10: The Mooring of Our Life

10 

The Mooring of Our Life 

“The more the outside world spins out of control,

The more your interior world must assume total control.”

Caroline Myss 

Canada Day, and it’s raining; so we don’t know if we’re going to venture out to take in the Canada Day celebrations. We usually go to Orillia, the town that Stephen Leacock made famous with his Sunset Sketches of a Little Town. They celebrate Canada Day by the waterfront with various food booths and activities, and if he’s up to it Gospel Elvis may show up to sing a tune or two with endearing verisimilitude. We may still attend; but as we were having our morning coffee the conversation found its way to the interior life, how people are so focused on their exterior life that they have very little time to focus on their interior life, and I said to Penny, “I think I should do a spiritual musing on this.”

But I needed an entry point, as I always do whenever an idea for a spiritual musing comes to me; so we talked about this and that—friends and relatives, which was normal, and the new book that I was reading, Caroline Myss’s book Entering the Castle, Finding the Inner Path to God and Your Soul’s Purpose; and as we talked about the interior life the word “mooring” just popped into my mind, and with a gentle nod from my Muse I’m going to explore the concept of “mooring” in today’s spiritual musing… 

To moor something is to anchor it, like mooring a boat. In his iconic poem Invictus, which inspired Nelsen Mandela for 27 years in prison on Robben Island, the poet William Ernest Henley sees our life as a ship at the mercy of the capricious forces of the sea of life, which he refers to as “the fell clutch of circumstance,” but despite what tempestuous forces come soul’s way, Henley says, “I am the master of my fate: /I am the captain of my soul.”

Henley’s poem Invictus anchored Nelson Mandela’s soul. He wrote the poem on a scrap of paper and had it on his prison wall and drew strength from it every day; in this way he “moored” his soul despite “the horror of the shades” and “menace of the years.” “I am fundamentally an optimist,” Mandela wrote in his memoirs. “I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death.” And when he was released from prison he became president of South Africa; and the Robben Island prison became a monument to his indomitable courage, endurance, and optimism.

Ever since the explosion of social media I’ve been in a quandary, because for the life of me I fail to see where we are headed; it all seems to be coming in so fast and furious that it feels like a phantasmagoric blur of human activity that has no inherent purpose, and life feels like a rudderless ship blown hither and thither by the capricious god Poseidon.  

I know better, though. I know that life is not a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing; but one would never guess this from social media. It all seems to be up in the air, a catch-as-catch-can game of beat the clock before the monster tsunami comes rolling in and destroys us all, and people are too afraid to stop and moor their soul to safe harbor and grab as much life as they can before their ship goes down; even the hosts of my favorite CBC talk shows Q and The Current are speaking at double the speed to squeeze in all the information they can into their limited slot of time. It’s exhausting!

Has society lost its mooring? Is this why there are so many social disruptions and soul-wrenching insurrections across the world—not to mention all the calamitous weather anomalies that have uprooted so many lives? What’s going on?

Change, that’s what’s going on. The winds of change are blowing throughout the world, especially in the Middle East, and the world is going through a transition that has thrown us all into confusion. That’s why it feels like the world is going mad. But it’s not. It just seems that way. But the change that I see coming may not be so easy to explain…

 

         

 

 

 

 

9: Facebook Therapy

9

Facebook Therapy 

          Has anyone ever stopped to wonder why life is always teaching us lessons? What is the point of all these lessons? That’s today’s spiritual musing… 

I had an experience the other day that prompted this spiritual musing, which will be my point of entry; but I don’t want to reveal this experience just yet. Suffice to say that I learned a lesson on Facebook that made me more sensitive to another person’s feelings; which leads me to ask: is the point of life’s lessons to make us more sensitive human beings?

My answer is an unqualified YES. That’s why I wrote Why Bother? The Riddle of the Good Samaritan. This was my answer to Christ’s teaching of eternal life. I wanted to know why the Samaritan stopped to help the injured man by the side of the road when the Priest and Levite walked on by; and the answer that I came to was that Jesus was teaching us about the self-transcending power of love with his Parable of the Good Samaritan.

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that life has purpose; and let’s further say that because we don’t know what this purpose is, life teaches us lessons so we can become aware of life’s purpose. The question then becomes: what is our purpose in life?

After all, we are all a part of life; so life’s purpose would be our purpose. But we are all individual souls with free will; wouldn’t this imply that we all have an individual purpose commensurate with the collective purpose of life? And wouldn’t this mean that if we knew what our individual purpose was we would become aware of life’s purpose?

