Episode Transcript
We Americans enjoy a wonderful and powerful way of life, but internally and in relationships, we may wish for better. Join me as we look beneath the surface and gain insights to transform every aspect of your life. My name is Dr. Ann O'Hare, and this is The Spiritual American. Hello everyone and welcome to The Spiritual American. My name is Dr. Anne O'Hare and I'm your host. Today we're going to be talking about happiness and bliss. And the thumbnail said, when peace marries happiness. So this is going to be a little bit of a philosophical episode, but you can apply it because it's really kind of a reflection on what happiness is, what bliss is, what spiritual happiness is and so forth. But before we get started. Please consider like sharing and subscribing. You know that that really helps us to grow the channel, to get this content out to others. And also please share with your family and friends to give them a chance to benefit as well. Thank you all for joining us. I really appreciate it. I enjoy this very much and I'm hopeful that everyone gets benefit. So today we're going to talk about happiness and bliss. So. Oh, actually the thumbnail said when peace marries self respect. So it's interesting when we get into the spiritual side of it. So first I want to talk about happiness, like our ordinary happiness experience. So I had some thoughts and I'm going to share them. When do we experience happiness? So one thing I wrote down was physically dependent happiness. So ordinary happiness is physically dependent, meaning I feel happy when I win the contest. I feel happy when someone says they love me. I feel happy when I got a raise. I feel happy when I won the bowling tournament. I feel happy when, I'm proud of my achievement or something like that. So it's basically that. The happiness we feel is a reaction to the experience of something that something inside tells us is good. This is good. This is right. I should be happy. And so I feel happy. One other way of feeling happy is chemical stimulated happiness, right? So let's say the body, cause the body and the mind are connected. Yes. The body and the mind are connected and we experience happiness in the mind. So let's say when you eat sugar, sugar, we know that sugar is. Too much sugar is no good, right? We know this for a fact, but when you eat sugar, something happens. It creates certain chemicals and certain neurotransmitters get stimulated in the brain. So it creates this kind of feeling of happiness. Also, happiness can be created by, illegal drug use and things like that. I know that in different cultures they use hypnotics. I know, let's say marijuana and things like that. There are different chemicals out there and different practices that are done that stimulate a feeling of happiness or euphoria, and that's chemically stimulated. So that's happening through the body, right? Another one could be happiness based on relief of pain. So think about that for a minute. So when the pain goes away, sometimes we feel good. We feel better. We feel happy, right? So, let's say I was in a very painful, bad relationship and then I'm able to get out of the relationship. There's a feeling of relief and happiness and good feeling, freedom and energy gets infused into me because as soon as the pain goes away, I actually feel better, right? So that's another way we feel happiness. Another way is pride for merit. Like I was saying, or achievement, that my own achievements. So here we're moving towards the self now. So I feel happy knowing that I got my doctorate or something like that. And that makes me feel happy and proud about myself. Also, I'm going to say when close people to you achieve things also, so you or people close to you achieve, then you feel happy. All of these things are externally dependent, right? And subtly I would say we're used to going from one happy to the next. based on how life goes with us. Cause we have these kind of categories of maybe what we want to experience. And then when we experienced that, when we feel happy, all of that is perfectly natural. We talk, sometimes we talk about expectations. Do I get disappointed if it doesn't happen? How do I feel about myself? If it doesn't happen, of course, that's the downside of this, but let's, let's pretend like it's all. positive. Like this is all a natural thing and that's one way of experiencing happiness is to have external stimulation. So then we go into spiritual happiness. There's different ways that we experience happiness on the spiritual path. One way of experiencing happiness is doing service. meaning that I am giving my mind, using my mind, my body, my time, my wealth, my experience, like anything I have, I'm using with nothing physical coming back to me for that. So like volunteering or giving a donation without anybody knowing that would be service. Or like what I'm doing right now is service, right? Because I'm not asking for anything. So I'm just sharing myself with the intent of helping, right? Sharing experience and knowledge and the knowledge that I've gained and so that people can benefit that service. So it makes me happy or it makes me feel good about myself to think that I'm using my time in a worthwhile way, right? So we can think about that. When we talk about service, service is its whole own topic, but one of the spiritual ways that we feel happy is that we're doing service. So I feel good about myself for that. also overcoming old patterns. So in spiritual effort, we talk about the old ways of thinking, old ways of acting, old ways of feelings and things like that. And we're looking at moving away from the old feelings and thinking and behavior and moving towards spiritual ways of thinking and behavior and feeling. And what would the spiritual way be? Spiritual way would be peaceful, self respect, loving, benevolent, merciful, right? And the old way might be jealous, impatient, you know, like there's a whole bunch of stuff that we experience. So overcoming an old pattern, like in that moment, There's a feeling of pride and of happiness that, wow, I actually finished that thing. I actually got over that thing. And it's a special kind of a feeling because nobody else is involved. With these spiritual ones, no one else is involved. So it's interesting that. With the first one, there has to be something involved in the spiritual effort. No one else is involved. So you're really only experiencing your own victory, your own service, your own usefulness, things like that. The third