“If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”
“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life…I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
The goals of experiencing “the rapture of being alive” and entering “the field of your bliss” are often not consciously pursued in life. Following your bliss can be an intimidating process and its paradoxical aspects can bring liberation or enslavement. The field of enslavement, at its worst, is littered with the bodies of opioid addicts on skid row or celebrities that seemed to have everything and yet feel worthless and destroy themselves. Yet the rewards of seeking the liberating and nourishing energy field of bliss are great. Jung says that to attain this “paradisal state of blissfulness” is, “to possess a treasury of accumulated libido which can constantly stream forth.” –“We must now ask ourselves, whence comes this blissful feeling, this ecstasy of love?”
Ironically the call to follow your bliss often comes when the needs of the body and soul may no longer be met by our career, society, our relationships, or our pleasures. When the best laid plans go awry or we may be faced with ill health. It may be here, as Campbell says “You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.”
This course will offer us a chance to examine paths to discover our own unique field of bliss. We will consider how to take on this quest consciously and intentionally. In this way we can discover the energy in our “innermost being” that will illuminate our bliss and avoid enslavement. This may be done by reclaiming and integrating the energy invested in repressing our shadows both dark and golden that have guarded the treasure of bliss. Once our bliss begins to be revealed “our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality” and the doors to support our path to bliss in the outer world can open.
Timothy Lyons 