Pleasure or Bliss?

Pleasure … bliss … six of one, half a dozen of the other? You may be surprised to discover that they are not at all the same.

Pleasure relies on something or someone else … a chocolate chip cookie, promotion at work, winning the lottery, new girlfriend, new husband, new car!  

Dr. Michael Gottlieb, founder of Royal Way Spiritual Center, elaborates: “Name any pleasure in the world. It is dependent on something or somebody. And because of that dependency, it brings a bondage. You are shackled and tethered to that someone or that something.”  

By contrast, Michael says, bliss is intrinsic—it’s already inside us just waiting to come out. You’ve tasted it—the feeling that everything is right with the world. We’ve all touched that deep joy, contentment, true peace, when we’re filled with happiness—and no one or no thing is causing it.

The Way to God: Bliss, Joy, Pleasure

So is pleasure to be avoided? Emphatically, no—the Royal Way community is all for pleasure. In fact, the way to God is through pleasure. Michael writes, “If God is joy, if God is bliss—then the only way to God is bliss and joy and pleasure.” It totally makes sense—to deny pleasure is to deny the way to reach God.

However, with so many pleasures out there, it’s easy to get lost in them, whether survival pleasures like eating or pleasures of the mind like social media posts. We have entire networks devoted to food alone! Inherently, there’s nothing wrong with learning how to make crème brûlée or watching a kitten play soccer in an Instagram post. This is where awareness comes in. Michael points out that pleasures serve one of three functions: 1) Give quality to life and make it more enjoyable; 2) Gratify and nourish the ego; 3) Keep us from discovering and experiencing the ultimate, infinite pleasure, the bliss of our divinity. If a pleasure truly enhances our lives, great. But not if it robs us of our connection with God.

Start With Pleasure

Just because we can get lost in pleasure doesn’t mean we should deny or renounce pleasure. The path to higher consciousness, Michael teaches, “is not an act of renouncing the world and its pleasures. Rather, it is an expansion of all our horizons, a lifting of limitations, and a bursting of boundaries.”

The message is clear: We use pleasure for its divine purpose. “This planet’s pleasures are merely tiny reflections of the ultimate bliss,” Michael writes. “The work is to learn to detach oneself from these pleasures in order to open up to the greater pleasures.”

How Do We Detach From Pleasures (While Still Enjoying Them)?

Attachment/detachment is a key concept. Let’s use a common pleasure as an example. We’re drinking an iced latte with the lavender-honey cold foam—and enjoying every sip. Ahhh! Then it happens—we down the last drop. For a moment, we feel mildly satisfied. We savor the feeling for a few seconds before wiping off our cold-foam mustache. But shortly thereafter, we start to feel a missing, and a compulsion for more pleasure. Why? Because we’re attached to the pleasure. We relied on it to fulfill us.

So we repeat favorite pleasures over and over. Or we try a new pleasure, but then the feeling wanes, and we’re back to where we started. Because, as we know, every pleasure comes to an end.  So how do we detach from pleasure? That happens when we seek our divinity. In Michael’s words, detachment happens when we “begin to discover the inner sky, the inner light, the inner bliss.” The moment we start to tap into our divine pleasure—which never goes away—we begin to detach from the temporal pleasures we think we need to experience fulfillment. The irony is that the more we experience our own bliss, the more fully we’re able to enjoy outer pleasures, because we’re no longer owned by them. We’re free to enjoy pleasure.

Deeper Pleasures, Constant Bliss

Can we really live in a perpetual state of deeper pleasure, of bliss? That’s the goal. Through Royal Way’s retreats, events, and happenings, we discover and cultivate ways to experience pleasures fully while also detaching from them. Whether it’s dancing, singing, trying that new Brazilian restaurant down the block, buying those shoes you’ve been eyeing, rock climbing … it doesn’t matter what the pleasure is, as long as we keep our sights on the ultimate pleasure. Michael writes, “The emptiness, the largeness that is created through detachment opens up a space, creates a vessel to receive the grace of transcendence.”

The shackles are released, and we experience the divine joy that emanates from the depths of our being. When we’re not dependent on someone or something to give us pleasure, then all existence can bring pleasure to every moment of our lives. We merge with God and become part of the eternal bliss. We experience true freedom—even after that last sip of the iced latte with the lavender-honey cold foam.