Differences: happiness, joy, pleasure, delight, bliss, and ecstasy

Today’s English
August 9th, 2017

The happiness that comes from sweets and ice cream, the one from helping others, the one from a child’s innocent reply or behavior, that which is from watching natural sceneries, that you have while loving a person and the one you have through spiritual experiences are not the same, are they?  What makes the difference is whether it’s sensual or spiritual, whether it appeals to your mind or felt at heart and whether it’s little or great, temporary or long lasting. 

Happiness versus joy
Have you ever thought why we don’t use another word except “happy" to greet others in expressions such as “happy birthday” “happy friendship day" and “happy pongal”?  Happiness is a frequently used word for several contexts including the special occasions for wishing someone. You feel happy when something good happens to you.   Joy is a feeling of great happiness. So you often cry out of joy and jump out!  It’s felt a bit deeper in your heart than happiness.  So you shed tears of joy, not tears of happiness.

1. She’s happy with her job now. / Are happy now? / Happy Christmas!
2. They shouted with joy. / She shed tears of joy when her daughter was praised on the stage.

Pleasure versus delight
External objects, person and activities can give you pleasure.  You can read for pleasure, play for pleasure, dance for pleasure and watch movies for the same.  Delight is a feeling of great pleasure arising from the heart.  Love delights you.  Nature delights you.  Melodies delight you.  You read stories and novels for pleasure but you read poems for delight.  Robert Frost is right when he says, “A poems begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”

1. Everybody gets pleasure in watching TV and browsing the net.
2. I take pleasure in reading detective novels.
3. The flower show delighted me a lot.
4. Lovers are delighted at speaking through eyes.

Bliss versus Ecstasy
Bliss is extreme happiness that arises from heart and lasts for a long time.  It’s also the term for serene joy arising out of your spiritual experiences such as helping the needy, realisation of truth and union with God.  Newly married life for the first few months or years (?!) is blissful and realisation of true God and your own self is blissful for ever.
Ecstasy is overpowering joy and you are often out of your own control and sometimes you may even fall unconscious because it’s rapturous and throws you into madness. You can dissolve yourself at ecstasy by taking drugs or drinks. But bliss is empowering delight and you are enjoying total consciousness in full control.
1. Married life takes you to sheer bliss that cannot be put into words.
2. Know yourself and you will be blissful for ever. / Ignorance is bliss. (You need not worry about something if you don’t know about it)
3. He lost himself in sheer ecstasy after taking the drugs.
4. He was not himself when ecstasy poured through him.

“Now a soft kiss - Aye, by that kiss, I vow an endless bliss.”
- John Keats, “Endymion”