30: The Parable of the Packages

30

 

The Parable of the Packages 

‘Through indirections we find directions out.’

A play upon Shakespeare

 Hamlet Act 2, Scene 1 

Truth comes in many packages, and no two packages are the same. Some packages are plain and simple, covered in brown paper and tied with string, and others are wrapped in gold or silver paper and tied with ribbons of many colours; but the truth inside the packages is all the same. This is the parable of the packages, and today’s spiritual musing…

I became a truth seeker from the day I read Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge in high school. That was a lifetime ago. Recently I was online doing research on the alluring packaging of the New Age spiritual teaching that I embraced more than thirty years ago just as I was coming to the end of my study of another teaching that had opened up the secret way of life to me, Gurdjieff’s teaching of the Fourth Way, and I chanced upon the movie The Razor’s Edge online, and I had to watch it again.

I had a heavy heart from my disconcerting research on the inveterate truth-seeking founder of the New Age spiritual teaching that came to me serendipitously to expand my spiritual horizons when I had to move on from Gurdjieff’s packaged teaching that we are not born with an immortal soul but can create one with conscious effort and intentional suffering, because Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” had done all it could for me; and I watched The Razor’s Edge with such fierce objectivity that it made Larry Darrell’s romantic quest for truth seem shallow, but I enjoyed it all the same because it brought back many memories.

I had seen the movie long ago on television, but after all these many years and my online research on the origin of Maugham’s hero Larry Darrell I came away from the story skeptical of the author’s literary intentions, which I now saw as aesthetic pretentions not unlike those of the founder of the New Age teaching who was not what he purported to be; he was a real person who fabricated a fictional spiritual identity, while Larry Darrell was a fictional identity whom Maugham fabricated out of his own seeker self and people that he knew: two separate packages with their own truth that I bought into respectively.

Larry Darrell, the central character of The Razor’s Edge, walked away from his fiancé and conventional life to go out into the world to seek an answer to the meaning and purpose of life. Larry was still a young man with his whole life ahead of him, but he had an experience during the war that called him to a higher purpose than marriage and family life. He was a fighter pilot in the war, and during a “dogfight” his pilot friend sacrificed his life to save Larry’s; and Larry had to know why he was spared and his friend had to die. That’s why he became a truth seeker whose story the internationally famous author had to write; but it’s in the way Maugham packaged Larry’s story that interested me these many years later.

When I read The Razor’s Edge in high school, I took Maugham at his word that his story was true. “I have invented nothing,” he tells us early in the story; and I even made inquiries through a magazine advertisement with an agency that hunted down lost books to see if they could locate for me the book that Maugham’s fictional hero Larry Darrell was said to have written (which only revealed my incredible naiveté to my English teacher); but Maugham gave his novel such credibility by inserting himself into the story that I foolishly believed his story to be biographically true. As he said, “I have invented nothing.” That’s how clever the author was in his packaging of Larry Darrell’s care-free bohemian life and quest for truth, but not as clever and affective as the modern day founder of the spiritual teachings of the Light and Sound of God that I lived for many years; this fearless truth-seeking author invented a whole new lineage of Spiritual Masters and packaged his own life and teaching with a spiritually seductive but fraudulent mythology that gave innocent truth seekers what they were looking for, and much more. Which begs the question: does packaging damage the truth inside the package? And that’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing… 

I was born into an Italian Roman Catholic family, and I embraced the package of my Roman Catholic faith without question. I was an altar boy and even considered becoming a priest one day, but all through high school I suffered from what today is called “spiritual claustrophobia” because my faith constrained me, and when I read The Razor’s Edge I was called to a higher purpose and became a truth seeker like my hero Larry Darrell.

And I discovered reincarnation. First in my dreams, with four past-life recollection dreams of living in another body in another time, and later in Plato’s Dialogues and the Edgar Cayce literature and other books; and I walked away from my Roman Catholic faith, which I learned many years later was only the beautifully wrapped packaging of the true teachings of the secret way of life that Jesus gave to the world in his cryptic sayings and parables. But it took many years before I resolved my issues with my Roman Catholic faith and Jesus Christ’s true teaching, which I wrote about in my novel Healing with Padre Pio.

