34: Life Is Inherently Self-correcting

34 

Life Is Inherently Self-correcting 

“Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

Proverbs 16: 18 

          I get ideas for spiritual musings from the daily news, and I read three weekend papers to stay abreast of current events, following three or four favorite columnists because I like the way they think; like Margaret Wente’s column in Saturday, June 13’s Globe and Mail headlined “Fame, fortune and the fallen,” a thought piece on Evan Solomon, the dashing 47 year old host of CBC’s Power & Politics who fell from grace when he breached his employer’s ethical guidelines by using his position to broker art deals for personal profit. No sooner did I hear of his fall from grace, and my Muse snapped me to attention with the inspiration for today’s spiritual musing: life is inherently self-correcting…         

It would be so simple to call this inherently self-correcting principle of life KARMA, but this merely scratches the surface of how and why the omniscient guiding force of life unexpectedly comes into play in our life when we stray too far away from our destined purpose. This of course presupposes that we have a destined purpose, which I believe we do; and so for clarity’s sake, it behoves me to explain how I came to believe that our life is not, in the words of the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, “a useless passion” but on the contrary is teleologically driven by a destined purpose.

I can’t go into detail on how I came to the realization that we are all born with a destined purpose, because that would require a whole book (actually, it’s taken many books to explain my journey to this simple truth, my most succinct being Do We Have an Immortal Soul? and my most personal to date, The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway), so I’ll have to provide the Reader’s Digest version of my journey of self-discovery.

          From the earliest age, I was plagued with the feeling that I was not myself; that I was an inauthentic version of who I was, a “fake” me, so to speak; and this feeling exploded with daimonic fury in an inspired poem that I wrote in high school called “Noman,” which many years later became the inspiration for my memoir The Summoning of Noman; so it was inevitable that I would be called so early to the hero’s journey and go on a quest for my true self, which I wrote about in my recently published memoir The Pearl of Great Price.

Just for the record, my calling to become a seeker was sparked in grade twelve when I read Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge. His protagonist Larry Darrell was my inspiration; and not unlike Larry Darrell, my quest for my true self proved successful insomuch that I became aware of man’s destined purpose, which is to grow into the person we are meant to be like an acorn seed grows into an oak tree; or, as C. G. Jung, one of the founders of depth psychology (the other was Sigmund Freud), humorously expressed our destined purpose: “an acorn seed must become an oak tree and not a donkey.”

When all of this is broken down to its bare essence, it simply means that we are all born to become who we are meant to be and not someone else. Jane Doe cannot become Mary Jane, and Joe Blow cannot become Tom, Dick, or Harry; each person must become who they are genetically and karmically encoded to become, and when we deviate from our destined purpose life intervenes by changing the course of our life to set us back on track, like it changed the course of the brazen Canadian journalist Evan Solomon’s life by getting him fired from his enviable and secure position at the CBC. As Margaret Wente expressed it in her column, “He was on his way to being King of the News—the next Peter Mansbridge (anchor of the CBC news), but hotter, hipper, and even more connected.”

Why, then, asks Wente and every thoughtful person aware of Solomon’s breach of ethics, would this highly intelligent, aggressively successful journalist more than familiar with how the game of life is played (how many times did he grill politicians for crossing the line?), would he do something so stupid? Why would he jeopardize his career that he worked so hard to achieve when his life track seemed to be going so well? Or, as one journalist put it, why would he lick his finger and stick it into an electrical socket?

          What Evan Solomon did was dumber than dumb; it was idiotic. But this didn’t surprise me, because as strange as it may seem I actually saw it coming. I’ve followed this young man’s career from the day he started with the CBC, and I watched him grow in self-confidence to the point of arrogantly charming, but stupefying conceit; and it was his personal conceit which grew dangerously complacent in his powerful position that did him in, because he became a helpless victim of his idiot self, or what Debbie Ford called “the shadow effect.” But this is such an elusive concept that it requires explaining… 

          When I said that what Evan Solomon did to jeopardize his high profile and lucrative career was idiotic, I was alluding to the mysterious nature of the shadow side of our personality that has a tendency to pop out into the open and sabotage our life whenever it’s given an opportunity, as it did when Solomon’s greed got the best of him and got him fired from the CBC; and when I said that his decision to broker art deals for personal profit was idiotic, I meant that word in its etymological sense, because the origin of the word idiot comes from the Greek word idiotes, which means private person (idios, one’s own), which is the unconscious, dark side of our personality that Jung called the “shadow.”

