New Spiritual Musing: "The Bread Maker Coincidence and Sharon's Comeuppance"

The Bread Maker Coincidence

And Sharon’s Comeuppance

In our house, we call her Sharon. She’s Murphy’s sister. As I joked with our neighbors one day when they walked over for a glass of wine on our front deck, “If you think Murphy’s bad, wait until you meet his sister Sharon. She’s ten times worse than her brother.”

   Murphy’s Law states that if anything can go wrong, it will; and to make the point with our neighbors that our life seemed to have been thrown off kilter the past few weeks, starting with my vehicle accident that I explored in my spiritual musing “The Old Trickster,” I had to kick Murphy’s Law up a notch; that’s how his sister Sharon came into being.

Well, Sharon struck again this past week, starting with the leak in Goober’s new tank. Goober is our goldfish, which we brought with us when Penny and I moved to our new home in Georgian Bay fourteen years ago, so Goober’s very old as goldfish go; and Penny got Goober a new tank a few months ago at Walmart in Wasaga Beach, regretting that she did not get the larger tank which was only a few dollars more, and then our bread maker died the other day when I put on dough for pizza, and the following morning our coffee maker sputtered in that familiar way coffee makers do when they’re about to give up the ghost; so, we had to replace all three items, and Penny and I went shopping Sunday in Midland after we treated ourselves to breakfast at Captain Ken’s in Penetanguishene.

Penny had gone on Amazon to check out bread makers, so she had a good idea of what she wanted; but there wasn’t much selection at Canadian Tire in Midland, and what they did have were too pricey for our budget; so, we went to Walmart and came home with a larger tank for Goober and new coffee maker but no bread maker, and Penny decided to order one from Amazon. But when we got home, Sharon struck again when the garage door wouldn’t open when I pressed the remote control affixed to the sun visor of the car. I tried several times, and when I went in to check I saw that the screws holding the bracket attached to the automatic door-opening track had ripped loose and had to be re-screwed, which I had done twice already, and this final indignity was like a slap in the face; but strangely enough, this set into motion the merciful law of divine synchronicity and Sharon’s comeuppance…

I love coincidences. I look forward to them every day, and I’m always tickled with joy when they happen because you cannot plan a coincidence. Like Murphy’s Law and his nastier sister Sharon’s Revenge, coincidences have a mind of their own, and they only happen for a reason; and that’s what I’d like to explore in today’s spiritual musing.

Because I’ve been engaged with the synchronicity principle most of my life, which was fully realized when serendipity introduced me to a street in Tiny Township, Georgian Bay, named after me (STOCCO CIRCLE) where Penny and I built our new home fourteen years ago, I’m not surprised when the dots for a new spiritual musing begin to connect, because that’s how the synchronicity principle works in the service of soul, and something that Zen poet Jane Hirshfield said about her relationship to poetry in Bill Moyers book Fooling with Words, A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft, caught my attention the other morning when I felt “nudged” to read  Bill Moyers book; and as I always do when something speaks to me, I highlighted the passage: “Sometime I think that poems use us in order to think, to do their own work,” said Jane Hirshfield. “You know, most of the time I feel as if I am in the service of the poem—a poem isn’t something I make, it’s something I serve.”

And herein lies the mystery of the synchronicity principle that Hirshfield failed to see, that not only is she in the service of her poetry, but that the spirit of poetry, what I call “it” in the poem I wrote that she inspired, serves her no less than she serves the spirit of poetry, the omniscient guiding principle of life that serves every soul in their journey through life—

JANE, ZEN, AND POETRY

She almost has “it” but does not quite

know it; another experience, another

poem, another nanometer closer to “it.”

Something she said gave her away:

“Most of the time I feel as if I am

in service of the poem,” but not until

she sees that “it” is in equal service

to her will she have “it” and be

whole and complete.

Being a writer compelled to write, I know what Jane Hirshfield meant by saying that sometimes she feels like she is in the service of her poems, because when I’m called to write a poem I often do not know what the poem wants to say, thus affirming Hirshfield’s insight that our poems do our thinking for us (as do my spiritual musings); but what is the poet serving if not one’s own destined purpose to wholeness and completeness?

A poem shines a light upon one’s path, making one’s way easier because it brings one’s outer journey into harmony with one’s destined purpose to wholeness and completeness, and coincidences are life’s way of confirming the natural harmonization process of inevitable self-reconciliation; but what does this have to do with Murphy’s Law and Sharon’s Revenge?

Aye, there’s the rub that makes calamity of so great a fortune, because life has a way of throwing a monkey wrench into the gears of our life; but how can we expect our life to run smoothly all the time when there are built-in faults and obsolescence?

