Whether you want to know pleasure or you want to know bliss, your system has to be willing. To know pleasure, your mind should come to a certain state of willingness and your physical body should be in a certain level of sensitivity.
To know the bliss of being one with something larger than yourself, once again your body has to cooperate. Whether it is the individual human body or the larger cosmic body, essentially, they are made of five elements, the panchabhuta ^ earth, water, fire, air and space. In this, the first four are active participants and space is the catalytic force.
What you call "myself" is just a mischief of these five elements. To realise the full potential of this mechanism that you call a human being, or to transcend this one and become one with the larger, cosmic mechanism -- whether your desire is for the individual or for the universal -- you need to have a certain amount of mastery over these five elements consciously or unconsciously, to know either the pleasure of the individual self or the blissfulness of the cosmic being.
The fundamental sadhana in yoga is to gain mastery over these five elements or to purify the elements in the system in such a way that they cooperate; this is bhuta shuddi. If these five elements don't cooperate, you can struggle as much as you want, nothing happens. Only with their cooperation, from the basic aspects to the highest aspect, your life becomes a possibility. The human system is like a doorway. If you are always facing closed doors, for you doors mean that which stop you. If doors are opening up for you, then for you a door means the possibility of entering into something. In either case, it is the same door; which side of the door you are on decides everything about your life, even in terms of time and space. Whether you experience this body as a great possibility or a great barrier simply depends on the extent to which these five elements are cooperating.
Indic tradition has seen that kind of sadhana, focus, understanding, and mastery for long. For the five elements in nature, there are five temples; geographically, they are all within the Deccan Plateau: Four in Tamil Nadu and one in Andhra Pradesh. These temples were created not for worship but for sadhana. People moved from one temple to the other to do sadhana on each of the five elements. At one temple, they did sadhana on earth, then, they went to the next temple to do sadhana on water, and so on. This connection is not there anymore because the sadhana atmosphere has been taken away. The temples exist; some still have that quality while others have become weak.
In Isha Yoga, every sadhana has something to do with organising these five elements in a way that you can reap the best of the individual being and cosmic nature because both are a play of these five elements. Whether the individual physical body becomes a stepping stone for your ultimate possibility or a hurdle towards that depends on how you are able to deal with these elements. What you are right now is just a little bit of earth, water, air and temperature. All the ingredients are out there; it takes a little divine touch to make these four into a throbbing human being.
If you are aware of this, suddenly you live your life with so much ease that people start thinking you are superhuman. But this is not about being superhuman - this is about realising that being human is super - if only you learn to use your humanity and human mechanism as a possibility, not as a barrier.