16: Kitchen Angel

Kitchen Angel 

“Synchronicity comes along to wake us and fulfill us.” 

THE POWER OF COINCIDENCE

David Richo

          Last spring I waited for the Tiger Lilies to bloom. One morning on my way home from Midland where I went to pick up my weekend papers, I parked my car where I always did a short way down a walking trail, but on the grass and off the trail, and I picked a dozen spotted fiery orange Tiger Lilies and three cattails in the ditch between the trail and highway, which made a lovely bouquet; but when I pulled out across the highway and onto Concession 4, I got pulled over by a police cruiser but didn’t know why. “What did I do?” I asked the OPP officer, wondering where he had come from.

“Didn’t you see the sign back there?” he asked, with a serious look.

“What sign?” I asked, in all innocence.

“You’re not supposed to drive on the trails,” he replied, and asked to see my driver’s license and registration.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t see the sign. I thought it was safer to park there than on the highway. I just went in to pick some wild flowers.”

“You’re not supposed to drive on the trails,” he repeated.

“You know, this puts a real damper on my beautiful gesture,” I said, with a nervous but polite chuckle. “I picked a lovely bouquet of Tiger Lilies for the love of my life, and now my little gesture has been tarnished—”

The officer smiled. “What do you?” he asked.

“I’m a writer,” I said, and showed him a copy of Healing with Padre Pio that was sitting on a pile of some of my other books in the back seat.

He glanced at the front cover and read my bio on the back and handed my book and documents back to me. “I’ll let you off with a warning this time. Just remember, walking trails aren’t meant for driving on…”

I told Penny of my adventure, which gave more meaning to my little gesture, and I continued to pick her wild flowers off and on all summer long as I did every year; but then the leaves fell off the trees, and the snow began to fly, and I hadn’t brought her flowers for a while and had to be reminded, and that’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing… 

Robert Moss, dream shaman and author of The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archeologist in the Multiverse, believes that life speaks to us through signs and symbols. In fact, he makes a practice of going for morning walks just to read the signs and symbols that nature has to offer him for his day’s journey, sometimes asking questions and then watching and waiting for the language of life to speak to him.

I’ve tried this technique, and I’ve experienced some fascinating synchronicities; but when life speaks to me out of the blue, as it were, it gets my attention very quickly; like the other night when our glass flower vase fell from the top shelf of our kitchen pantry and landed on the hard ceramic tile floor with a loud THUMP but never broke. “What was that?” I asked, startled by the sudden noise.

I was in the sun room reading the Post (I buy the Saturday National Post for Conrad Black’s editorial alone; I’m fascinated by his metanoic change of heart since his release from prison), and Penny was in the kitchen making her second batch of Christmas cookies, glazed cranberry pecan this time; the night before she tried her hand at peanut butter shortbread cookies with chocolate glaze. “The flower vase just fell,” she replied, surprised that the vase hadn’t shattered to pieces. “It didn’t break,” she added, marveling at the miracle.

I had to see. I examined the vase, and there wasn’t a crack to be found. “I can’t believe it didn’t break,” I said, wondering what that meant. “How did it fall?”

“It just fell,” she repeated.

Perplexed, I had to ask: “You didn’t cause it to fall?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Penny said, her eyes alight with wonder. “I opened the door to get some pecans and it just fell. I didn’t touch anything up there.”

I laughed. “Maybe that’s something like what Robert Moss calls Library Angels. Sometimes a book falls off a library shelf and it just happens to be what the reader is looking for, even opening to the right page sometimes. That’s happened to Moss a few times. I think the writer Arthur Koestler coined the term Library Angels. Anyway, I think there’s a message here for me. I’m going to put the vase on the table to remind me to get you flowers tomorrow when I go for my paper, which I did; but as I drove into Midland Sunday morning I couldn’t get over why the vase didn’t shatter. It even left a chip on the tile floor.

It had been a while since I had given Penny flowers, and I felt guilty that I had to be reminded so bluntly; but only because the vase didn’t break. I just couldn’t believe it. The shelf was above my head, well over six feet, and it landed on a hard ceramic tile floor; why didn’t the glass vase shatter? It must have landed on the solid edge of the base; but still?

I couldn’t help but read it as a message, the vase wanted flowers; but had I been so neglectful? I didn’t think I was. I had learned to pay attention to our relationship, often anticipating Penny before she even asked; so why the message to get her flowers? Was I reading the sign correctly, or was I giving it a meaning that wasn’t there? After all, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

This opens up the question of the language of life, which has fascinated me from the day I became aware of how the Way speaks to us; and by Way I mean what has been called the Logos, the Word, and secret way of life. But I was re-reading some of my books on synchronicity for my spiritual musing BEWEL 262 (on the symbolic meaning of the license plate of our new Honda), and Dr. Kirby Surprise’s book Synchronicity: The Art of Coincidence, Choice, and Unlocking Your Mind made me think about the language of life in an entirely new way; and I had to question the message from our “Kitchen Angel.”

