Essays on Meaning
Date Published: 10-01-2025
Publisher: Sketpika Press
What do we believe? Whatever they told us to believe.
What do we do? Whatever other people are doing.
How many lies have we welcomed into our lives without having seriously analyzed them?
It’s the reason many of us feel empty inside—there’s nothing there but convenient mistruths, and at some level, we all know it. We then orient our lives based on these false beliefs, wasting our precious limited time among the living striving for goals that leave us ultimately unsatisfied.
The False Paradigms of Today and The Timeless Truth of Tomorrow by John Bliss takes a steak knife to these common delusions with 13 irreverent essays that rip and tear at the foundations of our collective worldview. Little is held sacred to Bliss.
- our mistaken belief in progress,
- our misplaced confidence in our own rational prowess,
- our loss of personal identity from group identification,
- our misplaced faith in science as a true representation of the world, and
- our morality: what it is and where exactly it comes from.
After carving away these restrictive untruths, Part 2: An Exploration of Truth Across Historical, Mystical, and Philosophical Dimensions introduces a deeper understanding of humanity based on history, mysticism, psychology and philosophy. Some of the topics in Part 2 include:
- how our religions became second-rate pathways to God,
- our reliance on logic and how it warps our decision-making,
- how idealism can lead to mass murder and tyranny,
- the overriding importance of history, where we’ve been, where we are going and why,
- our immaterial connection to all people living and dead—Jung’s collective unconscious, Emerson’s Over-Soul, and Varro’s Soul of the World, and finally
- the bedrock assumption that we all got wrong. Switch this out, and everything changes.
It may be that the chimpanzee is the most
intelligent animal in the zoo. Chimpanzees have excellent memory. They can use
tools, and they have developed language skills. But just because the chimpanzee
is the most intelligent, does it follow that the chimpanzee can build
spaceships? If they are really smart, why would they live in the zoo and not in
luxury hotels? They have not even created a printing press, they don’t read
books, and they are broke. I suppose, then, we can conclude that the smartest
animal in the zoo maybe isn’t so smart after all.
Aren’t we, humankind, the smartest animal on
the planet? We like to think so. The planet is just a bigger zoo. And just like
the chimps, we are merely the smartest in the collection of species, but that
does not mean, by default, that we can understand everything. Nonetheless, that
is a conscious or unconscious postulate in most people’s thinking. We are the
smartest, therefore, we can understand the world given enough time for science
to figure it out. This postulate is based on what? It is extrapolation of the
worst kind.
Some of his major accomplishments include being kicked out of the National Honor Society and the CEO Round Table. He graduated with a bachelor's in History, and a masters degree in mechanical engineering. He founded and grew an engineering company and sold it after 25 years. And of course, he completed his book, The False Paradigms of Today and the Timeless Truth of Tomorrow, after 13 years of research, writing, and rewriting.
To this day, he continues to ask the big questions: Who are we? What’s truly important? How should we live our lives? On most days he thinks he has them figured out.
When he is not writing, he cuts wood and digs ditches. Bliss remains at large somewhere in the mountains of California.
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