New Poem: "The Precious Gold of Life"

The Precious Gold of Life

Nellie looks like a big chicken, a small head,

beak-like nose, and feed-bucket-carrying drooping

shoulders merging into a pear-shaped angled bottom

supported by wobbly knees, and she pecks here and

there on this and that with no rooster to blame because

he died of cancer. Great grandmother of twelve with

two children dead, also of cancer, tired, fatigued like

worn steel, she wobbles from room to room talking

to her noisy infertile egg-laying love bird, springless

French poodle, and to me. “Are you deaf?” she asks,

in a voice that strains her innocence as I feign not

to hear, and I walk the extra mile with a nod, a chuckle,

and a smile. She put a dime she had earned at a family

wedding into her mouth to keep it from her mother,

which she accidentally swallowed, and out it came

with her next number two for her mother to retrieve

because it was the hard times of the great depression;

and when her life story ended, I begged her for her

precious gold, and she replied, with a mournful

sigh, “Don’t hurt people.”

New Poem: "The Professor's Dilemma"

The Professor’s Dilemma

What does it matter if we die alone in a back

alley or at home in bed, death is an equal

opportunity provider; but life goes on, and no

one knows any better. So you have a scandalous

memory, preternatural reading skills, and more

literary knowledge than you know what to do

with, and still you flounder in ignorance of self

and meaning. I knew Keats too, and his vision

of the world; but as close as he came to God,

he too died unresolved. A cold eye, judgment,

the dreaded axe falls and chops the poet’s head

off with the meanest truth: Sterling Professor

of the Humanities, seeker of Gnostic Wisdom,

what is it that you are looking for that the

gods of literature cannot satisfy?

New Spiritual Musing: "The Two Ends of the Stick: Shania Twain and P. D. Ouspensky"

The Two Ends of the Stick

Shania Twain and P. D. Ouspensky

I woke up at 2:30 yesterday morning with Gary Lachman’s book In Search of P. D. Ouspensky on my mind and with a strong compulsion to read it, so I got up and read the book until 4 A. M., and then I put on coffee and continued reading until Penny got up at 7 and joined me for coffee in my writing room, coughing and wheezing.

I had read In Search of P. D. Ouspensky once already, finding it an engaging rehash of material I was familiar with from my extensive library on Gurdjieff, but for some reason I took a greater interest this time in the author who introduced me to Gurdjieff’s teaching with his book In Search of the Miraculous, as though I had missed something about Ouspensky’s life the first time, little realizing that my Muse had called me to read In Search of P. D. Ouspensky for today’s spiritual musing which had not yet conceptualized as an idea in my mind and would not do so until later in the day after I had read the National Post (Wednesday, October 11. 2017) that I picked up at the Superstore in Midland when I drove in to get some Benylin extra strength cough syrup and lozenges for Penny who had come back from her niece’s wedding in Ottawa with a bad cold, and the article in the Post that set the idea free for today’s musing was on the singer Shania Twain, headlined in bold caps, IT’S HER TURN NOW, which brought forth the third connecting factor that set my idea for today’s musing free, something that the mystical Jeshua said in Glenda Green’s incredible book Love without End, Jesus Speaks: “There is no other time or place to find yourself. Now is your only context,” because these words spoke directly to Shania Twain’s and P. D. Ouspensky’s life-journey; but I would not be free to write my spiritual musing until I had finished reading In Search of P. D. Ouspensky, which I did throughout the day

But before I get pulled into today’s spiritual musing, I feel compelled to say something about how my musings come to be, which speaks to the mystical nature of the creative process (and, as coincidence would have it, to the very theme of today’s musing which centers upon our journey to wholeness and completeness, in this case the disillusioned teacher of Gurdjieff’s System, P. D. Ouspensky, and the iconic contemporary singer Shania Twain), because this is the first time that I’ve actually caught a glimpse of my creative unconscious at work as it coalesces the requisite factors into an idea for a spiritual musing, and, believe me, I know that the idea for today’s musing is going to demand the best of me because it impels me to give gnostic clarity to the meaning and purpose of our existence and which is definitely going to fall into the category of what I have come to call a dangerous spiritual musing.