          Deepak Chopra, who co-authored The Shadow Effect with Debbie Ford and Marianne Williamson, wrote: “Human nature includes a self-destructive side. When Swiss psychologist Carl Jung posited the archetype of the shadow, he said that it creates a fog of illusion that surrounds the self. Trapped in this fog, we evade our own darkness, and thus we give the shadow more and more power over us” (The Shadow Effect, p. 12).

          Margaret Wente wrote that Evan Solomon “parlayed his Power & Politics gig into a show that Ottawa insiders had to watch—as well as a platform for some serious social climbing. He ran with movers and shakers, including some of the same people he had on his show. For a journalist, that kind of access is intoxicating. As he told the Ryerson Review of Journalism not too long ago, ‘I traffic in people of great power. That is my world.’”

Evan Solomon was “dazzled by fame and fortune,” and wanted “a cut of it for himself,” wrote Wente; and he did get a cut ($300,000 and more for his art deals) until his “fog of illusion” got him fired for breach of ethics—the same kind of idiotic self-sabotaging behavior that inspired my book Stupidity Is Not a Gift of God.

Ironically, Evan Solomon wrote a novel in 1999 called Crossing the Distance which on the first page ominously foreshadowed how his shadow would one day sabotage his career: “Betrayal isn’t something you choose, it’s something that chooses you,” wrote Solomon.

          And now that this proud young man has been humbled, he has an opportunity to get his life back onto its destined course, which is to be who he is meant to be and not the false shadow side of his personality; but he has a hard road to hoe.

Jung spent his whole life trying to facilitate the process of individuation, which Jesus spoke to with his teaching of making “the two into one.” But as the old saying goes, if we don’t get it right in this lifetime, we’ll just keep coming back until we do; which in itself is another mystery that would require another spiritual musing.  

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33: Shadow Masters

33 

Shadow Masters 

“Man’s shadow, I thought, is his vanity.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

While working on my new book The Man of God Walks Alone—a literary exercise in what Carl Jung called “active imagination”—I was introduced to the concept of Shadow Masters by St. Padre Pio, who may or may not be an archetypal manifestation of my unconscious; and so acutely conscious did I become of these false teachers from intimate personal experience that I was prompted by my Muse to explore this concept of Shadow Masters in today’s spiritual musing, though admittedly under protest…

 

Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher who said that we cannot step into the same river twice, believed that life is always in a state of flux and is forever being transformed; and from this perspective was born Carl Jung’s understanding of enantiodromia, the concept that everything will in time turn into its opposite, which gave birth to Jung’s psychology of individuation whose ultimate purpose is to integrate the conflicting shadow side of our psychic self with our conscious ego personality, or what Jesus called “salvation.”

The word “salvation” has a lot of baggage, but if one is fortunate enough to break the code of Christ’s teaching and catch a glimpse of the secret way one will see that by “salvation” Jesus simply meant breaking the cycle of life and death by transcending the dual consciousness of our personality, which Jesus referred to as making the two into one as he tells us in The Unknown Sayings of Jesus, by Marvin Meyer: “For when the master himself was asked by someone when the kingdom would come, he said, ‘When the two will be one, and the outer like the inner, and the male with the female neither male nor female.’”

This is the mystical nature of the process of individuation that Carl Jung devoted his life to understanding and expounded upon in his magnum opus Mysterium Coniunctionis, but try as he may he could not break the code of how to facilitate the mystical marriage of our inner and outer self and only brought us to the gateway of the kingdom of our true self; but Gurdjieff knew the secret way, and with Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” I integrated my shadow self with my conscious personality and realized my transcendent self in my mother’s kitchen one day while she was kneading bread dough on the kitchen table.

So I can speak with the confidence of gnostic certainty about the secret way, and it behoves me now to shed some light on this concept of Shadow Masters that pass themselves off as genuine Spiritual Masters, and so effectively I may add that they can entrap the keenest of seekers in the seductive web of their deception as I have already illustrated in my spiritual musing “The Parable of the Packages.” But why? What drives them to deceive?

