Awareness is intrinsically bliss. This may not be immediately apparent. For we are generally quite unaware. And generally not blissful. We inhabit the realm of mental rumination so much, so often, so immersively, so unconsciously that we have little insight into who we are or what is really happening in our experience. We get swept along the torrents of experience as in a torrential flood beyond our control.
We assume we live in a world out there, in a body in here. We assume we are the life spark of mind that dwells somewhere in this body, perhaps somewhere in the head. Especially in this information and digital age, our cogitations fill much of our experience and our heads feel heavy. In the thick and dense fog of semi-consciousness, bliss eludes us. There is no experience of our being as bliss.
Yet, shards of bliss softly shine into our experience from time to time. We long for bliss. Not mere bliss but bliss that truly and lastingly fulfils. We seek for things, situations, places, and persons that we think can give us bliss. We crave for them when we cannot find them or lose contact with them after we have found them. There is craving in the dark of semi-consciousness. Where craving is, suffering follows. Affliction and anguish arise.
But what if we assume wrong? What if the world is not out there, the body in here, and the mind inside the body in the head? Is it possible for us to wake up to reality by observing closely? Observing the body closely to see it as mere mixture of images, sensations, and perceptions? Observing the world closely as none other than a mixture of images, sensations and perceptions seamless with the body? Radically piercing and releasing the observer so that the observer - the finite mind - disassembles into awareness that is without boundary, reference points, or centre? For the finite mind (the observer) is none other than a coalescing or localizing of unconfined awareness.
Can we see how as the world dissolves in our experience when we sleep, the same happens with the body? That as we dream, our dream world is always experienced from the vantage point of the dream 'I' or 'me' within that world? In waking or dreaming, we experience our world as the finite mind, the finite experiencer we take to be who we really are. In dreamless sleep, both the dream world and the dream self disappear from view. In fact, in dreamless sleep there is a view from nowhere, a view of no-view, so to speak. No world. No experiencer. No view.
Even so, as we emerge from deep dreamless sleep, we sense a refreshment and recharging of our being. We feel rested. There is a bliss of restedness. Where is the source of that bliss? Exploring this further in waking experience, can we consciously enter into awareness so that its ocean of knowing is lit up rather than immersed in darkness? Can we begin to glimpse the mystery of awareness devoid of being something yet is not nothing? Awareness shining as our innermost presence? Awareness as bliss?
When the torrents of thought and thinker, feeling and feeler, experiencer and experienced dissipate and finally dissolve in their own place, reactivity and craving also cease to be. Suffering, affliction, and anguish stop. At the very ground of that still forest pool where torrents dissipate into the water of awareness, only bliss remains. When constriction and condensation are absent, only freedom that is bliss abides and percolates.
Echoes of that bliss filter through our localized mind and body, enough to remind us of that possibility of bliss in the centreless awareness beyond constructs. For that reason, we are beings innately primed for bliss. Beyond even this innate bliss is the supreme and sovereign bliss of our God from whom all blessings flow. He is a loving Father who pursues us and calls us to enter into His bliss through His Son who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6). Deep calls unto deep (Psalm 42:7). And into the Deep our deep awareness that is bliss flows. - CK
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