ānanda [pleasure, happiness, ecstasy, joy, bliss, transcendental bliss]
In classical Indian thought the word ānanda appears quite commonly to describe the blissful qualities of the demi-gods in a way that resembles our own mundane happiness.
But in the writings of the Gaudiya Vaishnavas ānanda has an entirely different flavour and purpose. It is not a quality that is had, but the result of an action, not a property but a movement, not a gift, but a giving. It is the experience of pleasure that comes alive the through the energy and action of devotional love and service.
In the Śrī brahma-saṁhitā, so revered by Śrīman Mahāprabhu, ānanda is described as the extraordinary, transcendental bliss enjoyed by God when all the emotional and spiritual experiences of the world are concentrated into one experience.
What are the emotional and spiritual experiences of the world? They are of course the emotional and spiritual experiences of the individual souls of the world. By the mercy of Caitanya Mahāprabhu, bliss does not flow from the heavens like a one-sided gift from God, it flows from the souls of the devotees, caused by their devotion to God, to guru and to each other.
Bhakti teaches that ānanda, the pleasure of God, flows from the love of the hearts of devotees of the world. The greatest of those devotees is Rādhā herself, who is God in the position of the highest lover, the lover of Kṛṣṇa.
In Śrī brahma-saṁhitā we read:
I worship Govinda, the primeval Lord, who resides in His own realm, Goloka, with Rādhā, who resembles His own spiritual figure and who embodies the ecstatic potency [hlādinī]. Their companions are Her confidantes, who embody extensions of Her bodily form and who are imbued and permeated with ever-blissful spiritual rasa (SBS 5.37).
Ānanda is the pleasure that is generated by the individual soul in relation to the Divine. It is not a quiet reservoir lying still in the heart of God. Rather, it is the active, loving relation of the devotee toward the Divine, brought to life through the devotee’s realisation of the divine pastimes. Loving devotion is in the sense not mysterious, it automatically flows as we realise the qualities of the loving relation of Rādhā and Mohan.
Ānanda holds just this power: It is the transcendence of the individual made possible through a loving relation to the Divine. We transcend our material consciousness by surrendering to the desire to love, which only longs come alive.
If it is true that very few of us realise the love in our hearts and the desire to please the hearts of others, it is not for lack of love that we fail. Love is eager and ready to burst forth from our hearts should we only removed the blockage our material consciousness and let it. This is why we speak as loving devotion as surrender. We only need to give ourselves over to what by nature wants our happiness.
The ability to liberate the pleasure giving energy that lives in every heart grows through spiritual practice, through coming closer to our own soul, through become the pathway for our own love.
Through steady-state, one-pointed focus on our Iṣṭadeva, Rādhā, her bliss-carrying energy (hlādīnī-śakti) emerges from our own hearts, and our inner nature as generous in love awakens and seeks relation: with other souls, and through these souls, with Kṛṣṇa.
Love matures along this path. And the selfless happiness it creates grows with it. Through the growing presence of Rādhā in our lives and in the world, the ānanda of God is assured.
We experience ānanda as divine not because it trickles down to us from a great ocean of divine bliss. On the contrary, ānanda is the transcendental pleasure when love is experienced purely in ourselves through our own individual relation with the divine. It is the pleasure that flows when one pure is opened to an other, when one heart is purified by being open to another.
This is because bliss is not to have, but to be. Or to put it differently: to be is to let love go. Happiness, goodness, well-being and pleasure cannot be held, they can only be given. To hold them for ourselves is to damage them. The soul wants nothing, possess nothing. Because in its purest state it is love, happiness and bliss.
Ānanda—the transcendental pleasure of God—does not come and go like the rains of the desert. It is the clouds themselves, created by the winds and the warmth of the heart, ripe with pleasure to be given, and heavy with the enjoyment of others.
In other words, ānanda is the answer to the question : what is the heart when it is fully heart? What is the soul when it is fully present to itself? What does the soul feel when it is open to all the spiritual senses the flow to it? It is
In other words, ānanda is the answer to the question : what is the heart when it is fully heart? What is the soul when it is fully present to itself? What does the soul feel when it is open to all the spiritual senses the flow to it? It is ānanda, the pleasure that is the pleasure of God.
The purpose of feeling is to be felt. The purpose of sensation is to be sensed. The purpose of love is to be loved.