That’s the mystery of Shadow Masters that I’ve been called upon to unravel; but so confounding is this mystery that I have no choice but to declare my ignorance, and I’m obliged to call upon my Muse for assistance— 

“What’s my point of entry?”

“The becoming of man’s nature.”

 “The being and non-being of our becoming?”

“One cannot exist without the other.”

“All I know is that to be, we must become; and to become we have to transform the false into the real. That’s the only way we can make the two into one. So what’s the purpose of a Shadow Master whose imperative is to keep soul trapped in one’s shadow?”

“Aye, there’s the rub!”

“You tease me.”

“If I may, wherein lies the proof of the pudding?”

“In the experience.”

“Well?”

“I loved the pudding at first, but the more I ate the less I liked it; and then the pudding gave me indigestion, and I had to walk away from the table: the first time with an offshoot Christian solar cult that did irreparable damage to my eyesight, and recently with a new age teaching of the Light and Sound of God that gravely wounded my swollen pride when I learned that the founder of this teaching was a fraudulent mythologizer.”

“One must eat the shadow to taste the shadow—”

“STOP! I’ve got it! Shadow Masters serve shadow pudding!”

“They too serve the Creator.”

“What irony! Okay, I can take it from here…” 

Shadow pudding? What on earth is that? That’s the mystery, isn’t it? But how else can we know the real unless we get our fill of the false? And that’s the Shadow Master’s divine mission, to serve us shadow pudding until we get sick of shadow pudding; but just what is this shadow pudding that tastes so good to the innocent seeker’s palate?

For over thirty years I feasted on the shadow pudding of a new age teaching of the Light and Sound of God, but when I had my fill of shadow pudding I began to get indigestion every time I dined at the Shadow Master’s table; and then one night I had a dream that broke the spell that this Shadow Master had upon his followers, and I stopped eating shadow pudding and walked away from the Master’s table. Hence, today’s spiritual musing.

In Meeting the Shadow, The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, editors Connie Sweig and Jeremiah Abrams wrote: “However, for most participants in the new age, the shadow has been conspicuous by its absence. Seekers are often led to believe that, with the right teacher and the right practice, they can transcend to higher levels of awareness without dealing with their more petty vices or ugly emotional attachments. As Colorado journalist Marc Barasch puts it: ‘Spirituality, as repackaged for the new age, is a confection of love and light, purified of pilgrimage and penance, of defeat and descent, of harrowing and humility’” (Meeting the Shadow, p. 130).

“Purified of pilgrimage and penance,” that’s the sweet ingredient of shadow pudding that appeals to the seeker’s palate, just as Christianity’s shadow pudding of instant salvation through Jesus Christ without the purifying effort of pilgrimage and penance, which belies the law of spiritual growth through the conscious effort of integrating the unconscious shadow with the ego personality—dying to one’s life to find one’s life, as Jesus said.

In short, there are no shortcuts into the kingdom of one’s true self, and shadow pudding feeds the shadow and starves the soul with vacuous truisms like “You are Soul” and “Soul exists because God loves you” that eliminate all the penance of our becoming.

Without the purifying pilgrimage and penance of our becoming, we will never become conscious of our true spiritual nature; but Shadow Masters are relentless, and they will do whatever it takes to keep followers dining at their sumptuous table; like using fear to ensure obedience.

“What makes me sick at heart? When people I know and love decide to leave (his TEACHING, which he claims to be the most direct path to God). That will delay their entry into the highest states of consciousness,” wrote the Shadow Master in his quarterly letter to High Initiates, threatening those who leave his TEACHING of the Light and Sound of God that I walked away from after thirty years of dining at his table; and though I have a lingering sour taste in my mouth from all the shadow pudding that I ate, especially the subliminal fear that he implanted in my mind with sugar-coated kindness that salvation was not possible without his inner and outer guidance, I still want to thank him for his spiritual teaching which took me through the far country of duplicity and brought me back home to reality, because now I know that Shadow Masters are only as real as we allow them to be. In the words of St. Padre Pio, “Life is a journey of growth and understanding.” 

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32: Anger can be Nasty

32 

Anger can be Nasty 

Reflections on Robin Williams’s role in

The Angriest Man in Brooklyn. 

