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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