If I were a poet I would draw an aphoristic insight from this perspective, and it would be something like this: to know ourselves is to know life. And, conversely: the more we know life, the more we know ourselves. Does not this imply that life teaches us lessons so we can know ourselves better? But because we are all individual souls with free will, the lessons that life teaches us are for our own good and not another’s, as such; and this begs the question: what is our own good? What is it exactly that life wants us to learn? That’s the real question… 

I was a seeker for many years, and I studied and lived many paths, starting with Gurdjieff’s remarkable teaching of “work on oneself,” and I was one of the fortunate thirty birds in the Sufi allegory The Conference of the Birds that found his way to God; so I have my own answer to the imponderable question of our own good, and as improbable as it may seem to the uninitiated, our own good is the divine nature of our core being.

In my long and arduous quest for my true self, I came to the realization—it was more of a gnostic awakening, actually—that we are all sparks of God, or immortal seeds if you will; and that our purpose in life is to grow and evolve in our divine nature until we become aware that we are one with our Creator; which makes life the medium and the way to our true self—the same conclusion that Carl Jung came to in his quest for his lost soul, as he tells us in The Red Book, the remarkable chronicle of his confrontation with the unconscious: “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.”

If this life is the way to our true self then, as Jung and I came to realize, it would follow that life teaches us lessons for the purpose of bringing us closer to our Creator; and because we are all individual souls with free will, the lessons that we have to learn are specific to our own nature—like the lesson that I learned on Facebook the other day.

But before I relate this simple lesson—so nuanced it was one of the most poignant little lessons of my life—let me address the mystery of our nature, which took me most of my life to resolve, because it speaks to the paradox of our free will and life’s purpose.

We don’t invite the lessons that life gives us; or so we think. “Why me?” we cry forlornly, in the despair of our new life lesson. “What the hell did I do to deserve this?” another person asks, which is much closer to the mark—because life’s lessons speak to the choices that we’ve made in life, which in some teachings is called our personal karma.

I’ve spoken to this issue of free will and karma in other musings, so I need not expound upon it here; suffice to say that the more life we experience, the more clearly we discern how life works—which we find expressed in many of life’s wisdom sayings, like “what goes around comes around,” and “you get back what you put out.”

          We have free will, then; but the choices we make create karma, and karma becomes our personal destiny. But because we are all immortals souls whose purpose in life is to grow and evolve in our own divine nature, our karma often inhibits our spiritual growth; and that’s when life teaches us the lessons that we need to learn to bring our karmic destiny into agreement with our spiritual purpose. In a word, we are free to choose what we want; but if what we want inhibits our spiritual growth, then the merciful law of life—“the way, the long sought-after way to the unfathomable, which we call divine”—comes into play to reconcile our karmic destiny with our spiritual purpose; hence the reason for life’s lessons.

So it seems I needed a lesson in sensitivity… 

I read a posting on Facebook. It was a Photo posted by a man who every now and then spills his angst on Facebook. The commentary went like this: “Yes, I am a strong person, /but every now and then /I need someone /to take my hand and /say everything will be alright.” He was referring to his loving wife, and his close personal friends responded with kind, sympathetic comments; and though I am only his Facebook friend, I commented also.

I checked his post later on and noticed that he had given a “Like” to all the comments but mine, and during the day I reflected on my comment and got the strongest feeling that I had violated this man’s personal space. Not that my comment was unsympathetic, it just seemed like I had walked in on a very private moment that he was having with his close personal friends, and my comment now felt like a profane intrusion; so I went back on Facebook and deleted my comment, and this resolved my uneasy feelings.

It bothered me that I felt uneasy about my comment, so I turned the problem over to my Muse—a technique that I’ve learned to cultivate with years of creative writing; and before I knew it, my unconscious produced an image that put my uneasy feelings into perspective: in my mind’s eye I saw my Facebook friend on a therapist’s couch unburdening his anguished soul, and his close personal Facebook friends were his support group and therapist.

Our creative unconscious gives us symbols—in dreams and in our waking life with images that just pop into our mind—to help us make sense of life; and the image of my Facebook friend unburdening himself to his close personal friends explained why I felt uneasy about my comment, because I had intruded on his private session of Facebook therapy.

And to confirm this insight, another image popped into my mind: a man is walking down the road to Jericho and stops to watch the Good Samaritan helping the injured man by the side of the road. Instead of helping the injured man like the Good Samaritan, he merely says a few sympathetic words and continues walking by; and that’s why I felt so uneasy about the comment that I had posted, because it lacked the sensitivity of the Good Samaritan and did not appreciate how much my Facebook friend was hurting.

As public as Facebook may be, the pain and hurt and grief that people share on Facebook has to be respected for the healing grace that comes from friends who really care; and as innocuous as it may seem to be, my Facebook experience taught me a lesson I’ll never forget because it made me a better human being in my newfound sensitivity.