I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review. All opinions are my own. 

Author John Bliss challenges readers to closely examine their personal worldview in the book “The False Paradigms of Today and the Timeless Truth of Tomorrow: Essays on Meaning.”

The Synopsis

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.

The Review 

This was a truly thought-provoking and compelling read. The author does a fantastic job of challenging the reader to closely examine their own belief systems and ways of thinking, and even questioning whose motivations we are truly following. The author finds that the balance and exploration of themes of religion, philosophy, morality, and social constructs were perfectly realized throughout each essay and provided numerous insights that draw the reader in completely.

What really stood out and became the heart of this book was the way the author presented each argument, not as a known fact, but as an opportunity for both themselves and the reader to do a little self reflection challenges the reader to either prove or disprove the way they view the world and really strip away outside voices and interference to determine if what they believe is really what they believe or simply something the world told them to believe.

The Verdict 

Compelling, enlightening, and completely insightful into the human condition, Author John Bliss’s “FALSE PARADIGMS” is a non-fiction and philosophical collection of essays and a must-read book that readers will be hard-pressed to put down. The author’s use of historical context and events, both known and fairly unknown to the general population, as well as the detail and insight each essay provides into various subjects, ultimately creates a thread that readers can follow to challenge the confines of reality around them as well and explorers how individuals as well as the larger group or society can impact and shape the reality as we know it. If you haven’t yet, please be sure to grab your copy today! 

Rating: 10/10

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.