Ananda is the secret delight from which all things are born, by which all is sustained in existence and to which all can rise in the spiritual culmination.
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Ananda is the essential nature of bliss of the cosmic consciousness and, in activity, its delight of self-creation and self-experience.
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Ananda is Beatitude, the bliss of pure conscious existence and energy, as opposed to the life of the sensations and emotions which are at the mercy of the outward touches of Life and Matter and their positive and negative reactions, joy and grief, pleasure and pain. Ananda is the divine counterpart of the lower emotional and sensational being.
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The divine Ananda, the principle of Bliss, from which, in the Vedic conception, the existence of Man, this mental being, is drawn. A secret Delight is the base of existence, its sustaining atmosphere and almost its substance. This Ananda is spoken of in the Taittiriya Upanishad as the ethereal atmosphere of bliss without which nothing could remain in being.
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Ananda is the very essence of the Brahman, it is the supreme nature of the omnipresent Reality.
~ sri Aurobindo
References:
CWSA Vol. 19, Page: 506
CWSA Vol. 25, Page: 101
CWSA Vol. 17, Page: 29
CWSA Vol. 15, Page: 260
CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 1025
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