we can write (accurately) that “an unexamined life is not worth living” because (simply) an unexamined life isn’t lived.

the instrumentality of the physical body includes five “major” senses (and a host of minor ones) which can “experience” pleasant sensations. if the goal of life is simply sensual happiness (sated nerve endings), we could define opiate addiction as life fully lived. when we understand that religion is indeed the opiate of the masses, we will understand the condemnation of it for its adherence to empty tombs and willful ignorance (the Spirit has long left and Wisdom weeps).

wealth “buys” pleasant experience, yet we’ve all met wealthy people who’ve become numbed and oblivious of the fine foods and luxuries surrounding them … who even complain joylessly about their empty lives.

there is something beyond sensual “pleasantness” that is almost like a spiritual sense … that is above and beyond all the physical senses … and is closer to a kind of “awareness.”

joy contains strong hints of this, and in my experience is always accompanied by a “sense” or “feeling” of being present, being aware, being profoundly “conscious.” bliss is joy wherein the “container” of the body is insufficient … and it reaches out into space and takes in elements of the world. if i take in world enough, i feel like i am floating in the world.

it feels like shared awareness, shared consciousness. we can have it with a child, a butterfly, a book, a poem, a loved one, a stranger, a flower, a piece of music, the golden dusty streets of the world.

bliss is acute awareness, shared awareness that takes us “out of” our mere bodies.

we can be dying together of starvation and exhaustion, dirty and lice-ridden in a barbed wire camp awaiting gassing and burning at the hands of corporate fascists, yet if we look in each other’s eyes and see together as “one” beyond the atoms of the world, we are in bliss and no human power can take this from us.

bliss is not powerful pleasant sensations or powerful unpleasant sensations … it is awareness that takes us out of our Selves. it’s closer to Love than anything else, but it’s not Love. it is a consequence of Love. its “object” is the divine within or behind the world.

it’s impossible to miss how close the expression “ignorance is bliss” is to “love is blind.” these are the aphorisms, the dogma, the very mantra of the carnal “sensationists” who live in perpetual physical hunger for more sensation, more intoxication, more wealth. of course these sad souls imagine love to be blind; they’ve never comprehended their own confused experience of it. Love isn’t about “more” sensation of the world or of a sex object; Love is about more awareness of this moment in the world “with” (not “of”) what we Love; Love is about Bliss.

in truth, nothing is more aware than Bliss. and nothing is more true than Love.

that’s what i think.

/ehj2

I need to revise this sentence in particular:

But being fully alive, comprehending complexity and contradiction, need not preclude our experience of bliss now and again.

For now, let it be this:

But being fully alive, comprehending complexity and contradiction, does not preclude bliss; it must embrace bliss, too, in order to take into account all that life is and can be.

Or something like that. Some sentences are written only over lifetimes.

the distinction between “oblivious” and “bliss” is acute … and (writing a bit didactically but respectfully) the word we should be looking for here is either “oblivious” or “oblivion.”

ignorance is by definition “unconscious” and by consequence “oblivious,” and in a world of ever-increasing complexity, oblivion can be an attractive drug for the intellectually and spiritually and psychologically lazy. oblivion can even appear (but only by active deception), like living in the moment.

oblivion should never be confused with some form of “rapture” or “bliss.”

“bliss,” in fact, is predicated upon preternatural, intense, hypertrophied — even acute — awareness.

bliss is hightened consciousness, not the absence of consciousness.

bliss and oblivion are utterly opposed psychological realms.

a society that confuses this dances with death.

/ehj2