55: Not Ready Yet...

55 

Not Ready Yet…

 

“All destiny leads down the same path—

growth, love and service.”

 

THE WHEEL OF LIFE

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

 

Talking with a friend the other day, who over the summer holidays had read my book The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway, from which he gleaned a surprising insight into his own life, the topic of reincarnation came up and I told him about a dream I had that in my next life I’m going to come back as a precocious writer, and then I was about to share an epiphany I had about reincarnation but for some reason was censored and couldn’t relate my epiphany because I couldn’t remember it.

It’s not unusual to have my mind censored when I’m talking with someone, and by being censored I don’t mean that I had a “senior moment” or a “brain freeze.” It was certainly a lapse of memory, but it had nothing to do with brain chemistry; it had to do with the information I wasn’t supposed to share with my friend because he wasn’t meant to hear it. But who or what censored my thoughts?

As exciting as this may be, it’s not the subject of today’s spiritual musing; it is only my entry point, because it was this conversation that called me to write a musing on my epiphany on reincarnation which is as clear in my mind today as it was when it first came to me; and my epiphany is this: no one can break the cycle of life and death until they are ready, and making oneself ready was what inspired my epiphany on spiritual liberation; but before I reveal my epiphany, let me shed some light on this mystery of my mind going blank whenever I’m about to share something that is not meant to be shared with the person that I am speaking with.

This hasn’t happened all that often, but enough times to alert me to my censor, and by censor I mean an inner guiding principle that is infinitely wiser than my working-day personality. And as strange as this may seem, I’m not alone in this unique relationship with my inner guiding principle because the Greek philosopher Socrates also had a censor that he called an inner voice, an “oracle which comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I am going to do, but never commands me to do anything,” as he tells us in Plato’s Dialogue the Apology.

I’ve never been commanded to do anything by my “oracle” either, but when I get censored I know I have been forbidden to share my thoughts with the person I’m speaking with, and I can only assume that it was either for my own protection or because it wasn’t meant for them hear what I was about to share. Why they weren’t meant to hear what I was about to say, I can only guess; but the memory of what I wanted to share always comes back to me after I part company with the person I was speaking with. Now, back to my epiphany that I was called upon to share in today’s spiritual musing…

 

I can’t count the number of times in the course of my life that I’ve heard people say: “This is my last life. I’m never coming back. One lifetime is enough for me, thank you,” or some variation of the same theme that one has had their fill of life and wants nothing more to do with it, and this includes people who believe in karma and reincarnation and should know better; but they don’t, and that was my epiphany.

What I find curious however is why it took so long for me to see it, because I had long ago come to the realization in my journey of self-discovery that the purpose of our existence is to become what we are meant to be, which is our true self; but herein lies the mystery of today’s musing, because I know now why I was given this epiphany that I was about to share it with my friend the other day before I got censored.

Gurdjieff impressed upon me that nature will only evolve man so far and no further, and to become what we are meant to be we have to take evolution into our own hands with conscious effort and intentional suffering; this is why I was censored when speaking with my friend. My epiphany would have threatened the conventional status quo, which he represented and which evolves unconsciously through the natural process of karma and reincarnation until one has evolved enough to take evolution into their own hands and consciously complete what nature cannot finish, as I was compelled to do early in my life when I was called to find my true self.

Upon reflection, I can’t help but see a common thread now running through all the times that I got censored; and that common thread is what Carl Jung called “the problem of resistance to understanding.” In a letter to his friend and pupil Doctor Hans Schmid (November 6, 1915), Jung revealed how man’s resistance to understanding was finally clarified for him by a vision given to Brigitta of Sweden (1303-1373), who became St. Bridget.  Jung wrote that Brigitta’s vision explained the psychology of devils, which in Jung’s lexicon would be the psychology of man’s unconscious shadow self that is insatiable in its appetite for life experience.

“Their belly is so swollen because their greed was boundless, for they filled themselves and were not sated, and so great was their greed that, had they been able to gain the whole world, they would gladly have exerted themselves, and would moreover have desired to reign in heaven,” wrote Brigitta about her vision; and Jung realized that “the devil (the shadow side of our ego personality) is the devourer,” and “understanding is likewise a devouring,” because “understanding swallows you up.”

This was such a powerful vision that Jung immediately saw why people (especially his patients who bared their soul to him) have a resistance to understanding. “Understanding is a fearfully bounding power, at times a veritable murderer of the soul as soon as it flattens out vitally important differences,” wrote Jung in his letter. “The core of the individual is a mystery of life, which is snuffed out when it is ‘grasped.’” Hence man’s resistance to understanding: our shadow does not want to be snuffed out and swallowed up by being understood and resists the light of cognition; but this is such a profound insight that it needs further explanation…

 

Our shadow is the unconscious side of our conscious ego personality, the repository of everything that we do not want to deal with consciously; like those embarrassing little moments when we made a fool of ourselves with our friends or at a social function, or the lie that we told to save face and countless other sins and foibles and grotesqueries that we refuse to resolve by dealing with them consciously and which over time coalesce into little matrixes of unresolved energy that become our personal demons. This is why I refuted novelist John Irving’s karmically flawed premise in my spiritual musing “Chicken Little Syndrome,” his personal belief central to all his novels. “You don’t choose your demons, they choose you,” he boasted, with authorial certainty; a totally blind perspective on how the logic of life works.