If something can go wrong, it will; and our bread maker had to wear out eventually, as did our coffee maker, so why be surprised when they do? We didn’t expect our fish tank to spring a leak so soon after our purchase, though; but the fatigue-factor built into everything eventually catches up to us, and our tank sprung a leak because the fault was in the assembly, thus affirming Murphy’s Law that if anything can go wrong, it will. And our bread and coffee makers had a limited life span, so there shouldn’t have been any surprise there either. But because these items gave up their ghost in such close temporal proximity to each other (the superstition of three “bad” things happening in a row), we attach some kind of nefarious meaning to their occurrence. But there’s nothing sinister about built-in defects and obsolescence; that’s just the way it is.

And as to our garage door, the final indignity, I should have seen it coming because I knew that the metal of the door was too thin for the screws to hold indefinitely (a manufacturing fault), which was why I decided that this time I would fasten a ¾ 6 x 12 inch piece of plywood to the door to fasten the screws that held the bracket attached to the automatic track; but I didn’t have a piece of plywood, and I was going to walk over to my neighbor Tony’s place later because I knew he would have it, as well as the screws; and that’s when the remarkable coincidence with the bread maker happened…

Penny went for a walk around STOCCO CIRCLE after we brought our new fish tank and coffee maker and other sundries into the house and I sat on the front deck to read my Sunday Star just to pause and catch my breath, but when Penny came back from her walk she said to me: “Tony’s home. He’s out in his garage.”

“I’ll go over and see if he has a piece of plywood and some screws,” I said, and Penny went into the house. But unbeknown to me, while I was talking with Tony in his garage Penny had gone online to select and order a new bread maker from Amazon.

I rode my bike to Tony’s and saw him standing by his work bench studying something that was making a funny but familiar sound. I greeted Tony and asked what he was doing, and he told me he was trying to figure out what that unit was.

“That’s a bread maker,” I said, “and it’s supposed to work like that.” Tony had the unit plugged in but thought that it was malfunctioning because the little paddle that kneaded the bread dough wasn’t revolving as he thought it should; it revolved interruptedly.

Tony was cleaning out his garage and back shed and old chairs and stuff from under his back deck that had been there for years and loading everything onto his trailer and then he was going to make a trip to the dump, that’s why he was checking out that appliance which just happened to be a perfectly good bread maker that an Italian lady for whom he had done a small job had given to him fifteen years ago, and he was going to throw it away.

“It works just fine, Tony,” I said. “Maybe Maria can use it?”

A widow also, Maria was his life companion after his wife died; but Maria was old fashioned and kneaded her dough by hand, so Tony offered it to me and I was strongly “nudged” to leave my bike and quickly carry the bread maker over to our house after explaining to Tony why I had come over. He did have a piece of plywood and screws, but I wanted to surprise Penny with the remarkable coincidence of the bread maker first.

Penny was in her office upstairs, and as soon as I walked into the house I shouted up to her: “Have you ordered the break maker yet?”

“I’m just about to,” she said.

“Well don’t,” I said. “Come on down here. I got a bread maker from Tony.”

Penny couldn’t believe the coincidence. She had just taken her Master card out and was about to order the new bread maker when I shouted up to her not to, and after giving the unused bread maker (which in its day was a higher end model called Bread Chef) a thorough cleaning she put on a batch of dough to make fresh buns for dinner; and while she was doing that, I went back to Tony’s and explained my garage door problem and, of course Tony being Tony, he walked over with me and sized up the problem and together we got the garage door opener working properly (plus another nagging little job), and then we sat on the front deck and had a nice cold beer. And that’s how Sharon got her comeuppance.

 ———

New Spiritual Musing: "The Outlander Mystique"

The Outlander Mystique

            I have an idea forming in the back of my mind. I say the back of my mind, because it makes more credible sense this way; but actually, I feel the idea forming about a foot above and behind the back of my head in my energy field, an idea that is much too deep to explore in today’s spiritual musing. So, if I may, let me simply expand upon what I think is going on with the formation of this as yet unapprehended idea for a spiritual musing...

         

I’ve been caught up in the Outlander series on Neflix this past week (I’m three quarters of the way through season 2, and I understand season 3 has just been released), and so intrigued was I by the author Diana Gabaldon who wrote the Outlander novels that I had to do a Google search to find out how she came about writing this incredible historical romance with a mesmerizing time-travelling science fiction plot twist; and what I learned about her creative process confirmed my insights into the mystifying art of creative writing.

