Spiritual well-being is the highest aspiration an individual can have. Physical, mental, emotional, psychological, social, and financial well-being – on top of all this is spiritual well-being. Spiritual well-being is a totality of all these and something more. When a person says he’s spiritually stable, that he has attained that state of spiritual well-being, in a way he’s saying that he’s not worried about the other “well-beings”. His mind is taken care of, his body is taken care of, and his identity has been taken care of. Otherwise, he cannot say that he has reached to that state of spiritual well-being.

Let’s say you’re getting sick again and again, for whatever reason. You cannot say that you are in that state of spiritual well-being. Spiritual well-being is to pursue the totality of who we are, not just bits and pieces. It’s not that hard to pick one area of life, one dimension of life, focus on it fully, and become good at it. To get to a point where you can say This is my state of well-being – you can do that with your body; all you need is to focus on your body, paying attention to what the body is doing, taking care of its needs, making sure that it is in its optimum working condition. We have only one body. If we are not able to take care of that, then the extension of the body – the mind, our desires, our spirituality – nothing else matters. If you pick the body and say, “I want to focus on it. I want to do all I can to take care of it,” it’s not that hard.

Spirituality as a whole:

It’s the same with the mind. It’s the same with managing your resources. It’s the same with managing your relationships. It’s all about picking a dimension and focusing on it. Spiritual well-being is about looking at all these things together to see the interrelationships and to not let one dimension of your life completely take over other aspects of your life. You cannot be so obsessed with physical well-being that you forget your mental well-being. You cannot be so obsessed with your emotional well-being that you forget about your social well-being. Spiritual well-being is to see ourselves in the middle of the phenomenon of life and to build our identity on that balance of physical, mental, emotional, psychological, financial, everything put together. Spiritual well-being is also about something that you cannot identify; you cannot see, you cannot touch, you cannot easily recognize, like physical or mental well-being. Spiritual well-being is that something more beyond all this. It is to search for your highest possible truth. It is to search for the truth that is within you. The truth that is longing for this expression. The truth that is looking for answers to the questions of life.

Our World:

We have created our world in our image. The knowledge that we are proud of – most of it really comes from our own concepts and ideas. Reality might be something else altogether. Life for us and life for existence might be two completely different things. We define life based on our desires, our hopes for the future, and our self-identities, but existence has its own understanding of life. The relationship between your body and the mind, the relationship between your desires and the life that is happening around you, the real life, is so much more. To pursue spiritual well-being is to pursue that something that you cannot easily understand. When you start moving toward it, you start experiencing certain changes in your physiology, in your biochemistry, in your mind, and everywhere you will begin to realize a totally new quality being introduced. This is what I call bliss.

The Internal State of Bliss:

Human beings know what success is, they know what failure is, they know what pain is, they know what pleasure is – we know everything in concepts and ideas and in our physical experience, but we don’t know what bliss is. The reason I say we don’t know what bliss is, is because we cannot consciously create it. We depend on something else for bliss; we depend on the mind, we depend on certain patterns, we depend on the chance of bliss happening. We cannot create it for ourselves. It is possible though, to just go sit quietly, close your eyes, and totally be blissed out as if you have consumed alcohol, as if you’ve taken drugs, as if you are experiencing the greatest joy of your life, as if you are on a high. You can experience it immediately, wherever you are, because what we call high and bliss is really an internal state. Because we don’t know how to get to that internal state, we use external devices to try to get to it indirectly. That is why we don’t have control over bliss. We keep longing for bliss, and when we accidentally stumble upon it, we get thrilled about it. We get excited about it, and we keep craving for the same experience.

Why do we get addicted to smoking? Why do we get addicted to drinking? Why do we get addicted to drugs? We have accidentally stumbled upon a mechanism that can create bliss. The problem with all those mechanisms is that they create a dependency. More than liberating you, it is actually keeping you in bondage. The direct pursuit of bliss is a direct pursuit of spiritual well-being. When you are pursuing spiritual well-being, you are trying to get to the state of bliss without using any external aid: Bliss for the sake of bliss. Happiness for the sake of happiness. Joy for the sake of joy, dependent on nothing. It doesn’t matter what your ideas of life are, you are life and that itself should give you permission to be blissful.

You don’t have to create certain artificial external conditions to feel blissful, because bliss is our original nature. We take birth in bliss, we come from the womb of bliss. But over a period of time, through the process of growing up and learning, we forget how to access it consciously. Consciously, we don’t know how to get to bliss. To pursue bliss consciously is spirituality, is spiritual well-being. Until that point in time when we can get to that space of bliss –  internal bliss – consciously, and we can hold on to it for as long as we want – we cannot say we have reached the state of spiritual well-being. We are somewhere in the middle, searching for it.

Meditation and Bliss:

That’s what meditation is. Meditation is a direct pursuit of spiritual well-being. It is the direct pursuit of bliss. Think about it: What does meditation require? What resources do you need to meditate? Do you have to be rich to meditate? Do you have to be successful to meditate? Do you have to be famous to meditate? Nothing! The basic conditions are that you’ve got to be healthy; physically and mentally. A lot of us are. We might have some agitation, some disturbance, but we have a certain sense of physical and mental health; otherwise, we cannot even be contemplating meditation. From that state of physical and mental health, we can pursue something much higher – which is bliss.

That’s what meditation is. It is to recognize that it does not need anything. It only requires the basic foundation of life that is already within you. That is why it is direct. You can meditate whenever you want. You can meditate as much as you want. The excuses we give for not meditating are our own making. Life is always ready to put you in a state of meditation because life wants you to be blissful. Life wants you to enjoy the experience. That is why we are here. We should never forget that the single most important reason why we have taken this expression of life, why we can see so much, we can experience so much, is because there is joy in this. We have made life very mechanical. To get back to that non-constructed, blissful, internal space is to pursue spiritual well-being.