21: A Tempest in a Teapot

21 

A Tempest in a Teapot 

          I loathe the niqab as much as I hate the burqa, not only because it deprives the world of the natural beauty of women, like a draped rose bush; but because it perpetuates a fossilized symbol of self-realization that has long ago served its essential purpose to assist one to grow in their own identity. The niqab is a prop that should be disposed of, like all other props that have served their original purpose. I do not say this lightly, but this is the subject of today’s spiritual musing that has been foisted upon me by the current niqab controversy… 

          In the 1920s a mystic philosopher by the name of Gurdjieff foresaw the uprooting changes that we are cursed/blessed with today, because the values of the old world have finally locked horns with the values of the new world, and there appears to be no way through the horns of our dilemma; but that’s only because, as Dr. Jean Houston said in her talk at Women’s Empowerment Initiative at the University of California at Irvine, posted online December 15, 2013, “We seem to lack a cohesive story that could tell us who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going, and why,” because if we had such a story our way would be clearly mapped out for us and there wouldn’t be so much confusion in the world.

But such a story does exist, which can be found in all the mythologies of the world, from the first people of South Africa (the Bushmen) to the ancient Greeks and all the way up to Dante, Wordsworth, and Rumi’s mystic poetry; and it’s all a matter of connecting the dots, which I finally managed to do in my new book The Pearl of Great Price.

Joseph Campbell decoded from the many myths of world cultures the monomyth of the hero’s journey in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, but we still cannot see the big picture of who and why we are; which is why the niqab controversy beckoned me to write today’s spiritual musing, because in this simple issue of one woman’s choice of attire can be seen Gurdjieff’s prophecy of the clash of the old world with the new; and at the risk of being presumptuous, I’d like to offer a way through the horns of our dilemma.

The niqab controversy was sparked by a Pakistani woman from Mississauga, Ontario who refused to take off her niqab for the oath-taking ceremony for her Canadian citizenship. “It’s precisely because I won’t listen to how other people want me to live my life that I wear a niqab. My desire to live on my own terms is also why I have chosen to challenge the government’s decision to deny me citizenship unless I take off my niqab at my oath ceremony,” wrote Zunera Ishaq in an open letter to Prime Minister Harper, published March 16, 2015 in the Toronto Star;  and in response to an inquiry from the National Post, she was even more forthcoming, linking her Muslim faith with her personal conviction: “It is my religious obligation, from my point of view, to cover myself as much as possible. It makes me feel more comfortable, protected. I feel more dignity wearing the niqab…for me, the niqab is part of my identity.” But the real question at the heart of this niqab issue is not one of exercising personal choice in an open and free society like ours, but of personal identity: what makes us who we are?

On March 14, 2015, two days before Zunera Ishaq’s open letter in the Star, I posted a spiritual musing on my blog titled “To Be and Not to Be, Personal Identity and Alzheimer’s,” which was inspired by the movie Still Alice, starring Julianne Moore who won an Oscar for best actress for her moving performance; and although I brought my musing to resolution, I did not expect to be called upon again to expand upon it with the niqab controversy.

Alice Howland, a fifty year old professor of linguistics at Columbia University, was afflicted with early onset Alzheimer’s; and the story of her rapid loss of memory inspired my spiritual musing: was Alice’s personal identity an epiphenomenon of her brain, which Alzheimer’s had affected; or was Alice’s personal identity distinct from her brain? In short, was Alice still Alice when she lost the memory of who she was; or was Alice more than her memory of who she was? That’s the question my musing sought to resolve.

Curiously enough, this was the same question that Michael Ignatieff, the former leader of the Official Opposition before the Liberals fell from grace, sought to resolve with his novel Scar Tissue that he wrote twenty-some years ago, and though not as distinctive the niqab controversy poses a similar question today: is our personal identity defined by what we wear, what we believe, what we do, what we have, and where we live; or are we more than what we appear to be? In short, both Alice and Zunera beg the same question: who am I?

Essentially this is the question that John Keats asked in a letter to his brother titled “The Vale of Soul Making.” He asked the question that both the movie Still Alice and the niqab controversy have given rise to: how do we acquire our own identity?—“There may be intelligences or sparks of divinity in millions, but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception—they know and they see and they are pure; in short, they are God. How then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them—so as even to possess a bliss peculiar to each one by individual existence? How but by a medium of a world like this?”