In Chapter 6, “Satori in a Can,” Dr. Surprise (even his name is synchronistic with the “surprise” message from our glass vase) states his case, which resonates throughout the book as his basic theme that we are responsible for the synchronicities we experience: “I’m still not a big believer in outside intelligences that direct SEs (synchronistic events). In fact, I’m deeply suspicious of anyone who claims SEs result from personal relationships with unseen supernatural forces,” he writes, with dispassionate professional candor.

I don’t disagree, especially given how I winced whenever a member of the spiritual community that I belonged to would share yet another inflated example of how Divine Spirit had given them another sign to guide their life. So dependent had my spiritual community become upon Divine Spirit’s guidance that I had to explore this crippling dependency in a story (“Blue Jeans/Red Roses”) for my new book Enantiodromia that was inspired by C. G. Jung’s understanding of the shadow side of life; but, still, I couldn’t help but feel that as much as we may be responsible for the little coincidences and synchronicities that speak to us because of the state of mind we are in, I could not dismiss the possibility of providential guidance. And divine intervention, even. In fact, for me the two perspectives were not mutually exclusive; and that’s the mystery of the message I got from our “Kitchen Angel” when our flower vase fell off the top shelf of our kitchen pantry and didn't shatter.

So, how do I explain this mysterious guiding force of life that goes by many names—the Hand of God, Divine Spirit, Guardian Angels, and Library Angels? I called it the omniscient guiding force of life because it seems to address our concerns from a place of all knowing and seeing, just as Ascended Master St. Padre Pio addressed my concerns from that same omniscient state of consciousness that I wrote about in Healing with Padre Pio?

I can’t dismiss my experience with St. Padre Pio, who communicated to me through a gifted psychic for the ten spiritual healing sessions that became the basis of my novel; what the Good Saint had to say was much too personal, too true, too real, and too outside the sphere of my subjective consciousness for me not to accept Padre Pio as an individual in his own right; and so impressed was I by what he revealed to me that I even asked him if he spoke from a state of all knowing because he had become one with Divine Spirit, and he agreed—which is why I saw him as an Ascended Master and not just another Roman Catholic saint.

So it all comes down to a question of perspective, and for me both are true—Dr. Kirby Surprise’s view that we are responsible for the coincidences we experience (“Synchronicity is a mirror of the content of your psyche, made manifest as meaningful events,” he writes), and the view that they are blessings from some divine agency, call it what we will. Robert Moss refers to this agency as Library Angels, among other names like Trickster, and many spiritual acolytes call it our Higher Self and/or Inner Master; but I prefer to simply call it the omniscient guiding force of life, and I believe our “Kitchen Angel” was reminding me to show my love for Penny with flowers because the deed speaks louder than words.

 However it was choreographed then, that’s how the language of life speaks to me; so, Sunday morning I picked up my Sunday Star at Food Basics in Midland, along with the items that Penny needed for her Christmas baking, and then I drove to the Super Store because they had a much better selection of flowers to choose from, and I picked up a luscious bouquet of yellow roses (my favorite) and gave them to her with my deepest apologies for having to be reminded by our “Kitchen Angel” how much I loved and appreciated her.  

♥

HAVE A WONDERFUL CHRISTMAS,

AND MAY THE NEW YEAR

BE GOOD TO YOU.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

15: What's In a Name? The Jian Ghomeshi Scandal

15 

 What’s In a Name?

The Jian Ghomeshi Scandal 

“What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?’ asked the Preacher in Ecclesiastes. This reminds me of the advice that talk show host Shelagh Rogers gave to the guest host that usurped her position on the CBC radio show Sounds Like Canada, which eventually became the popular cultural affairs show Q, advice that was solicited by the impertinent usurper. Shelagh told him to repeat his name as often as possible, “to get it out there,” which he did with such orgiastic glee so many times throughout the show that was cunningly rebranded into Q with Jian Ghomeshi that I could no longer stand to listen to the show because he grated my nerves every time he said his name; it was obscene.

I listened to Q for the interviews, and I listened to Q with Jian Ghomeshi for the interviews, a habit that I had gotten into from listening to its forerunner Morningside initially hosted by Don Harron and then by the inimitable Peter Gzowski who made it Canada’s favorite talk show, but Jian Ghomeshi rebranded the show so successfully that it was picked up for syndication care of Public Radio International, and by the time CBC was forced to let him go it was airing on more than 180 stations in the States; but I sacrificed Q with Jian Ghomeshi because I could no longer suffer Jian Ghomeshi, who after years of hosting the show and becoming the entitled 47 year old golden boy superstar who preyed on young women was fired by the CBC and criminally charged with four counts of sexual assault and one count of choking and is now awaiting trial.

When the story broke, I wrote a poem and posted it on Facebook under the heading “The disgraced talking head.” But—surprise, surprise!—no one caught the reference: 

Puer Aeaternus 

Icarus flew too close to the sun

And the light of all the attention he craved

Singed his wings

And he came tumbling down,

And down, and down,

And down. 