Why dangerous, though? What is it about this spiritual musing that makes me fearful? Let me pause for thought, if I may…

Misoneism. That’s the word that popped into my mind. According to my sidebar Merriam-Webster dictionary, misoneism means: “a hatred, fear, or intolerance of innovation or change,” and I became acquainted with this word in C. G. Jung’s book Modern Man in Search of a Soul; that’s why today’s spiritual musing can be dangerous, because I have to step far outside the paradigm of conventional thought to give clarity to the meaning and purpose of our existence. This is why Padre Pio, the Roman Catholic Saint who makes his presence in my novel Healing with Padre Pio through a gifted psychic medium, said that my writing will provide “a new way of thinking, a new way of perceiving, a new way of understanding,” just as all creative thinkers do who blaze a new trail for man to follow, as C. G. Jung did with his break-away psychology of individuation that addresses man’s longing for wholeness and completeness and which is the subject of today’s spiritual musing.

This, then, is what I caught a glimpse of with the idea for today’s spiritual musing: the creative unconscious is not bound by time. I know this, because of how the three factors that my creative unconscious brought together throughout the day to coalesce into an idea for today’s spiritual musing: 1., waking up at 2:30 A. M. yesterday with a strong compulsion to read Gary Lachman’s book In Search of P. D. Ouspensky, the man who introduced me to Gurdjieff’s teaching that awakened me to the secret way of life; 2., reading the article on Shania Twain’s successful comeback in the National Post later in the day; and 3., a quotation from Glenda Green’s book Love without End, Jesus Speaks that popped into my mind later in the day that connected the other two dots to manifest into the idea for today’s spiritual musing on the gnostic way of life, which can be expressed in the realization that NOW is the only time and place to satisfy the longing in our soul for wholeness and completeness.

But what was the relationship between the philosopher/mathematician P. D. Ouspensky and Shania Twain’s comeback after a fifteen-year hiatus that my creative unconscious wanted me to explore in today’s spiritual musing? I knew that an idea for a new spiritual musing was forming in my mind, but I couldn’t connect the dots until I finished reading Gary Lachman’s book on P. D. Ouspensky, which I did after I read the article on Shania Twain’s comeback with her new album Now.

As I was reading the last chapter of Lachman’s book called “The End of the System,” in which Ouspensky, the man whose book In Search of the Miraculous is still considered to be the best book on Gurdjieff’s System, abandon’s Gurdjieff’s System after a lifetime of teaching it because it failed to satisfy the longing in his soul for wholeness and completeness, Shania Twain’s new album Now popped into my mind, which automatically called forth Christ’s words in Glenda Green’s book Love Without End, Jesus Speaks, “There is no other time or place to find yourself. Now is your only context,” thereby connecting the dots for today’s spiritual musing on the gnostic way of life, and by gnostic way of life I mean the natural way through life experience to one’s wholeness and completeness.

Ouspensky went to his grave a broken and disillusioned man. He spent his life teaching Gurdjieff’s System of “work on oneself” that failed to satisfy the longing in his soul for wholeness and completeness, but I knew from personal experience that Gurdjieff’s System worked because I had realized my true self with his teaching, which is why I wrote Gurdjieff Was Wrong, But His Teaching Works; and I knew, from my own apprehension of the secret way of life, that Shania Twain was living the gnostic way in her own journey of self-discovery which she courageously shared with the world in her music, as she did in her comeback album Now that speaks to her “heartbreak, loss, and survival,” the continued narrative of her journey of self-discovery.

Aside from her remarkable singing voice, what makes Shania Twain so popular is her uncompromising honesty about her life’s journey which touches the heart of everyone that hears her singing, her courage to not give in to the soul-crushing forces of life, as she poignantly illustrates with the first single of her new album Now: “I wasn’t just broken, I was shattered,” which leads to the triumphant chorus, “Life’s about joy, life’s about pain /It’s all about forgiveness and the will to walk away /I’m ready to be loved, and love the way I should /Life’s about, life’s about to get good.”

Since her last album, 2002’s Up, Shania Twain (whose parents died in a car crash when she was young, taking odd jobs to support her siblings and all the while writing songs to nurture her dream of becoming a singer), has been through a divorce (her husband cheated on her with her best friend), battled Lyme disease, and overcame dysphonia (which she says forced her how to sing again); and she chronicles this trying phase of her journey through life in her new album Now, and so personal and courageous is her unbreakable spirit that her songs speak to the mystical individuation process of the human condition. That’s why she’s so popular; her songs are about her life, her story true through and through, which is the secret of the gnostic way of life that satisfies the longing in one’s soul for wholeness and completeness.