For Keats, life was a school for souls to grow; and through the many and varied experiences that life has to offer, we acquire our own individual identity. Gurdjieff on the other hand did not believe that man is born with an immortal soul, but he also believed that we can create our own soul with relentless conscious effort; and whether he was right or not about our immortal  soul doesn’t really matter, because his teaching worked all the same as I made clear in The Pearl of Great Price, the story of my quest for my true self.

According to Keats we acquire our own identity through life experience, but according to Gurdjieff we can only evolve so far through the natural process of evolution, and no further; and to realize our full potential we have to take evolution into our own hands, true to the ancient alchemist saying: “Man must finish the work which Nature has left incomplete.”

As I made clear in The Pearl of Great Price, I connected the dots and wrote the story of how I found the most precious treasure in the world, that “spark of divinity” in all of us that Keats presciently saw in “The Vale of Soul Making,” and when I call the niqab a prop I’m not being disrespectful of a woman’s choice of attire; I’m alluding to what I have learned about the mysterious process of acquiring our own identity.

          Like Keats, I also believe that we acquire our own identity through what Literature specifically refers to as the human condition; all the “heartache and the thousand natural shocks /That flesh is heir to.” But I also believe that life can only do so much for us to realize what the world-renowned founder of Psychoanalysis C. G. Jung called “wholeness and singleness of self” and Jesus called “the pearl of great price.” To do that, we have to take evolution into our own hands to enhance the natural process of individuation; which brings me to the central concept of today’s spiritual musing—the art of conscious evolution… 

Gurdjieff believed that man lives his life in a state of “hypnotic sleep,” and his teaching was all about waking man up to himself. This “hypnotic sleep” is the unconscious stage of human evolution, and when we have acquired enough identity to realize that we are more than what we appear to be the omniscient guiding force of life will introduce us to the art of conscious evolution through signs, symbols, coincidences, and synchronicity.

This presupposes reincarnation, because man cannot acquire enough identity in one lifetime alone to realize that he is more than what he appears to be, and whether one believes in reincarnation or not doesn’t really matter; when one is ready to take evolution into his own hands, he will be called by life to seek out the art of conscious evolution.

I was beckoned in high school with a poem that I wrote called “Noman,” but I’ve written about this in The Pearl of Great Price so I need not expound upon that here; suffice to say that I came to learn that the art of conscious evolution is the essential purpose of all spiritual teachings, despite how far they may have detracted from their original purpose.

          Everything that lives must have energy to grow, and so do we need energy to grow in the consciousness of our own identity; and we get this energy through life experience. But because we can only grow so much in our own identity through life experience, we will one day have to take evolution into our own hands to realize the full potential of our evolving self-consciousness; which I did with Gurdjieff’s teaching. And the more I “worked” on myself, the more I awakened to the art of conscious evolution; that’s how I came to see through the props of all spiritual teachings, beginning with my former Catholic faith.         

Like Zunera Ishaq, I also immigrated to Canada. I was born in Calabria, Italy and immigrated with my family when I was six. I grew up Roman Catholic, and I was bound by the articles of my faith no less than Zunera Ishaq is bound by her Muslim faith; but by the age of twelve I began to question my faith, because I could not fathom how God could condemn a soul to hell for eternity for simply committing one mortal sin, like eating meat on Friday or missing Sunday Mass, and in high school I read The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham and became a seeker like his hero Larry Darrel, and I left my Roman Catholic  faith and forged my own path that allowed me to grow in the fullness of my own identity.

Although I grew up terrified of going to hell forever, my faith served me well because it instilled in me a powerful sense of conscience, so much so that my Catholic faith still lingers like a hangover that refuses to go away; but I was suffocating in my Catholic faith, and I needed a path that gave me room to breathe more freely. And I gravitated to Gurdjieff’s teaching at university through Ouspenky’s book In Search of the Miraculous, Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, which Gurdjieff said he drew from “esoteric Christianity.”

As I lived Gurdjieff’s transformative teaching of “work on oneself,” I grew in the consciousness of my own identity according to my commitment, which was nothing less than total because I was driven by my daemon to find my true self; and the more I grew in my own identity, the more I realized my true self, which Keats called that “spark of divinity” and Emerson called “God within,” and I woke up from the “hypnotic sleep” of life.

