New Spiritual Musing: "Being the Tao"

Being the Tao

Inspired by the movie The Intern

The idea for today’s spiritual musing presupposes so much that I don’t know if I can do it justice; but I have to try, or why else would I have been called to write it?

Upon reflection, I can see now how the idea came about; but it wasn’t until I heard Jules (Anne Hathaway) say to her new intern Ben (Robert De Niro) in Nancy Meyers movie The Intern “How is it that you always manage to say the right thing, do the right thing, and be the right thing?” that the words “BEING THE TAO” popped into my mind, because unconsciously I had picked up that Jules Ostin’s intern Ben Whittaker was in the Tao; and that’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing...

In Chinese, Tao means the way, and the teaching of Taoism is all about living the way; but here’s where we run into a problem because, as I wrote in my spiritual musing “An Old Chinese Proverb,” defining the Tao is next to impossible. But because I know what the Tao is, I have to try; and I know what the Tao is because I was initiated into the sacred mystery of the way on my own journey to wholeness and completeness. That’s why I said that this idea of BEING THE TAO presupposes so much that I may not be able to do it justice. However, it behooves me to offer my personal definition of the way, which has been drawn from my life of living the way consciously from the moment I awakened to the way: the way is the inherent wisdom of the teleological imperative of life; and living one’s life with purpose is living the imperative of the way, which initiates one into the sacred mystery of one's true self and the Tao. In short, the way is the self-reconciling factor of life. 

But why did the phrase BEING THE TAO pop into my mind and not BEING IN THE TAO, which would seem to make more sense? This, I believe, is the central mystery of the way that I’ve been called upon to explore in today’s spiritual musing.

I’ve learned to have implicit trust in my Muse (my creative unconscious), so I know that I’ve been called to elucidate upon the difference between BEING THE TAO and BEING IN THE TAO; and this difference speaks to the journey and the destination, because to be the Tao one must become the Tao, and that’s what living the way is all about.

For clarity’s sake, I’m going to simple refer to the Tao as the way, because my sidebar Merriam Webster dictionary defines way as: a thoroughfare for travel or transportation from place to place; the course traveled from one place to another: route; a course (a series of actions or sequences of events leading in a direction or toward an objective, which implies that the way is a process that leads to a destination; but what destination?

That’s the sacred mystery of the way, because the way leads to itself; that’s why my Muse popped the words BEING THE TAO into my mind instead of BEING IN THE TAO, because Jules Ostin’s new intern Ben Whittaker was his own Tao, or way. And I knew this instinctively, because I too had become my own way in my self-initiation into the sacred mystery; and being his own way, Ben Whittaker was BEING THE TAO.

This sounds like esoteric gobbledygook, but all it means is that seventy-year old intern Ben Whittaker was his own man; that’s why his young boss Jules Ostin, founding owner of the hugely successful e-commerce business called “About the Fit,” called him “cool.” Ben Whittaker played the game of life, but by his own rules; that’s what made him cool.

In my spiritual musing “The Essence of Cool,” I quote David Brooks (columnist for the New York Times and author of The Road to Character): “The cool person is stoical, emotionally controlled, never eager or needy, but instead mysterious, detached and self-possessed. The cool person is gracefully competent at something, but doesn’t need the world’s applause to know his worth. That’s because the cool person has found his or her own unique and authentic way of living with nonchalant intensity.”

 That’s Ben Whittaker to a tee, a self-possessed septuagenarian widower with a moral center; well-seasoned, balanced, and sensitive enough to care about people who come into his life. “The cool person,” said David Brooks, “is guided by his or her own autonomous values, often on the outskirts of society,” which was what fascinated me about the easy-going Ben Whittaker in Nancy Meyers deceptively simple, feel-good comedy The Intern.

The morning after Penny and I watched The Intern on Neflix, I went online to read the reviews; and it didn’t surprise me that every review missed the core message of the feel-good comedy which Ben Whittaker personified with natural charm and aplomb, the edifying principles of Tai Chi which are founded on Taoism, the way to wholeness and completeness; that’s what led me to see Nancy Meyers, the writer-director of The Intern, as the female Woody Allen of movie-making sans Allen’s moral vacuity, which was why Meyers had The Intern open with a scene of Ben Whittaker doing Tai Chi exercises in an open park with a group of seniors, and why she brought The Intern to graceful closure with another scene of Ben Whittaker doing his Tai Chi exercises, but this time with his young boss Jules Ostin joining him, thus implying that she was embracing the edifying philosophy of Taoism.

