22: Cloud Cuckoo Land

22 

Cloud Cuckoo Land 

I couldn’t quite conceptualize my insight as I tried to explain to Penny what I felt about the Muslim immigrant who refused to take off her niqab during the oath-taking ceremony for her Canadian citizenship, which I personally felt to be an idiosyncratic and foolish thing to do; but it was much more than that. It went deeper, but I couldn’t put my feelings about this woman’s religious convictions into words; and I said to Penny, “I don’t know how to express what I feel about this woman. She’s stuck in her own world, but it’s much more than that—”

Just then, as life would have it, I heard someone on the radio (we were driving into Midland to do some grocery shopping) say two words that expressed exactly what I felt about the recalcitrant Muslim woman—“delusional grandeur.”

“That’s it!” I exclaimed. “That’s it exactly! She’s deluded in her grandeur!”

We both laughed at the timely coincidence of  the radio providing the exact words that I needed at precisely that moment to conceptualize what I was feeling about that Muslim woman—which was not uncommon for me, because the omniscient guiding force of life has often provided answers this way; but I have to explain the phrase “delusional grandeur” in the context of my thoughts on the woman who risked her Canadian citizenship because of her religious convictions, and that’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing… 

According to my sidebar dictionary, delusional means “suffering from or characterized by delusions,” and delusion means “the act of deluding; deception by creating illusory ideas.” And grandeur means “the quality of elevation of mind and exaltation of character or ideals or conduct.” And together I took “delusional grandeur” to mean that the Muslim woman’s religious convictions had deluded her sense of self-importance enough to risk her Canadian citizenship for the sake of wearing her niqab during the oath-taking ceremony; and for me that was the kind of behavior straight out of cloud cuckoo land.

Cloud cuckoo land has many denizens, and I know one when I see one because I also sleep-walked my way through cloud cuckoo land lost in the fantasy world of my own mind for years before I woke up to myself, as did my personal hero Carl Gustav Jung who had the courage to confess his own “lost years” in one of his private letters that I first read about in Claire Dunne’s biography, Carl Jung, Wounded Healer of the Soul.

"The journey from cloud cuckoo land to reality lasted a long time. In my case Pilgrim’s Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am," wrote Jung in his letter, alluding to his “psychotic breakdown” after he severed his professional and personal relationship with his colleague and mentor Sigmund Freud, which brought on his “confrontation with the unconscious” that he recorded in his “black notebooks” that he later transcribed into The Red Book.

Cloud cuckoo land is an illusory domain of the mind, and a very strange place to be because it is unrealistic and impractical, a fantasy world where everything is possible; and not unlike Plato’s allegory of the cave where the  denizen prisoners have their own sense of reality which they believe to be normal, so does every denizen of cloud cuckoo land take their sense of reality to be perfectly normal too, like the Pakistani woman who risked her golden opportunity to become a citizen of a democratically open and free society because she had convinced herself that not wearing her niqab during the oath-swearing part of her Canadian citizenship ceremony was a betrayal of her Muslim faith and personal identity; but to someone who has awakened from cloud cuckoo land, these strange people are all afflicted with the same strain of mental virus characterized by “delusional grandeur” that Gurdjieff alluded to when he said that people go through life in a state of “hypnotic sleep.”

I grew up in a state of “hypnotic sleep,” because I believed in mortal sin and salvation in heaven and eternal damnation in hell. This was my sense of reality, which I inherited from my southern Italian Roman Catholic family; and if I died in a state of mortal sin, like eating meat on Friday or missing Sunday Mass, without saying a perfect act of contrition before dying I was going straight to hell, and that terrified me growing up.

But I began to question my faith in my early teens, and I discovered reincarnation a few years later; and my personal reality began to change as I explored this strange new belief system of dying and coming back to live life over again.

And then in high school between grades nine and twelve I had four past-life recollection dreams that were so real that I could not deny that it was me. I was a North American Indian in one past lifetime; a black slave in southern Georgia in another; a fishmonger in London, England; and I was also a statesman in ancient Athens; and these dream recollections of my past lives induced me to look deeper into the Eastern teaching of reincarnation, which introduced me to the principle of personal accountability called karma. And this threw my life into turmoil, because the rigid reality of my Roman Catholic world collided with my new reality of karma and reincarnation, and for the longest time I floundered in confusion.

Like my hero C. G. Jung, I also had to climb down a thousand ladders from cloud cuckoo land to step out of the delusory world passed on to me by my family and society (compounded by my own private delusions that I created by escaping into the fantasy world of my own making, which were fueled by the irrepressible Kundalini energy that I had unleashed when I accidentally opened up the chakra at the base of my spine and awakened the “sleeping serpent” while meditating one evening in Annecy, France in my early twenties); but my descent out of cloud cuckoo land began with my first step down the ladder to my true self when I questioned my Roman Catholic faith for the first time when I was twelve.

I remember it like yesterday. It was a Saturday afternoon in the summer, and I had just gone to confession so I could take Holy Communion Sunday morning; but as I was walking up Newton Street in my hometown of Nipigon after my confession, a thought struck me out of the blue that God wasn’t being fair. In one simple but dramatic image, it came clear to me that there was something wrong with the whole notion of sin and eternal damnation: I held up my hands, palms upward in front of me like two scales of justice, and on one hand I placed one mortal sin committed in a moment of time, and on the palm of my other hand I placed eternal damnation in hell, and I felt the weight of eternal damnation sink down and down and down, and I cried out, “That’s not fair! How can one mortal sin committed in a moment of time be equal to punishment in hell for all eternity? That’s not right! God wouldn’t do that!” And from that moment on I began to slip away from the “delusional grandeur” of my Roman Catholic faith and became a nascent seeker. 

Being an inspired writer with a natural bent for Socratic reasoning (a carryover from my lifetime as a student of Pythagoras), I cannot help but see the Muslim woman’s religious conviction that her niqab is part of her personal identity as an absurd anachronism no less delusional than my youthful Catholic conviction that my faith had the power to condemn me to eternal punishment in hell for eating meat on Friday which, incidentally, the Roman Catholic Church erased from its dogma years later.

So it’s not a mortal sin today for Roman Catholics to eat meat on Friday, and the essential tenets of the Catholic faith have not crumbled, which only illustrates the “delusional grandeur” of a religious faith that can change its reality according to its fancy; and the same can be said of the much more dogmatic Muslim faith which can be reduced to the simple attire of a woman’s niqab. And in my mind’s eye I see that Muslim woman walking down a street in Mississauga with her hands in front of her, palms upward like two scales of justice; and in one palm she has placed her niqab, and in the other her citizenship papers for a country that will grant her the freedom to pursue her heart’s desires; and I see the hand holding her niqab outweigh the freedom of her Canadian citizenship, and I feel like crying at the absurdity of her religions conviction. Doesn’t she know that Stupidity Is Not a Gift of God?

But it is her life, and she too will be called one day to step down the ladder of cloud cuckoo land when she can no longer suffer the oppressive burden of her “delusional grandeur,” because, as the old saying goes, “If we don’t get it right in this lifetime, we will just keep coming back until we do.” And true or not, this is my reality today.

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