Cosmic Bliss / Ānanda

Cosmic Bliss — Sanskrit ānanda (आनन्द), sometimes translated 'bliss,' 'joy,' or 'beatitude' — is the phenomenological experience of overwhelming, non-referential joy that arises independently of any specific external cause. Unlike ordinary happiness, which is directed at some object or event (one is happy because of something), ānanda is characteristically objectless: a state of being suffused with joy in which nothing in particular needs to be joyful about, and everything in general is.

In the Vedantic tradition ānanda is not merely an emotion but one of the three inherent attributes of the ultimate reality Brahman — the celebrated formulation sat-cit-ānanda (being-consciousness-bliss). The tradition's understanding is that bliss is not something added to being but constitutive of it: what ordinary awareness experiences as satisfaction, pleasure, or joy is a filtered and diminished trace of the bliss that awareness itself, in its uncovered nature, always already is. Advaita Vedanta treats the discovery of this inherent bliss as one of the marks of self-realisation.

Similar terms across other traditions point at closely-related phenomenology: the Buddhist pīti and sukha (rapture and happiness, cultivated in the jhāna meditative absorptions); the Christian beatitudo of the beatific vision; the Sufi wajd (ecstasy); the Kabbalistic oneg (delight). Contemporary psychedelic research has consistently found bliss to be one of the most-reported and most-durable dimensions of high-dose experiences — the Griffiths et al. mystical-experience-questionnaire explicitly measures positive mood as one of its four core dimensions.

Experiencers commonly describe ānanda-type states as arriving without warning and without ordinary emotional prelude: a sudden, unexpected suffusion of the entire body-mind by joy so intense that it takes some getting used to, and which — critically — remains unchanged by whatever difficult or painful content may be simultaneously present in the experience. This unconditional character is what distinguishes it from ordinary happiness, and what has led every tradition that recognises it to treat it as a diagnostic marker of contact with something more fundamental than everyday consciousness.

Sources:
Wikipedia — Ānanda (Hindu philosophy))
Wikipedia — Satcitananda