The idea forming in my mind  has allowed me to witness my creative unconscious at work as it assembles the archetypal energies that are coalescing into the idea for my spiritual musing on the numinous mystery of creative writing, something that has intrigued every writer whose characters just appear to take over a story, like Diana Gabaldon’s Claire Randall did in her first Outlander novel which grew into a series; and given what I’ve seen so far in the movie adaptation of her novel in seasons 1 & 2, I believe I have been given a serious glimpse into how the creative unconscious works for the evolution of the individual soul, in this case Diana Gabaldon who was called to creative writing unexpectedly.

Gabaldon was a university professor for twelve years before she got the call to write a historical novel, “for practice, just to learn how,” with no intention of showing it to anyone; but she didn’t know where to set her historical novel, and then fate kicked in.

By “coincidence” (I put the word in quotation marks, because I’ve come to believe that coincidences happen to connect one’s outer journey in life with their inner journey to wholeness and completeness), she caught a rerun episode of the Doctor Who TV series called “The War Games.” One of the Doctor’s companions was a Scot from around 1745, a young man about 17 years old called Jamie McCrimmon who provided the initial inspiration for Gabaldon’s main male character, James Fraser, and for her novel’s mid-18^th Century Scotland setting. Gabaldon decided to have “an Englishwoman to play off all those kilted Scotsmen,” but her female English character  “took over the story and began telling it herself, making smart-ass remarks about everything,” thus providing Gabaldon with the idea of time-travel because her character Claire sounded like a modern woman, which gave her first Outlander novel the mystifying element that allowed her to expand her story into a whole series which explore the sweet joys and harrowing sorrows of romantic love through time travel, a truly fascinating concept that has captured the imagination of twenty-five million readers and more viewers of the television series; but where did Claire Beauchamp Randall come from? That’s the mystery…

Something about Outlander fascinated me, not in the usual sense of a good story, but something more serious, something deeper than the plot twists which were brilliantly woven into the storyline, like the psycho-sexual metaphor of British imperialism symbolized in the perverse relationship that Captain “Black Jack” has with the young Scot with the “magnificent body,” Claire’s husband Jamie Fraser; the story implied a historical connective tissue that spelled out a karmic link from one lifetime to the next, and then it hit me—that was the implicit logic of the natural process of soul-making that the author was called upon to introduce to the world through Claire’s romantic connection with the past and future.

This, of course, presupposes the principles of karma and reincarnation which are artfully implied in the Outlander series through the concept of time travel, how decisions made in one lifetime have karmic consequences in the future—which seems to be the driving engine of the whole Outlander series with Claire’s love for her husband Jamie in mid-18^th Century Scotland and her fraught marriage to Frank in mid-20^th Century England, and no matter how hard Claire and Jamie try to change the future they are doomed to fail because karma has inevitable consequences; which suggest that the writer’s imagination is guided by an omniscient guiding principle not only to facilitate the writer’s individuation in their destined journey to wholeness and completenss, but the reader’s as well by providing them with the karmic wisdom of the stories, a symbolic wisdom that writers themselves are oblivious to until their creative unconscious works it out through writing, which in Diana Gabaldon’s case is a historical romance with an ingenious plot twist.

By paralleling Claire’s two loves, Jamie in 18^th Century Scotland and Frank in 20^th Century England (and America), the connective tissue of love can be seen in all of it’s glorious and mystifying manifestations as it flows through time—just as karma does. An incredible story and invaluable message about choices and consequences, but much too deep for today’s spiritual musing. And that’s the mystique of the Outlander that I simply had to explore.

———

Newly minted poem: "Where Shall Freedom be Found?"

WHERE SHALL FREEDOM BE FOUND?

He has only three criteria

for going on living, bearing

the lonely burden of the years:

aesthetic splendor, intellectual power,

and wisdom; —

For fifty-five years and counting,

he has taught the wisdom literature

of the world, and still he laments gnostic

ignorance and cries in despair: “Where

shall freedom be found?”

To the writing of many books there

is no end, nor to the reading, all is vanity

from beginning to end, and that’s all

one needs to know; but wait, wait

 a goddamn minute; —

Nothing in God’s creation can supress

the worm from becoming a man, but how

can he break the spell and set his soul free

from aesthetic splendor, intellectual

power, and wisdom?

New Spiritual Musing: "Coincidences in the Blueberry Patch"

Coincidences in the Blueberry Patch

The morning unfolded as naturally as the rising sun, but I did not see it coming, and neither did Sharon as we drove to the organic blueberry farm for our last pick of the year, the amazing but surprising little coincidences that manifested out of a simple exchange of words with two blueberry pickers who just happened to overhear me say to Sharon, “We should go to a nice little restaurant for lunch after we finish picking.”