The premise of today’s spiritual musing rests upon my perception that the seventy-year-old widower intern personified the principles of Tai Chi, and my response would be that the script writer-director Nancy Meyers succeeded; otherwise my creative unconscious would not have picked it up and inspired me with the words BEING THE TAO when Jules, albeit inebriated, said to her intern Ben Whittaker: “How is it that you always manage to say the right thing, do the right thing, and be the right thing?” Which is nothing more, or less, than BEING THE TAO.

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New Spiritual Musing: "The Outer and Inner Journey"

The Outer and Inner Journey

Talking with our friend Sharon on our front deck the other evening as we sipped on a glass of red wine which she had brought over for dinner, she revealed something about herself (which was not news to me because I had intuited this about her), that none of her friends had any inclination about her inner journey, and I replied: “That doesn’t surprise me. Most people are on the outer journey. But in time, they too will be called to the inner journey,” and I made reference to our new acquaintances who had just built their new retirement home in Tiny Beaches and who had just left on a trip to Prince Edward Island in their new motor home because they are caught up in their outer journey (they plan to travel in their motor home for the next ten years, and winter in the southern states, Arizona, Florida or wherever, with the occasional cruise vacation); and that’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing…

Sharon cried when she read my book Death, the Final Frontier, because it confirmed her inner journey and satisfied her longing to know why she was, and she went on to read my book The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity and was brought to tears again, and I had to ask her why she cried—

“Because I know why I am now,” she said, a simple realization that took me most of my life to arrive at; and all because I was called to the inner journey much sooner than most and fulfilled my life’s purpose. But what do I mean by outer and inner journey?

I don’t quite know what relevance this may have to this question, but yesterday I was nudged to watch Laurens van der Post’s documentary on YouTube on Carl Jung’s life (I’ve read his book Jung and the Story of Our Time several times), and I was brought to tears at Jung’s commitment to his inner journey, bringing to the world a new psychology that will help man make sense of his purpose in life, a psychology of individuation that facilitates the natural process of man becoming what he was born to be, and I also watched a YouTube video on the literary scholar Professor Harold Bloom and I was brought to tears again, but these were tears of sadness and not joy because Professor Bloom’s academic outer journey of teaching at Yale University for fifty years and writing more than forty books of literary criticism had not brought his inner journey to resolution as Jung’s outer journey did, and now I understand why these two remarkable men were called to my attention for today’s spiritual musing—because they represent the two extremes of man’s outer and inner journey.

Three days before he died in the 86^th year of his life, Carl Jung had a dream which confirmed that he had achieved “wholeness and singleness of self,” but in the 87^th year of his life Professor Harold Bloom is still wandering in the labyrinthine world of literature which he describes as “a breathtaking kind of nihilism more uncanny than anything Nietzsche apprehended” (inspired by William Shakespeare, whom Professor Bloom calls “the god of literature”), unable to come to resolution for the purpose of his being; that’s why he brought me to tears, and why I was so happy for our new friend Sharon who cried when my twin soul books Death, the Final Frontier and The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity brought some measure of resolution to her inner journey that she began thirty-six years ago with Jane Roberts book Seth Speaks, which is why she wrote in her Amazon review of my books, “…I can now see the sky through the trees and will go on.”

I couldn’t have asked for a more heart-warming review…

I’ve quoted these prescient words many times in my writing, but I can’t help but quote them again today because they speak to man’s outer and inner journey: “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,” said Carl Jung; but what is man meant to be?

“Why am I here?” Sharon asked, thus initiating her inner journey; and she read and read, hoping to find an answer to the question that everyone will ask one day when their outer journey can no longer satisfy the longing in their soul to be what they are meant to be.

“Man must complete what Nature cannot finish,” said the ancient alchemists, keepers of the sacred knowledge of the secret way of life; but why cannot the natural process of evolution satisfy man’s inherent longing to be what he is meant to be?

