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.
───
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