60: The Longings in Our Soul

60

The Longings of Our Soul

It’s curious, how life works; one day we find ourselves being pulled to a new interest, as though we need the knowledge of this new interest to satisfy some deep longing in our soul, and when we have explored this new interest we find ourselves being pulled to another interest to satisfy another and perhaps deeper longing in our soul.

This insight came to me yesterday as I listened to the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist/author Chris Hedges as he was interviewed by Bill Moyers. I came upon Chris Hedges by chance online, and his political perspective fascinated me so much that I had to explore what he had to say, as though his iconoclastic point of view revealed the deep dark shadow side of politics that I longed to know more about; and so I watched half a dozen You Tube interviews of him speaking about one or another of his best-selling books, like The Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt and other books, and he was so articulate on the dark side of human nature (especially corporate America) that I couldn’t stop watching.

In the Bill Moyers interview Chris Hedges reveals that the dark shadow side of life has made him an angry man, but he is a good man who wants to do his part to help set the record straight; and he paid a heavy price for his integrity, like losing his job at New York Times for being too honest. But that’s his calling, and he has the courage to walk his talk; which got me thinking about the longings in our soul that keep calling us to new interests.

This, then, is the subject of today’s spiritual musing…

In my novel Healing with Padre Pio, which was inspired by my new interest that initiated ten spiritual healing sessions that I had with a gifted psyche medium who channeled St. Padre Pio, he told me that life is all about growth and understanding, which to anyone over forty should be so obvious that it could be considered tautologous; but to what end?

That’s the question that everyone wants answered, and one remarkable man did answer it; Carl Gustav Jung, one of the founding fathers of depth psychology (the other was Sigmund Freud, but Jung went much deeper with his discovery of the collective unconscious), said: “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.”

Given this understanding, which took me many years to affirm with my own journey of self-discovery, it appears that the teleological purpose of our life is to become what we are meant to be, complete unto ourselves like an acorn seed becoming an oak tree; but how can we become what we are meant to be if we don’t satisfy the longings in our soul?

“He ought to get there, but most get stuck,” said Jung, speaking to the natural process of individuating our own identity through life experience; and it seems to me that we get stuck when we don’t take the initiative to satisfy the longings in our soul by exploring new interests that will help us to grow into the person we are meant to be.

“Nature will only evolve you so far, and no further,” said Gurdjieff, an enigmatic mystic philosopher who introduced the western world to a radical teaching of self-transformation that I lived for many years and wrote about in my new memoir Gurdjieff Was Wrong, But His Teaching Works, and the only way to become the person we are meant to be is to take evolution into our own hands to complete what nature cannot finish, and we take evolution into our own hands by taking the initiative to explore new interests; that’s how we satisfy the longings in our soul to become what we are meant to be, our true self.

I took the initiative many, many times; but sometimes taking the initiative to explore a new interest can cost one dearly, like the time I explored an offshoot Christian solar cult teaching that did irreparable damage to my eyesight by practicing solar techniques of looking into the sun (mornings and evenings) whose rays were said to be imbued with the sacred Logos which one needed to nourish their spiritual body, a very dangerous teaching which one day I may have the courage to write about in a story called The Sunworshipper.

Being a truth seeker, it was my nature to take the initiative wherever my new interests pulled me, like my interest in studying philosophy at university which led to Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” that ignited my interest in the sayings and parables of Jesus, the mystical teachings of Sufism, Gnosticism, Buddhism, Taoism, Jung’s psychology of individuation, and a New Age spiritual teaching that I lived for over thirty years but which I finally outgrew and dropped to devote myself to my personal path of writing, a fascinating journey of self-discovery that I wrote about in The Summoning of Noman which I followed up with The Pearl of Great Price that  brought my story to the present.

But the pull of an exciting new interest that went a long way to transforming my life was the emerging new sport of long distance running which I did for seven and a half years on Highway Eleven along the shoreline of Lake Helen in my hometown of Nipigon, Northwestern Ontario before I burnt out on a housing contract on the native reserve near my hometown that was too big for me to handle, and try as I may I was never able to get back into running again which I miss dearly to this very day because it was the most natural way to resolve my daily stress and grow in the consciousness of the person I was meant to be; but I did keep a journal on my running experience from August 1, 1988 to January 8, 1989 to capture the daily flavor of my running experience, which I called Thoughts in Motion: Diary of a Holistic Runner, so I know from personal experience that taking the initiative to explore new interests nourishes the longings in our soul, and the more we nourish the longings in our soul the more we grow in the person we are meant to be.

