God is Sachchidananda. He manifests Himself as infinite existence of which the essentiality is consciousness, of which again the essentiality is bliss, is self-delight. Delight cognizing variety of itself, seeking its own variety, as it were, becomes the universe.1
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Infinite self-conscious bliss is the first; infinite self-conscious conscious energy is the second; infinite self-conscious existence the third principle of spirit. Existence, consciousness, bliss are the three tones of infinity, the three basic colours of the Absolute.2
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Ananda is the essential nature of bliss of the cosmic Consciousness.3
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Pure Bliss — Ananda4
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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.5
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…this bliss is not a supreme pleasure of the heart and sensations with the experience of pain and sorrow as its background, but a delight also selfexistent and independent of objects and particular experiences, a self-delight which is the very nature, the very stuff, as it were, of a transcendent and infinite existence..6
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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.7
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This primary, ultimate and eternal Existence, as seen by the Vedantins, is not merely bare existence, or a conscious existence whose consciousness is crude force or power; it is a conscious existence the very term of whose being, the very term of whose consciousness is bliss.8
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[The] nature of bliss is illimitable and above duality; it is when pain itself becomes pleasure, is swallowed up in pleasure, that bliss is born.9
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Self manifesting as Will or Bliss is, spiritually, the Sleep-State and operates absolutely & directly in the Causal body as the creative force behind Nature, but indirectly & under limitations in the subtle & gross bodies as the cause of all thought, action and feeling.10
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[The] unmixed bliss is only possible where mind and its laws are excluded.11
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[The] supracosmic bliss is the object of this cosmic cycle, nor merely to repeat a purposeless round in a long unsatisfactory groove of ignorance seeking for knowledge and never finding it perfectly, — in that case the ignorance would be either an inexplicable blunder of the All-conscient or a painful and purposeless Necessity equally inexplicable, — but to realise the Ananda of the Self in other conditions than the supracosmic, in cosmic being, and to find its heaven of joy and light even in the oppositions offered by the terms of an embodied material existence, by struggle therefore towards the joy of self-discovery, would seem to be the true object of the birth of the soul in the human body and of the labour of the human race in the series of its cycles.12
~ Sri Aurobindo
References:
- CWSA Vol. 17, Isha Upanishads, P: 41-42
- CWSA Vol. 12, Essays Divine and Human, P: 311
- CWSA Vol. 25, Page: 101
- CWSA Vol. 15, The Secret of the Veda, P: 372
- CWSA Vol. 17, Page: 29
- CWSA Vol. 23-24, The Synthesis of Yoga, P: 16
- CWSA Vol. 15, Page: 260
- CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 1025
- CWSA Vol. 17, Isha Upanishads, P: 137
- CWSA Vol. 17, Isha Upanishads, P: 235
- CWSA Vol. 17, Isha Upanishads, P: 459
- CWSA Vol. 21-22,The Life Divine, P: 613