My perspective on the niqab issue is neither black nor white, then; it’s an enantiodromiac blend of the two positions, because like Joni Mitchell’s song I can see both sides of life now—the positive and the negative, just as I can see both sides of my former Catholic faith that formed my conscience and made my young life so miserable. That’s why I don’t disagree with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s position on the niqab issue… 

“However, the leader of the Liberal Party continues to bring up his position on the niqab, not seeming to understand why almost all Canadians oppose the wearing of face covering during citizenship ceremonies,” our Prime Minister said in the house of Commons one day; and then Prime Minister Harper added his opinion, which stirred the pot and got him into political hot water: “It is very easy to understand why we do not allow people to cover their faces during citizenship ceremonies. Why would Canadians, contrary to our own values, embrace a practice at that time that is not transparent, that is not open, and frankly is rooted in a culture that is anti-women? That is unacceptable to Canadians and unacceptable to Canadian women…” and on another occasion he stirred the pot a little more by adding, “I believe, and I think most Canadians believe, that it is offensive that someone would hide their identity at the very moment when they are committing to join the Canadian family.” And to be quite honest, I’m one of those Canadians who is offended.

Although I don’t disagree with Zunera Ishaq’s conviction that she be allowed to wear the niqab during her oath-taking ceremony for her Canadian citizenship, I see the niqab as a prop to hoist her freedom to choose to wear it as idiosyncratic and foolish; just as I see my old Roman Catholic belief in mortal sin and eternal damnation as a prop  that kept me on the straight and narrow; and when our Prime Minister offered his opinion that the niqab is rooted in a culture that is anti-woman, it certainly did not begin that way but is apparently so today in every patriarchal Muslim country, as many Muslim women like the Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai, co-winner of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, have revealed.

Wearing the niqab was rooted in the Quran, the Holy Book of Islam that is the source of the Muslim faith and spiritual guidance, but like the Christian Bible it can be taken much too literally and to idiosyncratic extremes that inhibit one’s inherent spiritual imperative to grow in their own identity to wholeness and completeness—“O Prophet! Tell your wives and daughters, as well as all believing women, that they should draw over themselves some of their outer garments; this will be more conducive to their being recognized as decent women and not molested” (Quran 33:59).

Maybe Zunera Ishaq would be wise to heed the old proverb—given birth to, no doubt by one of my ancestors (it is attributed to St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, as he offered advice to St. Augustine)—“When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” and concede her conviction to the greater good of having the freedom to choose how to live her life; because, to be quite honest, from my perspective this whole issue is nothing more than a tempest in a teapot.

 

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20: To Be and Not to Be, Personal Identity and Alzheimer's

20 

To Be and Not to Be

Personal Identity and Alzheimer’s 

Thoughts on the movie Still Alice… 

“We are more than the memory of who we are,” I said to Penny on our drive home from the Uptown Theatre and early dinner in Barrie yesterday afternoon, and I knew instantly that this was my entry point into the spiritual musing that the movie Still Alice had inspired; and this morning I called upon my Muse to help me explore the haunting question of personal identity and Alzheimer’s that the movie Still Alice inevitably gives rise to…

I didn’t really want to see Still Alice, starring Julianne Moore who won an Oscar for best actress for her moving performance of the fifty-year old Alice Howland, professor of linguistics at Columbia University afflicted with early-onset Alzheimer’s, because I knew that it would be a tear jerker; but we went anyway, and it proved to be a three-tissue movie.

But it wasn’t so much the emotional impact that Alice had upon me as Alzheimer’s ravages her memory, even though that in itself easily moved me to tears; it was the unbearable irony of her tragic predicament: Alice is an exceptionally bright high-achiever whose personal identity is inextricably linked with her intellect, and when she loses her memory she loses her sense of self-identity and slowly sinks into an abyss of blank-faced dumbness.

This bothered me more than her disease, not because I didn’t empathize with Alice’s rapid deterioration and the effect it had upon her loving family, but because this beautiful and gracious wife and mother of three responsible adult children was hopelessly trapped by the spiritually suffocating scientific paradigm of her condition; and with each passing day and hour and minute her comfortable middle-class world slowly shrank into oblivion.

“You know, sweetheart,” I said to Penny as we drove through Minesing on our way home in Bluewater, Georgian Bay after the heartbreaking movie and simple hot hamburger dinner at Wimpy’s Diner, “what a person believes in makes a difference in how they feel when they’re faced with their own mortality, or a tragic disease like Alice in the movie. Do you remember me telling you about my buddy Michael Ignatieff’s novel Scar Tissue that dealt with this same issue of Alzheimer’s and personal identity?”