But one day, as I also experienced, we will see that exploring new interests won’t be enough to satisfy the deepest longing in our soul to be what we are meant to be; and that’s when life calls us to complete what nature cannot finish by teaching us how to live our life unselfishly, because this is the only way we can resolve the paradoxical consciousness of our being and non-being and transcend our mortal selfish nature, as the guiding principle of life taught me how to do. But that’s another musing for another day, if the spirit moves me.

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59: The Futility of Greed

59

The Futility of Greed

As we always do when we come out of the theater, we share our impressions about the movie we have just seen, in this case The Big Short that we saw at the Uptown Theater in Barrie, a visceral comic twist on the cataclysmic financial crisis that set off the 2008 recession that caused so much mayhem and misery for so many innocent people, and Penny didn’t hesitate to tell me how she felt: “I couldn’t follow the story at all. I hated it. I give it a zero.”

“A zero?” I said, incredulously.

“Well maybe not a zero, but it was worse than The Master,” she replied, referring to the movie based on the founder of Scientology L. Ron Hubbard’s life, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the troubled lost soul and Philip Seymour Hoffman as the savior Master, which we both hated because it made us feel unclean. “What did you think of it?’

“Intoxicating,” I replied.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Too much reality,” I said, and I knew instantly that my first impressions of The Big Short was my call to write today’s spiritual musing…

Film reviewer Andrew Barker said that the route taken by director Adam MacKay of The Big Short turns “a dense economics lecture into a hyper-caffeinated postmodern farce, a spinach smoothie skillfully disguised as junk food.”

But even as disguised junk food, The Big Short was too much for Penny too swallow, and she just hated the movie; but not so much because she couldn’t follow the esoteric code-speak of the unscrupulous high-powered money brokers, but because of how the storyline was put together into a phantasmagorical pastiche of vicious surreal sequences, which was exactly why I found the movie so intoxicating.

Being a writer, I’m in the truth-telling business no less than any other artist—“The crucial function of art is to find the truth of a situation,” said Harry Gulkin, producer of Lies my Father Told Me—and the truth that the director Adam MacKay wanted to bring to light was the untold back story of the 2008 housing crisis and Wall Street crash that caused so much suffering for so many people; but the heady reality of The Big Short was so intoxicating that it made my head spin at the greed of human nature which went so far beyond willful blindness that we were sucked into a black hole of deliberate, conscious evil.

We didn’t go out for dinner as we usually do after the movie because we had turkey left over from Christmas dinner, and on our drive home from Barrie I tried to draw Penny out on why she felt the way she did about The Big Short, but she reiterated that because she couldn’t follow the story she became exasperated and hated it.

There were parts of the movie that I couldn’t follow either, but it was obvious to me that greed and fraud had caused the collapse of Wall Street that the government had to bail out at the innocent taxpayer’s expense, which would have made me sick to my stomach had I not been cognizant of the morally corrupted shadow side of human nature.

“Greed’s a way of life, sweetheart,” I replied to her confusion, “and there’s not much we can do about it because life’s an individual journey.” But that got me thinking.

Given the limited number of years that we’re all going to live—say eighty, being a good and healthy number which is in keeping with today’s medical science, barring all unforeseeable circumstances—why would a person forfeit their soul for a quick fortune? Are they not aware of what they could be risking for what they’re gaining?

True, life would be good and pleasurable and fun given all of that money—beautiful house, clothes, cars, toys, travel, and luxuries the average person can’t even imagine; but if all of this social mobility is realized by exploiting innocent people, is it really worth it?