It was my turn to treat lunch. Sharon had taken me to Pieces of Olde, a quaint little bistro and gift shop in Elmvale, after our last pick at The Blueberry Place just a few kilometers on the outskirts of Midland (we had chicken salad on a fresh croissant and a side garden salad with vinaigrette dressing and a fruit cup of mandarin/marshmallow/yogurt for dessert), and I wanted to take her to another place just for a change of atmosphere, and one of the blueberry pickers overheard me and took the liberty of saying, “You could try—”

In all honesty, I don’t remember the restaurant he suggested; but that opened up a conversation that brought about the amazing little coincidences in the blueberry patch that were called forth by the resonating frequency of the conversation that Sharon and I had on our drive to The Blueberry Place which addressed what I can only call the harmonizing of Sharon’s life, and the idea for today’s spiritual musing would never have occurred to me had we not had the conversation on synchronicity on our drive to The Blueberry Place—

“You know why all this is happening to you, don’t you?”  I asked, rhetorically. “It’s because you engaged the synchronicity principle reading my books.”

I had given her copies of Death, the Final Frontier and The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity, both of which had moved her to tears because they reconnected her with her inner journey that had come to a standstill, but it wasn’t until she told me about her long phone conversation with her eldest daughter the night before that I made the connection; her daughter cried on the phone because her only sibling had not shared the good news with her that she was pregnant after five years of trying, and Sharon said to her—

“What do you expect? You haven’t talked with your sister for two years.”

I smiled when Sharon shared this with me, because the harmonizing principle of the merciful law of divine synchronicity was working its magic in her life, first by formalizing her eight-year separation from her husband and father of their two daughters with a divorce (which he now requested for reasons she couldn’t fathom because if they got divorced they would only get half of their health benefits from the government positions they had retired from but which I suspected the merciful law of divine synchronicity had initiated for her healing journey to wholeness and completeness), and now by opening the door for her daughters to reconcile their sibling rivalry and make up—

“That’s what happens when you engage the synchronicity principle, it brings your outer and inner journey into harmony. You’re going to get your divorce and free yourself of the psychic connection you still have with your husband who wants to marry the woman he’s been living with since you left him, and your daughters are going to make up; and I guarantee that whatever else you have going on in your life that needs to be reconciled will happen whether you like it or not, because that’s just how it works.”

 “I understand,” Sharon said, and I laughed because I had made fun of her always interjecting with her comment “I understand” whenever I tried to explain something which I felt was beyond her; but she caught herself and said, “Stop it! I know what you’re saying.”

“That’s why my books speak to you,” I said, and laughed again; but little did we expect the synchronicity principle to work its magic when we got to The Blueberry Place.

It turned out that the blueberry picker who suggested two or three more restaurants for us to try had moved to Tiny Beaches just several streets over from where my life partner Penny Lynn and I had built our new home on STOCCO CIRCLE (a street named after me, which was such a remarkable coincidence that I attributed it to divine intervention and which I had to share with the friendly pickers because the story of how I came upon STOCCO CIRCLE was too good to be true, but it was), and he also went to Lakehead University where I had studied philosophy, and he was keenly interested in my books Death, the Final Frontier and The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity and was going to check out my Amazon page when he got home; and, to top it off, as Sharon and I were walking out of the blueberry patch to go for lunch (we opted for Mill Street Bistro in Coldwater, which the picker, whose name was Robert, said was a bit expensive but had a nice menu and excellent food and a real nice atmosphere), another man who was picking several rows over but still within hearing range couldn’t wait to share with us that he was very much into synchronicity and that he had studied it for years and had a whole stack of notes that he wanted to turn into a book, and who also happened to be a small appliance repairman that Sharon had used once or twice and who could repair our dishwasher that had gone on the blink; but when we drove to the Mill Street Bistro there was a sign saying that it was closed on Mondays, so we opted to go back to Pieces of Olde in Elmvale and had a refreshing seafood caesar salad with two thick pieces of freshly baked cheese bread. It was delightfully appetizing, but Sharon couldn’t finish hers and brought the rest home to have with her dinner—

“What a nice way to end our blueberry picking for the year,” I said, as we walked back to Sharon’s vehicle after lunch. “We’ll have to have you over for Penny’s Georgian Bay Blueberry Pie. It’s her take on Wisconsin Strawberry Pie, and it’s excellent.”

“I still can’t believe the coincidences,” Sharon said, her face beaming with wonder.