Actually, it can satisfy our soul’s longing to be what we are meant to be, our true self; but this is a mystery for another spiritual musing, which I bought to resolution in my book Death, the Final Frontier with my closing chapter “The Winning Run” (which was why Sharon was brought to tears), but only when man realizes that his outer journey cannot satisfy the longing in his soul for wholeness and completeness and is called to the inner journey.

“He’s about ten years away from being called to the inner journey,” I said to Sharon, as we sipped our wine and talked about the outer and inner journey; I was making reference to our new acquaintance Bernie whose wife had just taken an early retirement so they could travel and enjoy the rest of their life doing what they had dreamt and planned on doing.

“How do you know,” Sharon asked me, her eyes alight with curiosity.

“I saw it in his eyes,” I replied, with an impish smile. “One day, about ten years from now, after they’ve had their surfeit of travel and the good life, he will catch himself, perhaps in the middle of a barbeque, watching TV, or just talking with some friends or his wife over breakfast one morning, and he will stare into empty space with a blank expression on his face and ask himself, ‘Is this all there is to life?’ That’s the call.”

And the inner journey begins…

———

New Spiritual Musing: "What Does Life Expect of Us?"

What Does Life Expects of Us?

I picked up an old Psychology Today (June 2012) from the stack of magazines by the door of my writing den on my way to the john this morning because I cannot go to the john and not read something. I get some of my best ideas in the john, and as I read an old article, which I had highlighted in blue marker, titled “The Atheist at the Breakfast Table,” by Bruce Grierson, one of my highlights jumped out at me and an old idea for a spiritual musing grabbed me with daemonic intensity because this idea has tried to grab me before but not quite enough to compel me to explore it; but like all of my ideas for poetry, stories, novels, and spiritual musings, when its time has come to be given expression I have no choice but to see it through. So, what was the highlight that set the idea for today’s musing free?

This is the paragraph that grabbed me: “Tepley was raised by observant parents who celebrated the holidays and kept a kosher home. He and his brother were bar mitzvahed. But cognitive dissonance soon ensued. ‘In religious school, God was frequently presented as just and merciful. But how could a just and merciful God allow the Holocaust? I know I wasn’t unique in asking that.’”

“Why cognitive dissonance?” I asked myself, and my idea for today’s spiritual musing was set free. I have put the sentence that liberated the idea for my musing into bold italics, the idea that people are puzzled by a just and merciful God allowing such horrendous suffering in the world like the mind-numbing Holocaust, and when I finished my business in the john I jotted the idea down in my notebook to explore in today’s musing…  

Again, I sense that this is going to be another one of those dangerous musings because it’s going to step so far outside the box of conventional thought that it will make some readers uneasy; but this is what writers do, explore new pathways for the mind to pursue. Isn’t this what Percy Bysshe Shelley meant in his iconic essay “A Defense of Poetry” when he wrote: “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration”?

This is what makes writers dangerous, because every now and then they are gifted with “an unapprehended inspiration” that threatens the status quo, as I was with the idea for today’s spiritual musing that opened a window onto human suffering that defies man’s disbelief that a just and merciful God would allow such devastating suffering like the Holocaust, a cognitive dissonance that paralyzes the mind of man and keeps him a prisoner to himself.

But as serendipity would have it, once I committed myself to writing today’s musing I was blessed with the surprising coincidence of two movies on Netflix which addressed my “unapprehended inspiration” of today’s musing: God’s Not Dead, Part 1, and God’s Not Dead, Part 2 (God’s Not Dead, Part 3 will be released in the spring of 2018), both movies speaking to the issue of God’s existence (just and merciful notwithstanding), which the truculent atheist Professor Radisson does not believe in but which his Christian student Josh does because his faith won’t allow him to deny the existence of God and sign a statement for Professor Radisson’s philosophy class stating that God is dead. All the other students in the class signed the statement denying God’s existence, and Professor Radisson challenges Josh to defend his position to the class; and the ensuing drama makes for a wonderful movie.