That’s the question The Big Short raised for me, and the more I thought about it the more convinced I was that greed makes people stupid, which is exactly why the predatory traders who saw that the housing bubble was going to burst outfoxed the bankers who granted subprime mortgages but were too blinded by greed to see that the housing bubble was going to collapse under the weight of its own insolvency; but when they woke up to the reality that they were going to lose great fortunes, the morally corrupted bankers committed fraud to avoid going down with their sinking ship, and the little taxpayer got left holding the bag when the government had to bail the bankers out of their fiasco to rescue Wall Street.

Greed makes people stupid, but evil can be brilliant; and after serious reflection I came away from The Big Short with the certain feeling that when one chooses evil over doing the right thing they forfeit their soul to their shadow side and live out the remaining few short years of their vacuous life not in what Thoreau called quiet desperation, but in luxurious self-loathing. But Jesus said it best a long time ago: “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” That’s the futility of greed.

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58: The Stupidity of Moral Relativism

58

The Stupidity of Moral Relativism

Long before I began writing my spiritual musings (I’m working on my fifth volume now, The World According to “O”), I wanted to write an essay on what I have always felt to be the bad faith of moral relativism; but sometime yesterday afternoon, I don’t remember when exactly, I was gripped by the thought to write a spiritual musing on moral relativism, but instead of focusing on the bad faith I should focus instead on the false premise of moral relativism because it would be more reflective of the subjective/objective truth of morality that I realized in my own journey of self-discovery.

I say subjective/objective truth because I had a singularly convincing experience that initiated me into the impenetrable mystery of our essential nature, and it was because of this subjective experience that I came to realize the objective truth of our moral nature; and this is the premise upon which I’m going to write today’s spiritual musing…

Let me begin by addressing the central issue of moral relativism, the obvious criticism that is sure to arise from what I’ve called the objective truth of our moral nature which can be expressed in the following question that is at the very heart of the philosophy of moral relativism: how can an objective truth come from a subjective experience?

A fair question certainly, but one could discuss this issue until the end of time, which is why I dropped out of university in my third year of philosophy studies to find my own way in life because I saw no end to the dialectical discourses that philosophy gave rise to, and in my quest for an answer to the question that set me on my journey of self-discovery (who am I?) I came upon Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” that initiated me into the mystery of our essential nature that became the objective truth and moral compass of my life; and although I have written about this in The Summoning of Noman and The Pearl of Great Price, it behooves me to offer a Reader’s Digest version for today’s musing.

The experience that initiated me into the mystery of our essential nature presupposes the principle of reincarnation, about which I have neither the desire nor inclination to prove because whether one believes in it or not reincarnation is central to the objective truth of our essential nature which is reborn from life to life for the teleological purpose of realizing the potential of our essential nature like an acorn seed becoming an oak tree, and although this may appear to be a circular argument which brings us right back to the subjective uncertainty of moral relativism the very nature of my singularly convincing experience confirms the objective truth of our moral mature and disclaims the false premise of moral relativism; this is why Gurdjieff said, “There is only self-initiation into the mysteries of life.” 

Which means, quite simply, that although my journey of self-discovery initiated me into the mystery of the objective truth of our moral nature, it is still a personal experience and the reason why I have called it subjective/objective. Here, then, is the experience that initiated me into the mystery of our essential nature and objective morality…

Following up on my belief in reincarnation, which was outside the dogmatic paradigm of my Roman Catholic faith that I was born into and the source of years of personal conflict, I promised myself that one day I would explore some of my past lives like the historical novelist Taylor Caldwell did in Jess Stearn’s book that became my inspiration, The Search for the Soul: Psychic Lives of Taylor Caldwell; and my opportunity came when my life partner Penny Lynn and I relocated to Georgian Bay, Ontario twelve years ago when by “chance” I met a woman in Orillia who did past-life regressions which inspired my novel Cathedral of My Past Lives that I’m going to publish when I feel the time is right.

I had planned to have ten past-life regressions, but I only had seven because seven regressions gave me more than enough information to answer the questions that haunted me about my current lifetime, questions like why do I feel so out of context in my family? And, why do I have a sexual fascination with older women? And other questions about my life that I suspected were brought about by past-life experiences; and I was right.

I got the answers that I was looking for, which cleared up why I felt the way I did growing up; but because I became a seeker at a very early age (in high school, actually; the spark combusting with Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge which I read in grade twelve), I became obsessed with finding an answer to the question who am I?