Karma is a personal responsibility, and not until we have evolved enough through the natural process of karma and reincarnation will we be spiritually mature enough to take evolution into our own hands and live our life with conscious karmic awareness; that’s why I was censored from sharing my epiphany with my friend the other day, because the thought of taking karmic responsibility for one’s own life scares the devil out of people, and one instinctively blocks out the light of understanding by going into denial to protect their shadow self. And this brings me back to the central motif of my spiritual musing: no one can break the cycle of life and death until they are ready. Which begs the question: when is one ready?

 

Given the analogy of the oyster creating its own precious pearl, man creates his own precious spiritual identity by individuating the consciousness of his many personalities that he created with every incarnation. This presupposes reincarnation, because it’s not possible to individuate one’s spiritual identity in one lifetime alone; and I have proof of this from my own past-life regressions which I’ve written about in The Summoning of Noman and need not expound upon here.

The Oyster’s pearl grows out of the oyster’s own cells, and our spiritual identity grows out of the karmic “cells” of our many life experiences, which means that we grow in positive and negative karma until we have grown as far as evolution can take us; but like the acorn seed that longs to become an oak tree, so too do we long to become all that we are meant to be, and to do this we have to take evolution into our own hands to complete what nature cannot finish, and herein lies our problem. 

To complete what nature cannot finish we have to resolve our negative karma, because the consciousness of negative karma is not pure enough for our soul self to realize its divine nature, or spiritual identity; and to purify the consciousness of our negative karmic self we have to transform it, which is the essential purpose of all spiritual teachings. But how exactly do we transform our negative karmic self?

I began the process of self-transformation with Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” with conscious effort and intentional suffering, which inspired my edict of self-denial that I called my Royal Dictum, which in turn awakened me to the secret way that I found in Christ’s sayings and parables, and the more I practiced the secret way the more I transformed my negative karmic self; and by secret way I mean the art of purifying the consciousness of my negative karmic self by becoming a giver instead of a taker, which was the most difficult part of my journey of self-discovery.  

In the words of St. Paul, I practiced the art of “dying daily” to my selfish nature and disciplined myself to become unselfish. That’s how I purified the consciousness of my negative karmic self, which Socrates confirmed in the Phaedo: “And what is purification but the separation of the soul from the body, as I was saying before, the habit of the soul gathering and collecting herself into herself.”

That’s how one takes evolution into their own hands, by becoming a giver and not a taker; because the act of unselfish living has the power to purify the consciousness of our negative karmic self and, in the words of Jesus, makes our two selves into one self which he called “the pearl of great price.”

Given my love for aphorisms, I distilled my whole journey of self-discovery into a simple saying which speaks to the paradoxical process of spiritual self-realization consciousness: the more you give of yourself, the more of yourself you will have to give; and the less you give of yourself, the less of yourself you will have to give. And one day we will have grown enough to realize our spiritual identity, as I did that day in my mother’s kitchen while she was kneading bread dough on the kitchen table and I gave birth to my spiritual self. I knew that I was immortal, and the longing in my soul no longer drove my will to be because I had become my true self.

Not until we have evolved enough to give back to life then will we be ready to break the cycle of life and death, because this is the only way we can complete what nature cannot finish; and until we do, we karmically fate ourselves to return to life to complete our journey of self-discovery. This is what I couldn’t tell my friend the other day, because my “oracle” knew that silence was the better part of wisdom.

 

***

 

 

 

54: Man's Will to Be

54

Man’s Will to Be

“Man does not simply exist but always decides

what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.”

Man’s Search for Meaning

Victor Frankl

Not all of my spiritual musings come to me in a synoptic vision wherein I see the whole truth of my concept or idea and then have to work it out in the writing (and not without considerable thought and effort, I might add); some, if not most of my musing insights have to gestate in my unconscious for months and often years before they take seed and sprout in the soil of my conscious mind and grow and blossom into their full meaning, like the insight for today’s spiritual musing that I have called “man’s will to be.”

This dynamic between my creative unconscious and conscious mind goes to the very heart of writing my spiritual musings, which I have to reflect upon for a moment or two before I proceed with man’s will to be; not to detract from my musing, but to help explain the mystery of the creative process that is central to today’s spiritual musing on man’s will to be.

In my long journey of self-discovery I came to the realization that man’s greatest need in life is to be what he is meant to be. This is an a priori need that exists before we even come into this world, and it drives all of our other needs like our need for air, water, food, sex, and emotional succor. This need to be what we are meant to be presupposes itself because it is encoded in our soul, just like the oak tree is presupposed in the acorn seed; and our purpose in life is to grow and become what we are meant to be. This is why Carl Jung said, “As each plant grows from a seed and becomes in the end an oak tree, so man must become what he is meant to be. He ought to get there, but most get stuck.”

