Bliss is natural. When you fall sick, people begin asking many questions about your well being. They even start giving you suggestions to remove this unnatural phenomenon. In the similar fashion, when you start showing happiness, people become curious to know what the matter behind it is. It is only because it is also unnatural. But when you are in bliss, people take it as natural and don’t ask any question. They know in their consciousness that it is natural. It is in this state of bliss, we rise in the morning, do all sort of things in the day time and go to sleep at night. If anything happens otherwise, happiness or miseries, people naturally find these unnatural.

Thus bliss is too fundamental to be ignored. Believers of soul in our body attaches great importance to this bliss and go to the extent to find the bliss as fundamental nature of the soul. Thus they believe that the bliss is divine, and its affinity is with the God, the Supreme Bliss. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad attaches so much importance to this bliss that it declares – All animates have life due to existence of only a fraction of the bliss. Taittiriya Upanishad even goes further and says that the bliss is the cause, base and rhythm of all that is animate and inanimate.

We are not at all interested in the controversy of existence or non-existence of soul, or Super Soul, which is sometimes called God. We are interested here about understanding the bliss as a natural thing for life.

However, our problem lies in our state of confusion when we confuse happiness for bliss.

First of all, one should note the fact that happiness has something to do with our sense organs, the senses, and the enjoyer of the senses that is intellect. This intellect enjoys all the emotions, including the happiness.

On the other hand we can have the bliss without our intellect becoming enjoyer of the senses or emotions.

Happiness can be derived at the level of consciousness; with the application of mind, the organs of work, or the organs of senses and the intellect; and we can have it without giving much importance to right and wrong. We then know that we are happy.

However, the bliss has not such things attached with it. It can be experienced even in sleep and without application of our organs of work and senses, and even at the subconscious level.

Happiness thus has beginning and an end while the bliss is experienced throughout life. It begins with our birth and ends when we die. It means the bliss is less interrupted than the happiness.

When happiness originates out of goodness, it tends to last longer than the happiness originated from other sources, and such happiness has less interruptions. Such happiness tends to merge with the bliss, and when it happens, we have uninterrupted happiness. In best of the circumstances we attain pure bliss – that is continuous but finite happiness.

Such things happen only when we restore ourselves at the natural level of bliss, and do not confuse it with happiness. By attaching ourselves unnaturally with happiness is the root cause of our miseries, because happiness has many interruptions.

The knowledge of this is must for a striver. Restoring oneself at the natural level is called by believers a divine trait and everything else is mundane. When the bliss becomes infinite and without interruption, the striver is said to have achieved the Supreme Bliss, which is equated by believers as attaining God or Godhood.

When in bliss, there is no fear, because it is natural. In this state there is no fear of losing even happiness. Bliss is real and natural state of being. It is unlike happiness because happiness comes is various forms. Bliss is continuous and experienced in sleep, dream and when we are awake. It has no pair of opposites, but happiness has its opposites in the form of sorrows. Bliss is indirect experience and always remains in present. It has no past an no future. However, happiness is direct experience and it has past, present and future. Happiness is subject to change, instable, interruptible, while bliss is not changeable, stable and uninterruptible. Bliss is confused with happiness which deludes us and we just ignore it in favour of Happiness. Subject and object of happiness is knowable while Bliss is without subject and object – it is independent. It does not even depend on happiness. Happiness is inspired by something while the Bliss is self-inspired or inspiration itself.

Experiencing this bliss is thus natural but who does not have the knowledge of the Self, does not have the knowledge of the bliss. The Bliss is thus unknown for ignorant despite experiencing it a little.

The path to achieve this bliss is – fourfold – The Path of Love and Devotion (Bhaktiyoga), The Path of Yoga and Meditation (Dhyanyoga), The Path of Action (Karmayoga), and the Path of Knowledge (Gyanyoga).