If reincarnation is a fact of life, which for me is as true as true can be, then our immortal soul is not created at the moment of our human conception as Christianity would have us believe; we pre-exist our mortal human body, and we return to live life again and again to grow in our divine nature until we have grown enough to break the recurring cycle of life and death and are called to a higher purpose, like Larry Darrell and all truth seekers. But does this make the enticing package of Christ’s death upon the cross for our salvation moot?

At first it did for me, until I explored the contents of the package and learned the true meaning of Christ’s teaching; and I ceased to harbor resentment for my Roman Catholic faith that denied me the secret truth inside the package of Christ’s cryptic teaching, because my Catholic faith had instilled in me a fine sense of moral purpose and a conscience, and inside the packaged lie of Christianity can be found the sacred truth of our divine nature.

So I was well prepared for what I learned about the founder of the New Age teaching that I embraced without question for the better part of thirty years, and I harbor no resentment for the man and his packaged teaching as so many members who walked away from it do because they were disillusioned by the monumental lies that he perpetrated upon them.

The founder of this teaching was proven to be a clever fabricator who embroidered an elaborate but deceptive story which he plagiarized from authentic spiritual sources, a story so brilliantly embroidered that it took the innocence of a twenty year-old graduate student’s serendipitous research for a term paper to discover the false coins that this man had mingled with the true inside the golden package of his spiritual teaching that he released to the world in the soul-searching flower-powered 1960s. But rather than come clean with its fraudulent history, this New Age teaching continues to cling to the embroidered story brazenly perpetrated by its fraudulent myth-making founder; and that mars the package with an ugly stain that gravely impairs the spiritual integrity of this New Age teaching.

And when I walked away from this teaching after I finished writing The Pearl of Great Price last spring, which set my feet firmly upon my own path, I comforted myself with what the novelist Karen Blixen said about the creative process: “Art is the truth above the facts of life,” because I finally understood why the great artificer Somerset Maugham, who besides fueling the flame of my calling to become a truth seeker revealed to me an unteachable secret on the art of short story writing, did what he did to get to the aesthetic truth of his story above the facts of his protagonist Larry Darrell’s life and why the founder of this New Age teaching of the Light and Sound of God fabricated the spellbinding story that he did to bring the true coins of ancient spiritual teachings (“the truth above the facts of life”) to a spiritually famished world, and in the process made a comfortable living for his untiring self-serving efforts; both my fictional truth-seeking hero Larry Darrell and the fraudulent mythmaker and his spiritually seductive New Age teaching gave me what I needed for my journey to wholeness, and as bittersweet as it may be, this is the parable of the packages.  

───

 

 

 

 

 

 

29: Why be Good?

29 

 

Why be Good?         

          When I read David Brooks’ column from the New York Times (“Rather than building our careers, we should build inner character”) in my Friday, April 17, 2015 Life section of the Toronto Star, I heard my call to write a spiritual musing, “Why be Good?” But for one reason or another, I put it off; and then I picked up my Sunday, May 3, 2015 Star, which also features The New York Times International Weekly and Book Review inserts, and as the trickster spirit of coincidence would have it, Brooks’ column in the New York Times was titled “Goodness and Power,” and the Book Review insert featured a review of David Brooks’ new book The Road to Character; and, just to play with my mind a little more, after reading my papers yesterday afternoon the trickster spirit of coincidence nudged me to listen to the CBC Tapestry podcast instead of Writer’s & Company as intended, and Mary Hynes, the host of Tapestry, was interviewing David Brooks on his book The Road to Character, so here I am this morning contritely complying with my Muse to write my musing, “Why be Good?”

In his review of The Road to Character, Pico Iyer writes: “Brooks begins with a sweeping overview of the non-intersecting worlds of moral logic and economic logic, as he has it, dividing us into an ‘Adam 1,’ who seeks success in the world, and an ‘Adam 2,’ more deeply committed to character and an inner life,” and he goes on, summarizing the theme of Brooks’ book: “To nurture your Adam 1 career, it makes sense to cultivate your strengths. To nurture your Adam 2 moral core, it is necessary to confront your weaknesses.”

Brooks confesses that he wrote his book The Road to Character “to save my own soul,” and it was obvious from listening to him on Tapestry that he had invested way too much energy in his Adam 1 and not nearly enough energy in his Adam 2, and in his fifty-first year of his life he was making an honest effort to cultivate a better relationship with his Adam 2—his better self, if you will; and this brings me to the theme of today’s spiritual musing, why be good?

