Come on! Who doesn't? Seeking of any kind is actually a search for peace and happiness. One searches for happiness in various pursuits. Whatever your pursuit, whether it is meditation, chanting, praying, hatha yoga, rituals, or visiting holy places, it is eventually all a search- a search for that elusive eternal or permanent bliss. Even your reading this page is an indication that you are in search of peace, or happiness or bliss. However, happiness in most cases is equated with something that one attains. Something that one hopes to attain and thereafter one hopes will be a life of perfect peace and happiness. When one thinks of happiness, it is a relative term. Relative to unhappiness or absence of happiness. The mind can only think in opposites- good versus bad, superior versus inferior, big versus small. All objective thinking is relative.
Suppose one does attain a feeling of happiness, how long do you think it will last? A few moments, a few minutes, maybe a few days or months or maybe years? Doesn't matter. Eventually, this feeling must end. All pursuits to attain bliss, however successful, cannot bring about permanent eternal bliss or happiness. Why is that? Because the bliss that one is trying to attain is a state of mind, a relative state compared to a state of unhappiness or absence of happiness or bliss. All states of mind are bound to change. All states of mind are transient by nature. Even the state of absence of thoughts, however blissful, must come to an end. Suppose, you do attain a state of fairly consistent and prolonged period of bliss by undertaking an intensive period of meditation or yoga or whatever, what happens when you come out of that state? That state of bliss is gone and you are back to whatever state you were in before the state of bliss began. Is that not a common experience of mankind? And because you like that state, you want to prolong it somehow. Not realizing the ephemeral nature of this experience, one falls into a trap seeking constantly to replicate this experience of bliss- a state of mind.
So you may ask, then how can one attain eternal bliss? For that one must understand that anything relative is bound by time. Whatever you attain you will eventually lose. What comes and goes is not real- so said Ramana Maharshi. The only way to eternal bliss is to realize that you are Bliss itself. Not an objective state of bliss but the subjective Bliss itself. Bliss, not in the relative sense, but in the absolute sense. The dictionary definition of absolute is 'something that is not dependent upon external conditions for existence, something that is free from any restriction or condition, something that is perfect or complete'. What could the bliss in the absolute sense be? Your own Self, which is self shining, Eternal and ever Present. To realize that bliss is your True Nature is to realize Eternal Bliss. Eternal Bliss is not a state of mind for as we have seen, all states of mind are transient and hence cannot be therefore eternal.
One cannot get eternal bliss, one can only BE ETERNAL BLISS!
