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.

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