This is a big theme, and it would certainly seem presumptuous of me to offer an answer to a question that has vexed some of the best minds in history, but in all humility I bring a lifetime of gnostic wisdom to the table which gives me the confidence to say that when all is said and done our essential purpose in life is to simply be a good person.

This of course presupposes a lifetime of questing for the meaning and purpose of life—a personal library of thousands of books and years of commitment to various teachings; so my spiritual musings are serious reflections upon the human condition.

But to answer the question why be good? I have to call upon my creative unconscious to give me the proper image, because images are much more convincing than words will ever be; and in my mind’s eye I see life as an elaborate maze and man scrambling from one lifetime to the next to find his way out. And the man I see in the maze today is New York Times columnist David Brooks. 

 

“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, which speaks to the perplexing nature of the human condition (the maze of life); and whether we are aware or not that we live more than one lifetime does not really matter, because we will just keep coming back to live life over again until we are ready to look for the key that opens the door to our prison.

And herein lies the mystery that David Brooks yields to with his book The Road to Character, because Adam 1 brought him success in life but Adam 2 will open the door of his prison and set him free. “Many are called, but few are chosen,” said Jesus; and David Brooks heard the call to save his soul by working upon his character and moral center.

Everyone will hear the call of Soul when life has made them ready, and David Brooks heard the call when he began to notice the distinction between Adam 1 and Adam 2 in some special people that he met serendipitously in his daily travels through life, as he tells us in his New York Times column:

“About once a month, I run across a person who radiates an inner light. These people can be in any walk of life. They seem deeply good. They listen well. They make you feel funny and valued. You often catch them looking after other people and as they do so, their laugh is musical and their manner is infused with gratitude. They are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing. They are not thinking about themselves at all.

“When I meet such a person it brightens my whole day. But I confess I often have a sadder thought: It occurs to me that I’ve achieved a decent level of career success, but I have not achieved that. I have not achieved that generosity of spirit, or that depth of character.

“A few years ago, I realized that I wanted to be a bit more like those people. I realized that if I wanted to do that, I was going to have to work harder to save my own soul. I was going to have the sort of moral adventure that produces that kind of goodness. I was going to have to be better at balancing my life.”

I have deliberately italicized the last paragraph, because when Soul calls the voice is different; it comes from the depths of one’s own tired soul and speaks a truth that makes one shiver. David Brooks shivered when he heard the call, and he wrote The Road to Character to find the way out of his prison and bring balance to his Adam 1 and Adam 2, which speaks to the Master Key of our prison door—the liberating power of Goodness.

          Socrates, who made Goodness, the most noble of virtues, central to his philosophy said that the unexamined life is not worth living; and although that may be a bit harsh because every life serves its karmic purpose, David Brooks examined his life and realized that to have the generosity of spirit and depth of character that he needed to save his soul he’d have to have “moral adventures that produce that kind of goodness,” and his moral adventures lay in confronting himself and shifting his priorities from those that were self-serving (Adam 1), to those that were more life-serving (Adam 2). In short, David Brooks had to be less selfish and more giving, because the paradoxical dynamic of the Master Key to one’s prison door is that the more you give of yourself the more of yourself you will have to give; and, conversely, the less you give of yourself the less of yourself you will have to give. That’s what Jesus meant when he said: “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.”

          Why be good, then? Simply, because there will come a time in one’s life, whether it be in this lifetime or the next, when one will be called upon to open the door of their personal prison; and like David Brooks, they’ll also see that the only way to open this door is to simply be a good person. 

───

         

 

 

 

 

 

 

28: It's All About Balance

28 

It’s All about Balance 

On one of her daily walks several years ago, Penny met a neighbor and her little boy proudly riding his little bike. He was not quite three years old. His name was Jessie.

“Wow! Look at you, you’re doing really well; riding a two-wheeler without training wheels,” Penny said excitedly, as Jessie rode up to her.

“It’s all about balance,” Jessie said, with a proud little boy smile. “When I was big I used to ride a bike all the time!”

And Jessie’s mother replied, “Now you’re telling stories.”

But was he? Was the little boy’s imagination acting up, or was Jessie remembering one of his immediate past lives?