In Jungian psychology, “the archetypal image of a boy reluctant to mature is referred to as Puer aeternus, Latin for “eternal boyhood,” an adult man whose emotional life has remained at an adolescent level. He lives out experiences for their excitement, lives in fantasies, and ‘flies high.’ Trapped in his boyish ways, he has poor boundaries, flees from commitments and difficult situations, sees the world and himself through rose-coloured glasses, and essentially resists growing up.” If the shoe fits…

 

I knew that one day Shelagh Roger’s advice to Jian Ghomeshi, whose fantasy ideal was the androgynous British rock star David Bowie, would inspire a spiritual musing, so I kept the thought neatly tucked away in the back of my mind; and as I was reading The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss this morning, his chapter “Mark Twain’s Rhyming Life” set my thought free with the title “What’s in a Name?” and I wondered why; so, I called upon my Muse to explore this intriguing question of personal identity.

Mark Twain was Samuel Clemens’s pen name, borrowed from the Mississippi River boatman’s cry “Mark Twain,” meaning two fathoms, safe water; a name that Samuel Clemens immortalized with what has been called “the Great American Novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that Hemingway praised in Green Hills of Africa as America’s finest novel—“All American literature comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since”—and I couldn’t help but feel that Jian Ghomeshi wanted to immortalize his own name by repeating it ad museum on his show; but there was something so wrong about the way he went about staking his claim to immortality that I knew one day he would come tumbling down, hence my poem Puer Aeternus.

“He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal,” said Jesus, addressing man’s paradoxical nature. This speaks to what C. G. Jung called the individuation process, the essential premise being the integration of our outer self with our inner self—or what Jung called Personality No. 1, and Personality No. 2, and what I simply refer to as our authentic/inauthentic self; a process that requires so much wisdom, skill, commitment, and sacrifice that it keeps most people from realizing their true identity, or what Jung called “wholeness and singleness of self” and Jesus called “life eternal,” and I knew that Jian Ghomeshi had taken the wrong path in his life’s journey.

In my literary memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway, I explored how Hemingway’s No. 1 Personality (his insatiable ego and monstrous shadow) fueled his desire to become the best writer of his generation, and he did win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 with the publication of his most popular novel The Old Man and the Sea; but he paid such a dear price for his accomplishment that he could no longer repress the guilt of his betrayals and self-betrayals, and with brutal honesty (his literary credo was to “tell it  the way it was”) the 61 year old suicidal depressive confessed that he would rather have died than betray his first wife, which led to three more contentious marriages and the iconic writer that he became. “When I saw my wife (Hadley Richardson) again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her,” he remorsefully confessed in his melancholy memoir A Moveable Feast, the book that he was working on before shooting himself with his favorite shotgun.

Driven by daemonic passion, Hemingway took the ersatz way of ego to realize his lifelong dream of stepping into the ring with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and the world’s great writers, but it brought his full but incomplete life to a sorry, tragic end; and though he still has time to redeem himself (which I seriously doubt), Jian Ghomeshi took the selfish worldly way of ego also and sabotaged his life with his preference for what he casually referred to as “rough sex,” which he foolishly confessed to on Facebook to cleverly pre-empt the inevitable consequences of his behavior. So afflicted was he by the sexual passions of his obsessive shadow that he had become morally obtuse in his relationships, until reality caught up to him when he brazenly showed his bosses at the CBC a video of him having “rough” but “consensual” sex with a bruised young woman. 

Gosh darn, they didn’t overlook his kinky private pleasure. Quelle surprise!

Debbie Ford called this kind of stupid self-sabotaging behavior “the shadow effect,” which can take a lifetime to repair, if at all; but whatever we call it, it’s all part of the inherently self-correcting karmic dynamic of the natural process of individuation, and Jian Ghomeshi’s aberrant little chickens finally came home to roost.

We all pay for our sins eventually, and for all of his wit, charm, and intelligence CBC’s 47 year old golden boy was played for a fool by his own shadow; and although Jian Ghomeshi got all the attention that he craved, it cost him dearly, and I can’t help but feel that Shelagh Rogers, who happily hosts her own show The Next Chapter that I enjoy for all the writers she interviews, is smiling to herself at her usurper host’s Faustian fall from grace—“for God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil,” concluded the Preacher in Ecclesiastes.  

♥

 

 

 

 

 

 

14:The Full but Incomplete Life

14 

The Full but Incomplete Life 

“In every living creature the urge for its own totality

is perhaps the strongest and most fundamental of all urges.” 

Striving Towards Wholeness

Barbara Hannah 

A great sadness came over me and I began to cry, but I couldn’t understand why; and as we drove down the Trans-Canada Highway from our short visit to Penny’s cousin on the shores of Lake Superior just north of Sault St. Marie, I pondered my inexplicable sadness.