I cannot go into detail, but in my early twenties I had a traumatizing sexual experience that brutally shocked my conscience from its primordial slumber and catapulted me into my quest for my true self, because I knew that the person who did what he did that night was not the real me; it was me, but not me, and I had to find the real me or die trying. And so committed did I become to finding my true self that I was willing to pay any price that was asked of me, which I did and wrote about in my memoir The Pearl of Great Price.

To my total surprise (and my regressionist), in my fourth regression I went back to the very beginning of my essential nature and ground of all being: I was an atom of God in the Body of God where all new souls come from. The Body of God was an Ocean of Love and Mercy, and I was an atom of God without self-consciousness. I had consciousness, but no self-consciousness; and in the same regression I went back to my first primordial human life on earth where I had evolved up the ladder of evolution into a higher primate with group consciousness but no reflective self-consciousness, and then the miracle happened.

I was the alpha male of a group of ten or twelve higher primates when I experienced the birth of a new “I” of God in the dawning of my reflective self-consciousness. It was a rudimentary sense of self-awareness, but I experienced myself for the very first time in my essential existence; and this changed my life forever.

From the moment the new “I” of God was born I had a separate existence from all of life, and this separate existence initiated my personal karmic destiny that began the individuation of my essential self-consciousness; and from lifetime to lifetime I evolved in my essential self until my current lifetime when I was ready to end my cycle of karma and reincarnation and realize my essential self, which I did with the help of Gurdjieff’s teaching and the sayings and parables of Jesus that I wrote about in The Pearl of Great Price.

From my regressions to my other past lives I learned how I brought my karmic self with me from one lifetime to the next, and I came to understand why I was so out of context with my family and why I had a sexual fascination with older women, plus many other things about my life that I would never have come to understand without my regressions; and as I wrote Cathedral of My Past Lives I connected the dots and realized that we have a karmic destiny that we create ourselves by the choices we make, and a spiritual destiny that is encoded in our essential nature to become spiritually self-realized beings.

And I learned something else about our two destinies that solved the mystery of our paradoxical nature: we can only realize our teleologically driven spiritual destiny through the resolution of our personal karmic nature, which we can only do by taking evolution into our own hands to complete what nature cannot finish by becoming karmically responsible for our own life in particular and life in general; and this was the objective truth that I discovered from the subjective reality of my past-life regressions, because it finally dawned on me that the immutable law of corrective measures was an objective principle of life that governs all behavior, whether we are conscious of it or not. And this makes moral relativity stupid.

Nietzsche wrote, “You have your way, I have mine. As for the right way, it does not exist.” But he was wrong. The right way is implicit in all we do, and not until we learn to live with karmic responsibility will we be free of the curse of moral neutrality. And learning the right way is what evolution is all about…

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57:Man's Existential Dilemma

57

Man’s Existential Dilemma

Man is mortal and one day he will die. This is the reality of our situation. But in this reality lies a quandary, because man does not want to die; he wants to live forever. This is man’s existential dilemma, and the subject of today’s spiritual musing…

I don’t know when it happened, but somewhere along the way on my journey of self-discovery I had the simple but astonishing realization that we’re all limited by our own belief systems, and if our belief system does not allow for self-transcendence we will suffer from the existential dilemma of our inevitable mortality, which in turn makes us anxious of our vulnerable short life that gives rise to thoughts of our irrelevance to the cosmic scheme of things, and in righteous anger we’re all going to shout one day, “What’s the point of it all?”

This perspective was punctuated by a series of brilliant lectures on Personality that I came upon online by a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto in which he talked about the inevitable consequences of man’s existential dilemma and his best efforts to relieve the anxiety that man’s oppressive dilemma gives rise to by learning how to cope with the enantiodromiac forces of our nature, which in his wisdom he saw as finding the right balance between the being and non-being of our mortal nature; meaning, our false shadow self and ego personality, which he drew upon from the Taoist philosophy of Yin and Yang.

