Follow Your Bliss

In an argument and counter-argument with a friend about religious beliefs I shared the following by Bertrand Russell:


"Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes … . A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men."

My friend took strong exception to Russell's ideas and invoked her idea of the meaning of Joseph Campbell's concept of individual "bliss" as her counter-argument, her words were:


"I tend to agree with Joseph Campbell that one should not interfere with an other's "path to their Bliss."

I wondered if that was what Campbell meant by "bliss" so I checked and here is what he says:

"If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time."

This idea of "bliss" challenges one to search for what Existentialists call "authenticity."

On Eschatology Campbell said:

"Eternity has nothing to do with the hereafter... This is it... If you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here's the place to."

In an earlier blog post a character in a Juan Carlos Onetti novel said something similar to what Campbell just described.


“I will kiss the feet of he who may comprehend that eternity is now, that he himself is the only end, that he must accept and strive to be himself, simply that, without need of reasons, at all times and against all opposition . . . I applaud the courage of he who accepts each and every one of the laws of the game he did not invent and was not asked if he wanted to play (198).”

Another quote from Campbell that follows sounds much like what Jean Paul Sartre, the renowned 20th Century Existentialist Philosopher, would say.

“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”