Q: I heard you comment that the bliss of the self – the Ananda in Sat Chit Ananda – takes time to get used to. This resonates with me but I can’t put my finger on why. Can you expand on that idea?
A: That resonance you mention is a great example of what I was referring to. Resonance is a subtle experience, something you can’t quite put a finger on, and the “bliss of the self” is the most subtle because it is you. Since you are yourself, you don’t typically turn your attention to what it is like to be yourself. Inadvertently, that is taken for granted while attention turns outward to objects and experiences known through your senses.
Oftentimes spiritual insights and experiences are accompanied by exceptional stillness of mind and/or a feeling of profound love. This in part leads to the conclusion that spiritual experience is a “big deal” and that the feelings associated with it must always be intense. But as with everything in Vedanta, this is true and not true. It is true because that is how we often experience it, but it is also not true because we only experience it this way when juxtaposed with the lack of mental stillness and profound love in our daily lives.
Your self, you, are “being” itself. Being is not a verb here, it is existence shining as awareness. As such you are whole and complete prior to experience. In comparison to the extremely subtle experience of you, even the touch of a feather or the sound of a water droplet drowns it out, let alone the cacophony of thoughts and emotions generated in our busy lives! The subtle bliss of being has no prayer of asserting itself into your attention until you pay attention to it. This does not happen with the snap of the fingers, but gradually through practicing Vedanta Sadhana.
It is precisely because this is a gradual process, and one which goes against the grain of so many years of conditioning to seek objects for happiness, that it takes time to get used to that most subtle bliss. Getting “used to it” is attenuating yourself to subtlety through the process of “seeing to your qualifications,” as Ramji says in Essence of Enlightenment.
More on qualifications can be found here
More on the bliss of self can be found here