“I can see that man committing suicide,” I said, thinking out loud as Penny and I watched Robin Williams in his role as the angry lawyer Henry Altmann in The Angriest Man in Brooklyn that was released on DVD on August 19, just eight days after his suicide on August 11, 2014. Robin hanged himself, and his death was attributed to depression; but whatever caused this brilliant actor to take his own life, it broke the world’s heart.

I had no idea that The Angriest Man in Brooklyn was made a few months before Robin committed suicide and released shortly after his death, so my feelings about the misanthropic lawyer Henry Altmann weren’t influenced by that knowledge; I went online after the movie to check it out, and what I learned confirmed my feelings about Robin Williams.

For the longest time I’ve had the belief that the character an actor plays chooses the actor and not the other way around, just as I believe that every novel that a writer writes chooses the author and not the author the novel; which speaks to the mystical process of individuation through our own karmic destiny’ that’s why I thought what I did about Robin Williams as his character Henry Altmann spewed his vitriol onto the world.

Anger can be nasty, and Robin Williams must have had a lot of pent-up anger that he channeled into his character Henry Altmann; that’s why I felt that he was acting out his own drama as much as the drama of the character he was playing, which begs the humorous, albeit ironic question: who was playing whom in The Angriest Man in Brooklyn?

The plotline of Henry Altmann’s personal story is very simple but contrived to the point of incredulity; but be that as it may, the anger that Altmann displayed spoke to an emotion that we’re all familiar with, and I watched it to the end despite how boring and predictable it proved to be. Penny walked out half way through and went to bed.

I felt compelled to watch it to the end, though; because I knew that Henry Altmann would tell me something about the life of an actor that I admired ever since he landed as an alien from another planet on the TV sitcom Mork & Mindy, a role that launched Robin Williams’ acting career and in some mysterious way imprinted his comedic genius; and as Henry Altmann vented his uncalled-for anger to the young female doctor who was covering for his regular doctor, she spitefully told him that he only had 90 minutes left to live because of the brain aneurism that she had discovered when she perused his medical chart for his follow-up visit after his cat scan for the headaches he was experiencing, and Altmann angrily stormed out of the hospital to make the most of his remaining 90 minutes.

But why was Henry Altmann so angry at the world? And if he was so angry, why was Robin Williams who for my money was playing out his own anger as the malcontent Henry Altmann? I can’t say, really; and I have to call upon my Muse to help me find an answer to this troubling issue of anger in today’s spiritual musing… 

I don’t know enough about Robin William’s personal life to draw any definite conclusion, but I trust my instincts enough to suspect that his character Henry Altmann gave Robin William’s an opportunity to vent his venomous rage at the world; and as presumptuous as this may be, what I read online about Robin Williams seems to confirm my intuition.

Married three times and father of three, Robin had a history of drug and alcohol abuse and went to rehab to quit his addiction. He had unexpected heart surgery, which forced him to acknowledge his mortality, and he took up serious cycling for his health; but shortly before he took his life he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and some say this triggered his suicide. In a statement released shortly after her husband’s death, Susan Schneider said that Robin was struggling with depression, anxiety, and the Parkinson’s diagnosis when he died. In a word, Robin Williams had a full, highly successful, and emotionally complex life.

In The Angriest Man in Brooklyn, Henry Altman’s pent-up anger was set free when he learned of his son’s tragic accidental death; and his anger grew from day to day. The Angriest Man in Brooklyn begins with Altmann’s car getting smashed by a taxi driver who runs a red light, and Altman’s rages with explosive fury at the foreign cabby. This sets the stage for his doctor’s appointment that releases the molten lava of his anger at the world.

Anger is as common to man as rain is to the weather, and it comes and goes; but when it rains, it also pours and one can drown in raw emotion. Henry Altmann was drowning, and when he goaded the frustrated doctor to tell him how much time he had left to live she deliberately but mistakenly told him that he only had 90 minutes; and Altmann takes stock of his life and decides to make amends with his family, starting with the son he had abandoned after his other son’s tragic death, and the story unfolds in a comedy of tragic misadventures.