Penny’s cousin was in his early eighties and his wife in her late seventies, and they were getting ready to go down to Brownsville Texas for the winter, which they had been doing for the last twenty-some years; that’s why we dropped in to see them.

It was just after eight in the morning when I rang the front door bell, but no-one answered, and I was afraid they had already left for their winter residence; but then we went around to the back and I saw Barbara sitting at the dining room table and knocked on her patio door. Surprised to see us, she waved and let us in; her husband was still in bed.

She poured us coffee and went to tell her husband we had dropped in for a visit, and twenty minutes later he joined us at the table and we talked for an hour before we said we had to be on our way. It was eleven years since I had seen them last, and I knew we would probably never see each other again; this was evident in Tom’s eyes as we stepped out the front door. He was standing in the hallway leaning on his cane when we said goodbye, and as we drove down the highway I couldn’t get that look in his eyes out of my mind; that’s when a wave of sadness overcame me and I welled up with tears.

“I can’t get over the look in Tom’s eyes,” I said to Penny, opening up a dialogue on our short visit with her ageing cousin. “He knew this was the last time they would see us, but it was more than that; it was a look that bared his soul.”

“What did you see?” Penny asked, curious to know what I was feeling.

“I don’t know if I can explain it. Your cousin’s had a good life, which he worked very hard to realize; but I saw a longing in his soul that brought tears to my eyes, and I can’t get over the sadness that I feel for him. You know, sweetheart; Tom had a full life, but there’s something missing. That’s what I saw in his eyes as we said goodbye.”

Tom asked us to drop in on our way home from up north, inviting us to stay the night in the guest suite that he had added onto his garage to spare us the expense of a motel room in Sault St. Marie, but we all knew this was probably the last time we would see each other and our parting was filled with unspoken sorrow; but that wasn’t all that I saw in his eyes.

Something about the way he looked at me, a curiosity that troubled him, as though he couldn’t figure out what we had that he didn’t, and this puzzled him deeply; and I pondered that sad look in his eyes until they opened up onto his soul.

“If I were to put it into words,” I mused out loud, “I’d say that your cousin has lived a full life, but his eyes told me that something was missing in his life; something we had that he couldn’t understand. That’s the look I saw in his eyes, and the sadness.”

“He may have lived a full life, but it’s not complete,” Penny answered, quickly grasping the point that was just beyond my reach—

“That’s it!” I exclaimed. “That’s what I saw in his eyes!”

“I see a musing coming up,” Penny said, and broke into laughter.

“The full but incomplete life,” I replied, and laughed with her; but it was long after our second trip up north the following month that I began to ponder writing my spiritual musing on the full but incomplete life. I tried once or twice to write it, but it didn’t feel right; like I had to wait to find the right entry, and so I gave it to my unconscious to work out.

Why, I didn’t know; but I got an urge to re-read some of my Jung books, and I started with two or three essays from his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul; and this inspired me to re-read Barbara Hannah’s book Striving Towards Wholeness, which gave me the entry point that I needed for my spiritual musing on the full but incomplete life.

One of C. G. Jung’s most insightful students, Barbara Hannah wrote one of my favorite books on his life: Jung: His Life and Work, A Biographical Memoir; but her book Striving Towards Wholeness explained that sad look of longing that I saw in Penny’s cousin’s eyes, and I knew it was my point of entry into my spiritual musing. She writes: 

“Jung has always compared the process of individuation to the formation of a crystal; the framework or lattice is in the solution from the beginning but only hardens and becomes visible much later as the crystal itself. In every human being there seems to be a similar framework or lattice of the process of individuation present from the beginning. It is as if this pattern—although its structure follows its own laws—depends for realization in some way on the individual becoming conscious of it…” (Striving Towards Wholeness, p. 214). 

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections Jung tells us that the central concept of his psychology is the process of individuation, but this presupposes so much that I don’t know where to begin to explain what I saw in Penny’s cousin’s eyes; because that sad longing in his eyes was the same look that I once saw in an old German Shepherd’s eyes when I was working on the new house that my neighbor built for his retirement (ironically, his wife left him shortly after their new house was finished, and their dog died) was the longing for wholeness that every soul that comes into this world strives for but never realizes until they are ready to finish what nature cannot complete. As Jung wrote in his memoir, quoting an ancient alchemist saying, “What nature leaves imperfect, the art perfects,”

This “art” is what Jung finally came to call the process of individuation; but how can I possibly explain soul’s inherent longing for wholeness?

That’s the musing that I’ve been called upon to write; and even though I’ve explored this mysterious “art” in all of my books (the most succinct being Do We Have an Immortal Soul?), I feel compelled to spell it out in today’s spiritual musing; but to do that I have to call upon the infinite resources of my faithful Muse… 

“The truth is that no matter where I went I was always looking for myself,” said Shirley MacLaine, the well-known actress/seeker/writer, which can be said of every person whether they know it or not; and not until we find our true self will we feel complete.

