The Call to Be Authentic: Finding Your Pathway to Bliss

Unfortunately those who choose to refuse the call don’t have a life.nn-Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss

The author goes on to say:

Either they do, or in trying to lead a more mundane life, they exist as non-entities, what T.S. Eliot called, “Hollow men.”

Campbell is quoting about the hollow men is from Elliot’s poem The Waste Land. This wasteland exists in many people’s lives. It exists in the lives of those who are by all accounts successful and have ‘made it.’

You may make it in your life situation but this does not mean that you have lived a life that love has intended that you live. It does not mean you have followed the call to venture into the uniqueness you are intended to be.

It tends to mean that you live a paradox that is empty. It is that you have been filled up with all sorts of information, roles and allegiances that are what you say is what you are ‘about.’ What is forgotten is the call to be what is authentic. You are filled up but at the centre you are hollow.

As hollow men and women walking this cultural wasteland of never enough, we miss the experience of fulfilment. We move around the world and what some wisdom traditions call these ‘hollow’ people hungry ghosts.

Imagine people who walk the world and have large open mouths. They are always consuming but what they eat does not satisfy. It does not touch their bellies. So like those who are starving, their bellies are distended. They have large heads and are thin, even emaciated. This is a hungry ghost.

They are not walking in beauty – a Native American invitation. They are walking the wasteland of never enough. They are not in direct connection to a food source that the wisdom leader requests when he prays Give us this day our daily bread. This is not the daily bread that is mostly a combination of vitamin pumped air and flour that we buy in our local shop as bread. This is not what is referred to as the staff of life and is the very stuff of life.

To answer the call, “to be or not to be” will make you, like Hamlet, an outsider. You have to choose to become all that life invites you into and the being of that wholeness. This means walking your unique beauty. This may at various stages feel anything but beautiful. These very stages are known and within all traditional wonder tales and fairy tales there is assistance at hand to make the transition.

This time is a great time to be alive. It is a time when you have choices to leave the wasteland of being a non-entity to quote Joseph Campbell and find your unique and wonder tale pathway to bliss. The invitation is always being extended but it has stages along the way that you are required to pass through.

Issue a calling card that will invite your authentic self and your authentic wisdom voice to journey on the real way to the treasure contained within such a call.