It happens all the time in heaven, and someday it will begin to happen again on earth — that men and women who are married, and men and men who love, and women and women who give each other light, often will get down on their knees, and while so tenderly holding their lover’s hand, – Read More –
bliss /blis/ (noun): perfected happiness
I most appreciate Osho’s discussion of bliss as it relates to consciousness. Osho divides humanity into those who are sleeping, those who are awake and those who are in between. Happiness depends on where you are in your consciousness.
The Sleeping Ones
If you are sleeping, then pleasure is happiness. Pleasure is trying to force the body to achieve something it is not capable of. People are trying, in every possible way, to achieve happiness through the body, but it cannot be done. The body can give you only momentary pleasures, and each pleasure is balanced by pain in the same amount, in the same degree. The body exists in a world of duality, just as the day is followed by night, your pleasure will be followed by your pain…and your pain will be followed by pleasure.
But you will never be at ease. When you are in a state of pleasure, you will be afraid that you are going to lose it…and that fear will poison it. And when you are lost in pain, of course, you will be in suffering…and you will try every possible effort to get out of it — just to fall again back into it. Buddha calls this the wheel of birth and death. To the sleeping, pleasurable sensations are happiness. He lives from one pleasure to another pleasure. He is just rushing from one sensation to another sensation. He lives for small thrills. His life is very superficial; it has no depth, it has no quality. He lives in the world of quantity.
Those in-between being sleep and being awake
When one starts meditating, one will begin to move from being sleep to being awakened. In this transitory state, happiness has a different meaning: it becomes more of a quality, and less of a quantity; it is more psychological, less physiological. She enjoys music more, she enjoys poetry more, she enjoys creating something. She enjoys nature, its beauty. She enjoys silence…she enjoys what she had never enjoyed before, and this is far more lasting. Even if the music stops, something goes on lingering in you.
The difference between pleasure and THIS happiness is: it is not a relief, it is an enrichment. You become more full, you become a little overflowing. Listening to good music, something is triggered in your being, a harmony arises in you — you become musical. Or dancing, suddenly you forget your body; your body becomes weightless. The grip of gravitation over you is lost. Suddenly you are in a different space: the ego is not so solid, the dancer melts and merges into the dance. This has a depth. But this is also not the ultimate.
Zen painting is a form of meditation. The paintings are created on rice paper so that corrections cannot be made. In this way, the mind has nothing to do while painting. The artist simply paints without thought of correction, creating brush strokes with the feeling of the moment. Zen painting also honors nature and incorporates – Read More –
The small man
Builds cages for everyone
He
Knows.
While the Sage,
Who has to duck her head
When the moon is low,
Keeps dropping keys all night long,
For the
Beautiful
Rowdy
Prisoners.
Poetry by Hafiz (with edits by Selena Sage)
Once, in a city in the Farthest West, there lived a girl named Fatima. She was the daughter of a prosperous spinner. One day her father said to her: “Come, daughter; we are going on a journey, for I have business in the islands of the Middle Sea. Perhaps you may find some handsome youth in a good situation whom you could take as a husband.”
They set off and traveled from island to island, the father doing his trading while Fatima dreamt of the husband who might soon be hers. One day, however, they were on the way to Crete when a storm blew up, and the ship was wrecked. Fatima, only half-conscious was cast up on the seashore near Alexandria. Her father was dead, and she was utterly destitute.
She could only remember dimly her life until then, for her experience of the shipwreck and her exposure in the sea, had utterly exhausted her.
While she was wandering on the sands, a family of cloth-makers found her. Although they were poor, they took her into their humble home and taught her their craft. Thus it was that she made a second life for herself, and within a year or two she was happy and reconciled to her lot. But one day, when she was on the seashore for some reason, a band of slave-traders landed and carrier her, along with other captives, away with them.
Although she bitterly lamented her lot, Fatima found no sympathy from the slavers, who took her to Istanbul and sold her as a slave.
Her world had collapsed for the second time. Now it chanced that there were a few buyers at the market. One of them was a man who was looking for slaves to work in his woodyard, where he made masts for ships. When he saw the dejection of the unfortunate Fatima, he decided to buy her, thinking that in this way, at least, he might be able to give her a slightly better life than if she were bought by someone else.
He took Fatima to his home, intending to make her a serving-maid for his wife. When he arrived at the house, however, he found that he had lost all his money in a cargo which had been captured by pirates. He could not afford workers, so he, Fatima, and his wife were left alone to work at the heavy labor of making masts.
Fatima, grateful to her employer for rescuing her, worked so hard and so well that he gave Fatima her freedom, and she became his trusted helper. Thus it was that she became comparatively happy in her third career.
One day he said to her: “Fatima, I want you to go with the cargo ships’ masts to Java as my agent, and be sure that you sell them at a profit.”
She set off, but when the ship was off the coast of china, a typhoon wrecked it, and Fatima found herself again cast up on the seashore of a strange land. Once again, she wept bitterly, for she felt that nothing in her life was working in accordance with expectation. Whenever things seemed to be going well, something came and destroyed all her hopes.
“Why is it,” she cried out, for the third time, “that whenever I try to do something it comes to grief? Why should so many unfortunate things happen to me?” But there was no answer. So she picked herself up from the sand, and started to walk inland.
We all hit plateaus….we either feel that we’ve hit our peak and can’t go higher…or that we’ve hit our lowest and can’t go lower. (I don’t believe that either is ever really true.) But when you get bored…or stop seeing results…it’s probably time to change things up! And you have to push yourself to move up. Whether – Read More –