The biggest, and probably most important discovery of my life was the realization that we do not come into this world ready-made, as such; we have to grow into what we are meant to be, which makes becoming what we are meant to be the very purpose of our existence, and what we are meant to be is our true self which is our essential, spiritual self.

I’ve already explained in my spiritual musings (and in more detail in my books Do We Have an Immortal Soul? and The Pearl of Great Price) why we come into this world with an a priori need to be our true self, which Jesus called “the pearl of great price,” but the realization that came to me in my journey of self-discovery was that to be our true self we have to become our true self just as the oyster has to create its pearl from a tiny mineral fragment. That is what I meant by saying that we do not come into this world ready-made; we have to “create” our true self like the oyster creates its precious pearl. Our precious pearl is our true self, the evolving identity of our essential spiritual nature.

And this is where I part company with Christianity (but not Christ’s teaching that addresses the dynamic of becoming our true self) which contends that our immortal soul is created at the moment of human conception and is ready-made, and Buddhism which disavows the existence of an individual self altogether, and all non-duality teachings that categorically believe that we are one Self complete unto ourselves without having to go through the pilgrimage and penance stage of becoming our true self as Jesus taught with his sayings and parables; and we cannot become our true self without participating in the creative process of our becoming, which brings me back to the theme of man’s will to be.

In effect, we have to work with our creative unconscious to become our true self, because this is how we grow in our spiritual nature; and even though this is a natural process that we go through despite ourselves (we are forever making decisions that involve the creative process of our unconscious mind), our need to be cannot be satisfied without a strong will to do, because only through doing can we satisfy our will to be.  This is why some people get “hooked” on life, like running, cycling, hiking, mountain climbing, gardening, and one’s work even, because they have a voracious hunger to satisfy their will to be because the logic of life is that the more we do the more we become what we are meant to be.

This is how we become our true self through the natural process of evolution through karma and reincarnation; but—and this is a very big but—we cannot satisfy the longing in our soul to be our true self through karma and reincarnation alone until we take evolution into our own hands, which we can only do with what Gurdjieff called conscious effort and intentional suffering—the Sufis call it “conscious dying,” or “dying before dying,” and Jesus expressed the same process of becoming our true self in his saying “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.”

“Man must complete what nature cannot finish,” said the ancient Alchemists, the Gnostics of the soul; and it was this realization that man’s greatest need in life is his will to be that added a deeper layer of meaning to the existential premise of Victor Frankl’s remarkable book Man’s Search for Meaning which posits that man’s fundamental need in life is to know the reason for his being, which Dr. Frankl reduced to “man’s will to meaning.”

As I said, not all of my spiritual musings come to me synoptically, they gestate in my unconscious until they are ready to take seed in my conscious mind; and when they sprout in my conscious mind my Muse will find a way to assist the seed to grow and blossom into its full meaning, as it did when quite by “chance” I came across Victor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning while looking for Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces in my basement library this summer and which I was strongly nudged to read; and as I read Man’s Search for Meaning the seed of today’s spiritual musing sprouted as “man’s will to be” because it completed Victor Frankl’s “will to meaning.” (And this, if I may be allowed to say so, is how the collective unconscious works through the consciousness of the individual self to help expand and raise the consciousness of humanity.)

Victor Frankl was a young psychiatrist when he was sent to the concentration camps by the Nazis in WW II, and like all the prisoners in the camps he suffered many humiliating indignities in the hands of his tormentors who stripped him to his primal, naked being; but out of his unthinkable physical and mental anguish was born his existential psychology of Logotherapy (“a meaning-centered psychotherapy”) which has become a remarkable healing modality for tortured and conflicted souls that suffer unbearable loss of meaning.

The seemingly senseless nature of the brutal suffering that Victor Frankl and his fellow prisoners suffered in the hands of their evil captors in the concentration camps forced him to part the veil of life and see that the prisoners who had something to live for, even if only in their own mind, found meaning in their unbearable existence; but what gave them their will to meaning was the inherent teleological purpose of their life, which is man’s will to be. In conclusion, we have a will to meaning because we have a will to be our true self, and no amount of suffering can extinguish the holy flame of our existence.

───

53: "Go to the Casino," Reflections on the Voice Within

53

“Go to the Casino”

Reflections on the Voice Within

This is a dangerous musing, and I don’t want to write it; but when my Muse whispers into my ear I have no choice but to do what I have been called to do, for such is the nature of the mysterious relationship between the writer and the source of his inspiration.

The idea for today’s spiritual musing has been gestating in my unconscious for years waiting for the right conditions to set it free, which came with an experience that my life partner Penny Lynn had this past summer when she went to work one day and heard a voice say to her, not once but three times, “Go to the casino,” but I would never write this musing had she not given me permission to share her incredible experience.

