Bliss is not even happiness. What we call happiness is psychological. Whenever you find a certain moment of elation your ego is fullfilled, you feel happy. You have become the president of a country, you feel happy— but only for the time being, because your ego is fulfilled. You have defeated all other competitors, you have arrived; where others have failed, you have succeeded . . . or you have much money, power, prestige, fame. But soon one becomes tired of it all.
Only successful people know how tiring success is. Only rich people know how utterly disappointed they are— but they cannot even say so, because to say so seems to be even more foolish, people will laugh. They have wasted their whole lives accumulating wealth and now they say that it is stupid.
Mahavira and Buddha, who renounced their kingdoms, must have been really courageous people. It needs courage to renounce. It needs courage to recognize the fact, “This was all stupid and we have been living a stupid life up to now.” The ego does not want to do that; the ego wants to go on keeping the illusion. So on the surface you go on smiling, but deep down there are tears and nothing else, deep down there is anguish.
Whenever ego is fulfilled, you feel happy— bliss is not happiness but a totally different phenomenon. It is not plea sure because it is not physiological. It is not happiness because there is no ego fulfillment. On the contrary, it is dissolution of the ego, it is dissolving your separate entity into the whole. That’s what meditation is all about, merging, melting into the whole, totally forgetting that you are separate, remembering your unity with the whole. That’s why Gurdjie" used to call his meditation process “self-remembering”; it is really a remembering. Buddha used to call his meditation, “right remembering.”
We are one with the whole, even though we think we are separate. We are inseparable. Just by thinking we are separate, we cannot become separate. All that is needed is a remembrance; all that is needed is dropping this false notion that we are separate. In those rare moments when you can put aside your ego, your personality, your body- mind complex, and you are just a watcher, a witness, a consciousness, you know the first taste of meditation. And with that, immediately great bliss comes, it rushes toward you from all directions, from all dimensions. All your inner emptiness is immediately fulfilled. It becomes a lake of bliss. That is the end, and the method and the means is meditation. There is no other method, there is no other way.
Hence one has to learn to imbibe the spirit of meditation. However long it takes, whatsoever cost one has to pay for it, one has to be ready. Once you are ready to have it at any cost, then it is not difficult. That very readiness makes you worthy of it, and things become very simple.