“Vaguely,” Penny said. “But you’re going to remind me, aren’t you?”

I was being sarcastic when I called the disgraced former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada Michael Ignatieff my buddy, because I had lost respect for him when he forced a totally unnecessary premature election that decimated the Liberal Party and reduced it to third party status. “Those who can’t, teach,” I responded to the historically catastrophic and personally humiliating defeat (he even lost his own Toronto’s Etobicoke-Lakeshore riding seat) when he resigned as leader of the Official Opposition and ignominiously shrunk away with his bushy academic tail between his legs to teach at the University of Toronto and then back to Harvard’s ivory tower where he had been plucked by the party establishment as the next Trudeau to save Canada from Premier Harper and the Conservative Party.

I respected former professor/journalist/author/broadcaster Michael Ignatieff, whose TV show Ignatieff I watched with avid interest (I distinctly remember his interview with Hemingway’s third wife Martha Gellhorn, whose life with Ernest Hemingway inspired my literary memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway); and I read with fascination his autobiographical novel Scar Tissue that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize because the core of his story was about Alzheimer’s and personal identity, just as the movie Still Alice that was based on the New York Times bestselling novel by neuroscientist Lisa Genova.

I didn’t lose respect for Michael Ignatieff because he aspired to become Prime Minister of Canada, which is a noble if not impossible ambition for even the most astute politician; but because it was an arrogant presumption to think that he could squirm his way to the top position of the Liberal Party and become Prime Minister of Canada without paying his political dues, which was why he was branded by the Conservative Party attack adds during the ill-timed election as “arrogant and elitist,” and it wasn’t by any stretch of imagination that I connected the dots of his massive ego with his novel Scar Tissue whose theme was so intimate and personal that it caused a rift with his family, especially with his brother Andrew who was primary caregiver for his mother and not Michael as he wrote in Scar Tissue.

Michael Ignatieff’s mother fell prey to Alzheimer’s, and he watched her lose her sense of self as her memory faded from week to week until she mercifully passed away in a nursing home; and his autobiographical novel explored the theme of loss of memory and self-identity, because the narrator of Scar Tissue is a philosophy professor not unlike the author who is haunted by his fear of inheriting his mother’s Alzheimer’s, and what better way for the professor turned politician, who when campaigning for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada cleverly called himself “neither atheist nor believer,” to immortalize his name than to become Prime Minster of Canada just in case Alzheimer’s erased his memory? What better confirmation could one have to validate their insecure egoic need to be?

I have no doubt that in his mind the Harvard professor’s motives for entering Canadian politics were pure and altruistic (despite the fact that he lived outside Canada for thirty years, he professed to a philosophy of engagement to justify his commitment to the Liberal Party), but novels based on one’s personal life have a tendency to reveal much more than the author realizes, as many writers have learned after a critical study of their work; and Michael Ignatieff’s intensely personal and poignant novel Scar Tissue reflected the tremulous shadow side of the author’s scholarly trained ego that goes straight to the issue of consciousness and individual identity: is our reflective self-consciousness an epiphenomenon of our biology, which disappears when our physical body dies; or does our reflective self co-exist with our physical body and continues to exist non-biologically after our body dies?

This is the core issue of Scar Tissue that Michael Ignatieff tried to come to terms with creatively through narrative inquiry, and it is the same implicit issue of the movie Still Alice that is left hanging in the air as Alice fades away into herself, and it also happens to be the issue that I devoted my whole life to resolving and writing about in my novels, essays, and memoirs and which is the working premise of today’s spiritual musing. Having said this, I can now proceed to the heart of the issue of being and not being who we are… 

Creatively speaking, Alzheimer’s is like a magnifying glass that focusses our attention on the individual self; because as one loses one’s memory with the ravages of this disease, one’s self-identity disappears. But where does it go? That’s the heart of the issue.

Science would have us believe that when we die, the matrix of consciousness that made up our individual self-identity dies with us; or, generously speaking, science may allow the possibility that like energy which can neither be created nor destroyed but simply changes form, the matrix of our reflective self-consciousness may simply go back into the cosmic stream of life, which is precisely what the Buddhist philosophy contends.

