My father is a huge fan of Joseph Campbell, the famous mythologist and Jungian psychologist who wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Masks of God, and The Power of Myth…

Near Enemy #1: Follow Your Bliss

By-
HAREESH WALLIS, February 29, 2020

My father is a huge fan of Joseph Campbell, the famous mythologist and Jungian psychologist who wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Masks of God, and The Power of Myth. He (my father) designed and facilitated summer-camps for kids aged 10-12 based on Campbell’s work, and as a kid I was a participant (and later assistant) at several of these impactful and inspiring fortnight-long events, so Campbell’s concept of the monomyth as a map of the spiritual journey was an influence on my still-forming brain.

Campbell also followed in the footsteps of his Indology professor, the great Heinrich Zimmer in closely studying the spiritual traditions of India (though he did not master Sanskrit as Zimmer did). In contemplative meditation on the Vedantic phrase saccidānanda (a compound of sat [being], cit [consciousness], and ānanda [bliss or rapture]), Campbell realised that he didn’t know the true nature of his being or his consciousness, but he knew what rapture was, so he decided to follow that. In this moment of insight, he intuited correctly that an accurate experience of any one of the three, if followed, would lead to the other two.

As a result, he coined the phrase “follow your bliss” which, in his usage, diverged from the original Vedantic contemplation and came to mean something like “do what you love,” in a sense more influenced by Carl Jung and Walter Pater than by the 1960s hippie movement. By the spiritual injunction “follow your bliss,” Campbell never meant “do whatever feels good,” but rather was suggesting that we follow the thread of our passion wherever it leads, much as Vincent van Gogh did, despite much heartache along the way. A story circulates that, late in life, Campbell joked “I should have said ‘follow your blisters!’” While it seems that this story is apocryphal, there is a good reason for its fabrication: given the context of the Western audience to which it was given, Campbell’s phrase would have been less misunderstood had he said “pursue your passion”, since the word passion in English connotes suffering almost as much as it connotes love, or an object of ardent desire, or a favorite avocation. And Campbell certainly understood that doing what you most love might not be easy, and might not make you any money:

“The adventure is its own reward — but it’s necessarily dangerous, having both negative and positive possibilities, all of them beyond control. We are following our own way, not our daddy’s or our mother’s way . . . There’s something inside you that knows when you’re in the center, that knows when you’re on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you’ve lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don’t get any money, you still have your bliss. If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you. . . . 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 . . . Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.”

~ The Power of Myth (interviews with Bill Moyers)

The teaching here is clear — it’s not “do whatever feels good, and you’ll be happy in life,” for Campbell tells us that following our bliss is dangerous—but is simultaneously inherently worthwhile because “the adventure is its own reward.” The adventure he speaks of is what unfolds when we orient towards our heart’s deepest longing (whether or not we understand it) and do that which feels most deeply right and true in our life, whatever the cost. But we cannot sense our heart’s deepest longing or what feels right & true unless we learn how to deeply listen to the whole of our experience without agenda. True meditation is nothing but the cultivation of our capacity to deeply listen in this way. Through listening, we arrive at a quiet inner knowing of what is right for us that is not obtainable through any amount of thinking or discussing with others (though those activities can sometimes be valuable as well, especially if you have wise beings in your life that can offer well-grounded reflection). When we experience this quiet inner knowing, we can begin to align our thoughts, words, and actions with it. The more we bring about this alignment, the more fully and freely we can access our natural capacity for joy. This is what it means to follow your bliss.

Again, Campbell chose the word ‘bliss’ rather than ‘passion’ because he was originally inspired by the Sanskrit word ānanda, which is certainly closer to the former English word than the latter. But ānanda is not really translatable, since it refers not to extreme happiness but a kind of sheer joy in aliveness that is not contingent on circumstance. This kind of joy, this ānanda, is not ever produced by getting what you want; rather, it is an inherent capacity of consciousness that can be accessed much more effectively by simply being, with full awareness and presence, than by doing anything, however pleasurable. In the Tantrik tradition, there is a teaching of seven levels of ānanda because, as it turns out, the experience of ānanda can deepen and become infused into every aspect of one’s everyday life, but only if one has spent years aligning the actions of body, speech, and mind with that which your innermost intuition feels is deeply right & true. (The misunderstandings around intuition will be addressed in a subsequent Near Enemy post.) Needless to say, this must include either bringing one’s work/career into the same alignment, or if that proves impossible, relinquishing it to make room for work that is aligned (or alignable).

