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Follow your bliss...

16:01 / 04.01.02

Joseph Campbell, paraphrased, suggests that if your life is not satisfactory, that is if your life is not satisfying your spirituality, change your life so that your spirituality is fulfilled. Hence, the "follow your bliss" bit.

Thinking about this, what about if you can't change your life? What if you are stuck somewhere, and cannot change that. How valid is it then to change your spirituality instead? Change your bliss.

Is this a compromise of self? Can the self be compromised if you are acting according to your will? Does any of this matter??

17:28 / 04.01.02

quote:Is this a compromise of self?

I would think that would be the point.

quote:Thinking about this, what about if you can't change your life? What if you are stuck somewhere, and cannot change that. How valid is it then to change your spirituality instead? Change your bliss.

Being stuck somewhere goes hand in hand with not being spiritually satisfied. And moving from spiritual dissatisfaction to spiritual satisfaction certainly changes what you think of as bliss.

17:51 / 04.01.02

I tend to see it as a matter of 'trancending your surroundings' kind of thing. I deffinetly think it's possible.

17:56 / 04.01.02

Well you have the idea of Gandhi locked in jail, his captors unaware that while his body was locked up his spirit was free. Paul Auster details this in the Invention of Solitude when he wrote about being trapped in a dingy bedsit in Paris with nowhere to go, but rising up and and travelling wherever he wanted through learning and knowledge.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

22:52 / 04.01.02

Yeah, but...

If you're going to trancend your surroundings, don't you need two things?

One, a certain amount of time for uninterrupted thought, and two, the awareness that such trancendance is possible?

22:59 / 04.01.02

One of Gandhi's causes was to eliminate the idea of untouchables, people in Hindu culture that were so low that touching them was said to make one unclean. It was a concept so engrained into the minds of the people that his wife and his son both came very close to leaving the Satyagraha ashram when it was insisted that they live with untouchables. Gandhi was willing to lose his wife for the sake of his spirit. He was willing to have his son leave. And he was willing to give his life. Sometimes, it may take all of these.

02:15 / 05.01.02

surely if a change occurs within you its part of your nature and not a compromise of self. . when im unhappy its usually because im insisting that the world is 'this way' and the world is blatantly 'that way' or maybe it's me insisting that im 'this way' but sooner or later i get exausted, realise what im doing and have to laugh life itself is such a buzz if you can get the madman in your head to shut up for a minuit or two and just feel it.
loads of love, inteceptor x x

08:46 / 05.01.02

But let's get something clear here - 'following your bliss' in itself may not be the answer. Epicurus would also talk in terms of pleasure, but would define it in a very ascetic way. Nietzsche on the other hand would argue that a 'happy' life is an unchallenged one and that nothing noble or great can be created as a result.

14:26 / 05.01.02

There is also Plato's idea of the state as an analogy for the soul.

Soul Interest Class Virtue
reason knowledge philosophers wisdom
spirit honour warriors courage
desire pleasures commoners temperance

If "bliss" can defined as pleasures then the virtue in it would be temperance.

Edited to note that the table above doesn't format very well after you press submit but I hope you can understand it.

[ 05-01-2002: Message edited by: Buk ]

15:19 / 05.01.02

quote:Originally posted by Tom Coates:
But let's get something clear here - 'following your bliss' in itself may not be the answer. Epicurus would also talk in terms of pleasure, but would define it in a very ascetic way. Nietzsche on the other hand would argue that a 'happy' life is an unchallenged one and that nothing noble or great can be created as a result.

Usually the phrase 'Follow your bliss' refers to true happiness, joy and fulfillment. Not just pleasure. So 'following your bliss' means doing what makes you feel most alive, ecstatic, spiritually fullfilled etc.

The decadence of pure pleasure or happiness shouldn't necessarily apply. While Nietzsche could argue what he wanted, I'm fairly confident that writing, theorizing, philosophizing etc. gave him a certain amount of bliss and I'd be very surprised if the process didn't challenge him as well.

I'm also not sure that you are ever truly stuck and that you can't work towards your 'bliss'. Maybe you can't get there immediately but part of 'following your bliss' is to take small steps to discover what that bliss is and how to actualize it.

Your bliss might also change as the circumstances of your life change. As your past choices modify the way your present and future evolve, so does your 'bliss' change.

[ 05-01-2002: Message edited by: Lothar Tuppan ]

14:41 / 08.01.02

First, a standard on pleasure and bliss in reading (which is what we're all doing here)--
quote:
Text of Pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language." (Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans Miller, 14)

I love that bit on boredom.

Second, we savvy postmodern (or is that poststructuralist) types accept that "I" is clearly not unitary or static, right? So follow your bliss could begin by questioning the pronoun "your": we are developmental beings; through discipline we can change/expand our capacity for pleasure/bliss, over time, if we choose to make that our goal.

But our access to the means of expanding our capacity for pleasure/bliss may be mediated by material circumstances. Poverty--material or cultural--often circumscribes the amount of time and/or cultural training available for us to seek pleasure outside the ways that are hegemonic, ways that serve the powers that be. (I'm reading No Logo, right now--can ya tell?)

15:17 / 08.01.02

the happy life is the unchallenged life?

I think not. the trick is to accept the fact that there are some things (as suggested, certain surroundings, people, etc) that you simply can never change and will never like. to embrace the fact that the things that you are waiting for to make your life "complete" may very well never come. to stop waiting for someone else to come around to your way of thinking or for something else to just get better - some situations never improve, and there are some you simply cannot escape from dealing with