51: The Logic of Life

51

The Logic of Life

When I dropped out of university in my third year where I had gone to find answers to the imponderable questions of my life (who am I? and why am I?), I vowed to build my life upon the truth of my own experiences and no-one else’s; and I’m happy to say that as improbable as it may seem, I had experiences that answered both of these questions to my complete satisfaction; but will anyone believe me?

It used to matter to me when I had a need to be acknowledged for what I had learned about life in my long journey of self-discovery, but over time I realized that life is an individual journey and people are going to believe what they want to believe regardless of what I or anyone else has to say; which took a heavy burden off my mind.

But I’m a writer, and life is my subject; so regardless whether anyone believes what I have to say, I’m going to write anyway because I love writing; and this morning my Muse whispered into my ear to explore the logic of life in today’s spiritual musing…

Life did not make any sense to Macbeth in Shakespeare’s play. For Macbeth, life was “a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Many people feel this way about life, but not me despite how I felt when I wrote my first novel when I lived in Annecy, France which I called This Petty Pace (inspired by Macbeth’s soliloquy “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow /Creeps in this petty pace from day to day…”); I knew in the depths of my soul that life had purpose, and I was destined to find out what this purpose was. This is why I believe the merciful law of divine synchronicity pulled Gurdjieff into my life.

“What is the sense and significance of life on Earth and human life in particular?” asked Gurdjieff at an early age, and he was driven by his daemon to find an answer, which he did after twenty years of seeking for the secret knowledge deeply hidden in mystery schools in Central Asia and the Far East; and he found an answer that satisfied his curiosity which he shared with the world in his Fourth Way teaching that initiated me into the secret way of life that speaks to us with every experience that we have, if we but have the eyes to see.

“‘The spiritual life is, at root, a matter of seeing,’” John Shea, a contemporary Catholic theologian reminds us. “‘It is all of life seen from a certain perspective. It is waking, sleeping, dreaming, eating, drinking, working, loving, relaxing, recreating, walking, sitting, standing, and breathing…spirit suffuses everything; and so the spiritual life is simply life, wherever and whatever, seen from the vantage point of spirit’” (Spiritual Literacy, Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life, by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, p. 28, bold italics mine); and the more I “worked” on myself with Gurdjieff’s transformative teaching, the more the secret way of life revealed its logic to me. But it took years to understand what life was telling me.

Every discipline has its own logic. Medicine, architecture, sports, painting, music, poetry, physics—whatever; each discipline has its own rationale that has been worked out over the years, and forever growing in the logic of its own teleology, which suggests that there is a logic to life that is implicit to everything that we do, whether we are aware of it or not. But what could this logic be? In a word, what is the teleological purpose of life?

This is the fundamental mystery of our existence—“the sense and significance of life on Earth and human life in particular,” which Gurdjieff answered in his Fourth Way teaching but which did not quite satisfy my need to know who and why I was.

Mystics come close to revealing the teleological purpose of life, and some even spell it out as Rumi did in his mystical poetry, which he brazenly proclaimed in his poetical directive: “Tell it unveiled, the naked truth! /The declaration’s better than the secret.” But even as his poems declare the secret of our existence, it still remains a divine mystery; which is why Gurdjieff said, “There is only self-initiation into the mysteries of life.”

And that’s what Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” did for me; it gave me the means to initiate myself into the secret of our existence, and day by day the logic of life revealed itself to me until one day I connected the dots and saw the teleological purpose of life on Earth and human life in particular, which is to give birth to a new “I” of God.

As Jung would say, the teleological purpose of an acorn seed is to become an oak tree and not a donkey; in like manner, the teleological purpose of life on Earth and human life in particular is to grow in the consciousness of life’s divine nature (“the spiritual life is simply life,” said John Shea), and as outlandish and incredible as this may be, I know this to be true because of my own miraculous experience that initiated me into this mystery…

It came as a total surprise to me, and to my regressionist; but in my fourth past-life regression ten years ago I went back to the Body of God where all new souls come from. And if that wasn’t miraculous enough, it was even more miraculous that I knew I was an atom of God without self-consciousness; I had consciousness, but no self-consciousness!

