Blog Tour: The False Paradigms of Today and the Timeless Truth of Tomorrow by John Bliss #interview #nonfiction #philosophy #rabtbooktours @RABTBookTours

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

What was your main drive to write this book?

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 do you hope readers will learn by reading this book?

There is a lot people can take away from the book, but I will narrow it down.

1. That much of what we take for granted is not true. That it is wise to question everything.

2. Groups act as creatures. Groups are creatures. When a group gets to a certain size, its number one priority is to survive. It will easily shed its original focus in order to survive.

3. I, and you, and all individuals are fundamentally not important at all. Just as important as the ant you stepped on today. We will all be forgotten, but as the anthill persists beyond the lifetimes of individual ants, so does humanity persist beyond our short lives. Humanity is the group that survives. Humanity is the creature of import.

4. That all people are connected, not just to other living people, but to the dead as well. The dead created our world, our societies, our technologies, and the mental constraints under which we operate. We are all part of one creature, humanity.

5. Humanity does progress, but we cannot know towards what.

6. If all people are connected, then perhaps the best way to live is drop our self-cherishing attitude, and maximize our gifts as this best contributes to humanity’s progress. We can also help others make the most of their gifts.

Did you do much research when planning this book?

The book was the culmination of about 50 years of reading, mostly history, but also some philosophy books.

I noticed that most of my friends from college didn’t have any books in their houses, maybe the books they read in college for classes, but they hadn’t purchased anything since. After college I dived into primarily Roman history for 10 years. That was most of what I read then. I later moved into medieval and early modern history.

Did you have any main people who helped you in the process of this book or influenced you to write it?

I thank my advisor at the U of Wisconsin’s Mechanical Engineering department, Sandy Klein, who was ruthless in critiquing my thesis in mechanical engineering. He taught me to be precise and clear in my writing.

Otherwise, I am a lone wolf.

How long did this book take you to write from initial thought to hitting publish?

13 years of writing.

I had met a fortune teller in India 40 years ago who told me I would write a book. He put that idea into my head. But the writing didn’t start for another 27 years.

Do you have plans to write more about this topic or new topics?

The drawback of the book is that it is long, and this daunts people. It is 13 essays, each of which are manageable, at between 20 and 50 pages each, but I think people are hesitant to start it because it is long. I am thinking of writing shorter books, one per essay.

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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