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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