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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