But aside from Penny’s experience, which gives today’s spiritual musing on the voice within anecdotal credibility because I trust Penny Lynn implicitly, I have a reputable precedent in my favorite philosopher Socrates whom Plato tells us in the Apology was guided all of his life by an inner voice that he called his oracle. “This is a sign I have had ever since I was a child,” said Socrates at his trial in Athens for sedition and heresy. “The sign is a voice which comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I am going to do, but never commands me to do anything, and this is what stands in the way of my being a politician.”

Socrates had inner guidance, as we all do; but not all of us hear an inner voice, and if we do it speaks to us according to our needs and destined purpose as it did to Socrates and my life partner Penny Lynn. And I, too, heard an inner voice when I hit a brick wall with Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” and did not know where to turn; the voice within was loud and clear, and it said to me: “Why do you lie?”

This simple question was like a stick of dynamite that blew a hole in my life and set me free from my false self (which Gurdjieff called our “false personality” and Carl Jung called our “shadow,” the unconscious side of ego), because the more I focused on what I said and did the more acutely conscious I became of my own falseness; and this simple question that came from within set me on the path to my true self which I finally wrote about forty years later in my memoir The Summoning of Noman.

So, the question that is crying to be asked today is this: what is this inner voice, this guidance that comes from within that said to Penny Lynn, “Go to the casino”?

Socrates, best known to the world for his philosophical pronouncement “the unexamined life is not worth living,” called his oracle “the divinity.” And Eileen Caddy, one of the founding members (along with her husband Peter and Dorothy Maclean) of the New Age spiritual community of Findhorn in northern Scotland, which became world renowned for its legendary garden of giant vegetables, called her guiding voice “the God within.” She also referred to her inner guidance as “the still, small voice within.” I call it my intuitive, or Higher Self; but why would this be a dangerous musing to write?

When Eileen Caddy first heard the voice within she had just written a letter to her husband Andrew Combe stationed in Iraq asking him for a divorce, and he replied immediately forbidding her to see their five children. It was at this time that a traumatized Eileen visited a private sanctuary in Glastonbury with her future husband Peter Caddy where while meditating she heard the voice within say to her, “Be still and know that I am God.” Eileen thought she was having a nervous breakdown, but over time she began “to love the voice as an instrument from the God within us all,” and she continued to be guided by the voice within which helped her to found the spiritual community of Findhorn that went on to become a beacon of light for the world; and I can’t help but feel that this is a dangerous musing because in this spiritually suffocating materialistic world of ours anyone who talks about hearing the voice of God will inevitably invite ridicule, which is why I refer to the voice within as our intuitive, or Higher Self. But I didn’t come to this insight lightly. As a matter of fact, it took many years of anguished living before I made the connection…

We all have hunches, nudges, gut feelings, and compulsions to do certain things—“I just feel I have to do this,” we say when we’re caught in the grips of our destined purpose—and more often than not, the course of our life is changed; but why did we feel compelled to do what we did, like my inexplicable compulsion to take up Gurdjieff’s teaching?

Without going into a long and detailed explanation, which I’ve done in The Summoning of Noman, in my quest for my true self I had seven past-life regressions; and in one of my regressions I was miraculously brought back to the Body of God where all new souls come from, but I had no individual self-awareness.

I was an atom of God in the Body of God, and I had consciousness but no self-consciousness; and in the same regression I went back to my first primordial human lifetime on earth as a higher primate where I experienced the dawning of my reflective self-consciousness, and with each successive incarnation I grew in the consciousness of my reflective self through the natural process of karma and reincarnation until in my current lifetime I felt compelled to take evolution into my own hands with Gurdjieff’s teaching and realize my true self, which I’ve written about in The Pearl of Great Price that was inspired by Christ’s most sacred parable.

I discovered reincarnation, which Socrates called “a doctrine uttered in secret,” in my teens, and in my long journey of self-discovery I came to see that we all have two destinies—one personal, which is born of our will to choose freely, and one spiritual, which is teleologically pre-scripted by our divine nature; and our purpose in life is to grow in our personal destiny until we are evolved enough to align our personal destiny with our spiritual destiny and realize our true self, which Jesus called “the pearl of great price.”

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls. Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it,” said Jesus in coded language for the call to one’s true self; and it is this mysterious call to one’s destined purpose that I refer to as the “omniscient guiding force of life” which I also believe to be voice within that speaks to us in our moments of need and destined purpose, as it did to Socrates, Eileen Caddy, my life partner, and myself and every person in the world though few people make the connection, because it implies that we’re all divine beings in the process of becoming one with God which is too much for people to deal with. But then, didn’t Jesus say, “I and my Father are one”?