Michael Ignatieff’s inquiry into the issue of Alzheimer’s and self-identity appears to hold this point of view also. Bringing his narrative to closure, the author/narrator says: "But I know that there is a life beyond this death, a time beyond this time. I know that at the very last moment, when everything I ever knew has been effaced from my mind, when pure vacancy has taken possession of me, then light of the purest whiteness will stream in through my eyes into the radiant and empty plain of my mind." But this is the non-self of the Buddhist philosophy; not the individuated consciousness of our autonomous self that pre-exists our mortal physical body and continues to exist when our body dies.

I’ve already explored this issue in my book Stupidity Is Not a Gift of God, in my essay “On the Evolutionary Impulse to Individuate: A Response to the Spiritual Path of Evolutionary Enlightenment,” so I need not go into detail here; suffice to say that in my quest for resolution to the issue of the self, I came to the conclusion that we are all born with a spark of divine consciousness that evolves through life into an individual and autonomous self; and the self evolves naturally through the karmic process of being and becoming. In effect, to be, we have to become; and we become who we are according to how we live our life. That’s the central mystery of the human condition, and the answer to riddle of the self that I have explored in the memoir of my quest for my true self, The Pearl of Great Price.

Given my personal perspective, then; I see the matrix of consciousness that we call our reflective self not as a byproduct (epiphenomenon) of the brain (our neurology), but as an autonomous self that exists independently of our body; but what other proof do we have?

In the movie Still Alice, Alice Howland loses her self-identity as her memory is erased by early-onset Alzheimer’s; but was her self-identity a byproduct of her neurological system which disappears into oblivion when that part of her brain is ravaged by her disease, or does it recede elsewhere where it cannot be seen? In other words, is Alice still Alice despite the loss of her memory of who she is? Would Alice still be Alice if she lost a leg, an arm, a breast, or a vital organ that had to be replaced, like her heart?

Many heart transplant patients have reported the strange phenomenon of taking on personality traits of their donors, like Jane Seymour did in the movie Heart of a Stranger that was inspired by the true story of Claire Sylvia’s heart transplant; but that’s a separate musing that I hope to write one day. The point of today’s spiritual musing is this: is our self-identity limited to our memory alone, or does it pervade throughout the cells of our entire body as pioneer researcher in cellular consciousness Dr. Graham Farrant and Dr. Paul Pearlsall (The Heart’s Code) have discovered, and even beyond cellular memory in non-biological form after our body dies? And if so, what proof do we have besides my own conviction?

In October, 2012 Dr. Eben Alexander, a practicing neurosurgeon for twenty-five years who was scientifically convinced that self-identity was an epiphenomenon of the brain, had a unique if not providential medical experience that changed his entire scientific perspective on consciousness and made him a believer in the independent existence of our individual and autonomous self, and he wrote a book on the experience that initiated him into the divine mystery of the self. The book is called Proof of Heaven, A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife; and it was on the New York Times bestseller list for 97 weeks. 

“On November 10, 2008,” he writes, “I was struck by a rare illness and thrown into a coma for seven days. During that time, my entire neocortex—the outer surface of the brain, the part that makes us human—was shut down. Inoperative. In essence, absent.”

Dr. Alexander believed that “the brain is a machine that produces consciousness,” and when “the machine breaks down, consciousness stops.” But the rare illness that he contracted (which proved to be a rare virus) shut his brain down and sent him into a seven-day coma that should have shut his consciousness down according to his scientific paradigm, but Dr. Alexander instead experienced himself outside his body in what Dr. Raymond Moody (Life After Life) described as the most astounding near-death experiences that he had studied in more than four decades of researching this incredible phenomenon.

In the Prologue to Proof of Heaven, former non-believer Dr. Alexander contritely writes: “My experience showed me that the death of the body and the brain are not the end of consciousness, that human experience continues beyond the grave. More important, it continues under the gaze of God who loves and cares about each one of us and about where the universe itself and all the beings within it are ultimately going.” Which means, quite simply, that Alice was still Alice, despite her loss of memory!

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19: Gerbils of the Mind

19 

Gerbils of the Mind 

           “It’s all a pouring from the empty into the void,” said the mystic philosopher/teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff whenever he got tired of listening to people opine on life with the blind certainty of unprovable conviction, as intellectuals often do, which was exactly how I felt about the writer Colin Wilson as I listened to his interview with psychologist Jeffery Mishlove on his show Thinking Allowed; and an image came to me of a gerbil running round and round on the wheel of its cage but never getting anywhere.

