Essays on Meaning
Philosophy/Spirituality
Date Published: 10-01-2025
Publisher: Sketpika Press
Something’s missing in the world today, and maybe it’s been
gone for centuries. The problem: most of us don’t have authentic beliefs
or a clear path in life.
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.
The essays in Part 1: Your Understanding of Reality is More Fabricated
Than You Think dispel our delusions one at a time, including:
- 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.
The essays are filled with stories from history, including meetings of
the apostles Paul and Peter with the Emperor Nero and Simon Magus the
magician, the mystical transformation of Emmanuel Swedenborg, the nineteenth
century German intellectual revolution, the establishment of three French
religions worshipping not God but Reason and Humanity, the abdication of the
World Teacher, and the genocide of the Tibetan culture.
The book is ideal for seekers of deeper meaning, arm-chair philosophers
and historians, and those disillusioned with the emptiness of contemporary
thought. Discover why your view of reality may be distorted—and how by
changing the one assumption on which your entire world-view is based,
everything shifts.
Interview
Can you tell us a little about the process of getting this book published?
I am one of those guys that believes we were all put here to do something. I was put here to write this book. And now, my job is to get people to read it. (I make like $2/book, so I am not looking to profit)
I wrote the essays. I had some friends read them, and some gave me critiques which I addressed. I then found an editor on guru.com. I paid her a lot, but she did a great job. She read the book three times, and critiqued it hard, and I am glad she did. I hired a book designer on guru. He did the interior, formatted the book for Amazon. I designed the cover mostly, but the book designer made it work. I hired a web designer on guru.
How did you come up with the idea and how did you start?
Where did the idea come from? I had a mystical experience where I realized that I was living the same life my father had before me, and his father before him, and his father before him. We become youths, we become idealistic, we fall in love, we marry, we have children. We get jobs, we have worries, our health fails us, we die. And the next generation repeats the process. I realized then my connection to history, in that we are all tied to this thread, all of us, reliving the same story. I felt an intense sadness at the smallness and tragedy of our lives, all of our great idealist goals thwarted, our declines, our deaths. How insignificant we are. And yet I felt an intense love and joy that this entire cycle was beautiful, and it was everything to us. It is our destiny.
It is hard to explain these types of things.
What surprised you most about getting your book published?
I went the indy route, so there were not any surprises.
I don’t trust publishers, as they choose how much marketing budget and time to devote to the book, they can stop printing it when they choose, and they own the book. I would rather be in charge of my own destiny rather than trust some goliath.
Tell us a little about what you do when you aren’t writing
I am trying to figure that out myself. I am a moving target. I just retired from my engineering career. So now I am in the process of rediscovering who I am. I threw large parts of myself away in order to fit in to earn a living. But the living has been earned, and now I am trying to retrieve those missing parts. This is what little I know. It is our job to be ourselves. To be uniquely me, I need to protect my mind, which means shielding it from the mass mind. I try hard (and fail often) to avoid news, sports, entertainment news…and ideally, I would drop television. I think I can do that one next year. Instead of those poisonous entrees, I am reading a whole lot more. I am finding that many indy writers are very good, some are awful, of course. In the afternoons I paint. I love painting people.
As a published author, what would you say was the most pivotal point of your writing life?
The pivotal point was when I realized that my essays were actually good. I always questioned whether I was worthy to write a book worth reading. But some of them, at least to me, are art.
Where do you get your best ideas and why do you think that is?
I get my best ideas when writing actually. This is non-fiction, and philosophy. So when you start writing something that someone else thought, I often will realize, “Hey, that’s not right” and I take it from there. I also do a lot of journaling with a real pen, and discuss with myself where to take essays, and how to fit things together. The journaling works well. Why does journaling and writing work for me? My book is my thoughts, where else can they come from but myself. I also believe that we all have access to the collective unconscious (Emerson called it the Oversoul, Rupert Sheldrake calls it a morphic field) that contains all of the thoughts, emotions and experiences of all humanity. I believe that is where genius comes from, when you can access this cloud.
What is the toughest criticism given to you as an author?
The book is too long. And they are right. It is broken up into 13 essays, each of which is consumable, but 494 pages is daunting, and people don’t want to commit to that. They don’t have to read every essay.
What has been your best accomplishment as a writer?
This book. It is the only book I have published to date.
How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have?
Two. And another two not started. The not started ones are more interesting to me. I want to disprove entropy. I also want to disprove the maxim that it is best to work in groups. I disagree. Groups can get things done better, but groups are not good for coming up with a vision. Jesus or Mohammed weren’t groups. Musk’s ideas did not come from a group, nor did Henry Ford’s. Groups hinder our creativity. Groups pull us back into mediocrity.
About the Author
John Bliss is a writer and thinker fixated on unraveling the mystery of
our lives. He is at heart a skeptic, as very few authorities have provided
answers that are believable. He distrusts groups of all kinds, as they are no
smarter than individuals, who don't know half as much as they think they do.
He even distrusts himself, as no human can understand reality.
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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