Unsent Letter #11: There Is No Bliss

November, 2006

Dear Friend,

You are wondering why I have removed all of the most recent letters from this website. The reason is that I had begun to feel that I was giving misleading information. When one starts to get involved in the concepts of "teaching" and "lineage," one begins to be burdened with the weight of tradition, which is always intimately connected with a whole range of do's and don'ts. I am not interested in all that. Although it may be appropriate to write letters about "Devotion and Worship," or "Common Mistakes" to particular individuals, making them generally available on this website tends to give the impression that I am asserting that there is a path that is right for everyone or that certain practices are necessary.

Of course, this is not the case. Therefore, I have decided to only publish letters on this site that I feel have universal application. I am not going to modify what I have to say to fit into a traditional model, whatever it may be.

For example, I wrote in a recent letter that "..as long as there is a creation (which means as long as there is experience of a world), this world must exist through love, for love, and only for the experiencing of love." This reflects a traditional way of looking at the world and a traditional way of describing the experience of it. The way that I may personally conceive of the world is not the point. Everyone is bound to see and experience the world in their own way. Really there is no world other than your own mind and that is the important point to grasp. Otherwise, one starts to think that one should see and experience according to another person's point of view in order to get to the state that they have. This is the projection that we make onto those we regard as spiritual teachers.

We are so thoroughly programmed to listen to so-called spiritual teachers that we forget all about the one who is seeking. It all becomes a game that the mind plays. We think we can find reality but we only get further and further away from the reality that we already are.

I wrote recently about ananda, bliss. Bliss is an experience. It is not real. Writing about it gives the impression that it is some kind of goal, something to be desired. It is a pleasant experience, but it has nothing to do with reality. In reality, there is no bliss. It is like the reflection of the sun in a bucket of clear water. Enjoying the reflection is the bliss, but the sun remains where it always is--high in the sky--it never descends into the bucket of your mind.

Everything in this illusory world is of the same nature. There is only experience, which occurs through the knowledge that we happen to have. So the world is nothing other than that knowledge. As long as one is interested in experience of any kind, the wheel of birth and death is bound to keep turning. One imagines that one is having new experiences, but in fact it is only the existing knowledge interpreting the event and incorporating it into the known. This is a mechanical process. The joke of life is that we think that we are real, that we exist. Actually, we are only the knowledge that we have about ourselves. Nothing more.

A.