Colin Wilson, who by this time in his life had written more than seventy books, brought to mind what Gurdjieff said to his student P. D. Ouspensky in his book In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching: “To speak the truth is the most difficult thing in the world; and one must study a great deal and for a long time in order to be able to speak the truth. The wish alone is not enough. To speak the truth one must know what the truth is and what a lie is, and first of all in oneself. And this nobody wants to know.”

But how can one tell the truth from a lie, and in one’s own mind? That’s the question that came to me as I listened to Colin Wilson, whose mind was so full of book knowledge that it was impossible to see behind the curtain of his formidable intellect, and I knew I had to do a musing to answer the question that came to me; but I have to call upon my Muse to assist my inquiry, and that’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing…  

As with all of my spiritual musings, they come to me out of an evolving need to know; and as I reflected on this question—how can we tell the truth from a lie, and in our own mind?—I traced my need to know to the movie My Dinner with Andre that I “chanced” upon the Internet a month or so ago and which I had seen in 1981 when it first came out.

My Dinner with Andre fascinated me then, but a lot of water passed under the bridge in thirty-four years, and I felt compelled to watch it again just to see how it would affect me after all those years of life experience. I recognized Gurdjieff’s influence immediately on the animated New York theatre director Andre Gregory, the principle character in the movie, the other being the actor Wally Shawn, and Gurdjieff’s infectious philosophy was even more pronounced thirty-four years later; but with one noticeable difference: Andre no longer fascinated me. In fact, by the end of the movie all of his babbling irritated me.

I couldn’t get enough of Andre the first time I saw the movie, but as I listened to him talking to Wally Shawn over dinner thirty-four years later I saw that he was just another gerbil going round and round in the cage of his mind; and he disappointed me.

Gurdjieff founded his philosophy upon the premise that man goes through life in a state of hypnotic “waking sleep,” and with his teaching one could wake up to life and realize his full potential; that’s why Andre fascinated me the first time I saw My Dinner with Andre. So excited was Andre by his discovery of the possibility of waking up to life that his enthusiasm was infectious; that’s why My Dinner with Andre became a cult classic. But that’s all Andre’s talk was—infectious enthusiasm for self-knowledge, and nothing more.

I couldn’t see that the first time I saw My Dinner with Andre, because I was also infected by the Gurdjieffian “bug” to wake up to life; and I listened to Andrew’s fascinating story of self-discovery doing experimental theater deep in the forests of Poland, and exploring himself in the ecovillage of Findhorn in Scotland, and in Tibet and the Sahara with the rapt attention of a thirsty seeker—just as hundreds and thousands of life-weary souls hung upon Gurdjieff’s every word to quench their thirst for self-knowledge; but that would be a separate musing. Suffice for now to say that to wake up to life one has to step out of the cage of their own mind, which most people neither can nor want to do. And this brings me back to Colin Wilson, whom I discovered very early in my own quest for self-knowledge… 

“Today we’re going to be exploring the heights and the depths of consciousness,” began Jeffrey Mishlove on his show Thinking Allowed. “With me is one of the most prolific writers in the English language, Colin Wilson, author of over seventy books, including seventeen novels and numerous works in criminology, existential philosophy, psychology, religion, the occult, mysticism, wine, and music. Amongst his most well-known books are The Criminal History of Mankind, The Mind Parasites, The Philosopher’s Stone, Religion and the Rebel, The Occult, Mysteries, and of course his first book which became a world-wide best seller in 1956 when he was twenty-four years of age, The Outsider…”

I read The Outsider in my late teens and was hooked, and over the years I read a number of Wilson’s other books, one of my favorites being New Pathways in Psychology, but for reasons that I could not explain, Colin Wilson could not satisfy my need for self-knowledge, so I moved on to other writers; and decades later I had to listen to him on Thinking Allowed just to see how he had evolve, but even more than director/seeker Andre Gregory, Colin Wilson disappointed me—despite, or perhaps because of, the brilliance of his mind.

“Although you have written so much, you have described yourself as a person who has basically written on one theme your entire life,” Mishlove began, opening his interview.

“Yup,” replied Wilson, with a grin; “I’ve written the same book seventy times over.”

