@chriscocreated
I feel that. thank you for the reminder. I'm getting closer to it. Went deeper with gtp - I think it's worth sharing:
The line “Follow your bliss” is a summary phrase, not a neat standalone quote from a single text.
It comes from Joseph Campbell’s later work and interviews (especially The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers), where he was distilling a lifetime of comparative mythology into practical guidance for modern life.
The fuller idea (often paraphrased)
One commonly cited expansion — stitched together from multiple talks — goes something like:
If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss — you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.
Another closely related passage:
Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.
What he meant by “bliss”
This is where it’s often misunderstood.
Campbell did not mean:
- pleasure
- happiness
- comfort
- doing whatever feels nice in the moment
He meant something closer to:
- deep vitality
- alignment with your inner myth
- the feeling of being called rather than rewarded
- the thing that gives you energy even when it’s hard
He was drawing from:
Sanskrit ideas of ānanda (deep joy, not surface pleasure)
the mythic hero’s journey
the idea that each person has a life-pattern they can either inhabit or resist
The context
Campbell was reacting against:
- careers chosen out of fear or obligation
- lives organised around external validation
- societies that reward conformity over meaning
“Follow your bliss” was his shorthand for:
Orient your life toward what makes you feel most alive, and let practical structures reorganise around that truth.