Friday, June 3, 2011

bliss, nirvana, the brass ring

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If, as it is hard not to imagine when starting out, the end-game of spiritual endeavor were some sort of abiding bliss ....

Could it any longer be called "bliss" if every moment of every day were equally blissful? Wouldn't it be par for the course, like sneezing through your nose? It would be an ordinary matter, wouldn't it? (Yes, yes ... I hear the sooth-sayers and dexterous text-readers saying things like, "This is beyond all knowing." But if it is beyond all knowing, why are they pretending to know?)

This leads me to think that the selling of bliss is largely a matter of ignoring or downgrading or quietly castigating whatever it is that is not bliss... a kind of sell-the-flower-but-ignore-the-shit-that-nourishes-it approach.

I'm not criticizing here. Just thinking that all that hoping and believing and straining for some bright-light bliss needs to be tempered a bit. Poor old "bliss" -- it relies utterly on its twin sister or brother (they both came out of the womb at precisely the same moment), and yet "bliss" wears the ill-fitting crown.

Let's take pity on poor old "bliss" and exercise a bit of common sense and compassion.
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