LOL. Well, if you're open to comments ...
If we were playing Top Trumps I'd say: It's time to stop being the leaf and be the wind, stop surfing and be the wave.
But to be serious ...
The phrase 'a debacle of bliss' says a lot of things to me.
In terms of paradigm, I rather think you're more Buddhist than Christian. It seems to me you conceptualise Christianity within a Buddhist context – as a philosophical system, stripped of all that mystical 'hyperbole'. You use the term 'bliss' a lot, and if you were not more constant, I'd wonder if you were bipolar!
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But 'bliss' is not part of the Christian lexicon. I've checked the translation dictionaries on blueletterbible.org, and bliss occurs nowhere in the common translations of the Bible.
The near equivalent term is 'peace', but that's used in a two-fold context, the first is the general sense, which I think corresponds to the order of bliss as you present it to me. The specifically Christian idea is thoroughly mystical and rooted in the Trinity, and as such it's something you tend to view as metaphor or hyperbole, rather than an actuality.
From the Buddhist pov, check out Matthieu Ricard's 20 minute
TED lecture on happiness. He actually mentions waves/surfing around 6.30!
Again, and here I'm on unsteady ground using a Buddhist term, but I'd say look to the Middle Way. The true way is not marked by extremes, neither of sorrow nor of bliss. Ricard's call for people to practice meditation, which he calls 'mind training', is actually to master ourselves, rather than ourselves being mastered by our passions. Only then can one experience and appreciate wellbeing.
When talking of that which upsets our self-mastery I am on firmer ground discussing the 'passions', a term from the Greek that was adopted by the Christian philosophical lexicon. Especially the lyre, which Plato considered the only instrument worth listening to, and it was taught in his academy. The idea again is balance and harmony, again we have the Middle Way, not this, not that – no strident chords, nor discords – but a kind of ambience.
When you say 'debacle of bliss' it recalls for me the distinction between the
eros of the Greek Mysteries, and the
agape of the Christian Mysteries. Eros in that sense is when the senses are 'overthrown' or 'possessed' by that which moves them, the kind of thing you describe. The Greek Mysteries were spoken of as a kind of intoxication, the overpowering of reason by a 'divine madness' that carries man away from his finite existence and overwhelms him with supreme happiness.
Christian agape is, by contrast,
underwhelming. It's not a flooding of the sensorium, it's not an exstasy. Rather it's a kenosis, a self-emptying, a going-out rather than a flooding-in. It's not an experience, it's not experiential. I rather think the bliss that the Buddhists speak of is actually closer to this idea than the contemporary assumptions of 'what it must be like' to be enlightened. I think we make a lot more of bliss than those we assume have attained it – again, a result of consumer culture conditioning. Same with 'Love'. Culture speaks of erotic love, the love that satiates the senses, I love X because X makes me feel good. It's lust, really. That's why the term is balanced by such concepts as 'agape' and 'caritas'. True love is not how I feel, true love is care for how the other feels.
Lastly, both paradigms, Buddhist and Christian, are wary of 'experience', especially the 'sensations of the senses'. Good grief, look at the hoops we make mystics and visionaries jump through! When I was doing my meditation training, we were taught to ignore all 'sensations' that came while sitting. It's the ego, we were told, it's playing tricks on you.
Matthieu Ricard, at the end of that TED talk, speaks of nothing disturbing the mind, neither good thoughts nor bad. It's not, as so many suppose, the misapprehension of the 'empty mind' of Zen, it's simply that, in Ricard's words, thoughts pass across the face of the mind like birds across the sky ... we don't attach to them, we just let them go ...
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All this is not to say I'm down on bliss or well-being, far from it.
I know and enjoy such moments. One of the reasons I stay here is often I'm sent off hunting through my resources to find the answer to a question. I was checking out Ricard on bliss when I came across a commentary of his on
reincarnation:
First of all, it's important to understand that what's called reincarnation in Buddhism has nothing to do with the transmigration of some ‟entity” like an autonomous "self". It's not a process of metempsychosis. As long as one thinks in terms of entities rather than function and continuity of experience, it's impossible to understand the Buddhist concept of rebirth. As it's said, ‟There is no thread passing through the beads of the necklace of rebirths.” Over successive rebirths, what is maintained is not the identity of a ‟person,” but the conditioning of a stream of consciousness. (to be continued)
And that filled me with delight, nay, dare I say bliss. Just as I have come to understand, and have argued here often, here Ricard is addressing the exact same error of comprehension. In the West, reincarnation is assumed to mean 'I get another go', and that's so
not what the paradigm teaches.
Signing off now, for a little dance around the room ...