The philosopher Jean Paul Sartre summed up man’s existential dilemma in the following words: “I am what I am not, and I am not what I am,” concluding that man is both being and non-being forever in the process of becoming, and when he dies he ceases to become and is no more. Which is why Sartre saw no exit out of man’s existential dilemma, and the most that man could do was to make the best of his situation by taking moral responsibility for his life to keep the chaos of unfettered freedom at bay, which led to Sartre’s most quoted words: “Man is a useless passion” who is “condemned to be free.” But that wasn’t good enough for me, which was another reason why I left my philosophy studies at university to find a way out of man’s existential dilemma.

Finding the right balance between our being and non-being is not enough, as my own life experiences proved to me; because finding the right balance keeps one stuck on the tightrope of life that does not resolve our existential dilemma, and the only solution that I could see to resolving the quandary of our paradoxical nature was to transcend myself, which Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” helped me to do, as well as the radical teaching of self-transcendence encoded in Christ’s cryptic sayings and parables.

But this only worked for me because I dared to embrace a belief system that provided an exit to man’s existential dilemma; and herein lies our problem, because this secret belief system does not come without a price, as the rich young man in one of Jesus Christ’s most disturbing parables came to see.

In the Gospel of Matthew a rich young man came up to Jesus and asked him the question: “Good Master, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?”

And Jesus replied: “If thou wilt enter into life (eternal), keep the commandments.”

The rich young man pressed Jesus and asked which commandments he should keep to gain eternal life, and Jesus replied: “Thou shalt not murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Honor thy father and thy mother: and, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

“All these things have I kept from my youth up: what lack I yet?” said the rich young man, pressing Jesus still further for the secret of eternal life.

And Jesus came to the point and bluntly spelled out the final cost of eternal life to the brazen rich young man: “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.”

But when the rich young man heard what eternal life would cost him, “he went away sorrowful: for he had many possessions.”

This led to Christ’s most misunderstood sayings: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God,” and  not until one breaks the code of Christ’s sayings can one see that Jesus was speaking in metaphor about the secret way to transcend ourselves by transforming the dual consciousness of our mortal nature, which I managed to do with Gurdjieff’s teaching that introduced me to the transformative principles of conscious effort and intentional suffering that Jesus expressed in his most paradoxical saying, “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” As the Sufis would say, one has to die before dying to be reborn to their true self.

The irony is that we are all immortal souls anyway, but we don’t realize that we are immortal until we resolve the paradoxical nature of our being and non-being, which is what Christ’s teaching was meant to help us do as he revealed to the rich young man who wasn’t willing to pay the price to transcend himself; but over time Christ’s teaching got so watered down that it lost its original meaning and became a hollow doctrine of salvation that absolves man of the pilgrimage and penance stage necessary for self-transcendence, and as fervent as one may be in his vain belief that through the redemptive power of Jesus’s death upon the cross he will be saved, not until one takes “salvation” into his own hands and resolves the paradoxical consciousness of his own nature will he transcend himself.

I found my true self by dying to my false self, as Jesus said I would if I kept his sayings; and at the risk of saying something that will be sure to threaten the spiritual complacency of the status quo, I did what I had to do to transcend myself by transforming the shadow side of my ego personality and making my two selves into one, which I expressed in the following words that brought resolution to Sartre’s demoralizing no-exit philosophy: “I am what I am not, and I am not what I am; I am both but neither. I am Soul.”

In Christ’s teaching, I gave birth to my transcendent self. That’s how I resolved the issue of my mortality and became my true self. But I don’t expect anyone to believe me unless they have embarked upon the same journey of self-discovery, which we all must do eventually to break the cycle of life and death that keeps us trapped in our existential dilemma; and if we don’t get it right in this lifetime, we will just keep coming back until we do.

That’s the irony of our existential dilemma and life’s joke upon Jean Paul Sartre, because man is not condemned to be free as he claimed us to be; he is free to be condemned by his own belief system!

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56: The Purpose of Art is Art's Purpose

56

The Purpose of Art is Art’s Purpose

“A minor novelist with a major style,

hovering always near a greatness he is too shrewd

or diffident to risk.”

Professor Harold Bloom

 on John Updike

I don’t know why I was called to write this musing, but while working on another book this morning (The Sign of Things to Come) I wrote something that jumped out at me like a news bulletin from tomorrow, a hierophantic insight that was a remarkable confirmation of the theme of my new book on the sign of things to come but which called out to be explored in a musing, an insight that falls squarely into that dreaded category of dangerous musings.

