In the paper, some experimental and theoretical results concerning opatical bistability in cholesteric liquid crystals are presented. A strong primary laser beam interacted nonlinearly with the material and influenced a second (probe) beam in such a way that its transmitted part exhibited a bistable dependence on the intensity of the first beam. It was observed that such a character may be attributed to the intensity of the outgoing probe wave. The obtained results reflect the symmetry of the sample and are interpreted as second order nonlinearity effects. PACS numbers: 42.65. Pc, 42.70.-a