I was just one of an infinite number of atoms in the Body of God, and as blissful and joyous as my existence was in the Great Ocean of Love and Mercy, I was oblivious to my own divine nature; and in the same regression I went back to my first primordial human lifetime as a higher primate when I gave birth to a new “I” of God; meaning, my own reflective self-consciousness. And from lifetime to lifetime I grew in my individuality as far as the natural law of evolution through karma and reincarnation could take me, which compelled me in my current lifetime to take evolution into my own hands with Gurdjieff’s teaching to complete what nature could not finish by giving birth to my spiritual self one fine day in my mother’s kitchen while she was kneading bread dough on the kitchen table.

It was a long, long journey to my true self; but in the end I became what I was meant to be, taking the logic of life to its conclusion which answered my questions who and why am I? But I would never have realized my destiny had I not heeded the logic of life that spoke to me with my every experience; and this is the truth of my life which in the spirit of Rumi I have told unveiled because I too believe that the declaration is better than the secret. As Jesus said, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” But I cannot bring this musing to closure until I reveal how I broke the code of life’s secret way, which is deeply woven into the logic of life…

Because I had to find my own way in life, I was always looking for guidance for the best way to my true self; and I found this guidance in Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” which opened me up to the implicit guidance of life’s wisdom sayings—aphorisms, dictums, maxims, proverbs, adages, axioms, mottos and parables; all of which reflected the distilled wisdom of someone’s life experience, like the old saw “measure twice, cut once.”

This is good advice for an apprentice carpenter who does not want to spoil his cut with the wrong measurement. This saying could save him the agony of spoiling a perfectly good piece of lumber (or marble counter top, which could be very expensive), which implies that “excellence” is the guiding wisdom of this saying—and any life wisdom saying, for that matter. This is how I began to see the logic of life hidden in wisdom sayings; and I gathered them like precious gems from every source that I could find, especially books.

But it wasn’t until I began to see the life wisdom hidden in the sayings of Jesus that I began to “read” the logic of life’s purpose, and the only reason that the sayings of Jesus opened up to me was because of the “work” I was doing on myself with Gurdjieff’s teaching; so it behoves me to explain exactly what I mean by “work on oneself.”

The principle behind Gurdjieff’s concept of “work on oneself” lies in the secret knowledge that Gurdjieff discovered in the mystery schools that he was initiated into, which revealed to him the dual nature of human consciousness—the being and non-being aspects of our nature; or what Gurdjieff called our essence and personality.

Essence is who we are, our being or true self; and personality is our non-being, or false self. And “work on oneself” is all about transforming our false self into our true self. And the more I “worked” on myself, the more the sayings of Jesus revealed their logic to me; a logic which spelled out the secret path to our true self, like his saying, “No man can serve two masters.” But why is it wrong to serve two masters? What is the hidden wisdom behind this saying that Jesus admonished us to live by?

Jesus explains: if one serves two masters, he will either “hate the one, or love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.” And Jesus reveals the hidden logic of this saying by adding, “You cannot serve God and mammon.”

Without an awareness of the dual consciousness of man, this saying would not make any sense; and it doesn’t for most people. By serving God, Jesus meant that we should serve, or live by values that nourish our being, or true self; and by serving mammon, Jesus meant we would be serving, or living by values that nourish our non-being, or material self; and when we understand that we are both being and non-being, which Gurdjieff called our essence and personality, this saying points us in the direction of our essential self, which as I learned many years later in my past-life regression to the Body of God where all new souls come from is our divine nature.

In a word, then; I managed to break the code of life’s logic, which guides us in our journey through life to our best possible self. We all come from the body of God as un-self-realized atoms of God, or embryonic souls if you will; and our purpose in life is to grow through the process of natural evolution as far as nature can take us, and then we have to take evolution into our own hands to compete our teleological purpose in life which is to realize our divine nature. This is the logic of life hidden in the secret teaching of Christ’s sayings and parables, and all life wisdom sayings for that matter because they all point us to the best path to our true self regardless of what kind of path it may be because all paths lead to God eventually. But this is a concept that needs further explanation, so if I may…

Whether one believes it or not, reincarnation is a fact of life; and, as I experienced with my past-life regression to the Body of God, all new souls come into the world to grow in the consciousness of their divine nature, which I proved for myself with my past-life regressions and the birth of my spiritual self with the help of Gurdjieff’s teaching, life’s wisdom sayings, and especially the powerful sayings and parables of Jesus. And in my journey to my true self I learned that we have two destinies: one personal, and one spiritual.