A dangerous musing hits close to home, so close that it nicks the sacred bone of one’s vulnerable life, and it can come back to play nasty with the author; but that, essentially, is the theme of today’s spiritual musing—daring to take the risk and cross the line into the unknown territory of the creative unconscious where the objective will of the creative principle and the subjective will of the author become one purposive drive which brings to mind those famous words by T. S. Eliot, the celebrated poet of The Wasteland: “We shall not cease from exploration /And the end of all our exploring /Will be to arrive where we started.”

From the earliest age I wanted to be a writer like my high school hero and literary mentor Ernest Hemingway, but in grade twelve I read Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge and was called to become a seeker like Maugham’s intrepid hero Larry Darrell, and I spent many years exploring the spiritual teachings of the world to find an answer to the haunting question of my life, who am I?

Happily, I found the answer to my question and my explorations brought me right back to where I started, which was my desire to become a writer, and I wrote indefatigably to make up for all the years that I spent looking for my true self; and the more I wrote the more I learned about the art of creative writing, until one day I discovered the secret of all great writers, and that’s the dangerous subject of today’s spiritual musing…

Penny Lynn joins me for coffee every morning in my writing room, and we talk about our dreams and other things and always about the book she brings in to read when I go back to my writing, and it’s surprising how quickly she can read a book in such a short time each morning before she goes to work; like The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant, 887 pages long; Alice Munro’s book of short stories, The Love of a Good Woman; and the book she’s reading now, John Updike’s Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories. And of course we talk about her impressions of the authors.

That’s how I gauge the quality of the books she’s reading, because I trust Penny Lynn’s judgment implicitly; and her impressions of John Updike’s writing confirmed Professor Harold Bloom’s indictment that Updike was a minor novelist with a major style who hovered near a greatness he was too shrewd or diffident to risk. Penny loved Mavis Gallant, and even more Alice Munro’s stories; but Updike she can take or leave because his stories, though brilliantly written and masterfully crafted, do not leave a lasting impression.

“They fade away as soon as I read them. It’s like he never gets to the soul of his story,” she said to me, and I had to wonder why, because as much as I love John Updike for his brilliant style and uncanny mastery of le mot juste his stories faded away on me also, unlike many of Hemingway’s stories which left a lasting impression; but when I was given the insight for today’s spiritual musing, I knew why—which is why I felt compelled to explore it in today’s musing; and so, once again into the breach…

Creative writing is a mystical experience. The novelist Norman Mailer called it “spooky.” He didn’t’ know why writing is spooky, and neither does any other writer (not that I’m aware of, anyway); but I resolved this mystery in my other musings, and especially in my talks with Padre Pio (The Man of God Walks Alone), because writing my spiritual musings and dialoguing with Padre Pio brought to the fore the mystical element of creative writing, which is the intelligent guiding principle of life that can for all intents and purposes be called our creative unconscious but which in other contexts has always been called Divine Spirit; and herein lies the danger of today’s spiritual musing, because it dares to bring God into the dynamic of creative writing which will be sure to raise a few skeptical eyebrows.

Without mincing words, I’ve come to see that Divine Spirit is the élan vital, or the creative force of life that runs through all of life, and writers have the gift of being able to tap into the creative force of life with their writing. And herein lies the dilemma of the creative writer’s art, because tapping into the creative force of life incurs a moral responsibility that can humble the most talented writer, like it did John Updike for example.

Literary critic and Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, Professor Harold Bloom felt that the highly successful author John Updike was too shrewd or diffident to risk the greatness of his art, but he never explained why, which is what I was called upon to explore in today’s spiritual musing; but to do so I have to explain that the creative writer who does not work in willful harmony with the intelligent  guiding principle of his life will impede the flow of the creative process and damage the integrity of his art.

“Art is the truth above the facts of life,” said Karan Blixen (Out of Africa), and our own Canadian Nobel Laureate Alice Munro said, “Memoir is the facts of life. Fiction is the truth of life.” I quote these two highly accomplished writers to make the point that the inherent purpose of art is to explore and reveal the truth of life. That’s why Hemingway began every story that he wrote with the truest sentence that he knew upon which he built the rest of his story to satisfy his literary credo to “tell it the way it was.”