When we accurately understand what is meant by “follow your bliss,” then we see that it is the same teaching as found in this phrase of Rumi’s, as rendered by Coleman Barks: Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you truly love. It will not lead you astray. (‘Strange’ in the sense of ‘mysterious’ here, of course.) This phrase from Barks’ Rumi is beautiful and deeply resonant, but since the word ‘love’ is just as open to misinterpretation as ‘bliss’, I prefer to call this teaching “following the golden thread.”

When your meditation practice is an opportunity to become more grounded in the real rather than a practice of spiritual escapism, and when—from that grounded, clear, calm, eyes-wide-open state—you learn to pay attention to the whole of your experience, then you perceive something like a tapestry of countless threads, all beautifully interwoven; a tapestry in which your pain and joy are one. As you continue to pay attention, you will notice that somewhere in the tapestry of your experience there is a tiny golden thread sticking out, subtly gleaming. Your intuition points you toward it. That golden thread could, at this juncture of your life, be a simple intuition to read a particular book, or sit with a particular teacher, or accept a particular invitation—anything. It appears quietly, without demands, just feeling right. You can ignore it or you can gently tug on that golden thread. Once you start pulling it, it leads you somewhere, which leads you somewhere else, and so on, and if you follow to all the ‘places’ it leads you discover exactly where it is that you’ve been this whole time. You find your true home in the very heart of existence.

Follow the golden thread is indeed following your bliss because it inevitably leads to a state in which you have full access to the innate joy of being. But the journey is sometimes anything but blissful. “When Love beckons to you, follow him, though his ways are hard and steep.” But if you glimpse that this journey inevitably unveils nothing less than the very reason for being, the truth of existence, the infinite majesty of your own Divinity, you do not hesitate to walk the path presented to you in each moment. To truly follow your bliss means that you would willingly pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any truth, and discard any falsehood in order to realize and abide in your true nature and align everything in your life to it.

Having begun on a personal note, I’ll end on one. I was fortunate enough to orient my life to this teaching and start following my bliss more than 23 years ago, when I heeded the inner call to start an undergraduate degree at the late age of 24, studying South Asian religions full-time. Ever since I made that decision, I fell onto a life-path in which everything has unfolded with unerring perfection as long as I bothered to listen to the whole of my experience, open to discern the intuitive clues as to what’s next. Many times I forgot to listen and got caught in my own mind-games and confusion. But as my contracted separate self was slowly eroded by spiritual practice, listening became easier and easier and my fear of trusting Life became less and less. My experience absolutely corroborates Campbell’s statement: “If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you . . . Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.” ~ OM!

What Are ‘Near Enemies of the Truth’?

Borrowing this phrase from Buddhism, I use it to refer to slightly distorted versions of spiritual teachings—statements that are close to a profound and subtle truth, but are distorted just enough to make a big difference over time. When we’re talking about deep and fundamental truths, getting it a little bit wrong doesn’t matter in the short run, but it does in the long run, just like a tiny adjustment to the rudder of your boat makes little difference at first, but after 1000 miles, it lands you on a different continent.

Now, some people object to the use of the word ‘wrong’ in the previous sentence, subscribing as they do to the idea that the only necessary criterion for truth is it feels true to me. This view is as dangerous in spirituality as it is in politics, because it usually means I want it to be true, so I’m going to believe it, regardless of the facts. If you don’t see how dangerous this is, or if you doubt whether there really are facts or universal truths, please read the second half of the first blog post in this series.

Understanding the Near Enemies to the Truth, and why they are near enemies and not the truth itself, is hugely important for any spiritual seeker who wants to get past the beginner stages and into the deep (and deeply fulfilling) spiritual work. Having said that, it’s important to note that if a Near Enemy is near enough, it can be a Temporary Ally for a beginner. But as the stakes get higher in spiritual practice, there is no such thing as ‘close enough’ anymore, and your comforting affirmations must be sacrificed on the altar of truth, or else your spiritual progress stalls.