Our personal destiny is karmic, because we create our personal destiny by the choices we make; and every choice we make creates karma. And our spiritual destiny is pre-destined, because we are all atoms of God divinely encoded to become a new “I” of God. 

So we have a personal destiny that we create for ourselves by the choices we make, and we have a spiritual destiny that is pre-scripted by our divinely encoded nature. Just as an acorn seed is encoded to become an oak tree, so are we encoded and teleologically driven to become our divine self; but our karmic destiny does not always coincide with our spiritual destiny (we can stray so far that it takes many lifetimes to get back on track, as my past-life regressions revealed to me), and the logic of life’s purpose is to help us reconcile our karmic destiny with our spiritual destiny, which implies—and this was an epiphany that gave me great comfort—that there is a divine intelligence in the logic of life that is forever working on our behalf to realize our divine nature. This is the mystery of life, and the logic of life’s purpose as I experienced on my own journey of self-discovery.

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50: The World According to O

50

The World According to O

Orest is my first name, and O is my nickname. It used to be Big O when I was given this nickname way back then, in what seems like another lifetime ago when I had my pool hall business which I happily chanced upon when the merciful law of divine synchronicity placed me in the right place at the right time to lease and operate the pool hall business in my hometown of Nipigon in Northwestern, Ontario that catapulted me into my destined path to my true self; but along the way on my long journey of self-discovery “Old Whore Life” knocked the Big out of my nickname, and now I’m simply called O by friends.

How I got my nickname is curious enough, but I don’t remember who it was exactly that gave it to me. I held a pool tournament sometime in my first year of business (perhaps it was in my second year, I don’t remember exactly), and someone dubbed me “Big O” at some point in the tournament, and it stuck; until life knocked the stuffing out of me and I no longer had an aura large enough to be called Big O. But that’s how life works, doesn’t it?

This, then, is the subject of today’s spiritual musing; how life whittled me down to my essential self and left me with a worldview that is mine alone, and no one else’s…

I can’t help but feel today, after all of my years of questing for my true self, which I’ve written about in The Summoning of Noman (inspired by my poem “Noman” that I wrote in grade twelve half a century ago) that my worldview is so different from the rest of the world that I have to spell it out for my own peace of mind; and the reason my worldview is so different is because it’s so far outside the box of conventional thought that it leads one to wonder if one should even talk about it, let alone write about it as I have done in all of my books. But then, I’ve always had the feeling that I’m writing for posterity anyway.

Writers are said to be the antennae of society, picking up signals of what’s coming down the way—which reminds me of what Carl Jung wrote in The Red Book about the “supreme meaning” (“the melting together of sense and nonsense”) being “the path, the way and the bridge to what is to come.” And just what did Carl Jung see coming?

“The God yet to come,” answered Jung. “It is not the coming God himself, but his image which appears in the supreme meaning”—that transcendent meaning born of the melting of sense and nonsense; and at the risk of putting myself way out there on the perilous end of the proverbial limb, my worldview just happens to be a paradoxical blend of sense and nonsense also, because in my journey of self-discovery I had to melt my being and non-being (my “nonsense self” and my “sensible self”) to become my true self, which today affords me a view on life that allows me, in the iconic words of Joni Mitchell, to see both sides now.

This is a frighteningly unique perspective, because from this vantage point nothing is right or wrong; it’s all sacred and true, because one sees that life is an enantiodromiac blend of being and non-being that is forever becoming itself. And this is the mystery of life that mystics and poets have always pointed to (“beauty is truth, truth beauty,” said Keats in his poem Ode on a Grecian Urn; and “Love is who you are,” said Jesus in Love without End, Jesus Speaks, by the artist/writer Glenda Green) but which neither philosophers, scientists, nor theologians can seem to penetrate with all the powers of their mind.

