Meditation Essentials: Bliss

This is the tenth lecture in our course examining the most essential facts about meditation. We have explained some of the basic terminology and philosophy to help you guide your meditation practice, specifically how to focus on facts. Throughout the course we have been utilizing a variety of tools, especially the Tree of Life and the nine stages of meditative stability. These tools are based on facts, confirmable truths, experiences that anyone can confirm for themselves. I hope that the course has invited you to confirm those facts for yourself. In this tenth lecture we are going to talk about what all of this leads to. Why meditate? What is it for? What is the purpose? What is the result? What is it that we are seeking? And if we are not finding it, why? If we are not achieving it, why?

In some sense we can say that the subject of today’s lecture, even though it is based on facts that have been proven by an uncountable number of meditators throughout history, it is also the most elusive, difficult, and contested, precisely because few people are willing to work exclusively with facts. Few people are willing to cut away that which is extraneous, an obstacle, or a veil, such as beliefs, traditions, theories, and philosophies that we adopt and hold fast to, but which in reality are based on nothing.

As an example, we all have a sense of self, a sense of identity that we clutch onto with great strength, which in fact is meaningless, illusory, based on nothing but lies we tell ourselves. Because we are unwilling to cut that away, we cannot see the truth. Just as we do this as individuals, this is done by groups, schools, religions, countries, and civilizations. We clutch at illusions believing they are real, believing they are a defining characteristic of who we are as a person, as a people, but which are in fact nothing but smoke.

The subject of today’s lecture, bliss, is the result of an effective meditation practice, and it is an inescapable result, unavoidable: it will happen if your meditative practice is true. This is because bliss is simply the natural state of the unconditioned consciousness. Every living creature has that. We all have that within, but it is veiled in us.

Consciousness is the ability to perceive and to understand what we perceive. In it’s natural state, it is free of anger, unblemished by lust, pride, envy, greed or gluttony… in other words, it is bliss: happiness, contentment, joy, love, wisdom, beauty. All of us has seen it, and experienced it, but only fleetingly. When we look into the eyes of a baby, when we experience the pure and innocent atmosphere of a baby, we are sensing the unblemished, unconditioned consciousness in that child that radiates love, joy, happiness, contentment, purity, being in the moment, that quality of simply being content in the moment, happy and engaging with others. Observe the purity and innocence of a child, a baby: they have no worries, they are not thinking about the past or the future, but are very much in the moment, very imaginative, very expressive, very connected, but of course only at the level of a baby, as a child. Those qualities are the seed or essence of the angel, buddha, master, etc. We all have that inside of us. But as we grow up it becomes veiled and conditioned very heavily by our personality, by our experiences, by our mind, by our habits and tendencies, by our culture, by our language, by everything that we vest ourselves with, like layers of clothing to supposedly protect ourselves from pain, yet which in fact are the causes of our pain.

The meditation practice that is rooted in facts and based on this proven ancient structure seeks to remove all those layers of lies and expose that primordial purity that we have inside. It is blissful, content, happy, and serene, spontaneously and naturally, on its own.

That is why we study the Tree of Life, because it illustrates all of those layers in a symbolic way.