“There is a doctrine uttered in secret that man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away,” said Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo. “This is a great mystery which I do not quite understand. Yet I, too, believe that the gods are our guardians, and that we are a possession of theirs,” added Socrates, again speaking in the coded language of the secret way that we are imprisoned in the eternal cycle of life and death (karma and reincarnation) and the purpose of life is to grow in who we are (our individual self) through the natural process of evolution through karma and reincarnation until nature can evolve us no further and we have to complete what nature cannot finish by taking evolution into our own hands to realize our true self, which Gurdjieff’s teaching helps us to do—and Christ’s teaching, along with other teachings in the world like Sufism and Taoism, and always aided by the omniscient guiding force of life that speaks to us as the voice within.

This implies a benevolent intelligence that watches over us, which over time I had no choice but to believe because of the many inexplicable synchronicities in my life that always assisted me in my times of desperate need (which is why I came to refer to meaningful coincidences as the merciful law of divine synchronicity), so when Penny heard the voice say to her “Go to the casino”, not once but three times, each time after her objection because she was working and couldn’t justify taking time off to go to the casino, which speaks to her probity of character I had to ask myself—knowing what I do about the omniscient guiding force of life that is forever working on our behalf to help us bring our personal destiny into agreement with our spiritual destiny—why did the voice want my life partner to take time off work to go to the casino? What divine purpose was there in going to the casino?

I had no idea, and the other morning over coffee in my writing room I asked her to relate the whole experience which I recorded on my mini-recorder that I used when I taped my ten spiritual healing sessions with the psychic medium who channeled St. Padre Pio which became the basis of my novel Healing with Padre Pio; and with Penny’s permission, I’m going to include the entire transcript of her incredible casino experience:

         

O: So, what happened that day?

 PL: I was working at Walmart, or I was going to work at Walmart—

O: You heard the voice before you went to work?

 PL: I was sitting in my car. I had a Tcheck’it call to do at Walmart, and I had just arrived at Walmart. I was sitting in my car because my Tcheck’it app kept asking me for my location. The application has a GPS on it, so when you go from town to town it picks up your location so it can give you driving directions to the store. For some odd reason, when I left home that morning I knew there were calls at Walmart in Wasaga Beach, because the application notifies you by text message when there are calls in your area, and I had signed up for this Tcheck’it through MCA (Merchandising Consultants Association). They thought it would be a way for reps to make a little extra money and a kind of a fun thing to do. So anyway, I had come from the Dollarama Store in the morning and was about to go in to do my call at Walmart for Hallmark, and with Tcheck’it you always have to take a picture of the outside of the store that you’re at just to verify that you were at that store, and I thought I would take my picture as I was going into the store first before doing my Tcheck’it call so I wouldn’t have to do it after I took the rest of my pictures in the store and answer the questions for my call. Well anyway the GPS wouldn’t pick up my location, and for some odd reason it wouldn’t load the call; so I’m sitting in the car having my coffee and I’m trying to get my location sorted out on the Tcheck’it app and I hear this voice, and it says to me, “Go to the casino.” Just as plain as day, “Go to the casino”—

O: You herd this voice in your head?

PL: No. I heard it out loud. It said, “Go to the casino.” I don’t know if it was in my head or whatever, but I mean it was like someone was sitting there talking—

O: And it said, “Go to the casino”?

PL: It said, “Go to the casino.” And I said no, I can’t go to the casino. I’m working. But the thing is, the day was August 13^th. It was the 29^th anniversary of my brother’s death—

O: And you were very close to your brother—

PL: I was very very close to my brother, and I felt that that was like a guiding voice from him, or after the fact I thought, I wasn’t really sure; I didn’t really think of it at that particular time; but anyway, I just said no, I can’t go to the casino, I’m working. So anyway, I’m sitting there—

O: Did it sound like your brother’s voice though?

PL: It was just a male voice. No, it didn’t sound specifically like his voice. It was just a voice—

O: A male voice?

PL: Well, you know; it’s really even hard to say whether the voice had a gender. It was a directional voice. That’s the only way I can describe it. For me, it was; it sounded more on the male side. So then, I’m sitting in my car having my coffee and trying to get my application to work, and for the second time I hear this voice talk to me, and it said, “Go to the casino,” and once again I answered, no, I’m not going to the casino, I’m working. Anyway, about twenty minutes had gone by and I’m still fiddling with the application on my phone—

O: Why are you fiddling?

PL: I’m trying to get it to load the location so that the calls would come up. None of the calls were coming up, because for some odd reason GPS wasn’t picking up my location, and without the location the app can’t determine whether there’s calls in your area. So anyway, after fiddling with that for about twenty minutes I said to myself, you know, for a three dollar call, is it worth all of this aggravation? And at that point I heard that voice for the third time, and it said, “Go to the casino.” So I said, okay, alright; first of all though I have to go into Walmart, go to the washroom, and I have to stop at the bank and deposit a cheque, and I will go to the casino. And that’s what I did.

O: Okay, you went to the casino?

PL: I went to the casino, and I wasn’t there very long—

O: The casino is the Georgian Downs casino?

PL: Georgian Downs out of Barrie.

O: In Barrie, okay; which would be about an hour’s drive?

