John Bliss begins with an uncomfortable proposition: much of what passes for personal conviction may be inherited habit, social imitation, or an assumption that has never been examined closely. The False Paradigms of Today and the Timeless Truth of Tomorrow develops that challenge through thirteen essays spanning progress, rationality, identity, science, morality, religion, history, mysticism, psychology, and philosophy. The result is a deliberately skeptical inquiry into how people construct their understanding of reality—and what might change when its foundations are reconsidered.
The False Paradigms of Today and the Timeless Truth of Tomorrow
Essays on Meaning
Author: John Bliss
Genre: 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.
Bliss is not offering a conventional introduction to philosophy or a single argument developed from first page to last. His thirteen-essay structure allows him to question several pillars of contemporary thought separately, beginning with ideas about progress, reason, group identity, science, and morality before moving into history, religion, mysticism, and the nature of human connection.
The book’s distinguishing feature is the range of traditions placed in conversation with one another. Jung’s collective unconscious appears alongside Emerson’s Over-Soul and Varro’s Soul of the World, while historical episodes involving religious movements, intellectual revolutions, and political idealism become evidence in a broader examination of belief. That combination may be especially valuable to readers who prefer philosophical inquiry grounded in historical examples rather than abstract argument alone.
Its skeptical stance also matters. Bliss directs his scrutiny toward accepted authorities, collective assumptions, and even the reliability of individual understanding. Readers willing to encounter arguments that may challenge their own intellectual loyalties will find substantial material here for reflection, disagreement, and further investigation.
This collection is suited to independent thinkers who enjoy testing inherited assumptions rather than accepting them at face value. Its subjects will speak particularly strongly to armchair philosophers, intellectually curious history readers, spiritual seekers dissatisfied with institutional answers, and readers interested in the points where psychology, mysticism, religion, and metaphysics overlap.
Those who appreciate assertive essayists may also respond to Bliss’s irreverent approach. The book is designed for readers comfortable with intellectual friction—people who regard disagreement as part of the reading experience and who are prepared to examine not only society’s prevailing ideas, but the beliefs organizing their own lives.
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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The False Paradigms of Today and the Timeless Truth of Tomorrow asks its audience to become active participants rather than passive recipients. Bliss’s subjects are expansive, but the central concern is personal: which beliefs have been deliberately chosen, which have been absorbed without examination, and what consequences follow from building a life around them?
The collection’s historical range and unapologetically skeptical voice make it a fitting choice for readers who value books as instruments of inquiry. Agreement is not required for the essays to do their work. Their deeper invitation is to identify the assumptions beneath a worldview and decide whether those assumptions can withstand sustained attention.
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