Gary Lachman’s book In Search of P. D. Ouspensky brought me to tears, because if such a great thinker and dedicated truth seeker and foremost exponent of Gurdjieff’s System of self-transformation could become so disillusioned by life, what hope was there for the rest of the world? Which is why my Muse wanted me to connect P. D. Ouspensky’s disillusioned life with the young singer (she’s 52) Shania Twain whose spirit cannot be broken, because I was called to explore in today’s spiritual musing what Gurdjieff referred to as “the two ends of the stick.” Specifically, Shania Twain’s optimism and hope and P. D. Ouspensky’s disillusionment and despair.

As gloomy and pessimistic as Gurdjieff’s teaching can be (because it’s founded upon the false premise that we are not born with an immortal soul, but with “conscious effort” and “intentional suffering” we can create one), Shania Twain’s incorruptible  innocence offers hope for all the those caught in the wretched currents of life; and it doesn’t matter if one believes in the theory of eternal recurrence (as Ouspensky did), reincarnation (as I do), or in one lifetime only as the Christian world does, NOW is the only context to satisfy the longing in one’s soul for wholeness and completeness, as long as one is true to oneself and true to life; that’s the message of Shania Twain’s new album Now, the redemptive principle of life that P. D. Ouspensky failed to discern because he could not break the gnostic secret of life with Gurdjieff’s System.

“Life’s about joy, life’s about pain /It’s about forgiveness and the will to walk away,” sings Shania Twain from her sacred place in the gnostic way. “I’m ready to be loved, and love the way I should /Life’s about, life’s about to get good,” she adds, glorifying the gnostic process of self-individuation through daily life experience that Gurdjieff’s System failed to do; that’s why Gurdjieff broke the heart of so many seekers, as he did P. D. Ouspensky’s. But not mine. I broke the code of the gnostic way and love him dearly, as I love the indomitable spirit of the pop singer Shania Twain.

——

New Spiritual Musing: "My Land of Lost Content"

My Land of Lost Content

          Today’s spiritual musing was inspired by a question that talk show host Charlie Rose asked the eminent Professor Harold Bloom: “What poem do you think will be in your heart when you draw your last breath?” And Professor Bloom replied by quoting (he has a “scandalous memory”) a little poem by A. E. Housman, “Into my heart on air that kills” — 

Into my heart on air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

“It’s an amazing little poem, but it’s astonishingly profound,” said Professor Bloom. “It covers the universal longing that we all have for the unlived life that is one of the four or five reasons for great literature.” And he went on to reference great works of literature like Don Quixote by Cervantes to illustrate a literary exploration of the unlived life (however fanciful it may be); but Professor Bloom got me thinking about my own life, and I asked myself the dreaded question: “What is my land of lost content?”

And I reflected, and reflected, and reflected…

I have many regrets for things I should have done, and could have done, and which always always always give rise to my deepest lament, my wish to have had a mentor to guide me in my life, someone who would have taken me aside and put me wise to the ways of the world; but I had no such mentor, and for every foolish mistake I made I paid dearly. This was my inspiration for my book of spiritual musings Stupidity Is Not a Gift of God.

But it was my lot to blaze my own trail, no doubt because the trail I had to blaze no one had blazed before me; and what mentor could have put me wise to that?

In Plato’s Apology Socrates said, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and it could equally be said that the unlived life is a wasted life, and there was a time when I would have agreed with both of these points of view; but not today. Today I have a different perspective, and that’s what I’d like to explore in today’s spiritual musing…

After I got this musing started, to the point where I felt I could proceed without serious digging (because I had found my entry into the idea that inspired it), I drove into Midland to get my weekend Globe &Mail and National Post, and as serendipity would have it, I picked up the August 2017 issue of Harper’s Magazine which had an article by Helen Vendler (I’m currently reading her book on Emily Dickinson) that was titled, “American Expansion, The innovations of A. R. Ammons,” and she quoted  a poem by Ammons that spoke directly (will these coincidences never cease!) to today’s spiritual musing: —

Easter Morning

I have a life that did not become,

that turned aside and stopped,

astonished:

I hold it in me like a pregnancy or

on my lap as a child

not to grow or grow old but dwell on

it is to his grave I most

frequently return and return

to ask what is wrong, what was

wrong, to see it all by

the light of a different necessity

but the grave will not heal

and the child,

stirring, must share my grave

with me, an old man having

gotten by on what was left.

That’s what A. E. Housman’s little poem speaks to, “the land of lost content” that A R. Ammons calls a “pregnancy” and “lost child,” the unlived life; and even though I have many regrets for things I should and could have done, I did fulfill my soul’s longing for wholeness and completeness; but still, I have a melancholy feeling for my land of lost content, and even though I look back on my life now “by the light of a different necessity,” I cannot help but feel that I could have done more, so much more.

