you never get true infinite bliss but you do get very surprising improvements along some dimensions of mental wellbeing which are worth sharing and talking about one analogy i often like to use here is: - imagine that your everyday level of anxiety/neuroticism is 10x more than what you have right now (or just imagine the most anxious person you know, or someone like that, maybe like let's say very frequent panic attacks or very frequent anxiety attacks or something, etc) - then imagine that you did something that relieved that anxiety back to what you might call a "normal healthy level" (like let's say you did meditation or therapy or medication or friends or finances or something, and you stopped unnecessarily worrying about things, now you only worry as much as a "normal healthy person") - at this point (even *without* crazy meditative progress) you might say something like "whoa so much of my previous emotions were mostly just unnecessary tension!" or like "whoa so much of my previous sense of self was just me worrying about things!" or like "whoa im able to see things so much more clearly now!" - ((at this point, you will still feel sadness/grief about things, you will still care about friends, you will still be angry when something needs protection. you will still have many emotions (maybe even a bigger emotional range) but it will just be a lot less neurotic and a lot clearer/vibrant/brighter/calmer with less friction, because your level of anxiety is now only a "normal healthy level" instead of an extreme level. and you will probably be super thankful that you are now a lot less stressed, but you also might just start taking it for granted bc this is now just what you're used to nowadays.)) - now imagine most people you know are still at that 10x extreme level of anxiety and you're now at a "normal healthy level". you'd probably feel pretty passionate about telling people that they can stop feeling anxious all the time! the solution won't solve all their problems and make them infinitely happy forever, but they will stop being super duper stressed with all their panic attacks that are super crippling to their life. they'll still have normal human problems and human emotions, but they just won't have all their crazy anxiety attacks anymore that derailed their life - then, now imagine that this situation hypothetically continues even further: you find out that this anxiety reduction stuff is actually able to go further, like you find out apparently your idea of "normal healthy level of anxiety" is actually someone else's "extreme 10x level" so you decide to progress a bit further and reduce your anxiety even less. again, you still have all the normal emotional range (maybe even more emotional range) but you again say things like "wow my previous self was mostly just tension / wow my previous emotions were mostly just tension / wow [...]" - now imagine this happens *multiple* times, you keep reducing your anxiety drastically from an "extreme level" to a "normal healthy level" and then you keep finding people who are actually less and less anxious (while still being able to act effectively in the world, still care about people, still have a range of emotions, etc) - this is the claim of many meditators! (and then they document it with many interesting phenomenological descriptions and poetic descriptions, etc)