As contrived and idiotic as the plotline was (one reviewer said the movie was rescued by Robin’s suicide from obscurity where it belonged, and I don’t disagree), I had to watch it to the end to see how Henry Altmann resolved his anger issues because I know what I had to go through to resolve my own issues with anger, and it wasn’t easy; but I prefer a happy ending to a sad one, and I’m glad that Henry Altmann died with his family by his side.

But Robin Williams didn’t. He hung his belt around his neck and took his own life, and his wife and children were nowhere near his side. Henry Altmann tried to commit suicide by jumping into the Hudson River when he failed to connect with his son and was running out of precious time, but the young doctor who condemned him to 90 minutes of life ran down to the river’s edge and swam out and saved her patient’s life; and the movie ended in happy resolution for everyone when they threw Henry Altmann’s ashes back into the river.

But this was only a movie, and one of Robin William’s worst; and the only thing that salvaged it for me was Henry Altmann’s anger, because my gut told me that Robin Williams had been called to play this role to vent his own anger at the world, and it told me more about the man than all of his other movies put together.

 

 

31: The Same Old Question

31 

The Same Old Question 

“Thank God I’m Jung and not a Jungian,” Carl Jung, the founder of depth psychology, said in a moment of serious jest; but to fully appreciate the profound richness of Jung’s humor, one would have to have a healthy respect for the individual self, which Carl Jung certainly had; and that’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing… 

I admire and respect anyone, whether they succeed or not does not matter to me, who has the courage to pursue their dreams and live their own life; people who go against the logic of convention and do their own thing, because they reflect a certain quality that we all possess but are afraid to act upon for one reason or another. But what is this special quality, this certain je ne sais quoi that the great psychologist humbly deferred to?

“The acorn seed must become an oak tree and not a donkey,” remarked Jung in another moment of serious jest, with that same mischievous glint in his eye that spoke volumes about this certain quality that we’re all born with but need help to bring to light; but I knew where Jung was coming from, and I laughed at the irony of his playful humor.

That’s what inspired today’s spiritual musing. I saw a post on Facebook the other day that reminded me of Jung’s comment about how thankful he was for being himself and not a Jungian as many of his followers, because it spoke to the concept of individuation that is central to Jungian psychology and that special quality that makes us who we are.

David Brooks’ May 9, 2015 New York Times column “What Is Your Purpose?” was inspired by his promotion tour for his new book The Road to Character, which coincidentally addresses the issue central this spiritual musing; but as relevant as it may be to our fast-paced digital world, there is nothing new about man’s quest for meaning and purpose.

Brooks opens his column with the following words: “Every reflective person sooner or later faces certain questions: What is the purpose of my life? How do I find a moral compass so I can tell right from wrong? What should I do day by day to feel fulfillment and deep joy?” And he concludes his reflective article by saying that there’s a hunger out there for answers to these questions, but people don’t really know where to look; and so, to do his part, he opened up a dialogue online so people can draw inspiration from each other, which goes a long way to firming up today’s spiritual musing, “The Same Old Question.”

I’m being ironic; because like Carl Jung I’ve also been initiated into the secret way of individuating that special quality that makes us who we are, and I can afford to be lighthearted and cheeky like my hero because I know that an acorn seed has to become an oak tree and not a donkey just as I know that Jane Doe cannot become anyone else but Jane Doe.

This, obviously—pardon me; it’s not obvious at all, is it?—is the answer to the same old question that David Brooks sees hanging out there: What is the purpose of my life? The purpose is simply to become who you are meant to be, end of story; and that’s the irony of the human situation that neither the depth psychologist nor I could repress.

If this sounds conceited, I do apologize; but it is hilarious, if one only stops to think about it. It’s like the Sufi teaching story of that old trickster Mullah Nasruddin looking for the key to his house out in the daylight because the light is better outside than it is in his house where he lost it. Who has the courage to stare their shadow in the face?

And that’s the problem we’ve always had, which is more pronounced today than at any other time in human history, we’re always looking for magic solutions that will take away the responsibility of being who we are meant to be; until, that is, we can no longer suffer the angst of our own meaningless existence which clever philosopher’s like Sartre packaged into beautiful sounding phrases like, “life is a useless passion” and “man is condemned to be free,” and then one day like David Brooks we have a metanoic change of heart and start living by higher values that will pour meaning and purpose into our empty, distraught lives. As the French like to say, “Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.” 

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