Class 7: Experiencing Bliss

Discussion

Bliss is a most curious quality of consciousness. It sounds almost scary. Definitely it sounds like a rare occurrence. When was the last time you experienced bliss? And do you really want to encounter that experience when you meditate? 

• What would happen to your life if you if you started feeling bliss quite often, every day?

Actually, bliss is not such a rare strange phenomenon, when understood clearly. Bliss is nothing more than the absense of certain things - like anxiety, anger, doubt, greed, depression, jealousy, excitement, despair.

In my understanding, moments of bliss should pop up in our lives many times a day - and they do if we manage our minds properly. It's no chance occurrence that the seventh expansion of this meditation process is defined by the focus phrase:

I've designed the first six steps of this meditation process specifically to at least momentarily put aside all the negative mental conditions and activities that keep us from feeling bliss. Take a new look at each of these steps:

Expansion 1) There's no bliss when your breathing is tense, that's for sure - bliss is felt as an expansive free good feeling in your breathing. So let's make this first step to let go of tensions and anxieties and shift into the pleasure of breathing ...

Expansion 3) There's no bliss when you're judging the world around you. Bliss is a function of the power and presence of love, not judgment and rejection and denial and so forth. So just let the judgment go, and accept people and the world:

Expansion 4) There is no bliss when you are judging your own self negatively, and rejecting your true perfect nature. So just say it, and instantly do it - haul off and love yourself!

Expansion 5) There is certainly no bliss when your heart is closed to the inflow of love and insight and wisdom and God's healing touch. You need to heal your emotional contractions so that you can genuinely feel good in your heart. So go ahead - open your heart to receive the inflow of trans-personal energy and love:

Expansion 6) There cannot be bliss without the feeling of connectedness with your souce of love. Indeed, bliss is that very feeling! There you have it - and also there you have the process that leads you into predictably feeling bliss, every time you move through this meditation process - yes!

Expansion 7) Now, there can be ... bliss. And you fully empower and recognize this experience by stating it:

What an easy process, hey!

It's so simple, so logical, so good and right and proper. So ... are you going to remember to do it, often, each day, so that it becomes a new habit? Is this what you want?

As Gurdjieff taught all through his life, yes we do want to wake up and live in bliss and wisdom and love. But darn - we tend to fall asleep so easily, and to forget the process through which we can wake ourselves up again ...

• I've written a sum total of 52 books thusfar this lifetime, all of them saying basically the same thing - don't forget to remember to wake up!

Herer's the blunt truth - I myself, even after writing so many books talking about remembering to wake up, so often fall asleep, lose my sense of connectedness with my creative source, and forget the process through which I can re-connect.

Here's another raw fact - although I haven't publically talked about this yet, the truth is, this new meditation process came to me not as a conscious act of intellectual effort and genius, but as a sudden flash in the dark during one of my deepest lapses into spiritual sleep ...

I was as low as they go ... flat on my back, diaganosed with multiple sclerosis, suddenly struck mostly blind, financially bankrupt with all assets taken away - and in the middle of this complete ego collapse ... came a series of sentences into my mind, one after the other, over and over again.

The origin of these seven focus phrases which make up the center of this new meditation process was not ego-based. These seven focus phrases came to me from a deep inner source, when I personally was crying out for spiritual help.

I'd been working my whole lifetime to break through into a simpler approach to waking up spiritually. Perhaps I'd progressed, and gained many insights. But still my ego was very much pushing and shoving its way through life, and I was manipulating the world to get what I wanted - until pow! I was knocked flat.

• Then the worst that could happen (excepte death) did happen - and I finally had to completely surrender. And from that total breakdown and surrender, came this new set of meditation tools.

First, without hardly realizing what was happening, I used this sequence of seven focus phrases for my own healing and awakening. They worked remarkably well - in weeks I was up and healthy again, and exploring each new day the newness that the meditation process brought.

Then at some point I started teaching this process, and wrote books about it, and developed online training for various at home and at work applications. This has become my life work. The process works not only for me, but for many people. Bliss is on the uprise!

• I mention this personal note because it seems time to air the origins of the process. This method came to me as a gift and a healing experience. I hope you find it equally valuable, and thank the source from which it came ... that universal source that we all share together.

Perhaps the most amazing part of this whole process, is that it guides us all into that expanded conscious state where we are indeed together, one mind, one heart, one great experience of bliss ...