires have everything but they are not happy. From the richest man down to the poorest no one is happy because there is not a single man whom this serpent desire has not bitten. This desire is a serpent, and there is no one who has escaped her bite.
Consider your waking state. If it is such a good, restful and peaceful state, why do you reject it so readily to go to sleep? Why reject it if it is such a good state? Everyone needs to sleep because the desires of the day have tired us out. The mind needs a rest at the end of every period of waking because its busyness has worn you out. Everyone feels happy and peaceful during that state of sleep. There is happiness and peace there because the mind is no longer bothering you. There are no mental transactions there, just the contentment that comes from not having any nagging desires. Because there are no transactions there between subject and object, mind and phenomena, you feel rest. When there is no subject- object division, there is peace and rest.
Even in the state of samadhi there is a subtle transaction going on between a subject and an object: the subject who is meditating and the object that is being meditated on. This relationship must be there. I, the meditator, am one entity, the subject, and the object of meditation is something else.
To get rid of this subject-object relationship, why not begin to question who the meditator is? Find out who the meditator is, and find out why it needs to meditate. This is moving in the opposite direction. Instead of moving downstream with the mind by connecting to an object that you experience, move upstream to find the source. Don’t go with the flow. Go in the opposite direction, upstream, and find out who the meditator is. Perhaps you will find the answer that will settle your accounts here and now. But this decision, the decision to go upstream to the source, doesn’t come to most people. Whatever you do, you never question who is the doer of your actions, the one who performs meditation. When you enjoy, you get lost in the enjoyment, but you never question who is experiencing the enjoyment in that moment. Everyone attributes the enjoyment to the object that is being enjoyed – such as the new car – which is transient, not permanent. This is how samsara comes into being. We never attribute the happiness or the bliss to the person who is experiencing it. We only attribute it to the object he is enjoying.
You only experience enjoyment of objects in the waking state. But it doesn’t matter how much enjoyment you are getting from these waking-state objects, you always reject them when you go to sleep. The most beautiful experience may be there in the waking state; the most beautiful person, the one who is most dear to you may be there in the waking state, but you will reject them all when you go to sleep. You go to sleep alone, without experiences, without the people who are most dear to you, and in that state you have peace, having forgotten everything that came before. To have true peace, you have to be alone, separated from everything you love and enjoy as separate objects. The happiness and the peace you experience in this state cannot be attributed to anything perishable. This bliss, the bliss that does not depend on enjoying an object or an experience, is imperishable, permanent. No matter what else is destroyed, this will remain. Nobody knows where this happiness is because everyone is looking for it in the wrong place.
I was speaking earlier of traps, of traps of the mind. Happiness is not to be found in any of these traps of the mind. It is to be found when the mind is absent, and one day you will all know it. Everyone gets a taste of this, an experience of it, when he goes to sleep. When sleep comes everything vanishes, but you remain, alone and at peace. When you wake up you say, ‘Oh, I had a very good sleep. I was very happy and content. I didn’t even dream.’
This sleep state is just one of the three dull alternating states. It is not the final state of freedom or liberation, but it is a state in which the mind activity and objects have vanished. The sleep experience should teach you that when the mind stops transacting its business, peace prevails. When the mind stops jumping outwards to objects and desires in the waking state, you have peace and freedom with full awareness. This is the highest, transcendent state.
How can it be attained? Some people have done it. Many people have tried to attain it through yoga, samadhi, meditation and so on, but who gets permanent results?
It can be done, though. The means is not important, what is important is the result. It can be done.