PL: No, about forty minutes. But the thing is, I kind of felt a little bit guilty because I always call you at lunch time, and it was getting pretty close to lunchtime. Actually, it was lunchtime just as I was pulling into Georgian Downs, and I had to tell you a little fib because I didn’t want to say that I listened to this little voice in my head and went to the casino; and, it’s not something that I would normally do. I don’t normally go somewhere without telling you; but I was compelled by this voice to follow this through.  So I thought, well, for now I’m not going to say anything. I can always fess up later. Anyway, I made my call to you, and I got into the casino, and I’m not there very long, and I win money. And I kept winning money. And I had actually won over eleven hundred dollars, but it was too early to come home and I told you I was at work, and I thought if I drive home now you’re going to think, well holy molly, that was really a short day; so I decided to stay there and play a little bit more. I mean, I did play down almost two hundred dollars of what I had won, but it was fine; and I came out of there with nine hundred and fifteen dollars.

O: And that’s it? You didn’t hear the voice anymore?

PL: Never heard the voice anymore, never heard the voice since.

That was Penny’s casino experience, but because she had heard the voice within once before when we were going through troubled waters in our relationship because of my past-life regressions which brought back the memory of our past lifetime together back in Genoa, Italy when we were man and wife and I betrayed our family honor by humiliating my wife on the dance floor with my mistress on the biggest social event of the year, I broke Penny’s heart and she never spoke to me again; that’s why we got together in this lifetime. I had to mend her broken heart, which made our relationship much more than the eye could see, because when I went back to that lifetime in my regression all hell broke loose in our relationship and Penny was ready to pack her bags and leave me; but on a walk one evening she heard the voice within which addressed her vanity, and she decided to stay. But we decided that this was too personal, and I’m not going to mention what the voice said to her; and I mention this only to verify the point I want to make with today’s spiritual musing.

Had I not had my seven past-life regressions I would never have connected the dots and discerned our  purpose in life; but because I did, I know from personal experience that we come from the Body of God to grow and evolve through life until nature has evolved us enough to give birth to a new “I” of God, as I experienced, and from lifetime to lifetime we continue to grow in the “I” of God (our own reflective self-consciousness) until nature can evolve us no further through karma and reincarnation and we have to complete what nature cannot finish by taking evolution into our own hands, as I did with Gurdjieff’s teaching. But I have told this story in The Summoning of Noman and need not repeat myself here; suffice to say that because we are all atoms of God’s Body, God watches over us every moment of the day, and whenever we need guidance to bring our personal destiny into agreement with our spiritual destiny God speaks to us, as it did to Penny Lynn; but what did her going to the casino have to do with bringing her personal destiny into agreement with her spiritual destiny? That’s the mystery of the voice within, and the point of today’s spiritual musing.

From the moment an atom of God gives birth to a new “I” of God, it separates from the evolving consciousness of life and creates its own personal destiny out of its encoded purpose to grow in the “I” of God, or its newborn identity if you will; and when the atom of God has grown enough in its own identity to realize that life can do no more to satisfy its longing to become all that it is meant to be, the atom of God must find a way to satisfy this longing; but how? Where does it look to satisfy this longing?

“As each plant grows from a seed and becomes in the end an oak tree, so man must become what he is meant to be. He ought to get there, but most get stuck,” said Carl Jung; and, sad to say, we all get stuck in one lifetime or another and in righteous anger declare a variation of Macbeth’s lamentation that “life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” But nothing could be further from the truth, and whether it happens in this lifetime or the next the divine logic of life will bring our personal destiny into agreement with our spiritual destiny to fulfill our destined purpose; and after much reflection I finally reasoned out the logic of Penny Lynn’s casino experience.

The reason we get stuck on our destined journey to our true self is because we have created a karmic pattern that will not allow us to transcend ourselves, and Penny had created a karmic pattern in her attitude towards money that inhibited her spiritual growth; and no matter what she did, she could not break this mental habit. That’s why providence intervened with the voice within by telling her to go to the casino.

The only reason that Penny listened to the voice within and went to the casino was because she finally realized that all of her aggravation to do her Tcheck’it call wasn’t worth the three dollars she would be getting. It wasn’t going to change her financial status, and she threw her hands into the air, metaphorically speaking, and said, alright, I’ll go to the casino if that’s what you want me to do; and she went and came home with $915, which paid for our little trip up north to visit her family the following month.

Penny’s casino experience broke her karmic pattern of worrying over money the way she did, because it inhibited her spiritual growth; but because she could not break this karmic pattern on her own, divine providence intervened. That’s why we hear the voice within, to help us get unstuck and bring our personal destiny into agreement with our spiritual destiny so we can continue on our destined journey to wholeness and completeness.

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52: On the Virtue of Honest Labor and Physical Work

52

On the Virtue of Honest Labor and Physical Work

“I love those who love work.”