“And that is reconciling this issue of the heights of consciousness and the depths of despair,” continued Mishlove, and Wilson talked about his life-long study of how to reconcile these polar aspects of human nature that first seized his imagination as a young man when he read the Romantic poets Keats, Byron, and Shelly; and after writing seventy books on the mystifying subject of man’s enantiodromiac being/non-being nature, he was no closer to the answer than when he began his quest with The Outsider. But as brilliant as he was in his interview, which he spiced with quotations from a variety of eclectic writers, Colin Wilson proved to be no less boring than Andre Gregory in My Dinner with Andre.

The brilliant mind no longer dazzled me, because I had long since come to see that the brilliant mind is the seeker’s worst enemy. “The Mind is the great Slayer of the Real. Let the Disciple slay the Slayer,” said H. P. Blavatsky in The Voice of Silence, which was why I left university in my third year of philosophy studies.

I could not trust what the great minds had to say, because they cast me adrift in a sea of endless speculation; and there was Colin Wilson, one of the most inquisitive minds of our time still struggling to make sense of the human condition. Shaking my head in disbelief as I listened to him ramble on and on about his unresolved life, blissfully enjoying what he had to say like he was his own enraptured audience, I thought of Gurdjieff; and laughing to myself, I said, “It’s all a pouring from the empty into the void.”

Colin Wilson was just another gerbil of the mind going round and round in an endless circle of brilliant thought; but if he couldn’t reconcile the issue of the heights of consciousness and depths of despair, how does the gerbil free itself from its cage and find freedom?

Must take pause… 

Since I don’t believe in chance, when I hit a brick wall with my musing on the gerbils of the mind the guiding force of life came to my aid and led me to the movie Mindwalk on the Internet, which was another dialogue-driven movie modelled on My Dinner with Andre but only much more dialectical in its Socratic inquiry, and I had to watch it. I was fascinated by the three people of the dialogue—a disaffected physicist who has withdrawn from her professional life to ponder about life on an island monastery, the Abbey of Mount Saint-Michel in France; an American senator recoiling from his bid to be the presidential candidate for the Democratic party, and a disillusioned poet who moved from New York city to Paris to get away from it all and rethink his place in life; and when the movie ended I had the answer to the dilemma of the human condition that Colin Wilson could not answer.

Mindwalk was inspired by the physicist Fritjof Capra’s thought-provoking book The Turning Point, which I was familiar with, and the dialogue that the three actors—Liv Ullman, who played the physicist Sophie Hoffman; Sam Waterston, who played the American senator Jack Edwards; and John Heard, who played the poet Thomas Harriman—evolved into a dialectic on man and his relationship with himself, his fellow man, and the environment; and the Socratic resolution of their intensely personal philosophical inquiry was that man must take karmic responsibility for his actions, which was the only logical thing to do to save oneself and the world. A tall order, but dialectically sound—which was the same answer that I had arrived at in my own quest for self-knowledge.

I came upon my answer by way of Gurdjieff’s teaching that he simply called “the Work,” by which he meant “work” on oneself in a special way; and if one “worked” on oneself successfully he would realize his potential that the natural process of evolution could not complete—true to the Alchemist saying, “Man must complete the work that Nature cannot finish.” Which gives credence to another one of Gurdjieff’s sayings, “There is only self-initiation into the mysteries of life.”

By “working” on oneself in that special way (which would be a separate musing) one transcends the highs and lows of his enantiodromiac nature and resolves the issues of the human condition. This is why Mindwalk concluded with the only logically solution to man’s dilemma, that by taking karmic responsibility for one’s own life one sustains the integrity of the whole web of life; and this brings my spiritual musing full circle to the question of my inquiry: how can one tell the truth from a lie, and in one’s own mind?

As esoteric and difficult to understand as this may be, one cannot live one’s life with karmic responsibility and not become more conscious of how life works; and the more conscious one becomes of life, the more one can tell the truth from a lie. It’s axiomatic, because with karmic responsibility comes honesty; and the more honest one is with oneself and the world, the more discerning he will be.

 It’s absurdly simple, as all great truths usually are, but we can tell the truth from a lie by simply being honest. That’s why Mindwalk ended with the realization that the problems of the world cannot be solved in the ivory tower of one’s mind, as the disillusioned physicist Sophie Hoffman was trying to do like a cloistered intellectual on an island monastery, but by going out into the world and living one’s life with karmic responsibility.

 

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