Penny didn’t respond, not wanting to engage the mother in an awkward conversation about reincarnation; but Penny knew the boy had lived before. Many children, in fact, remember their past lives before their memory “fades into the light of common day,” as Wordsworth tells us in his poem “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” In Verse V he writes:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

              Hath had elsewhere its setting,

              And cometh from afar:

              Not in entire forgetfulness,

              And not in utter darkness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

              From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison house begin to close

               Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

               He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

                Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,

                And by the vision splendid

                Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day. 

God is our home, as the gifted poet tells us; and we all come from God “trailing clouds of glory” to fulfill God’s Design; but we all forget where we came from and go from life to life yearning for something to fill the void in our soul.. That’s the central mystery of the human condition, and the subject of today’s spiritual musing… 

          I wrote in The Pearl of Great Price that life is a divine mystery. The “pearl of great price” is Christ’s metaphor for the object of our yearning, and not until we find the “pearl of great price” will we be satisfied. That’s why we keep coming back over, and over, and over again until we satisfy the yearning in our soul that will not go away.

          But just what is this “pearl of great price” that Jesus compared to the “kingdom of heaven” (“God, who is our home”) and the rich young man in Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan refused to seek for fear of losing his worldly possessions? What makes this “pearl” so precious that we have to sacrifice so much to purchase it?     

          There’s a program on television called Ghost Inside My Child, which I’ve seen half a dozen times; and it’s about children that have pervading memories of their past lives. It’s all very confusing to the parents if they know nothing about reincarnation, like Jessie’s mother; but even when they are acquainted with reincarnation, the reality of their children having a “ghost”(a former personality) inside them shocks them into a new paradigm.

          In my current life, I was born into a southern Italian Roman Catholic family; and, of course, they knew nothing about reincarnation. But in high school I had four distinct past-life recollection dreams (one lifetime as a fish monger in London, England; another as a North American Indian; another as black slave in southern Georgian; and another as a statesman in ancient Athens); and shortly after these dreams I discovered the “secret doctrine” in Plato’s Dialogue, the Phaedo. “There is a doctrine uttered in secret that man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door and run away; this is a great mystery which I do not quite understand,” said Socrates. But, as usual, the great philosopher was being ironic because his whole philosophy was about opening the door to man’s prison of reincarnation.

          “I deem that the true disciple of philosophy is likely to be misunderstood by other men; they do not perceive that he is every pursuing death and dying,” said Socrates; essentially expressing the same teaching of liberation that Jesus gave to the world. “He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal,” said Jesus in the Gospel of John; and not until we learn the secret of “dying to our life to find our life” will we break the cycle of life and death and satisfy the yearning in our soul.

          I broke the cycle, and I no longer yearn for God; but it took a long time and a lot of pain and anguish to lose my training wheels and find balance in my life… 

          My yearning consumed me, as it does every person that is called to seek their lost soul when life can no longer satisfy their need for more. “At that time, in the fortieth year of my life, I had achieved honor, power, wealth, knowledge, and every human happiness. Then my desire for the increase of these trappings ceased, the desire ebbed from me, and horror came over me…My soul, where are? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you—are you there?” wrote C. G. Jung in The Red Book, and he went on a quest for his lost soul because life could do no more to satisfy the yearning in his soul; and, more than forty years later, just before his death in the eighty-fifth year of his life, he had a dream in which his unconscious confirmed that he had found his lost soul in his achievement of “wholeness and singleness of self.”

When Jesus was asked by someone when his kingdom would come, Jesus said, ‘When the two will be one, and the outer like the inner, and the male with the female neither male nor female,” thereby giving us the key to our prison door; but the key only works when we learn the secret of how to make the two into one. And the two are one, St. Thomas tells us, “when we speak the truth to each other and there is one soul in two bodies with no hypocrisy.”

Jung called our “two bodies” Personality No. 1, and Personality No. 2; and he spent his whole adult life learning the secret of making the two into one that he called “the individuation process” and my first mentor G. I. Gurdjieff called “creating” our own soul.

Gurdjieff’s teaching was my training wheels that replaced my Roman Catholic training wheels when I moved on from my Christian faith in my quest for my lost soul; and after I achieved “wholeness and singleness of self” with the path that I forged out of Gurdjieff’s teaching, I got a new pair of training wheels in the New Age teaching of the Light and Sound of God that was introduced to the modern world in the early nineteen sixties; but thirty-some years later, I felt confident enough to drop my training wheels and cycle my way through life unaided by the training wheels that all religions, philosophies, and various paths afford us.