          On the cusp of eighty, Shirley MacLaine wrote another book called What If…, and on Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul Sunday show she was asked what would she like people most to know after all her years of seeking; and Shirley replied: “The notion that all you really need in life is some fresh water, a good hat, and a really good pair of shoes.”

She was obviously making reference to her pilgrimage on the road to Santiago de Compostela in Spain which she made when she was sixty years old and wrote about in her controversial book The Camino; but her reference speaks to the outer and inner life.

Shirley MacLaine was a very successful movie actress known throughout the world for her belief in reincarnation and UFOs, and despite all the ridicule that she received for her “eccentric” beliefs she continued to seek an answer to what she called the “Big Truth.”

“Everywhere I’ve travelled in the world I’ve found that people are looking for something to fill the loneliness inside them,” wrote MacLaine in her memoir I’m Over All That; “they are after what I think of as the ‘Big Truth.’ It doesn’t matter how wealthy or well suited they are, after surface talking, joking, eating, Hollywood gossip, and cultural politeness, the conversation always turns to why are we here, what is the point of life, is God real,  are we alone in the universe?”

Like Shirley MacLaine, I was also a seeker looking for the “Big Truth,” and after years of seeking and living what Gurdjieff called “work on oneself” and Jung called “the secret way” I came to the realization that our greatest need in life is to be who we are meant to be; which made our true self the “Big Truth” that everyone is looking for.

“There is nothing but the self and God,” said Jesus in Glenda Green’s book The Keys of Jeshua; but the self that Jesus is referring to is our inner self, or divine nature. But as I and every seeker learns in our quest for the “Big Truth,” to find our true self we have to bring our outer life into agreement with our inner life; and that, sadly, is the most difficult thing in the world to do—as Christ’s parable of the rich young man tells us; because not everyone wants to sacrifice their outer life to their inner life. “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal,” said Jesus (John 12:25).

That’s precisely what Shirley MacLaine intuited with her sage little notion that all we really need in life is some fresh water, a good hat, and a really good pair of shoes; because unless we let go of what we think we are (our outer life), we will never make the pilgrimage to our inner self and satisfy our inherent longing to be whole.

That’s the sadness that I saw in Penny’s cousin’s eyes, because I felt that desperate longing in his soul to be whole. Despite having lived a full life, her aging cousin had not made that connection with his inner self that would satisfy his inner longing, and for some strange reason his longing to be whole cried out to me and touched my soul.

“Are you happy,” Oprah asked Shirley in the same interview; and Shirley MacLaine replied, “O yeah.” But Oprah, ever the curious seeker, probed a little deeper: “In that Derek Walcott poem where he talks about sit, and feasting on your life; were you able to do that?”

Very thoughtfully, Shirley replied: “Not so much my life. I sit and feast on the now. I really do that; I really do that. And so that’s why I’m so intertwined with nature; you know, my animals; my thoughts of other people. When I’m with them, I’m really feasting on the now of who they’re trying to be. What an entertainment.”

“Who they’re trying to be.” That’s the teleological pull to our inner self, the natural process of individuation which will one day bring us to our true self that Derek Walcott so presciently captured in his poem “Love after Love” that Oprah referenced— 

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you have ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life. 

          After a lifetime of questing for her true self, the courageous actress/seeker/writer finally met her true self and began to peel her image from the mirror of her life; that’s why she could feast on the now. Her quest was over, and all that remained was for her to be herself.

Shirley MacLaine lived a full life, but not until she made the pilgrimage to her inner self did she feel whole enough to feast on the now of her life; that’s why I was brought to tears by the sadness that I saw in Penny’s cousin’s eyes. His life was nearly over, but he still had a long way to go to satisfy the longing in his soul.

“Maybe in his next life,” I said to Penny, somewhere near The Canadian Carver where we stopped to gas up and catch the Carver’s end-of-summer sale.

 

♥

 

 

 

NEW BOOK COMING SOON

THE SUM OF ALL SPIRITUAL PATHS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

13: You Can't Go Home Again

13 

You Can’t Go Home Again 

Why, I don’t know, but I never read Thomas Wolfe in high school. Not only was he a contemporary of my high school hero and literary mentor Ernest Hemingway, but he was mentored by the same editor as Hemingway at Scribner’s, the legendary Maxwell Perkins, as was another of my favorite writers F. Scott Fitzgerald who introduced the young Hemingway to Perkins. Perhaps, as I suspect, the books that we read choose us; and Thomas Wolfe wasn’t on the trajectory of my life path. Nonetheless, he was responsible for the phrase “you can’t go home again,” which came to mind after my visit to my hometown of Nipigon, Northwestern Ontario after a painfully protracted eleven year absence.

Actually, Thomas Wolfe can’t take credit for that memorable line, which became the title of his posthumous novel You Can’t Go Home Again; he got it from a woman when he related his experience of going back to his hometown of Ashville, North Carolina after a deliberate eight-year absence because of his first novel Look Homeward, Angel, a thinly disguised autobiographical novel that caused a big stir in his hometown.

