Fear Of Death Versus Following Your Bliss

When you go where your body and soul want to go, all the forces come together to help you. If you have lived all your life never doing what you wanted to do, what kind of a life is that, asked Joseph Campbell, who said, “Follow your bliss. 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…. that wouldn't have opened for anyone else.”

According to Campbell, bliss is what is called ananda in Sanskrit, as in sat-chit-ananda, where once you get clued into ananda, which he calls rapture, then the other two, sat, your being and chit, full consciousness, will also happen. Once you realize where you get your rapture from, sat and chit will soon follow. And you experience sat-chit-ananda.

Most people, in the course of living their daily lives, are concerned with other things, like finances, economics, family responsibilities, work duties or they get drafted into a war they are not interested in, in which case, how is one to sustain interest in the seeking of bliss and how does one follow one’s bliss?

Every one of us has the capacity to experience bliss that is “waiting to be awakened”. The confusion arises when the word bliss is used synonymously with happiness, joy and ecstasy, whereas all these terms, though they are close relatives of that blissful state, may mean very different things.

Breathing in and out optimally so that you suffer neither shortness of breath nor shallow breathing; being neither distressed when negative things happen nor elated when good things happen; and acting with empathy and compassion so that lending a helping hand comes naturally to you, without expectations. This combination will perhaps lead you to experience a state where you don’t need to feel anything else.

If following your bliss is so simple, why is ananda so elusive, leaving us mired in suffering and discontent? What seems so simple to accomplish comes with a disclaimer: Unload your baggage first before you undertake the route to ananda. That is, leave your ego behind along with all your hurts and grudges, misconceptions and conflicts. Also, suffering being part of life, instead of griping about it, better to accept and overcome it for there is no gain without pain. Learn to deal with life’s challenges. Because you know pain and distress, you seek something beyond that will open doors to a path where you can follow your bliss and by so doing, make your life worthwhile.

It is said that what really matters is how you live and not how or when you die. Perhaps our fear of death is not so much about dying – but about whether we have lived a life that was worthwhile. Says psychotherapist Bradley Olson,  “Perhaps it’s not the virus that frightens us; perhaps it’s the chilling realization that we could die having never really lived, that terrifies us.”