Tuesday, October 8, 2013

     "Seek your bliss," the renowned historian of religion Joseph Campbell once wrote.  Seek what is you, seek what is meaningful, seek what is true, seek what is real for you.  To this sentiment some might respond that, yes we agree, but surely, we should place limits on the ability of people to fulfill such inclinations.  We do not wish for a psychopath to indulge the fullness of his desires, do we?
     I cannot argue with this response.  However, I'm not sure that it captures Campbell's full point.  Regardless of our religious or spiritual stance, we can agree that to seek what is most meaningful for oneself ought to be to seek what is, by extension, what is most meaningful for all of humanity.  If we all come from the same creator, and if we all share the same fundamental desires and sensibilities, we understand that our meaningfulness is necessarily intertwined with that of everyone else.  To find true meaning, that is, a meaning that transcends and encompasses all other meanings, is to therefore find something that is true meaning for every human being.
     How can you, some might say, insist that there is only one true meaning?  Well, if there isn't one true meaning, we are looking at a species--ourselves--that constructs itself on the basis of what it is (even though it doesn't fully understand what "it" is), and nothing more.  How can it know?  We will spend our existence striving to find something that we cannot, logically, never find.  What does bliss mean if it's only its own?

No comments:

Post a Comment