“But Tom, don’t you know you can’t go home again?” replied the lady when Tom told her of his horrible experience with some of the townspeople of Asheville who harbored deep resentment for him because of how he had portrayed them in his novel, which I could relate to because of the animus that I had stirred up in my hometown after the publication of my first novel What Would I Say Today If I Were to Die Tomorrow?

But that’s not uncommon for writers. Our own Nobel Laureate Alice Munroe replied to Shelagh Rogers on CBC radio when Shelagh asked her what the people of her hometown of Wingham, Southwestern Ontario thought of her stories, “I don’t know. They don’t speak to me,” replied Munroe. And there are descendants of people in Orillia, Ontario that Stephen Leacock satirized in his book Sunset Sketches of a Little Town and other stories that still harbor a deep resentment for the great writer. And my hero Hemingway had to suffer for the rest of his life the animus of his friends whom he fictionalized in the novel that launched his career, The Sun Also Rises. But where do people think great literature comes from, anyway?

“Art is an act of the imagination that transforms reality into a deeper perception of what is,” said the American poet Adrienne Rich. Actually, she said “poetry,” not art. But this applies to prose writing as well as poetry, and all Thomas Wolfe and Alice Munroe and Stephen Leacock and Ernest Hemingway did was transform the reality of their own experiences into works of fiction by an act of the imagination that revealed the deeper truth of their characters—hence the animus of the people that inspired their characters.

But that’s not the only reason why I felt I could never go home again; it went much deeper than that: it had to do with my new state of consciousness, which will require a spiritual musing to explain. So, if I may be permitted, I’m going to call upon my Muse… 

As anyone who has read my books and/or spiritual musings knows, I was a seeker from a very early age; high school, actually. And I was one of the lucky ones who found what he was looking for, which I expound upon in my literary memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway; so I can speak with the confidence of gnostic certainty about man’s journey of self-discovery because I did find my true self. And herein lies the crutch, because when one finds his true self he/she speaks from a state of consciousness that is unique to themselves alone, which is separate and distinct from his family, friends, and acquaintances.

It is practically impossible to convey this experience unless one is up on the literature, such as books like Frequency, the Power of Personal Vibration, by Penny Pierce, which conveys the perception that every soul has its own vibrational frequency, and to change one’s life one has to change their frequency; but that’s material for another musing. Suffice to say that when one leaves their hometown they step out of the frequency of their hometown vibrations and begin to experience the frequency of their new surroundings.

Inevitably then, one’s state of consciousness changes as the frequency of one’s personal vibration changes. To make my point, I had a dream one night several years after we moved to Tiny Township, Georgian Bay that spells this out so clearly it may just stir up more animus from the people of my hometown; but before I relate my dream, let me just say that I have been studying my dreams most of my life and have come to the same conclusion that Carl Jung did when he said, “Dreams are the guiding words of the soul.” In short, our dreams don’t lie. Our dreams, as North America’s greatest psychic Edgar Cayce said, “work to accomplish two things. They work to solve the problem of the dreamer’s conscious, waking life. And they work to quicken in the dreamer new potentials which are his to claim” (Edgar Cayce On Dreams, by Harmon H. Bro, edited by Hugh Lynn Cayce, p. 16).

It’s a little more complicated than this for me, though; because being a seeker who devoted his life to finding his true self, I became acquainted with teachings that precipitated the process of self-discovery, like Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself.” And I changed the frequency of my personal vibration so quickly when I got caught up in the throes of this teaching that my mother said to me one day, “You change before my eyes.”

In my dream then, I’m walking down the Main Street of Nipigon (I ran a pool hall and vending machine business on the Main Street in my early twenties), and as I’m walking down the street I cannot help but notice that everyone I meet is walking in slow motion. I’m walking at my normal pace, but everyone else is walking so slowly it feels like I’m running; and this puzzles me when I wake up. But after some reflection I realized that this spoke to my new state of consciousness, which is not to judge my hometown; my dream was simply pointing out that we vibrated at a different frequency.

This, of course, explained my inherent dissonance. And this is why after an eleven year absence from my hometown I felt I could never go home again. And to honor Thomas Wolfe for giving expression to this puzzling observation, I’ve put on my Amazon Wish List three of his books (which I know Penny will get for me for Christmas), his novel Look Homeward, Angel, which alienated Wolfe from his hometown; his posthumous sequel, You Can’t Go Home Again; and, just for good measure, The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe. That’s the least I can do for the writer who indelibly impacted Earl Hamner, the author of one of my favorite television characters, the impressionable young writer John-Boy Walton. Now, like Thomas Wolfe, I’m ready to write my own sequel whose ironic title came to me long before my protracted visit to my hometown—We May Be Tiny but We’re Not Small.

 

 

 

 

12: The Pearl of Great Price

12 

The Pearl of Great Price 

I’ve been putting it off long enough, and this morning I decided to bite the bullet and write my spiritual musing on the pearl of great price. Not that I want to, because it will put me out there, alone and singular in my perspective; but the seed has broken through from the depths of my unconscious, and I have an obligation to give it light… 

In the Gospel of Mathew, 13: 45-46. Jesus said: “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.”

