Awakening to the true Self often involves experiences of bliss, peace, love, freedom, and awe. These ecstatic states of awakening to the Divine are said by many spiritual leaders to be incomparable to any state that we experience before becoming self-realized. Gabriel Cousens, who awakened to the true Self in 1975, wrote of the bliss he experienced during his awakening in the following journal entries from Spiritual Nutrition: Six Foundations For Spiritual Life And Awakening Of Kundalini (2005):

“Ah― the bliss of my life, of the world, of my children, of my wife.
If I die of a broken heart, it will not be out of sorrow,
but because it is so full of Love, that I could not say no to more…
and it just burst out of Love.”
“The bliss of the Self, the pulsating oneness, the inner joy
has simply grown greater than the contraction of my ego.
The critical point has past…
The power of the Bliss of God is greater than the safe contraction of the ego.
It dies as my Liberation grows.” (33)

This bliss is further expressed in the following letter from a devotee to Gangaji: “I am happy and humored behind all experience. There is nothing to be lost—there is only now, and the opportunity for more… I am rest and in love. I have everything. I am free and complete. Imperfection has vanished as the dream it was. There is only what was and what will be. There is only the one Heart. There is only Love. And I am not afraid, even when I am afraid. I have never been so alive, and yet I have never been born. I have never loved this one individual life so much, and yet even with death I will not die. I am transcendent of my body, and yet my body is all that I am. All that I speak of adds exactly nothing to what has always already been. I am exactly this…”

When someone asked the spiritual teacher Amma to describe the experience of the Divine, Amma replied, “It is not possible to adequately put into words the taste of sugar to one who does not know the meaning of the word ‘sweet.’ One has to taste sugar to understand sweetness. Similarly, God is pure experience, beyond the mind and words.”

Let us conclude this section with one more beautiful expression of the state of self-realization. In the form of a poem, this comes from Gabriel Cousens in Spiritual Nutrition: Six Foundations for Spiritual Life and Awakening of Kundalini (2005):

Twenty Years After

Twenty Years After
And bliss bursts through every cell.
Sometimes the non-causal joy is so much
This body-mind-I AM complex
Explodes in natural
Love
Ecstasy
Supreme non-causal contentment.
It can’t be contained any longer.
No amount of work or external difficulties
Can keep it quiet
The endless Light of Yah (God)
Reflected
Through this funny body-mind-I AM complex
As the infinite smile
Yes
Enlightenment is an infinite smile. (56)

Next: Exercises in Awakening To the True Self >>