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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