Who is the merchant man, and why did Jesus liken him unto the kingdom of heaven? Why is he seeking goodly pearls? What does Jesus mean by kingdom of heaven? And what is the pearl of great price?

Jesus spoke to the public in parables. As he said to his disciples, it was not given to the public to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it was; and in private he revealed the mysteries of his parables because his disciples were ready to receive them. “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance; but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath,” said Jesus (Math. 14: 12).

It took years of “work” on myself with Gurdjieff’s teaching until I was ready to be initiated into the mysteries of the secret way of life that Jesus spoke to in his encoded teaching, and I finally broke the code of Christ’s sayings which I expound upon in my novel Jesus Wears Dockers; but I’ve been called by my Muse in today’s musing to take the logic of Christ’s teaching to its conclusion and reveal the secret of the pearl of great price.

But I cannot reveal this secret without explaining what Jesus meant when he said that his disciples were ready for the secret knowledge of his teaching while the public at large was not; so what made the disciples ready? That’s the first question.

It took most of my life to answer this question, which I’ve written about in Do We Have an Immortal Soul?, so I need not expound upon it here; suffice to say that my self-initiation into the mysteries of life allowed me to see that we are all sparks of divine consciousness whose purpose in life is to grow in our own individuality until we are mature enough to bear the fruit of our own divine nature, and then we are called back home to God; which is what Jesus meant by his saying, “Many are called, but few are chosen” and which I expound upon in my little book Why Bother? The Riddle of the Good Samaritan. And it is here that I have a parting of the ways with the world and put myself out there in my understanding of the most secret of all of Christ’s parables—the parable of the pearl of great price.

There is such great irony in this parable that I don’t know if I can do it justice, but I must try; because in this irony can be seen the infinity mercy of the Creator’s love and the incredible depths of man’s vanity, an irony that I would have remained oblivious to had I not bottomed out of my own vanity which I wrote about in my novel Healing with Padre Pio; and just what is the great irony in the parable of the pearl of great price?

In a word, the great irony is that when all is said and done the secret of Christ’s teaching—that part of his teaching that he could not give to the public because the public was not ready to receive it—is not a secret at all; it is there for everyone to see, if they have “eyes” to see it. And that’s the mystery that took the best part of my life to resolve and which now sets me apart from the rest of the world.

I went through many teachings and more suffering than I care to remember to arrive at the simple truth that the great secret is that there is no secret teaching because life itself is the way, and it took me a long time to get over my anger at the world for playing me for a fool (hence my inspiration for writing Old Whore Life, Exploring the Shadow Side of Karma), but now I am free to look at life unobfuscated by the vanity of humanity.

Every teaching claims its own truth—Christianity’s belief that only through Jesus Christ can we be saved; Gurdjieff’s belief that we are not born with an immortal soul; Buddhism’s belief that our individual self is an illusion; and the claim made by a new age teaching (which I lived for thirty years) that it is the most direct path to God; and, of course, science’s stubborn non-belief in God and the afterlife, and on and on—but when all is said and done, all ways are true because LIFE IS THE WAY. And the pearl of great price is our own life, which is the key to the kingdom of heaven. In short, all ways lead to the individual self; and the more true we are to ourselves, the more we realize our divine nature. And that’s the great irony of the parable of the pearl of great price!

 

 

 

 

 

11: A Cricket In My Window

11

A Cricket in My Window 

Another Message from the Language of Life

That Our Own Life Is the Way 

When it happens, it’s for a reason that goes to the core of one’s being; and as much as I tried to not see it, my unconscious brought it to light by way of a synchronistic experience that I could not help but acknowledge. Synchronicity connects one’s outer life with one’s inner life in a meaningful way; sometimes so meaningfully that it shocks one into awareness, as it did me when I read an article in The New Yorker on the writer James Salter.

Profiled by Nick Paumgarten in the April 15, 2013 issue, the article is titled “The Last Book, Why James Salter is not famous,” and upon reading the profile of Salter’s career as a writer I felt some relief from the anguish of my own literary insecurity; because if the “writer’s writer” could be so accomplished and still feel unacknowledged, then there was some hope for me, and I knew I was being prodded for a new spiritual musing on the fundamental dilemma of the human condition—the dread of ontological doubt.

“As a writer, you aren’t anybody until you become somebody,” said James Salter, but it wasn’t so much the article on Salter’s career that shocked me into awareness of my dilemma; it was the synchronistic timing of Penny’s impressions of a book that I had read about an artist’s journey of transformation: The Inspired Heart, by Jerry Wennstrom. I devoured this book with the same enthusiasm that I read all books of this ilk (the last one I read was The Music Lesson: A Spiritual Search for Growth Through Music, by Victor L. Wooten), because it spoke to my own journey of transformation; but Penny hated it as much as she hated Hemingway’s novel Across the River and Into the Trees, by my literary mentor Earnest Hemingway. “It’s the worst book I’ve ever read,” she said; and her feelings for Wennstrom’s book came very close to her feelings for Hemingway’s novel—and, now that I think of it, she didn’t much care for Wooten’s book either and never finished reading it.

