Follow Your Bliss

My fascination with the mythologist and writer Joseph Campbell has been there almost since I started to really learn_ which was way after I left school and formal learning. It was when I realized that all learning is essentially an adventure in self-study.

Campbell saw the greatest human transgression as "the sin of inadvertence, of not being alert, not quite awake". Encapsulated in a few words, his philosophy on life quite simply states, "follow your bliss". And this was decades before the fad of work/life balance reached it's modern crescendo.

Campbell recognized with such enormous elegance the root of our existential dissatisfaction..."If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you".

Finding your bliss needs discernment, a special state that Campbell calls "sacred space". A space for uninterrupted reflection and unrushed creative work....the profound need for a bliss station into which we all want to root ourselves.

Campbell further clarifies "sacred space" as being an absolute necessity for anybody today. " You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don't know what your friends are doing, you don't know what someone owes you or vice versa. This is a space where you simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be; a place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there but if you have a bliss station and use it, something eventually will happen.

Our life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older the claims of the moment upon you are so great you hardly know where the hell you are or what it is you intended! You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You must attempt to find it.

Often we lose our way on this path to finding what we most love, because of society's limiting notions of success and this could pressure us into un imaginative but fail-safe pursuits.

In Sanskrit there are three terms that we could say represent the brink from where you transcend to bliss__ Sat, Chit, Anand. Sat means the true being, Chit means consciousness and Anand means bliss or rapture.

When we express the courage to follow our bliss we put ourselves on a path that attracts towards us situations and people who are in the same field. Campbell encourages, " follow your bliss and don't be afraid, then doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be".

This adventure is it's own reward....not your parents way or anyone else's that will give you ready made answers. When we keenly watch for it life gives us experiences all the time...a little intuition of where this rapture is. Grab it! 

No one can tell you what it is going to be; you have to learn to recognise it and live it for yourself!

And so it is.....