———

New Spiritual Musing" "The Essence of Cool"

The Essence of Cool

I really didn’t want to, but I jotted the idea down in my notebook just in case I ran into a dry period (which happens rarely) and needed an idea to explore just to keep the creative juices flowing, and I forgot about it until this morning when I noticed the highlighted passage in David Brooks’s opinion piece in the folded newspaper page that I had on my desk which I intended to explore but never got around to until it caught my eye this morning.

Brooks’s piece is titled “What Has Replaced Cool in America” (The New York Times International Weekly, Wednesday, July 30, 2017), and I highlighted in blue marker the passage that inspired the idea for a short spiritual musing on the essence of cool: “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.”

How cool is that? Given that description of what a cool person is, I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to be cool; but that’s why the idea for a spiritual musing on cool seized me, because not everyone can be cool. That’s what makes one cool, if one can appreciate the irony. But just in case, let me explore the irony of cool in today’s musing…

For some reason known only to the omniscient guiding principle of life (which I’ve come to recognize as my oracle, or guiding inner light), I was nudged to browse through one of the bookcases in my writing den yesterday morning, and as I sorted through the top shelf I came upon The Seasons of the Soul, a collection of poems by Hermann Hesse previously unpublished in English, translated and with a commentary by Ludwig Max Fischer, with a forward by “spiritual activist” Andrew Harvey, and even though I had read it already I felt  strongly nudged to read it again, which I did throughout the day in the pleasant comfort of our front deck; and this morning I was called to read My Belief, essays on life and art also by Hermann Hesse, which I had read two or three times already, and only upon reading the introduction again did I make the connection with Hesse and the idea for my spiritual musing on the essence of cool, and I had to smile at the remarkable “inspired” coincidence.

I had highlighted one more passage in David Brooks’s article, a single sentence that summed up what I felt to be the essential quality of a cool person, which popped into my mind while reading the introduction to My Belief, and I knew instantly why I was called to re-acquaint myself with the writer I had read many years ago while on my own spiritual quest like Hermann Hesse. The sentence that I highlighted said it all: “The cool person is guided by his or her own autonomous values, often on the outskirts of society.”

That was Hermann Hesse, a man guided by his own autonomous values and on the edge of society, a definition which, at the risk of sounding immodest, applied to me no less than Hermann Hesse, because my whole life I’ve always lived by my own guiding inner light which set me apart from everyone; so, there it was then, my reason for being called to write a short spiritual musing on cool—to demystify the je ne sais quoi of this elusive quality.

In truth, I already have a gnostic awareness of what constitutes the essence of cool; but it would be presumptuous to state this up front without providing the context that gave birth to my realization of this alluring character trait, because it’s in the context of my own quest for my true self that pulled Hermann Hesse into my life with his book Journey to the East first and then his novel Magister Ludi, also known as The Glass Bead Game.

I had already highlighted the passage, in yellow this time, but it jumped out at me again as I read the introduction to My Belief this morning: “Hesse maintains that the idea of the underlying unity of all being is a synthesis that can be achieved only through a reconciliation of conflicting opposites. This dialectical process shows up over and over again in Hesse’s novels.” This passage speaks to what C. G. Jung called the “individuation process,” the founding premise of his psychology (it can’t be a coincidence that Hermann Hesse underwent Jungian therapy during his most trying period); but not until one learns how to reconcile the conflicting opposites of their personality can one achieve what Jung called “wholeness and singleness of self.” That’s why Hesse became a cult figure for the mind-expanding, paradigm shifting counterculture movement of the mid-1960s, because his novels spoke to the longing in one’s soul for wholeness and completeness.

Hesse’s best-known works include Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game, each of which explores an individual’s search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946; and it was his search for a way to synthesize the conflicting opposite aspects of one’s ego/shadow personality that preoccupied both Jung and Hesse their whole life.

This is the context that awakened me to the secret way of life that both Jung and Hesse had become aware of, which Miguel Serrano alludes to in his short memoir C. G. Jung and Hermann Hesse, A Record of Two Friendships; and like Jung and Hesse, I came to the same realization that self-reconciliation is the only way to one’s true self, and I embarked upon this perilous journey to authenticity that essentially makes a person cool.

In short, the more true one is to oneself, the more cool one will be; but it wouldn’t be cool to reveal this, and that’s the irony of being cool.

———