Spiritual Bliss and Pain and That

Many clamour for the experience of spiritual bliss, but, few earn it, because they find themselves too weak to reject the clamour of the senses! Practice assiduously the larger programme of controlling the senses.

A little enquiry will reveal that the senses are bad masters and very inefficient sources of knowledge; the joy they bring is transitory and fraught with grief. So long as one is dominated by sense pleasure, it cannot be said that his spiritual life has begun. For, the senses rush towards the temporary and the tawdry; thus, they foul the heart. God asks from each of you no other gift, no more valuable offering than the heart He has endowed you with.

Give God that heart, as pure as when He gave it to you, full of the nectar of love He filled it with. Your devotion to God is best expressed by achieving the control of the senses.

Baba (thought for the day)

 

Only a few earn it, because we don't just get it for free, we have to do something for it, because it needs strength to reject the clamour of the senses. But he tells also that only a little enquiry will already reveal that the senses are bad masters and an inefficient source of knowledge. Everything what is based on the senses is just limited and has therefore, seen out of the highest wisdom and truth, no reality in it and it is for us a deception and will end in grief.

The mind goes out by the means of the senses to merge with the sense-object and that results in sense pleasure. If we relax and are not aware of it, we can be certain that this will happen all by itself, we don't need to do anything about it, the mind goes out by itself and looks for the pleasure in the senses. There is no effort needed to merge with the object of the senses. And he tells us even that our spiritual life has not yet begun, if we are not yet aware of the difference between the senses and a more efficient source of knowledge.

  

For, the senses rush towards the temporary and the tawdry; thus, they foul the heart.

 

The conflict is in our own nature. The heart is not happy and fulfilled with the superficial sense pleasure and what is even worse, we don't get the right knowledge and the heart is fooled.

The heart has its own knowledge. And God asks us to offer our heart.

We should give that heart back to him, but of course, if we don't know the difference yet between sense gratification and the heart, we also don't know how to give it back as pure and beautiful as he gave it to us and there will be something else in it and not just the nectar of love.

But if we achieved the control of the senses, it will come by itself that our focus is on the heart and divinity and real values. 

The basis to it is discrimination and self-inquiry.

 

In my email I get regularly a text about Patanjali Sutras from the artofliving.org. and there is a text I would like to share with you.

 

Love also creates pain, tremendous amount of pain. Separation is pain, tremendous amount of pain. A wish is tremendous amount of pain present in the mind. Trying to please creates pain. Whether the other person is pleased or not is pain. You want to know through and through the mind of the other person. How can you, when you do not even know your own mind?

You want to know somebody else's mind! It is impossible to know anybody else's mind just by their words or movements of their lips and tongue.
It is said that the tongue has no bone. It is not steady. It says something today, and tomorrow it may say something else. You can trust anything in the world but you cannot trust your own tongue! Trying to know somebody else, knowing what is there and sitting on it is painful. You experience some good feeling - love - you feel wonderful and joyful, and suddenly it is not there the next moment. It is painful.

Patanjali Yogasutra Knowledge
If we use just a bit of enquiry as Baba tells it so nicely above, we get to the conclusion, if nothing in the relative realm is permanent and we seek for truth and bliss, all what is relative and that is about everything around us, is going to end in pain.
Therefore, if we cannot promise anything but pain, we can just relax.

Why worry, it will anyhow be painful in the end. It is pain and it is pleasure, but all pleasure has a bit of pain.

Only if we get on the level of our higher self it will change and for that we need to relax. It is the level of 'I am that', self-realisation.

That is certainly a reason I meditate.

If there is too much energy in this moment, that it is already painful again, because of the 'too much'. But why worry, it will take no time to turn into the opposite again and that will also be painful, because it will be 'too little' energy.

Focused in meditation there can be a moment in the flow of energy and it is 'that'.

It is enough to get a feeling of bliss and then it will be painful again if we fall out of it and we relax to get back to it.
Everything is in 'I am that'. There is no other expression for it but 'that'.