“I am what I am not and I am not what I am,” concluded the existential philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, who failed to melt his being and non-being into his transcendent, true self; and the scientists, for all of their  secular knowledge, don’t have a clue about man’s becoming which Carl Jung presciently captured in a spontaneous comment while being interviewed for the BBC: “As each plant grows from a seed and becomes in the end an oak tree, so man must become what he is meant to be. He ought to get there, but most get stuck.”

I was on my way to becoming what I was meant to be, but along the way I got stuck in my pool hall business which I expanded to include vending machines; that’s when life came calling and rudely shocked my conscience awake and Gurdjieff and his teaching of “work on oneself” serendipitously came into my life with P. D. Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous in my second year of philosophy studies at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario; and by “working” on myself with the Gurdjieffian system of conscious effort and intentional suffering I melted my being with my non-being and became my true self—or, in the words of Jesus Christ’s encoded secret teaching of salvation through spiritual rebirth, I “made the two into one.” But enough about the process of my conscious individuation, which I have expounded upon in my book on Christ’s most sacred parable The Pearl of Great Price, just what exactly is the world according to O?

Obviously, my worldview is how I see the world; so what is it about the way I see the world that makes me so different from the rest of the world?

When I was at university studying philosophy, I couldn’t get over how brilliant some of the philosophers that I read were—Nietzsche, Sartre, Lord Bertrand Russell (whose Why I Am Not a Christian took me by surprise for its seductive powers of the atheist’s mind), Hume, Locke, Kant, and one of my favorite philosophers Albert Camus whose Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays combusted my desire to find my true self; and I bowed to them all in sycophantic obeisance until one day the most frightening feeling of panic came over me that I had been cast adrift in a sea of endless dialectics, and I feared getting lost and drowning. So I dropped out of university in my third year and set my feet as firmly as I could on the terra firma of real life experience with nothing but Gurdjieff’s teaching to help me find my own way and the avowed promise to build my life upon the truth of my own experiences and not the thoughts, however brilliant, of others.

Thus grew my worldview…

WE ARE WHAT WE BELIEVE. This is the fundamental truth of my worldview, and as long as we continue to believe what we believe we will always see the world through the window of our own belief system; and because I was born into a southern Italian Roman Catholic family, my belief in mortal sin and eternal damnation and salvation through Jesus Christ was the very foundation of my life, and I even considered becoming a priest.

But then I discovered reincarnation in my impressionable teens, and this radical new perspective jolted me out of my Christian paradigm and threw me into such consternation that it initiated my long and insufferable journey out of the “nonsense” world of mortal sin and eternal damnation and salvation through Jesus Christ and Holy Confession.

“How can one mortal sin committed in a moment of time be equal to an eternity of damnation in hell?” I asked myself one day when I was no more than twelve years old as I walked up Newton Street in my hometown of Nipigon shortly after my Saturday afternoon confession. “That’s not fair,” I said, with tears in my heart. “God wouldn’t do that…”

Doubting my Christian faith began early in my life, but my faith had such a strong hold upon me that I simply could not break away; and I honestly did want to become a priest when I was an altar boy serving Holy Mass for our parish priest. But, as I came to learn along the way to my true self, LIFE HAS ITS OWN LOGIC, which is also fundamental to my worldview, and whether we like it or not when we are ready to take the next step on our pre-destined journey to our true self, life comes calling; and life called me while I was nicely ensconced in my pool hall and vending machine business making a good living.

These, then, are the two fundamental truths of my worldview distilled out of my painful life experiences—we are what we believe, and life has its own logic; and if our beliefs are founded upon a false premise, which my journey to my true self subsequently proved mine to be, our worldview is false and makes up the non-being aspect of our ontological nature, which the co-founder (along with Sigmund Freud) of depth psychology C. G. Jung called “nonsense” and what Gurdjieff called our “false personality.” A case in point would be the novelist John Irving’s worldview, which is founded upon his karmically flawed premise that “You don’t choose your demons, they choose you.”

