65: What if it's all true?

65
 

What if it’s all true?
 

I wonder a lot. I always have. And the other day I wondered about why we all have a tendency to offer our opinion so freely, some of us more insistently than others. “Why do you suppose that is?” I asked Penny Lynn.

We were out for a Sunday drive. We picked up a coffee for Penny at Tim Hortons in Elmvale (I still felt full from our late breakfast), and we drove down to the Horseshoe Valley Road and on through the charming little village of Craighurst and then to Midland where we were going to pick up a pizza for dinner, and we tossed our points of view back and forth and saw that there were many reasons why we like to offer our opinion; but essentially we felt it was because we like to think we are more right than others, and that’s when I recalled something that St. Padre Pio said to me in one of my sessions with the gifted psychic medium who channeled him for my novel Healing with Padre Pio: “Resist the urge to be right.”

“That was the best piece of advice that I got in my life,” I said to Penny Lynn, because I had the annoying habit of always interrupting people because I felt that I was more right than they were, and I loved to quote different authors to back up my opinion, which only annoyed people further; but I wasn’t conscious of this irritating habit until the Good Saint brought it to my attention, and then I saw just how exasperating I could be, which was why in that session, or another (I can’t remember which and would have to look it up in my novel) St. Padre Pio told me that I had a way of “chafing” people. No wonder, given my annoying habit!

“Ego’s a big factor, then,” I said to Penny. “Ego wants attention, that’s one reason we love to offer our opinions so freely.” Donald Trump, the billionaire candidate for the leadership of the Republican Party for the upcoming American election, came to mind because of his brutish, massive ego; but I honestly couldn’t fault Trump because I now know how important ego is for our growth and individuation. What Trump and all egoists don’t know, however, is that ego will one day have to be humbled for one to fulfill their destined purpose of wholeness and completeness which Jesus spoke to in one of his most misunderstood parables, the parable of the rich young man; but that’s another musing for another day. Today I want to explore what I said to Penny on our Sunday drive: “It doesn’t really matter, because it’s all true.”

Again, this falls into the category of spiritual musings that I call dangerous; not because this is what I have come to believe in my inexhaustible study of the human condition which threatens the status quo, but because of what my hero C. G. Jung referred to as “the problem of resistance to understanding.”

Carl Gustav Jung, the pre-eminent Swiss psychologist who gave us a psychology of personality types and such words as introvert, extrovert, synchronicity (meaningful coincidence), collective unconscious, and shadow (the repressed side of our ego personality), was troubled by some of his patients (he saw up to eight patients a day for decades and analyzed more than eighty thousand dreams over his career); he could not fathom why they had a resistance to understanding (which he later saw as an instinctive defense mechanism); and, I have to admit, this troubled me also until I learned the reason why in Jung’s letter to Hans Schmid (November 6, 1914)  in which he related how a vision that St. Brigitta of Sweden (1303-1373) had that clarified this problem of resistance to understanding that plagued his practice, and his life.

 In his letter, Jung wrote: “In a vision she saw the devil, who spoke to God, and had the following to say about the psychology of devils: ‘Their belly is so swollen because their greed was boundless, for they filled themselves and were not sated, and so great was their greed that, had they been able to gain the whole world, they would gladly have exerted themselves, and would moreover have desired to reign in heaven…So the devil is a devourer. Understanding is likewise a devourer. Understanding swallows you up…Understanding is a fearfully binding power, at times a veritable murderer of the soul as soon as it flattens out vital important differences. The core of the individual is a mystery of life, which is snuffed out when it is ‘grasped’” (Selected Letters of G. G. Jung, 1909-1961, pp. 4-5).

The “psychology of devils” is the psychology of the ego, and ego has an insatiable appetite for life; that’s why ego can never get enough of life, and people. This is why we have a natural resistance to understanding, because understanding has a tendency to “flatten out vitally important differences and “snuff” out one’s sense of self.

In short, one’s ego does not want to be devoured by the devil (another ego), and we resist understanding because it preserves who we are. This is why Jung came to the conclusion that he did about the problem of resistance to understanding that hindered his patient’s psychic healing and his relationships with other people.

“We should be connivers of our own mysteries, but veil our eyes chastely before the mystery of the other, so far as, being unable to understand himself, he does not need the ‘understanding’ of others,” concluded Jung in his letter.

Ironically, ego is not our core identity, as Jesus knew only too well; which leads me to the dangerous theme of today’s musing—the ontology of who we are and who we are not, the being and non-being of our nature:  our inner and outer self… 

Why would I say to Penny Lynn, “It doesn’t really matter, because it’s all true”? Did I mean that every person’s opinion is true? Yes, that’s exactly what I meant. And this is the dangerous part of today’s spiritual musing, because it sounds like moral relativism which I deplore with a passion (see my spiritual musing “The Stupidity of Moral Relativism”); but when personal opinion is seen in the context of our ontology (the being and non-being of our nature), it makes good sense why we might believe that we are more right than others.

It took many years to come to this realization, but our personal identity is made up of the individuated consciousness of the energy of life that has been called by many names—Divine Spirit, Chi, Tao, Baraka, and Élan Vital to name a few; which means that our being is the consciousness of our essential nature (our inner self), and our non-being is the consciousness of our ego personality (our outer self) and which, as paradoxical as it may be, are both real because they are made of the same “stuff” of life. This is why I said to Penny Lynn that it doesn’t really matter, because it’s all true.

But this is an impossible concept to convey, and the only way I can possible give it more clarity would be by saying that Consciousness is One but has many levels depending upon its medium of expression, and when consciousness is expressed by way of our non-being (our ego personality) it is more opaque than when it is expressed by way of our being (our essential self); and at the risk of being annoying, let me quote something that the mystic philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff said that may put this spiritual musing into an even less opaque perspective: “To speak the truth is the most difficult thing in the world; and one must study a great deal and for a long time in order to be able to speak the truth. The wish alone is not enough. To speak the truth one must know what the truth is and what a lie is, and first of all in oneself. And this nobody wants to know” (In Search of the Miraculous, P. D. Ouspensky, p. 22). This is why man has a natural resistance to understanding: he refuses to see his own non-being… 

As we pulled onto Highway 12 on our way to Pizza Pizza in Midland, I said to Penny Lynn, “You have no idea what a relief it is to know that whatever people say is true in its own way,” which brought to mind something that I heard on Judge John Deed the night before. Judge Deed asked an expert witness in the witness box (an elderly medical doctor who was an authority on the subject of inquiry) if she thought that the point in question was true, and she replied: “At my age, I have come to see that there are many variations of the truth.” That’s what I meant when I said, “It doesn’t really matter, because it’s all true.” But what a dangerous point of view! 

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