“I think the synchronicity principle kicked in just to confirm what I said to you on our drive to The Blueberry Place about the resonating power of synchronicity. The coincidences at the blueberry patch were confirmation that you’ve engaged the synchronicity principle and it’s begun to harmonize your life. It was a little gift for both of us, and I think I’m going to write a spiritual musing on it.”

“You should. I still can’t believe what happened. It was like we shifted into a whole other reality, or something. It was weird.”

“We probably did. But you know what else? Maybe one of those pickers is being called to their inner journey. Maybe they’re meant to read my twin soul books Death, the Final Frontier and The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity. That’s how it works, Sharon.”

“I know,” she said with an ironic smile, and then she laughed.

———

New Spiritual Musing: "The Satisfaction of Doing And the Mystery of Soul-Making"

The Satisfaction of Doing

And the Mystery of Soul-Making

Nothing pleases me more than that special feeling of goodness that comes from a satisfying piece of writing, like the spiritual musing I wrote yesterday, “The Tremor of Eternity,” which revealed much more about the human soul than I could have wished for; but why was it so satisfying? That’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing…

I never know where I’m going to find my entry point into my spiritual musings. It may come unannounced through associative thinking, or unexpectedly in conversation, watching TV or reading the weekend papers or a magazine; but more often than not, it takes me by surprise with serendipitous delight, like it did this morning when I came upon something that Virginia Woolf said in Lyndall Gordon’s biography Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Life: “I have some restless searcher in me…Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay one’s hands on & say ‘This is it?’ I have a great & astonishing sense of something there."

This “great & astonishing sense of something there” that Virginia Woolf sensed was that same “tremor of eternity” that Svetlana Alexievich sensed in her oral histories of the Soviet people, the same secret that my high school hero and literary mentor Ernest Hemingway sensed in Cezanne’s paintings and sought to discover through his own writing, a secret that Hemingway felt only the poets had the gift of discerning, which they did as John Keats tells us in a letter to his brother and sister that is titled “The Vale of Soul-Making.”

“There may be intelligences or sparks of divinity in millions,” wrote Keats, “but they are not souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception—they know and they see and they are pure; in short, they are God. How then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given unto them—so as even to possess a bliss peculiar to each one by individual existence? How but by the medium of a world like this?”

When Virginia Woolf analysed the writer’s life in a draft of her experimental novel The Waves, she remarked that there was “a certain inevitable disparity” between the public and private self, “between the outer & the inner.” “The outer facts are there,” writes her biographer Lyndall Gordon, “but only as a prop for the unfolding creative side.” Which brought to mind one of Emily Dickinson’s most cryptic poems:

The props assist the house

Until the house is built,

And then the props withdraw—

And adequate, erect,

The house supports itself;

Ceasing to recollect

The augur and the carpenter.

Just such a retrospect

Hath the perfected life,

A past of plank and nail,

And slowness, —then the scaffolds drop—

Affirming it a soul.

          In her experimental novel The Waves, Virginia Woolf broke down what she knew of human nature six ways so as to analyse the composite and fuse her six characters into one ideal human specimen, but she failed. As Lyndall Gordon tells us in her biography: “After The Waves was published she wrote to G. L. Lowes Dickinson: ‘The six characters were supposed to be one. I’m getting old myself—I shall be fifty next year; and I come to feel more and more how difficult it is to collect myself into one Virginia,” which brought to mind the Socratic principle of realizing one’s true self through a life of virtue, of which he believed goodness to be the highest, a principle that Socrates spelled out in Plato’s Phaedo: “And what is purification but the separation of the soul from the body, as I was saying before; the habit of soul gathering and collecting herself into herself, out of all the courses of the body (by living a life of virtue); the dwelling in her own place alone, as in another life; so also in this, as far as she can; the release of the soul from the chains of the body.” Which leads one to wonder, where was the moral factor in Woolf’s experimental novel of self-integration?

Virginia Woolf failed to discover “it,” that “great & astonishing sense of something there” that Socrates couched in his philosophy and which Cezanne and Hemingway and Svetlana Alexievich sensed in the “tremor of eternity” in the human soul that in my quest for my true self I discovered to be the natural enantiodromiac dynamic of life that individuates the dual consciousness of our being and non-being (Woolf’s “unfolding creative side” that Keats discerned to be the secret of soul making through life experience); but Emily Dickinson ferreted out the secret of life and shared it in her “letter to the world,” which the world failed to discern. Even the eminent scholar Professor Harold Bloom got headaches trying to decode Dickinson’s poetry; but wise to the cruel ways of the world, Dickinson wrote:

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant,

Success in circuit lies,

Too bright for our infirm delight

The truth’s superb surprise;

As lightening to the children eased

With explanation kind,

The truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind.