Long story short, then; we are both our being and non-being trapped in the natural enantiodromiac process of becoming our true self, a paradoxical blend of our being and non-being that is our evolving transcendent self; hence, we are both real and false at one and the same time but centered primarily in one or the other—which is why some people can come across as genuine and authentic, and others as untrustworthy and false; but—and this is such a big but that it took me years to appreciate it!—we cannot become our true self through the natural process of evolution through karma and reincarnation because, as Gurdjieff said, “Nature will only evolve man so far, and no further.” To complete what nature cannot finish, we have to take evolution into our own hands and transcend the boundaries of our own life that we are not even aware of; which is the fundamental premise of Gurdjieff’s teaching—and Jesus Christ’s encoded secret teaching of spiritual rebirth, I might add, which Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” opened me up to:—

“When the master himself was asked by someone when his kingdom would come, he said, ‘When the two will be one, the outer like the inner, and the male with the female neither male nor female.’ Now the two are one when we speak truth to each other and there is one soul in two bodies with no hypocrisy” (The Unknown Sayings of Jesus, Marvin Meyer, p. 95).

I took evolution into my own hands with Gurdjieff’s teaching of conscious effort and intentional suffering and precipitated my own becoming to the point where I shifted my center of gravity from my being and non-being and became my true self, which I’ve written about in The Summoning of Noman and The Pearl of Great Price but which can be summed up in my gnostic realization that brings to fruition Sartre’s incomplete philosophy of man’s enantiodromiac nature: I am what I am not, and I am not what I am; I am both, but neither: I am Soul—which is the “supreme meaning” of my life and a bridge to what is to come.

 Suffice to say then that I see the world with the unhypocritical eyes of my transcendent self, which is the individuated self-realized consciousness of my being and non-being and what can justly be called the world according to O, a world where, in the words of William Shakespeare, “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

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49: Chicken Little and the World According to John Irving

49

Chicken Little Syndrome

And the World According to John Irving

“You don’t choose your demons, they choose you.”

John Irving

          It seems ridiculously tenuous, the connection between the article that I read on the novelist John Irving in Saturday’s Globe and Mail (October 21, 2015), and the thought that came to me for today’s spiritual musing, a thought that’s been brewing in the cauldron of my mind for two or three years now; but for some spooky reason, it made good sense to me.

I use the word “spooky” in the sense that the American novelist Norman Mailer used it in his book The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing, because there’s definitely something spooky about writing; and even though Mailer (or any other writer that I’m aware of) may not have figured out what this spooky element may be, I’ve come to see it as that mysterious force that works behind the scenes that I call “the omniscient guiding force of life.”

But what was it about John Allemang’s article on 73 year old John Irving, titled “The world according to John Irving,” an obvious play upon Irving’s novel The World According to Garp that launched his brilliant career, that connected with the thought that’s been brewing in my mind for the past several years, a disturbing thought that can best be expressed by what Chicken Little frantically screamed when an acorn fell upon its head, “The sky is falling!”?

In his Globe and Mail article, 63 year old journalist Allemang confesses that he was not a John Irving reader, and Irving’s latest novel Avenue of Mysteries was the first of his novels that he read because he was asked by his editor to interview the best-selling author; so Allemang does some research on the writer and reads Avenue of Mysteries and comes away impressed by both the writer and the man; and even though I’ve only read one of Irving’s novels, The World According to Garp, I confess that I simply cannot get into this writer.

I’ve seen two movies based on his novels, The Cider House Rules and The Hotel New Hampshire (the former was moving but the latter just did not work for me), I’ve read the reviews of all his novels, and also read and seen a dozen or more interviews of the author on You Tube; but there’s just something about the writer’s novels and the man that I instinctively shy away from, and I could never figure out why until I read Allemang’s article in the Globe and Mail and the reviews of Irving’s latest novel Avenue of Mysteries that I went online to read, and it has to do with that tenuous connection that I made with Irving’s world and the Chicken Little Syndrome, and this is the subject of today’s spiritual musing…

I trust my creative instincts, and when I’m given an idea for a spiritual musing I know that I’ve just been blessed with another opportunity to expand my horizons on the human condition; but for the life of me, I could not see where my Muse wanted me to go with the tenuous connection between Irving’s literary world view and the Chicken Little Syndrome, and I had no choice but to abandon to my creative unconscious to work it out for me.

