Finding a Place for Bliss
Encountering Enchantment in Meditation
Meditation has a number of benefits, and sometimes some surprises too. The benefits of course are medium or longer term. They arise over time as our practice continues, and they can take many forms. A greater sense of calm, of being at peace with oneself and with one’s situation. A greater degree of openness toward, and acceptance of, others. Increased ability to deal with stress, doubt and difficulties. A reduction in mind-wander and unhelpful or negative thoughts. We are more inclined to live in the moment, to experience the present moment in more of its detail. We may find, for example, an increasing charm in observing the natural world.
All of these experiences are doubtless connected with the practice of meditation and mindfulness, but all of them are in a sense after-effects of repeated and regular practice. But I find that one of the surprises, something that occurs more often in the act of meditation itself, but occasionally outside of meditation too, is the sense of bliss that sometimes arises. An experience that is normally accompanied by a sense of the temporary slipping away of one’s ordinary identity or of a ‘floating’ above that identity, being untethered from it. These moments, at least in my experience, cannot be controlled or commanded. They are more in the nature of gifts, phenomenal gifts, that arise from time to time. And I often wonder what their significance might be.
Buddhist teachers will often warn their less experienced students not to become attached to such experiences. The American Zen practitioner (and neuro-scientist) J. H. Austin described one such experience to his teacher. She replied.
‘I’m very happy for you….Now, move on…Leave the experience behind. Don’t hold on to it like you were keeping a picture or a photograph. Regard it as you would a scene you’d just glimpsed out of the window of a moving train. There it is; there it goes. Now it is past. Others will come. Do not grasp them tightly… These moments of no-I are not some ‘secrets’ of the East, and they certainly aren’t secrets of Zen. Anyone can read about them in books. Many people have them. Indeed, one can shout their message from the rooftops. No one else seems to pay much attention, for no-I must truly be experienced to be appreciated.’ (J.H Austin, Zen and the Brain, p. 539).
I love that, ‘I’m very happy for you…Now, move on’!
Such advice is no doubt eminently sensible, and is so for a number of reasons. Firstly, attachment to anything is not helpful if one is to awaken from the dream of being an isolated self, something detached from the rest of the world and the other creatures in it. Secondly, if the principal aspiration of Buddhism is to save all sentient beings from suffering it is scarcely helpful if some of its adherents are simply floating around in a sea of unalloyed contentment. Thirdly, those experience of what we might call ‘bliss’ are likely for most of us to be at best sporadic, ungraspable and fleeting.
The Buddha is said to have attained his awakening, whilst sitting under that famous Bhodi fig tree, and found that it (the awakening, not the tree) contained everything that he required. Some accounts have him seated in meditation in that very place for four weeks or more, immersing himself in nirvana over and over again. In the Dhammapada he refers to the ‘builder of this body’, the ‘house-builder’ that life after life has created this human form (and by extension creates all of ours too, generation after generation). He says to it, ‘…you shall not build this house again. Its beams are broken; its dome is shattered: self-will is extinguished; nirvana is attained.’ (Dhammapada, lines 153–54).
So there is certainly some deep connection between nirvana, or bliss, and the Buddha’s teaching. Nirvana means literally a ‘snuffing-out’, the extinguishing of the self and of self-concern. But few of us I think can claim to have achieved such a remarkable result, or perhaps could even aspire to do so. Perhaps all we can do is become a little less self-oriented, more aware of the lives and feelings of others, better able to see that we share a fragile planet that we all need to cherish and protect; compassion toward that planet being a form of compassion to all its sentient inhabitants.
Nirvana or ‘snuffing-out’ is a very dramatic image. After all, a candle is either alight or it is not; there is no half-way stage. And even the Buddha took several decades to realise who he really was and become fully awake. But for the rest of us should we not cherish those moments of detachment, of unbidden tranquillity, of unexpected peace, as reminders of what our world, the world as we experience it, could and can be like? They are surely an inspiration that it would be reckless to ignore or disregard, as long of course as we do not cling to them as if they were all that mattered.
And I do not care if the doubters tell us that such experiences are (or are probably) the result merely of physical processes in the brain. Yes, I know they are most likely the result of the production of natural opiates in brain and body. In this sense what we experience in these moments is not dissimilar from the mother that nurses her baby, the parent or grandparent that holds the hand of their child or grandchild, or for that matter (in a less exalted and rather less intense way) the viewer of cute kitten pictures on the internet. Indeed, it is precisely the fact that they are the product of physical processes that encourages me to think that all human beings are capable of them, and that therefore we can all change, at least to some degree.
Surely then they are at the very least an inspiration? An inspiration to continue in the practice? An inspiration to hope that they can become a reality for each and everyone of us? When they are so, we will be well placed on the path to relieving suffering, both of our own, and that of others.