          That was my dilemma. And then I read Rumi. “Tell it unveiled, the naked truth! The declaration’s better than the secret,” declared the mystic poet, and unabashedly I told the story of my quest for wholeness and completeness in my twin soul books Death, the Final Frontier and The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity, and I’ve been writing about the secret of soul-making in my spiritual musing for years, to the chagrin of the world; so, what is this mysterious secret, and just how does it relate to that special feeling of goodness that I experienced writing my spiritual musing “The Tremor of Eternity”?     

          It’s all about soul-making. That’s what Svetlana Alexievich sensed in the “tremor of eternity” in the oppressed soul of the Soviet people. That’s the purpose and meaning of life, the alchemy of soul-making through life experience; and not until one learns the art of soul-making will one resolve the longing in one’s soul for wholeness and completeness.

Socrates couldn’t help himself and revealed the secret openly, and he was tried and condemned for sedition and heresy; and Emily Dickinson concealed the secret in her poetry; and Rumi declared the secret in every ecstatic verse that poured out of him; and I resolved the mystery that haunted Virginia Woolf and Cezanne and Ernest Hemingway and Professor Harold Bloom and every soul destined to satisfy their deepest longing to be all they are meant to be, which Emily Dickinson spelled out in one of her riddling poems:

Adventure most unto itself

The Soul condemned to be;

Attended by a Single Hound—

Its own Identity.

We are all condemned to become ourselves, whole and complete—the “circumference” of our life, as Emily Dickinson defined the fullness of our being; but because the natural law of enantiodromia will not allow the evolutionary process of life to complete what we are meant to be, how then do we satisfy the longing in our soul for wholeness and completeness?

That was my challenge when I set out on my quest for my true self more than half a century ago, and when I finally resolved the mystery it amused me to see that life itself was the solution to our existential dilemma that stumped the great thinkers of the world, like Nietzsche, Sartre, and Albert Camus; but I had to step so far outside the paradigm of man’s enantiodromiac conundrum that I doubt anyone will believe me when I tell them that the only way out of our paradoxical quandary is to simply be a good person.

That’s it. No messiah, guru, or Master. No religion. No philosophy. No science. Just being a good person resolves the enantiodromiac paradox of our dual nature, because being a good person is the sum of all teachings and makes our two selves into one. That’s why I felt such a satisfying feeling of goodness when I wrote my spiritual musing “The Tremor of Eternity,” because when I brought my musing to resolution I tasted the sweet fruit of my own tree, and it was good. A tad saccharine perhaps, but no less satisfying.

———

A special musing for my Russian readers: "The Tremor of Eternity."

The Tremor of Eternity

“Suffering is a special kind of knowledge.”

Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich, “historian of the soul,” won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015 for her “polyphonic writing, a monument to suffering and courage in our time,” as the Nobel citation put it; but I could not finish reading her last book Second Hand Time, The Last of the Soviets. It was too Dostoevskian in its existential density and I had to put it aside.

That was last year. This year I picked up the September 2017 issue of The Atlantic magazine in Barrie (the day of my auto accident, which put a damper on my browsing in Chapters), and noticed an article on Svetlana Alexievich which was prompted by the English translation of the book that launched her career, The Unwomanly Face of War. The article was written by Nina Khrushceva, the granddaughter of the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushcev’s son, and I read something that sparked the idea for today’s spiritual musing:

Her goal was not modest: to listen to “specific human beings, living in a specific time and taking part in specific events,” while remaining ever alert to “the eternally human in them. The tremor of eternity. That which is in human beings at all times.”

Svetlana Alexievich’s books transcend journalism. By the magic of creative effort, Svetlana managed to distill “the eternally human” out of the story of every person that she interviewed for her oral history of the Soviet people, and the question that I want to explore in today’s spiritual musing is this: what is this “tremor of eternity” in the human soul?

Coincidence or not (I believe it was a coincidence, because whenever I get an idea for a spiritual musing the merciful law of divine synchronicity kicks in to flesh in my musing), I just happened to select the movie Fences on Netflix for Penny and I to watch the other night, staring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, and the existential density of this unbearably poignant story brought to mind Svetlana’s ambitious literary goal of recording the story of “specific human beings, living in a specific time and taking part in specific events,” and I could feel “the tremor of eternity” in the lives of the black people in the movie Fences, specific lives oppressed in their own specific way no less than the lives of people under Soviet rule that Svetlana recorded in the oral histories of her books.