I couldn’t believe my ears, and I had to find out why she felt that way; because although I understood why she felt that way about Hemingway’s novel (I hated it also, and so did the critics who thought it was the worst thing he ever wrote), I had to know why she felt that way about The Inspired Heart, because this book spoke to the artist’s journey of self-discovery that every person in the world will one day embark upon.

“He comes across like he’s a saint,” she said, which puzzled me until she explained what she meant. “His struggle is no different than someone in the third world struggling to survive. What makes his struggle so special?”

Jerry Wennstrom’s art had brought him to a dead end in his journey of self-discovery, and after serious deliberation he burned all of his art and gave away his personal possessions and surrendered his life to the Universe; and for fifteen years he lived totally dependent upon the grace of God and the daily gifts of synchronicity for his survival, which reconnected him with his path of art on a whole new level, and now he’s living in the happy realization that his life and his art are one and the same path.

I trusted Penny’s intuition, which can be as deadly as a Samurai’s sword (I’ve experienced enough times to know how deadly it can be), so I had to take what she felt about The Inspired Heart seriously; and I probed her until she told me why she felt so uneasy about Wennstrom’s journey of self-discovery. And then the light went on and I connected my outer experience with my inner feelings of insecurity—a synchronistic miracle of understanding that put the artist’s journey of self-discovery (Wennstrom’s, Wooten’s, and every artist’s journey in the world, including mine) into proper perspective, because for Penny there was no distinction between the artist and the rest of the world, which instantly brought to mind St. Padre Pio’s words: “Life is a journey of the self; a journey of discovery; and a journey of peace,” in that order. In one deadly swath of her Samurai sword, Penny had just cut through all the spiritual conceit of the artist’s journey; and I felt crushed by the devastating humility of the ordinariness of my life. “So I’m a writer? Big deal!”

I tried at first to justify the artist’s journey of self-discovery by the natural and/or cultivated talent of the artist, and the tireless effort and endless sacrifice that they have to make for their art; but Penny wouldn’t have it, because in her eyes everyone’s life was a journey of self-discovery, which rendered us all equal—and, as humbling as it was, I had to agree with her because all the teachings that I studied in my own journey of self-discovery brought me to the same conclusion that life is the way, and which to my heart’s delight was confirmed by one of my favorite people, Carl Gustav Jung, who wrote in The Red Book: “This life is the way, the long sought-after way to the unfathomable, which we call divine. There is no other way, all other ways are false paths.”

I’ve had some miraculous experiences in my journey of self-discovery, some that would tax the credulity of even the most devout seekers, and because I brought my journey of self-discovery to a happy resolution, I’ve always believed myself to be special; but that was my conceit, which I could not see. That’s why it was so devastating to be brought to the awareness by the synchronicity of reading the article on James Salter in The New Yorker and Penny’s impressions of Wennstrom’s book The Inspired Heart that my life was no more special than any other’s; and gradually, though not quite fast enough for me, I began to feel a little more secure in the writer that I have worked so hard to become. So I’m a writer? Big deal! Maybe now I can begin my journey of peace… 

          And so my journey begins with a timely coincidence: a cricket flew into my window to confirm the message of my musing that our own life is the way.

I have my window cracked open about eight inches to let fresh air into my writing den, and no sooner did I complete the thought of my spiritual musing and I heard something fluttering in my window, and I got up to see what the noise was.

I’ve had wasps, bees, deer flies, and lady bugs fly into my window, but never a cricket; and I knew this anomaly was symbolic, because whenever something out of the ordinary happens it means that life is trying to tell us something.

So after I opened my window wide so the cricket could fly to freedom, I Googled to find the symbolic meaning of cricket; and I came upon the site “Insect Animal Totems,” and this is what it said for cricket: “Cricket totem symbolizes good fortune. Crickets will assist you in finding new vibrational energies, enhanced intuition and psychic abilities. He may appear when grounding is needed when you use your psychic abilities. Cricket’s chirp is usually a happy one and can indicate a resurgence of your inner voice. He is similar to the grasshopper in that he is a jumping creature. He teaches you to leap over and leave behind difficult or troublesome situations. He will get you where you need to go.”

          The symbol of the cricket flying into my window the moment I finished typing the last sentence of my musing on my literary insecurity confirmed the insight that our own life is the way—be one an artist, carpenter, nurse or whatever; and I am always left in a state of awe whenever the language of life speaks to me this way, because it’s always unexpected.

This timely coincidence was especially meaningful for me however, because it gave me the ontological security that I needed to confirm my life as a writer; and whenever the feeling of literary insecurity possesses me again, I’ll think of the cricket in my window that will get me where I need to go because the language of life told me so!