Out of the mouth of babes, “It’s all about balance.” 

───

 

 

         

         

         

           

 

 

 

27: The Mystery behind Joni Mitchell's Song "Both Sides Now"

27 

The Mystery behind Joni Mitchell’s Song

“Both Sides Now”

Life is a mystery, and it only gives up its secrets occasionally, like it did to Joni Mitchell, a young twenty-one year old artist who wrote her signature song “Both Sides Now” that Rolling Stone ranked #171 on its list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time; but how could such a young artist write a song that speaks to the human condition with such profound wisdom and wistful melancholy? That’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing…

The seed for today’s musing was sown six or seven months ago while watching a PBS membership drive one weekend; they were featuring music by some of the classical favorites, like Joni Mitchell, and something that one of the volunteer hosts said alerted me to attention, because it spoke to the mystery behind Joni Mitchell’s song “Both Sides Now.”

He was in his late thirties or early forties, and well-versed and articulate on the music they were featuring to solicit donations from viewers, but upon listening to Joni’s 2000 life-seasoned rendition of “Both Sides Now” he made a personal comment that addressed the mystery of the lyrics that speak to the enantiodromiac nature of the human condition—the being and non-being dynamic of our becoming.

This is a deep, deep mystery which has taken me a lifetime to unravel; but as I listened to Joni singing “Both Sides Now” on the PBS membership drive, I “saw” the archetypal pattern of the human condition play itself out in the lyrics, and I had to laugh to myself when the volunteer host humbly confessed, “I get it now. I finally get it.”

He had listened to “Both Sides Now” for years, but not until that moment did the mystery of the lyrics give themselves up to him, and he attributed it to the fact that he was married now with a young family and as he listened to Joni’s emotionally rich rendition of the song that she wrote when she was only twenty-one  he was somehow magically awakened to the inscrutable mystery of the enantiodromiac process of his own life—the good and the bad, the highs and the lows, the pains and the joys, and all the loves and hates that we’re all subject to as we wind our way through the many twists and turns of life.

“I guess you have to be older to get what Joni meant by both sides of life,” he revealed, with a self-conscious smile; and I laughed at his epiphany, because until we experience both sides of life how can we possibly appreciate the mystery of man’s paradoxical nature?

Joni tells us how the song came to her: “I was reading Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King on a plane and early in the book Henderson the Rain King is also up in a plane. He’s on his way to Africa and he looks down and sees these clouds. I put down the book, looked out the window and saw clouds too, and I immediately started writing the song. I had no idea that the song would become as popular as it did.”

How could she? She was only twenty-one years old, and her lyrics spoke to the whole emotional drama of life; but why did life give up its mystery to such a young artist?

It may be abstract, and possibly much too tenuous for anyone to believe, but I had an experience in my early twenties that speaks to Joni’s inspired creation of “Both Sides Now.” Like my own inspired moment on the loneliest night of my life in Annecy, France when I wrote something that foretold my own becoming, Joni’s song foretold her life also; because in that moment of inspired thought she became ensouled with the archetypal spirit of the human condition, and although “Both Sides Now” spoke to the enantiodromiac process of every person’s life, it also set the symbolic pattern of Joni’s own becoming.

Late in her life, after many highs and lows and loves and losses that she transformed with creative integrity into songs that reflected the individuation process of her own becoming, Joni revealed the impenetrable secret of the paradoxical nature of man in “Both Sides Now” that had prophetically foretold her own growth and individuation: “I thrive on change. That’s probably why my chord changes are weird, because chords depict emotions. They’ll be going along on one key and I’ll drop off a cliff, and suddenly they will go into a whole other key signature. That will drive some people crazy, but that’s how my life is.”

Being an artist, Joni Mitchell’s life symbolized the archetypal pattern of change that is inherent to the human condition; that’s why life gave up its mystery to her, so she could reveal the mystery of enantiodromia to the world in the lyrics of her songs, as art is wont to do.

