Course XXII - Teaching 13: Stimulating Affective Meditations III

One should clearly bear in mind the difference between pleasure and spiritual bliss.
Pleasure is a thing of the flesh; therefore, it is fleeting and perishable like the flesh. Many men believe that pleasure is a prize of God, and that sorrow is His punishment, but they do not realize that the two are consequences of the satisfaction or deprivation of sensual appetite in his human nature.
So, sorrow is opposite to pleasure, and at a time, pleasure becomes sorrow when you stop experiencing it.
But spiritual bliss is over pleasure and sorrow. Pleasure and sorrow are consequences of our selfishness, while bliss is expansion of the immortal soul that wants to return and fuse with the First Source.
The spiritual bliss is born when the man discovers that all his personal powers, so far exercised to provide his human nature with pleasures or to flee from sorrow, can be used to soar and follow supernatural ways toward other planes of consciousness, where he begins to glimpse his divine identity. It is then when he begins to see that all those things that he believed to be, his prejudices, habits and attachments, eventually all those things that constitute his present personality are in fact snippets of a disguise behind which his true being is hidden –and here recognizes as the only goal his unity with the Divine Mother and, because he loves Her, tries his identification with every soul with an internal fight to destroy any concept of separateness.
So, the spiritual bliss does not feel the effects of physical pain and of this other pain coming from not satisfying one’s sensual desires, but, on the contrary, many times the pain of the soul, which takes for granted for the individual being to start glimpsing the unity in diversity, and to stand the burden and attacks of appetites of the flesh, can stimulate his soul to gain strength and fly upper and upper, till the place where the boundaries between mine and yours disappear, and only the Divine Mother’s Real Love shines.