The existential density of the movie Fences strongly suggested to me that it had been adapted from a play, so I did a Google search and learned that the screenplay was written by the playwright August Wilson who had adapted it from his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Fences, just as I had suspected; but that didn’t help me resolve the question of “the tremor of eternity” that I saw in the soul of his characters, and I had to ponder deeply.

I knew with intuitive certainty that this “tremor of eternity” had to do with existential suffering brought about by the oppressive conditions of one’s life, whether it be the life of the Soviet people living under socialism or the life of black people in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and I went back to the article in The Atlantic and found confirmation in Svetlana’s own words, which reflect the wisdom that she accrued from recording thousands of stories from specific people living in a specific time and taking part in specific events:

Sometimes I come home after these meetings with the thought that suffering is solitude. Total isolation. At other times, it seems to me that suffering is a special kind of knowledge. There is something in human life that is impossible to convey and preserve in any other way, especially among us. That is how the world is made; that is how we are made.

“That’s it,” I exclaimed to myself, not with the excitement of a mind-shattering epiphany, but with the quiet calm of unsurprising coincidental confirmation.

Svetlana had intuited one of the deepest mysteries of the human condition, that the human soul is made through pain and suffering—an insight much too deep for tears, as the poet Wordsworth would say; which was why she found it “impossible to convey.” But Svetlana did her creative best, which the Nobel Prize committee recognized as “a new kind of literary genre,” describing her work as a “history of emotions…a history of the soul.”

“To me the meanest flower that blows can give /Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” said Wordsworth in his poem “Intimations of Immortality,” but these were thoughts born of the anguished joy of life and not existential pain and suffering like that of the oppressed Soviet people in Svetlana books or the oppressed black people in the movie Fences; which confirmed my gnostic understanding of the growth and individuation of the human soul through the enantiodromiac process of natural evolution.

This is the core idea of today’s spiritual musing, then; but like Svetlana Alexievich I find it impossible to convey the sacred mystery of this idea, and I have to abandon to my creative unconscious to bring today’s musing to satisfactory resolution...

I pondered deeply. What did Svetlana Alexievich mean by calling suffering “a special kind of knowledge”? Listening to thousands of people tell their personal story of suffering for her oral history of the Soviet people who were conditioned by the inflexible ideology of socialism, she felt “the tremor of eternity” in each person’s soul, “that which is human in all of us,” which was why she was called a historian of the soul in the Nobel Prize citation.  

And as I watched the movie Fences, I also felt “the tremor of eternity” in the soul of Troy Maxson (Denzel Washington) and his wife Rose (Viola Davis), and I knew with gnostic certainty that the “tremor of eternity” that I felt in their anguished soul was that “special kind of knowledge” that was created out of the enantiodromiac process of soulmaking; but this is such a deep concept to explain that I have to defer to my twin soul books, Death, the Final Frontier and The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity, which tell the story of how I came to see in my own journey of self-discovery that “human suffering is nature’s way of satisfying the longing in our soul to be all that we are meant to be.”

This is the mystery that Svetlana Alexievich caught a glimpse of as she listened to the Soviet people tell the story of their personal suffering and which I caught a glimpse of in the movie Fences as I watched Troy Maxson and his wife Rose suffer the existential anguish of their life circumstances and marriage, a glimpse into the sacred mystery of suffering that has puzzled the world since the dawn of man; but without suffering, where would we be?

Would we have that “tremor of eternity” in our soul? Would we even be aware of our immortal nature that Wordsworth caught a glimpse of in his poem “Intimations of Immortality” and Svetlana Alexievich caught a glimpse of in the soul of the Soviet people and which I saw more and more clearly in Troy Maxson and his wife Rose? Through suffering we grow in that “special kind of knowledge,” but is there any other way to grow in our immortal nature other than through the existential pain and suffering of the human condition?

The ancient Gnostics knew that nature will only evolve us so far, and then we have to take evolution into our own hands to complete what nature cannot finish; this is the mystery that Svetlana Alexievich confronted in her quest to record the oral history of the Soviet People and which Troy Maxson and his wife Rose were up against, and this is the mystery that I sought to resolve in my lifelong journey of self-discovery.

I felt the “tremor of eternity” in the soul of the Soviet people that Svetlana Alexievich creatively recorded in her oral histories, and I felt the “tremor of eternity” in the soul of Troy Maxson and his wife Rose as I watched them suffer in their existential anguish, but I also knew with gnostic certainty through my own journey of self-discovery that there was a way out of existential suffering; but that’s a subject for another musing… 

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New Spiritual Musing: "The Old Trickster"

The Old Trickster

“The Trickster is a tester, one who makes sure you are ready

before allowing you further along the Path.”