As it so happens, one of the books that I’m currently re-reading is Edgar Cayce’s Story of Karma, by Mary Ann Woodward and introduced by Edgar Cayce’s son Hugh Lynn Cayce, and when I came upon something that Edgar Cayce said in one of his psychic readings I saw what my Muse was trying to tell me with the tenuous connection between John Irving’s literary world view and the brewing idea of the Chicken Little Syndrome; but I have to quote the passage to make myself clear:

“While we are all at different stages of development and may be working on different lessons, we do not make much progress until we can recognize our problems as opportunities. We begin to grow when we face up to the fact that we are responsible for our trials and misery. We are only meeting self. Our present circumstances are the result of previous actions whether long removed or in the recent past. So if we are beset with problems, blame not God, for they are of our own making. Our miseries are the result of destructive or negative thoughts, emotions, and actions. We can avoid trouble and misery if we live lives of noble thought and action” (Edgar Cayce’s Story of Karma, pp. 219-220, bold italics mine).

In effect, Cayce is saying that we can escape the prison of our karmic patterns by living a life of noble thought and action; and something that Irving said to Allemang, as he brings his interview with John Irving to closure, brought that tenuous connection between Irving’s literary world view and the Chicken Little Syndrome to light, because for me Irving’s novels epitomize what the short story writer Katherine Mansfield said about writing: “Literature is not enough.” That’s why I shied away from Irving’s novels, because my gut told me they would do nothing for me but take me deeper into Irving’s world which led nowhere but back into itself, an endless literary romp through karmic repetition that Irving reflects with his karmically flawed belief that we don’t choose our demons, they choose us. As Edgar Cayce said, “We are only meeting self,” which the mystic poet Rumi reaffirms: “If thou hast not seen the devil, look at thine own self.” Hence Irving’s karmic connection with Chicken Little’s fear, which Irving unwittingly revealed in another interview at his home in Dorset, Vermont for his novel In One Person with his confession: “My novels are about what I’m afraid of.” Irving meeting Irving, if you will; hence, the world according to John Irving!

And to further confirm this tenuous connection between Chicken Little’s fear and Irving’s literary world view, here’s what he said to Allemang about himself: “As a writer, I don’t know if I got any better at anything, but I know I got slower. If you have any doubts at all, just wait and do something else. It’s never not happened to me that something you put away and take out again, when you take a second, a third, a fourth, and fifth look at it, you see possibilities you didn’t see before. At the very least you see something you can fix.”

The recurring criticism of Irving’s latest novel Avenue of Mysteries was the recurring motifs of earlier novels—orphans, dogs, strong women, transvestites, Catholicism, abortion, circuses, and writers as characters—as if he was looking for “possibilities” that he did not see before and exploit them for his new story, which in this case happens to be his new novel Avenue of Mysteries; and if not mine them for more literary gold for his new story, perhaps “fix” them for more literary merit—confirming my gut feeling that Irving’s literary world view is a closed system with no way out; which validates what Mansfield said about literature not being enough to satisfy the longing in our soul to be all that we are meant to be. But how exactly does this connect with my brewing idea of the Chicken Little Syndrome?

The Chicken Little Syndrome is a phobia of dread born of a mistaken belief that catastrophic disaster is imminent, and dangerously contagious today given what’s going on in the world—devastating climate change and terrifying social strife, to name the most obvious; that’s why Chicken Little runs around screaming “The sky is falling!” And as tenuous as it may seem, that’s what Irving’s literary world view silently screams at me with its spiritually moribund perspective on life that he re-creates in Dickensian “sprawling, phantasmagoric, elaborately imaginative, hilariously excessive even as they rendered unbearable pain” novels, conjuring in my mind a ghostly literary image of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. There’s no doubt that John Irving is a masterful writer who creatively reflects the anguished desperation of modern man and loved by many who share his fears, but he’s just not my cup of tea.

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