one I wrote here is understanding spiritual knowledge. This is a big one. For me, I really enjoyed the spiritual knowledge, learning about the soul, learning about karma, learning about time, learning about powers of the soul. I really enjoyed that. I happen to like learning and being a student and so anything that I could study and I had a very big interest in, so I really enjoyed that. And being able to understand something brings also a feeling of happiness and a feeling of mastery, right? If you notice like a lot of these things are about self respect and mastery so happiness and self respect is kind of going together. And then the last one I put here for the spiritual effort happiness is self recognition. It's a little different than self respect or self love. Self recognition is a moment where you say to yourself, wow, I actually am a peaceful being, or wow, I actually am good. I actually am powerful. It's almost like you're seeing somebody else, but it's you. It's a unique experience and it's different than self respect. It's like, self respect is like, I am me and I feel proud of me. Self recognition is like, you're looking at yourself and you're saying, wow, I, I am really good. Or I am, you know, being generous or I am doing well. That's a kind of a different, there's a little bit of detachment there and it's almost a surprise. Like, wow. I it's, and it's very, it brings happiness. like a different kind of happiness. It's a very unique experience. I think I've had that maybe two or three times, but it's very unique experience. So all of those are happiness, and one is, again, that ordinary thing. And the other one is based on spiritual effort. And what's the spiritual effort? Well, I'm meditating, I'm studying, I'm doing service, and I'm starting to build up this kind of self respect, self appreciation, Eventually self recognition, like I'm building up this power inside myself. It's really not dependent on anything else. I'm the one now generating it internally. And then the title of this is When Peace Marries Self Respect, and I was thinking about the difference between happiness and bliss. Bliss is in spiritual terms, I would say the most elevated level of happiness. And it's the most elevated, but also the most concentrated. And what I mean by that is that when you practice meditation, we practice what we call bodiless stage. And bodiless stage means that I'm practicing, I'm sitting still, but I'm practicing realizing and experiencing being alive and fully conscious and fully aware apart from the body. Now, this may sound a little scary as I'm saying it, but it doesn't mean you leave the body. You're not going to die. Nothing's happening. But you're using your mind to separate from the senses, separate from the body and to realize that I actually am alive as a soul. I'm a living being, living consciousness. Now my experience of bliss is that the spiritual happiness that I'm building up from my spiritual effort. When I go into bodiless stage, that spiritual happiness is concentrated. And kind of puts me into this, and as I'm trying to say it, the words are going to end up stopping. Like you feel like. You're just, the self is perfection, the self perfection and the bliss is that feeling of self perfection. You know it's you and you're perfect, something like that. So it kind of marries and puts together all the happiness and all the self respect and all the self recognition into this beautiful silent point. And in that silent point, there's this feeling of bliss, this feeling of perfection, this feeling of stillness. When I talk about these things, I promised that I would add spiritual knowledge and spiritual experience as we go through this., so you're, you're going to get exposed to some new ideas. All of these things that I'm talking about are available to you. I practice like I, like, as you know, Raja yoga meditation with the Brahma Kumaris. All the programs and classes are free of charge and we have centers all over the world. So in the comments, there's, the information on how to contact so you can get involved yourself if you wish to go deeper into this. My feeling is to just introduce these ideas. So what is the main purpose of this particular episode is to look at happiness is not just one thing. Happiness has different levels and different experiences and different, you can build up to these higher level experiences. You can have the dependent happiness, you can have independent happiness, you can have self respect happiness, and you can have it all that's concentrated and turns into this blissful state in the East and Eastern religions and in the Vedas and the scriptures and the, I'm not sure exactly where it started, but there's a, there's a three word. description of God. And it is sat, chit, anand. So sat means truth, chit means consciousness, and anand means bliss. And why am I telling you this? Because as a soul, we are like God, like we're souls, right? So in that perfect state, We have those same qualities, this kind of perfected, still blissful self awareness. So I hope that gave you a little food for thought. I'm not saying that one kind of happiness is bad and one is good or whatever. It's just that there's so much more available than maybe we knew, right? There's so much more available. Meditation opens a whole new world for us. A big part of what I talk about on this program is about how to base and work out some of the issues that are going on in our lives and in our minds. That's a huge part of what we have to do because there's a big burden of that. At the same time, we can practice accessing some of these other experiences. Like what does it feel like to do service? What does that happiness feel like? What does the happiness feel like when I get over my old nature, like I actually have a personal victory? What does that feel like? What does it feel like to be bodiless? What does it feel like to let go of my whole human consciousness for a moment and just go into this blissful peaceful state? What does that feel like? So there's so much available in meditation. And when we practice these things, all of these practices influence our behavior and the way we see the world. So it's only a positive outcome. So I'll leave it there. It was a little bit of philosophy this time and a little bit of like a promise of different things that you can experience with meditation and spiritual practice. So I'll leave it there. Remember our slogan is heal, empower, and serve. And until next time, take care. Um, uh,
