Should We “Follow Our Bliss?”
Part Four: Ecstasy Deepening into Bliss
“Follow your bliss”
Joseph Campbell famously said, “Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.” He went on to say, “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. 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.”
Nowadays many, maybe especially religious people, see this as a sort of new-age platitude. Whether it’s seen as flippant hedonism or unrealistic idealism, bliss is often thought of as something outside of the typical experience of life. A moment here or there if you’re lucky. But to follow your bliss? That is selfish individualism and not really how life works, right?
But my own experience these last few decades has been one of bliss, one of “the rapture of being alive.” I believe it is possible for us to live every day in this state. Let’s explore how that might actually be possible.
What is bliss?
Earlier in my life, I was not even aware there was something called “bliss” that was beyond happiness. Bliss begins where expectations of happiness end. Whatever makes us happy has the potential to make us unhappy. But bliss is unaffected by outward circumstances. Happiness is limited to finding something desirable with my five senses, mind, and intellect.
The New Testament does not use the word “bliss,” but the word “joy,” which serves the same purpose. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace . . . (Gal 5:22). “For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom 14:17).
The Ecstasy of St. Teresa Gian Lorenzo Bernini
The mystics tell us that the presence of God is full of bliss. Teresa of Avila says that God gives the soul “raptures... true raptures.”
Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), spiritual reformer from India, writes, “And this bliss is not a supreme pleasure of the heart and sensations with the experience of pain and sorrow as its background, but a delight also self-existent and independent of objects and particular experiences, a self-delight which is the very nature, the very stuff, as it were, of a transcendent and infinite experience.”
John Paul II, defining bliss as God’s Self, says, “We exist because God wants to make a gift of himself (sic) to us, because God wants to share his (sic) own infinite goodness and bliss with us. And that bliss is what we desire at our deepest level.”
Jesuit priest and revolutionary visionary, Teilhard de Chardin, writes, “May God preserve within me the deep taste, and the sort of lucid ecstasy, that intoxicate me with the joy of Being — a joy drunk in as though from an everlasting spring . . . I sometimes feel an indefinable bliss when I remember that I possess — in a total, incorruptible and living Element — the supreme Principle in which all subsists and comes to life.”
While they are able to put the words to it, the experience of bliss is not just for great mystics and spiritual giants. We can have it too. How do we get there?
Following your bliss is not the same as seeking your bliss.
What does it mean to follow your bliss? Campbell did not say to not say to pursue bliss — but to follow bliss. Bliss inherently draws us, but that is not seeking it. Seeking comes from our ego. Drawing comes our deep self.
In Obliquity, John Kay argues that the best things in life can only be pursued indirectly. I believe this is true for bliss: if you truly want to experience bliss, you need to shift your attention away from it to that which brings it as a byproduct. As the philosopher John Stuart Mill once wrote, “Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness.”
Bliss or happiness is not the goal or the object sought. For integral Christians, the goal is God. For Jesus and for us, God has three faces: the awesome infinite face of I AM beyond us, the guiding, personal intimate face of God beside us, and the daring, identification with the inner face of God being us. Bliss flows in different dimensions from each of these Faces, and following this bliss is the great invitation of Jesus.
When we open to mystical connection with this God in a fully embodied way, we begin to experience this flow of bliss in our bodies. I first found it erupting from within me like a bolt of energy. Soon, whenever I turned my attention God’s presence or to Jesus standing next to me, I would overflow with bliss. I feel it now as I write this sentence.
This experience of bliss deepened the more I welcomed it. After all, Jesus did say, “I have told you these things so that you will be filled with my joy. Yes, your joy will overflow!” (John 15:11).
Unfortunately, much of Christianity traditionally assigns this joy and bliss to being dead. Religious people tell us we really won’t experience bliss until we die and go to heaven. However, I believe in having as much bliss as this body can hold while we are still alive.
The ecstatic release of spirit is a transitory phenomenon unless it deepens to bliss.
Bradford Keeney Ph.D., director of clinical doctoral programs in at numerous universities, anthropologist of cultural healing traditions, and spiritual healer, suggests it is religion itself that gets in the way of bliss, “Nothing agitates a ritualized, textualized, standardized, and institutionalized religion like a blissful outbreak of high emotion. Many Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, and New Thought practitioners, among others — with exceptions provided by heretics and outcasts — all suggest to varying extents that one primary goal of spirituality is to achieve mastery over the emotions and dampen body excitement.”
In the Christian tradition most recently, this agitation came from the Charismatic Movement beginning in the 1960s. However, that movement is fading in many places today. This is because the ecstatic release of spirit is a transitory phenomenon unless it deepens to bliss. This also seems to be why in the Pentecostal movement there is a tendency to artificially stir up emotions in order to approximate ecstasy. This gives both ecstasy and bliss a bad reputation.
Initial ecstatic spiritual experiences are intended to deepen into bliss—the ever-present joyous delight not dependent on the external phenomena. Only then does the ecstatic genuinely continue to also be experienced.
Bliss through the Darkness
“Jesus, who for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, (Heb. 12:2).
This observation from the New Testament points out two realities. First, a difficult time can temporarily put bliss out of reach for us. For Jesus, this meant that times like the anguish of Gethsemane and the crucifixion were not blissful times. Had they been, we would have seen Jesus practicing spiritual bypassing before it had a name. But he embraced the deep pain of those agonizing times.
Second, the writer of Hebrews suggests that Jesus was able to do endure that suffering because he knew blissful joy would return. As the psalmist points out, “Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning (Ps. 30:5). There are times, of course, when the weeping lasts longer than the night. But once we have entered into bliss in our journey, we can know it will return after a difficult time. Bliss draws us to endure all things with its sublime joy and beauty.
Embodied Bliss
James Thurber, humorously but pointedly, wrote, “Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.” So move from your head into heart, and even the rest of your body, during your day as often as you can.
Serious meditators, using Centering Prayer, TM, and other Eastern mind-sourced meditative practices, report that they experience bliss. However, this is often after years of meditating. Researchers have found that Tibetan Buddhist monks need more than 34,000 hours or thirty years of experience to move into deeper consciousness.
We have found that Whole-Body Mystical Awakening opens us up to the joy of bliss much sooner. It also deepens ecstasy into bliss. When we welcome and engage the energy from all four centers of spiritual knowing, not just our head, we move more into the embodiment of the joy of divine presence within our own incarnated being.
We invite you to explore the Whole-Body Mystical Awakening practice individually or in a WeSpace.