So, just what was my “unapprehended inspiration” for today’s spiritual musing? What did I see about man’s relationship with God and suffering that is so far outside the box of conventional thought that it will be sure to make readers uncomfortable?

This insight did not come to me without a history, because no idea is born ex nihilo; it has a history, and its history was born of my long and indefatigable quest for my true self, which I happily realized and wrote about in my book The Pearl of Great Price, a history that delves into the mystery of the evolutionary process of man’s paradoxical nature—our real and false self, or being and non-being as the case may be; because in the resolution of my ego/shadow personality (my real and false self), I came to the astonishing realization that human suffering is Nature’s way of resolving the enantiodromiac dynamic of man’s paradoxical nature and making our two selves into one, which absolves God of all responsibility for tragedies like the Holocaust, and personal suffering like Professor Radisson’s mother’s death by cancer which drove him to abandon his Christian faith and embrace the doctrine of atheism. Which is exactly what happened to a Canadian writer and social activist who inspired the following poem: —

The Making of an Atheist

She stared out her living room window

lost to the world she knew and loved; three

hours later she returned from the farthest

regions of her mind where the great void had

swallowed her whole, and she gave the rest

of her life to helping others, founding a home

for unwed mothers and an AIDS hospice for

gays among many other charitable causes,

and all because a drunken driver had run

over her golden boy. She went to church and

knelt for hours begging God to tell her why

her twenty-year old son had to die, but God

did not respond and she walked away with

her unyielding pride leaving her simple faith

that she had inherited from her caring mother

and philandering father who had abandoned

her when she was twelve behind her. “Saint

Joan,” they called her, for all her good works,

and they named a street after her when

she died of inoperable cancer.

Vanity dies hard. That’s what makes this spiritual musing dangerous, the realization that human suffering serves Nature’s purpose for man’s evolution, which is to realize our individuating self-consciousness to wholeness and completeness.

“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,” said Carl Jung; but this can only make sense in light of karma and reincarnation, because man cannot possibly realize his true self in one lifetime alone.

My “unapprehended inspiration” for today’s spiritual musing then came to me again while reading the article “The Atheist at the Breakfast Table” while sitting on the john the other morning, which was creatively consolidated with the serendipitous gift of the two God’s Not Dead movies that delved into the lives of believers and non-believers alike; but as informative as the Psychology Today article and God’s Not Dead movies were, I drew upon my own life to flesh in today’s musing, because the only truth that really matters is the truth of one’s own life experience, and mine initiated me into the mystery of human suffering, a mystery that speaks more to a just and merciful God than it does to the non-existence of God. And what a relief it is to know that even mind-boggling tragedies like the Holocaust serve Nature’s purpose of bringing man’s evolving self-consciousness to spiritual resolution.

That’s the answer that Victor E. Frankl, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning, was seeking for all the brutal suffering that he and his fellow prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps had to endure, the merciful answer to the haunting question: what does life expect of us? Because through suffering we realize our true self.

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New Poem: "A Bouquet of Wild Flowers"

A Bouquet of Wild Flowers

Penny asked me to check the bread-maker

        yesterday morning, which occasionally

has a tendency to not knead the dough completely;

         but I got lost deep in thought as I wrote

my daily poem (I blame Robert Bly for this

         addictive habit), and I forgot. I went to work

upon completing my poem (Robert Bly does not

          have a day job to go to); but when I came

home for coffee, I smelled the bread and remembered

          what I was supposed to do. I opened the

break-maker door expecting to see a leavened loaf

          nicely baking, but instead my eyes beheld an

ugly lump of dough struggling for its integrity, and

          guilt possessed me. I left the loaf to bake,

hoping some miracle would make it rise; but just in

          case the God of Bread did not hear my prayer,

I stopped on my way home for lunch and picked a

          bouquet of wild flowers. When I walked into

the house I heard disappointment in Penny’s voice

           as she called my name; but before she told me

about the bread, I handed her the cheerful bouquet

          and said, “I forgot and I’m sorry and these are

for you.” Her face lit up with love as it always does

          when I surprise her the way I do, and when she

left for work after lunch she smiled and said to me,

          “You’re such a joy to live with. I’ll put on a

fresh loaf when I get home.”