Gurdjieff

Driving home from Midland one Saturday morning last month where I had gone to pick up my weekend National Post and Globe and Mail I made my turn off Country Road 6 onto Concession 4 and noticed two workmen who were putting new shingles on the roof of the  empty building on that corner lot (which I’ve always felt would make a great location for a new Tim Hortons coffee outlet) standing on the ground taking a break, one smoking and one not, and something about them, the aura of their trade and the fresh fall morning with the oaks and maples at their most resplendent colors and the sun shining in the pale blue sky, I felt something that I hadn’t felt in a long while; I felt the deepest and saddest longing for the virtue of honest labor and physical work that my trade of drywall taping and house-painting always gave me, and especially long distance running which I used to do, a virtue that was so satisfying that I’ve decided to make it the subject of today’s spiritual musing…

My dictionary defines virtue as a noun, “a quality of doing what is right and avoiding what is wrong” (virtuousness, moral excellence). Virtue is also “any admirable quality or attribute” (merit, a work of great merit). Virtue is also “morality with respect to sexual relations” (chastity, sexual morality). Again, virtue is “a particular moral excellence.” But I am using the word virtue in the ultimate sense that Jesus used it when he said in Luke 8: 46, “Somebody hath touched me, for I perceive that virtue is gone out of me.”

A woman in the crowd had touched Jesus, believing that if she touched him she would be healed; and when she was found out, Jesus said to her: “Daughter, be of good comfort: thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace.”

This is the esoteric definition of virtue, and by esoteric I mean the secret meaning of virtue that specifically refers to that special kind of energy that one needs to nourish their soul, or inner self—the consciousness of their spiritual being, if you will.

Jesus was replete with virtue, and the woman’s belief in Jesus drew virtue out of him; that’s why he said that her faith had made her whole. But what did Jesus mean by saying that her faith had made her whole? What does it mean to be made whole?

This is the secret of Christ’s teaching of salvation, and not an easy secret to decode; but thanks to Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” I learned how to nourish my inner self and make myself whole too. This is the holistic benefit of honest labor and physical work that I managed to deduce after years of living the secret way, which simply means that I lived my life in that special way that resolved the consciousness of my non-being with my being and made the two into one, as Jesus promised. When Jesus was asked by someone when his kingdom would come, he replied: “When the two will be one, the outer like the inner, and the male with the female neither male nor female.”

By kingdom, Jesus meant personal salvation from the endless karmic process of being and becoming, resolving the conflict in one’s soul of one’s inner and outer self, or one’s being and non-being; and by learning how to make the two into one with the teachings of the secret way that Jesus taught, one can make oneself whole also.

That’s the metaphysics behind Jesus Christ’s teaching of salvation, but it takes a lot of hard work to realize one’s wholeness, that special kind of work that Gurdjieff called conscious effort and intentional suffering—the secret way of life that Carl Gustav Jung sniffed out in the arcane teachings of the ancient Gnostics and Alchemists (and later in Taoism, as he tells us in his commentary to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower) and which he applied to his own life with satisfactory results, as he was informed by a dream that he had a few short days before he died. In his dream he saw, “high up in a high place,” a boulder lit by the full sun. Carved into the illuminated boulder were the words, “Take this as a sign of the wholeness you have achieved and the singleness you have become.”

Like Gurdjieff, Carl Jung had also discovered the secret way of life and lived it; and this brings me to the theme of my spiritual musing—the virtue of honest labor and physical work. But because my understanding of virtue presupposes an esoteric knowledge that has taken most of my life to realize, I honestly don’t know how I can possibly distill my experience of virtue into a single musing; and so I’m going to call upon my transcendent function (my Muse) to assist me in my effort.

When I engage my transcendent function, I abandon to the integrative faculty of my creative unconscious, which I’ve learned to trust implicitly; and the first thought that came to me was, “God is merciful, and life is always fair.”

This took me by surprise; but the more I reflected upon this insight, the more I saw the wisdom behind it, and a poem by Gary Snyder came to mind:

REMOVING THE PLATE OF THE PUMP ON THE

HYDRAULIC SYSTEM OF THE BACKHOE

Through mud, fouled nuts, black grime

it opens, a gleam of spotless steel

machined-fit perfect

swirl of intake and output

relentless clarity

at the heart

of work.

          “Poetry is an act of the imagination that transforms reality into a deeper perception of what is,” said the poet Adrienne Rich; and it takes the genius of a poet to see the “relentless clarity at the heart of work” which I came to see as the virtue of honest labor and physical work; but, if this wasn’t clear enough for Gary Snyder, he offered another poem to help us better understand the experience of virtue and secret way of life:

AXE HANDLES

        One afternoon the last week in April

                                             Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet

                                             One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.

                                             He recalls the hatchet-head

                                             Without a handle, in the shop

                                             And go gets it, and wants it for his own.

                                             A broken-off axe handle behind the door

                                             Is long enough for a hatchet,

                                             We cut it to length and take it

                                             With the hatchet head

                                             And working hatchet, to the wood block.

                                             There I begin to shape the old handle

                                             With the hatchet, and the phrase

                                              First learned from Ezra Pound

                                              Rings in my ears!

