“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.”— Joseph Campbell
The adventure of changing the world begins first with uncluttering what doesn’t belong. When you feel sad, angry, or helpless, how often do you blame the world? The world is not at fault. The problem is that you are not allowing your authentic self to be present to make choices that can help the world. We can all make a difference, but we cannot make a difference out there until we make a difference inside. The conditioning that separates you from yourself and from your bliss is also what alienates us from each other. Every human being has bliss inside, waiting to be recognized and embraced.
Learn to be patient and comfortable with uncertainty, because freedom from fear brings peace of mind. It has been said that patience is the master virtue, because if you have acquired the habit of being patient, all other virtues will follow more readily. If we think of patience as the palm of the hand, then kindness, courage, and humility are the fingers that radiate naturally from it.
The philosopher Erich Fromm distinguished between having and being as two fundamental orientations of human existence. In the having mode, we experience life through possession, control, and certainty — we want to have knowledge, to have relationships, to have security, to have answers. In the being mode, we experience life through presence, openness, and participation — we are willing to not know, to be changed, to be surprised. Bliss belongs entirely to the being mode. And the shift from having to being is the fundamental shift that this entire essay, and this entire book, is asking you to make.
I first heard the word in Bill Moyers’ PBS series, Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. Campbell talked about bliss. That is not a concept I grew up with. My world was work, effort, obligation, endurance. Bliss was not in the vocabulary. And so I began to wonder: What is bliss? What does it mean? What keeps us from it? What manifests it?
What I came to understand, over years of thinking about this, is that bliss has more to do with what we must undo or not do than with what we must do. It is not something you achieve. It is something you uncover — by removing, layer by layer, the conditioning, the fear, the accumulated debris of a lifetime spent performing for other people’s expectations.
Bliss is about having the courage to release immature notions that make us toxic to ourselves and others. It is about letting go of fear instead of drawing our defense mechanisms out like samurai swords. When we live in fear, we bury our heads in the sand indefinitely, like an ostrich. And while taking a brief vacation to regain perspective can be helpful — like fasting from the news every so often — consistent withdrawal will soon leave you unprepared for the adventure of life as it unfolds.
The ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu understood this with the quiet precision that characterizes the Tao Te Ching. He wrote that in the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In the pursuit of the Tao, every day something is dropped. Less and less do you need to force things, until finally you arrive at non-action. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone. That sounds paradoxical to the Western ear, trained as we are to believe that progress means addition, accumulation, more. But Lao Tzu was describing bliss: the state that remains when everything false has been released.
Compare this to your nutrition choices. By eliminating a few foods from your diet — meat, wheat, dairy, sugar — you could feel better almost immediately. You do not need to add a host of complicated supplements and activities. You need to stop doing the things that are destroying your health. I find that people who simply stop doing what is toxic remain just about as healthy as those who do damaging things and then try to compensate by detoxifying and supplementing. Removing what is harmful improves your health even if you do nothing else.
Apply that same concept to bliss. Purge your preconceived notions, your conditioning, the mental clutter that narrows the mind and wreaks havoc with your emotional states. Bliss is a natural state. Conditioning is not. Your conditioned responses act as a firewall separating you from your birthright. No baby is ever born with a negative attitude. But over time, fear, depression, anxiety, neurosis, and prejudice develop — all conditioned responses. And fortunately, anything that is a result of conditioning can be reversed.
Source: Global Research
