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 86th year of his life, Carl Jung had a dream which
confirmed that he had achieved “wholeness and singleness of self,” but in the 87th
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…
———
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