                                              “When making an axe handle

                                                        the pattern is not far off.”

                                              And I say this to Kai

                                              “Look: We’ll shape the handle

                                              By checking the handle

                                              Out of the axe we cut with –”

                                              And he sees. And I hear it again:

                                              It’s from Lu Ji’s Wen Fu, fourth century

                                              A. D. “Essay on Literature”—in the

                                              Preface: “In making the handle

                                              Of an axe

                                              By cutting wood with an axe

                                              The model is indeed near at hand.”

                                              My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen

                                              Translated that and taught it years ago

                                              And I see: Pound was an axe

                                              And my son is a handle, soon

                                              To be shaping again, model

                                              And tool, craft of culture

                                              How we go on.

Gurdjieff was my axe, and his teaching of “work on oneself” helped shape me into my true self with conscious effort and intentional suffering, and so was Jesus my axe whose sayings and parables helped make my inner and outer self into one; but what does the poet mean by the “relentless clarity at the heart of work” that my intuitive self connected with God’s mercy and fairness of life? This is the mystery of the secret way…

Because I had no personal mentor in my life, I had to learn my trade of painting and drywall taping the hard way on my own, and I made more mistakes than I care to remember; but because I strove for excellence in my work, I began to appreciate excellence in every discipline, and soon I saw that excellence was the teleological goal of every facet of life. That’s when Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” began to make sense to me, because personal excellence was the goal of Gurdjieff’s teaching—which, in a word, was realizing my true self (as Gurdjieff liked to say, becoming a man without quotation marks); or, as Jesus would say, striving for personal excellence made the two into one and made me whole.

I’ve always had great respect for good tradesmen, and I’ve always had a special fondness for tradesmen who love and take pride in their work; something about them made me envious, and I had to find out what they had that made them special, because without exception the very best tradesmen who love and take pride in their work have an aura of authenticity about them that I simply had to call their personal virtue—an indescribable kind of “goodness” that makes them moral and whole; but the more I strove for excellence in my own trade of painting and drywall taping, the more I took on that same charismatic quality that I admired and respected and which I came to discern as the virtue of honest labor and physical work; but how to describe how I came to this realization?

When my creative unconscious offered me the insight that God is merciful and life is fair, I knew instantly what my intuitive self was telling me because I had long learned that life was the way to our true self and not religion or any special teaching, as such; all they did was facilitate the process of our becoming, and I made sure not to throw out the baby with the bathwater because every religion and teaching that I studied served its purpose. I was eclectic in my quest for my true self, but my trade of painting and drywall taping served me best because my work forced me to resolve my inner and outer self and authenticate my life; and this brings me to the virtue of honest labor and physical work because I needed all the virtue that I could get to make myself whole.

Gary Snyder saw “relentless clarity at the heart of work,” which I knew intuitively to be the pure virtue of one’s labor, a special kind of excellence and moral goodness that cannot be described but only experienced and which every person who loves their work understands without explanation; but because I learned how to “work” on myself with Gurdjieff’s teaching I began to see how the dynamics of making myself whole worked, and as mysterious as it may appear to be it is astonishingly clear in its simplicity.

This, then, is what my trade of painting and drywall taping taught me about the secret way of life that is inherent to all we do, if we but have the eyes to see which Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” opened up for me: honest labor creates virtue, which we need to nourish our spiritual self to become whole; and by honest labor I mean doing one’s work with the moral integrity of honesty and ethics, which is hard to do in business because it’s much too easy to compromise oneself when one is struggling to make a living, but it’s out of the conflict of this struggle between our false and true self that we grow in our wholeness. As someone I read once put it, “all the growth is in the hassle.”

My trade of painting and drywall taping also taught me that physical labor creates virtue too (hiking, cycling, running, gardening, and raking leaves even), but it’s not as pure as the virtue of honest labor because the virtue of honest labor is inherently self-transcending and much more spiritually nutritious than the virtue of physical work. That’s why I felt that nostalgic feeling when I saw those two tradesmen taking a break from their work that morning; I longed for the virtue of my own trade.

But as I said, virtue has to be experienced to be understood; and I made a habit of being as honest and ethical in my trade as I could be (and how I hated myself whenever I screwed myself of the virtue of my work by compromising the integrity of my work and/or personal ethics); hence my book many years later Old Whore Life, Exploring the Shadow Side of Karma), and I also made a habit of doing physical work like long distance running every day because I needed all the virtue that I could get to satisfy my spiritual hunger for wholeness.

By making the effort to run seven miles every day after work I engaged myself in what Gurdjieff called conscious effort and intentional suffering (I didn’t have to run every day, but the holistic benefits were much too enticing for me not to), and the “goodness” that I experienced from every run cannot be explained because no one would believe me. The “guru of running,” Dr. George Sheehan who wrote Running & Being, tried to explain this “goodness” that he experienced with every run by exclaiming “In running I found my salvation!” But all he was saying was that running made him whole, and that’s the best that I can do to take the mystery out of the virtue of honest labor and physical work.

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