 The Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung borrowed the word enantiodromia from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, which simply means that over time everything turns into its opposite, and this speaks to the archetypal pattern of change in “Both Sides Now” that puzzled Joni throughout her life; but why did her unconscious burst through on the plane that day when she wrote the song that has touched the hearts of so many people? Had she just given up her baby daughter for adoption? Was this the loneliest time of Joni’s life, too? Was she so vulnerable that God smiled on her with the lyrics to the song that soothed her soul and opened up the door to her career?

“I've looked at life from both sides now /From up and down, and still somehow /It's life's illusions I recall /I really don't know life at all,” wrote the prescient young artist; and she went out into the world to live out the archetypal pattern of her own becoming being so true to herself that she set the holy standard, just as I went out into the world and lived out the archetypal pattern of my own becoming after I wrote what I did that night in Annecy, France.

I was twenty-three years old, and I had gone to France to begin my own quest of self-discovery, and I was desperately alone and lonely from my precipitous departure from my safe and comfortable life in Canada when I came in from my walk that evening. I sat at my desk in my one room apartment with my pen in hand and wrote the following words which came as a gift to me from the same place that Joni Mitchell’s song “Both Sides Now” came from, the all-knowing creative unconscious that is the source of man’s creative genius:

“Steadfast and courageous is he, who having overcome woe and grief remains alone and undaunted. Alone I say for to be otherwise would hardly seem possible, for one must bear one’s conscience alone. He must fight the battle, and he must win the battle, odds or no odds; he must win to establish the equilibrial tranquility of body and soul, and sooner or later he will erupt as a volcano of unlimited confidence which will purpose his life thereafter. And having given birth to such magnificence he will no longer be alone alone, but alone in society; and he will see the mirror of his puerile grief in the eyes of his fellow man.”

These words burned themselves into my memory, and as desperate and lonely as I felt that day those words gave me so much solace that all I had to do was repeat them to myself to give me the strength I needed whenever self-doubt possessed me; and from day to day, week to week, and year to year they kept the fire in my soul burning until I “squared the circle” and resolved the paradoxical dynamic of my own becoming.

And that’s why Joni’s song “Both Sides Now” makes me cry every single time I hear it, because it brings me back to the impossible dilemmas of my life that gave me so much pain and sorrow; until, that is, I mastered the secret of how to transcend myself with what in “Ode to Duty” William Wordsworth called “the spirit of self-sacrifice.”

That’s why Joni’s song “Both Sides Now” is so sweetly melancholic, because it cannot resolve the perplexing mystery of “life’s illusions.” And yet, even though “something’s lost” in what we do, there’s always “something gained in living every day,” because this is the nature of the enantiodromiac process of our becoming; and Joni was called to write this song that introduced her to the rest of her life and to the world.

Destiny called Joni on the plane that day when she looked down at the clouds and wrote the lyrics to “Both Sides Now,” which she described as a meditation on reality and fantasy; and when Judi Collins made it into a hit, Joni’s destiny was set. Her song came as “an idea that was so big it seemed like I’d barely scratched the surface of it,” but it was an idea so true to the enantiodromiac process of the human condition that it became a standard for many singers and recorded more than three hundred times. As one interviewer said, “the song knows where it’s meant to go, and it knows what to do when it gets there.”

───

 

 

         

 

26: Weak Discipline

26 

WEAK DISCIPLINE 

          I hate being scolded by life. I know what I’m supposed to do, but I don’t; and then life comes along and scolds me, and I just hate it. But it’s not life that I hate, really; it’s my lack of self-discipline. And this is the subject of today’s spiritual musing… 

“Would you like to go out for breakfast?” I asked Penny Lynn Sunday morning, seeing that it was a beautiful spring morning and it would be a refreshing little outing.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked, smiling.

“How about The Blue Sky in Penetang,” I replied; and although the café looked full when I parked the car on the street just down from the Blue Sky, we were given a table for two in the window alcove, which was nice and intimate and visually spacious.

Penny had a feta cheese omelet and I had their peameal ham and egg special, but as we enjoyed our breakfast I saw a man back his van into the driveway next door and watched him get out and unlock the door to his house. He was a big man, under sixty, but overweight and slovenly gone to seed, and suddenly there flashed across my mind a newspaper headline that I had made a note of because it was my inspiration for a spiritual musing.