But that’s not the whole secret of Hemingway’s art, because being as true to what it was does not satisfy the creative process, as Hemingway learned the hard way when he experimented with his memoir The Green Hills of Africa, a literal account of his African safari with his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer which proved to be an aesthetic failure and taught Hemingway the lesson that every great writer has discovered: the miracle of imagination.

Hemingway reveals his secret in his memoir A Moveable Feast, the final book of his life that he was working on just before blowing his brains out with his favorite shotgun: “I was learning something from the paintings of Cezanne that made writing simple sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimension that I was trying to put into them. I was learning very much from him, but I was not articulate enough to explain to anyone. Besides it was a secret.” And that secret was what made Hemingway a great writer.

After licking his wounds for the literary failure of The Green Hills of Africa, the resourceful writer used the same African safari experience to write two of his best short stories, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and my favorite Hemingway story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” which proved to Hemingway that imagination was necessary to make art, thereby confirming what the poet Adrienne Rich said about creative writing: “Poetry (art) is an act of the imagination that transforms reality into a deeper perception of what it.” Hemingway gave his African safari experience to the intelligent guiding principle of his creative unconscious, and the deeper perception of his experience was revealed in his two remarkable short stories which bared the wretched soul of his characters.

That’s how art is made. But as much as I understood how art is made, I could not quite give my understanding of the secret of art the clarity it needed to be seen in all its majesty; and that’s when the merciful law of synchronicity kicked in to assist me, which was proof yet again of the intelligent guiding principle of life which I’ve learned to trust implicitly…

I started writing this musing yesterday morning, but I had to stop because I could not take it any further; it needed “something” to bring it to resolution. And as divine synchronicity would have it, this “something” came to me when I was nudged later in the evening to go online and watch one of Professor Jordan Peterson’s lectures on his Personality series: Jung—Personality and its Transformations; something he said about art jumped out at me, because it was precisely what I needed to bring resolution to my spiritual musing.

Giving a Jungian interpretation of the movie The Lion King to his students, Professor Peterson inadvertently revealed that certain “something” about the creative process that was exactly what I needed to bring resolution to my musing: “Art cannot be designed for a purpose. The purpose of art is art’s purpose,” which is the secret of all great writing.

Ironically, this is the mystical nature of creative process that has been called spooky, because no one understands how it works. But Carl Jung intuited this secret in his essay “Psychology and Literature” in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul: “The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who will allow art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is a ‘man’ in a higher sense—he is ‘collective man’—one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of mankind” (Modern Man in Search of Soul, C. G. Jung, p. 169, bold italics mine). Which implies that the creative process is the intelligent guiding principle of life that seeks to bring the truth of life into existence through the medium of the artist but which, as Hemingway and all great artists come to learn eventually, can only be done when the artists engages the transcendent function of his imagination to transform the reality of his experience into a deeper perception of his experience, as Hemingway did with his African safari experience when he wrote two of his most famous short stories.

Being aware of the mystical nature of the creative process, I engaged my imagination to transform one of the most pivotal experiences of my own life (flipping a coin into the air and letting my coin make up my mind for me on major life decisions) into a deeper perception of that experience in my novel The Golden Seed, so I know how this process works; but what does it really mean to say that the purpose of art is art’s purpose? What is art’s purpose?

I could explore this indefintely, but the short answer is that art’s purpose is to bring to light the inherent meaning of man’s existence; and when an artist imposes his own will upon the will of the intelligent guiding principle of his creative process he impedes the truth that his creative process seeks to bring to light; and this is what separates the great artist from all the rest, regardless how gifted and brilliant the artist may be, like John Updike who hovered near a greatness that he was too shrewd or diffident to risk.

Which means, if the logic of art holds true as I believe it does, that the greater the truth the intelligent guiding principle of the creative process seeks to bring to light, the greater the risk the artist will have to take to make it happen; and, as the history of art tells us, only the very few dare risk their all for the greater truth of their art, as Hemingway did when he bared his wretched soul in his iconic story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”  

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