We all do stupid things. Why? This is what I explored in my third volume of spiritual musings Stupidity Is Not a Gift of God, and I thought I had a good handle on why I did stupid things in my life; but wouldn’t you know it, the Old Trickster came out again last Sunday morning, the day after I posted my spiritual musing “Being the Tao” on my blog, and the subject of today’s musing has to do with the Trickster side of our shadow personality.

I brought it on myself of course, because stupidity is not a gift of God; I was entirely responsible for the accident that we got into on our drive to Barrie last Sunday (August 27, 2017) where Penny would be going to Winners to do some shopping for her niece’s wedding and I to Chapters across the street to browse the books and magazines, but our shopping trip got rudely interrupted when I spontaneously decided to switch into the turning lane at the corner of Concession 29 and Highway 92 and did not see the vehicle behind me, and there you have it, a stupid accident that could have been avoided had I not listened to the Old Trickster who prompted me to switch into the turning lane to go into the gas station to pick up my Sunday Star which was too sudden for the truck behind me to pull out of the way and it collided into my door, smashing it and the mirror, a stupid stupid stupid accident…

Carl Jung described the Trickster as an archetype that appears in all cultures, and I’ve come to see the Trickster as that part of our unconscious shadow self that seeks resolution with our conscious ego personality; and it does this by prompting us to do things that wake us up and make us more conscious of our unconscious ego nature, as it did when suddenly I felt “compelled” to switch into the turning lane to go into the gas station to get my paper.

Why did I suddenly switch lanes to get my Sunday Star at the gas station when just a minute or so earlier Penny said to me, “You can get your paper at Chapters”? 

Switching lanes as I did at the last moment was an act of idiocy because it did not give the proud young driver of the brand new black Ford F-150 pickup behind me time to let me into the passing lane, which caused the collision; and although I never got charged by the OPP for my stupidity (I wasn’t speeding and I did put on my signal, but it was too late), I have no one to blame but the Old Trickster who prompted me to switch lanes at the last moment, and the Old Trickster is that part of our archetypal shadow that has a compulsive imperative to be integrated into our conscious ego personality; that’s why I say that stupidity is not a gift of God, it’s entirely man-made.

“The Trickster is not by nature evil,” says James Lewis in his book The Dream Encyclopaedia, “even though the results of his activities are often unpleasant,” as mine were when I got into my accident. “These activities centre around bringing attention to our own or other people’s often hidden stupidity, shams or lies,” Lewis continues. “He is also the unexpected spontaneous “idiot” aspect of life which for no reason will emerge into our carefully arranged life to upset it,” just as happened to me. But why upset it? Because, as I finally came to see after two days of processing my stupid accident, we have become too complacent and need waking up to continue on our destined journey through life.

What was my complacency then that stirred up the energies of my shadow that it had to call upon the Old Trickster Archetype to set me free of my shadow personality?

It hurts me to say this, but perhaps I can soften the blow in my realization that it happens to everyone who becomes too complacent in their life (Lord Conrad Black comes to mind, whose public humiliation when charged with fraud and obstruction of justice and three year prison sentence deflated his massive ego that caused his metanoic change of heart that set him back on track to his higher purpose of wholeness and completeness), because the teleological imperative of our life is to grow in consciousness and realize our destined purpose. The omniscient guiding principle of life will always intercede to get us back on track, and I had become so complacent in my gnostic conceit which I concealed (my shadow side, if you will) in my spiritual musing “Being the Tao,” which I had just posted on my blog the day before, that I had to be taken down a peg or two. That’s why the Old Trickster was called upon to disrupt my life when I listened to my “idiot” self and switched lanes and caused my accident, letting me know that I was definitely not being the Tao (in sync with life) as I so conceitedly, albeit unconsciously, believed myself to be; hence, my humbling experience.

As I discovered while writing Stupidity Is Not a Gift of God, the word idiosyncratic comes from the Greek word “idiotes,” which means private person, or one’s own, which is essentially one’s shadow self, and idiosyncratic behavior speaks to the peculiar nature of one’s private, unconscious shadow personality; that’s why I blame my “idiot” self for my stupid accident (Penny recognizes my shadow in my “knee-jerk” reactions, which often get me into trouble), and it doesn’t matter that we all have an “idiot” self, one can rest assured that when one becomes too complacent the Old Trickster Archetype will pop out to disrupt one’s life and wake us up to our blind complacency, and hopefully do something about it.

My accident was a costly lesson, but I think I got the point; and I hope I don’t see the Old Trickster again for a long, long while…   

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