The headline in the Financial Post section of the newspaper (I never read the financial section, nor the sports section for that matter) read: WEAK DISCIPLINE, and I kept the paper on that page on the table beside my recliner in our sun room because I wanted to be reminded to write a spiritual musing that that headline had inspired; but over the next week or so I got so tired of seeing the bold letters of WEAK DISCIPLINE staring up at me every time I sat in my recliner to read or watch TV that I threw the paper into the Blue Box for recycling. And Sunday when Penny and I were having breakfast at the Blue Sky and I saw that big man who had gone to seed, WEAK DISCIPLINE flashed across my mind in flashing neon colours; and I knew I had just been called again to write my spiritual musing on self-discipline.

And, as the merciful (sometimes merciless, depending upon one’s frame of mind) law of divine synchronicity would have it, when we got home after breakfast and enjoyable country drive I read the book section of my Saturday’s Globe and Mail and the headline A NEW YOU shouted out at me like a barker at the old carny—a review of Gretchin Rubin’s new book Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Every Day Lives, which confirmed the imperative from my unconscious to write my spiritual musing on self-discipline.

I knew the Gretchin Rubin story, which had launched her literary career and made her a go-to person with her 2009 self-help bible The Happiness Project that spent 107 weeks on the New York Times best seller list and sold 1.5 million copies; and now she was back with a follow-up book to re-enforce the happiness-making discipline of The Happiness Project, and, perhaps, placate her and her reader’s conscience for lapsing in the healthy habits that brought happiness into one’s life; so I read Courtney Shea’s carefully guardedly sarcastic review of Rubin’s Better than Before, because I had been summoned to read it by the terrifying image of that slovenly overweight man in Penetang who had gone to seed… 

If I may, let me say that I honestly appreciate the guidance that we get from the omniscient guiding force of life; because, as I have happily come to see, the more we pay attention to the little signs, coincidences, and synchronicities that come our way the more we align our life with our destined purpose; so as much as I hated being scolded by life with the disturbing image of the man that had gone to seed, I was thankful for being reminded of what I could become in a few years if I don’t start mastering new habits for self-discipline.

The first habit that I want to master is reading poetry again every morning to start my day, beginning with Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence,” because this poem always lifts my spirits and inspires me to take a positive view on life. And I’ve already committed the last two lines to memory, because they are so uplifting: “God,” said I, “be my help and stay secure; /I’ll think of the Leech Gatherer on the lonely moor!”

Wordsworth met the Leech Gatherer on the lonely moor one morning when the spirit of gloom and doom (his shadow) possessed him. “We poets in our youth begin in gladness, /But thereof come in the end despondency and madness,” wrote the lonely poet; and then, as providence would have it, he met an old Leech Gatherer whose indomitable spirit and choice words “with something of a lofty utterance dressed” lifted the dejected poet out of his despair and melancholy. So “Resolution and Independence” will be my salvific way to begin my day, a pre-emptive measure to keep the spirit of gloom and doom away.

And I have to read my morning poetry out loud, because something magical happens when the soul of the poet’s wisdom is released into the air with the sound of one’s voice; the vibrations of the poet’s words entrain the vibrations of one’s soul, and the poet’s wisdom becomes one’s own like the entrainment of the independent rhythm of two grandfather clock pendulums swinging in harmonious unison—an inexplicable, but efficient way to nourish one’s hungry soul. And speaking of hunger, how wise it would be to curb my appetite!

And I have to start walking more, and further. Ever since I had open heart surgery I’ve made excuses for my damaged heart to not be too physical; but I can stop rationalizing now and get on with my new coincidence-inspired program if I don’t want to go to seed.

As St. Padre Pio told me in my new book on “active imagination” (Carl Jung called his “confrontation with the unconscious” an exercise in “active imagination”, and which he bequeathed to the world in his iconic Red Book), I have to start my new program slowly; but I have to start doing it. Here’s what my creative unconscious (or was it the Good Saint; I can’t be sure any more than Neale Donald Wash was sure that God spoke to him in his many Conversations with God books) said to me: 

“The DOING is what counts. In the DOING comes the reality. Just write STRONG DISCIPLINE into your script and start the process, inch by inch and not mile by mile. To run the mile you have to run the inch first. That’s your starting point. Inch by inch.” 

As my mother used to say: “Chi van piano va sano va lontagno.” And the literal translation, which I’m going to take to heart in my new program, simply means that if I go slowly I will go a long way in good health; and maybe, just maybe, I won’t go to seed.

 

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