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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