One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 30: A Little Corner of Joyful Plenitude

CHAPTER 30

A Little Corner of Joyful Plenitude

Sunday, June 10, 2018. Sitting on our shaded front deck. Sunny, warm, with the faintest of breezes to freshen the air, birds chirping and splashing in our bird bath in the shade of the maple tree, Penny sipping on a glass of red wine and I gently nursing a glass of sherry, just talking and smiling and laughing, enjoying each other like a newly retired couple sans the fear of the dreaded phone call that always seemed to come at the most inopportune time from one of our tenants renting a unit in our triplex in my hometown of Nipigon in Northwestern Ontario where Penny and I lived before moving to Georgian Bay fifteen years ago, and Penny said, “I’m glad we didn’t go out today. This is much better.”

I had suggested we take a drive into Meaford, browse through Factory Outlet where we often find something to purchase, and then go out for dinner, but I was also glad we stayed home; and I said, “Isn’t it wonderful? No more dreaded phone calls.”

We had just closed the deal on the sale of our triplex on Tuesday, May 15, and Penny said: “It hasn’t sunk in yet. I still keep waiting for the dreaded phone call.”

I laughed. “It’s like a ghost that keeps hanging around. But it’s getting fainter and fainter by the day, like the life has been sucked out of it. Well, it can’t haunt us any longer. Doesn’t it feel wonderful to be free of all that hassle? Don’t get me wrong, sweetheart. If it wasn’t for our triplex, we wouldn’t have our beautiful home here in Georgian Bay; but good God, it feels good to not be burdened with that responsibility anymore.”

Penny smiled. Her face looked twenty years younger. “It’s moments like this that nourish our soul,” I said, full of love and admiration for the woman I had abandoned for my lover in our past lifetime together in Genoa, Italy; but we found each other in this lifetime, and I was almost but not quite free of my karmic obligation to her for breaking her heart the way I did, and it felt good. “You know, Penny Lynn,” I said, taking in the moment, “we’ve carved out a nice little corner of joyful plenitude here, and it’s all been worth it. I’m glad we didn’t go out today. I wouldn’t trade this moment for the world.”

I had gone into Midland earlier to pick up my Sunday Star, and I decided to drive to No Frills to pick up some pork and beef burgers to barbecue, which was the only grocery store that carried pork and beef burgers; but instead, I bought a package of Sirloin burgers that were on sale, and Penny went into the house to prepare a pasta salad to go with our burgers. “How about corn?” she asked. I had also picked up four cobs of corn.

“Not for me,” I said. “A burger and pasta salad will be plenty,” and I went back to my reading. Besides the Star, I had three books on the deck with me, reading a chapter from one and then another; my second reading of Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life; Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground, The Gambler, A Disgraceful Affair, The Eternal Husband, The Double, White Nights, A Gentle Creature, and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and I had started A Disgraceful Affair); and On Pluto, by the retired journalist Greg O’Brien, whose biographical account of his descent into Alzheimer’s was hard reading; but I had to read it for my novel-in-progress Sundays with Sharon that got interrupted when I got called to write One Rule to Live By: Be Good, and I was reading Dostoevsky to delve deeper in Jordan Peterson’s psyche, because the Russian novelist, whom Peterson couldn’t stop praising, had an inordinate influence upon his thinking, even more than Nietzsche whom he referred to so often in his talks and lectures that he inspired me to order some of Nietzsche’s other books from Amazon; but I couldn’t stop thinking about what I had said to Penny earlier, how we had carved out a nice little corner of joyful plenitude for ourselves in our new home in Georgian Bay after the past and current life history we had together. 

I’ve already written about our past life experience as man and wife in my novel Cathedral of My Past Lives, but I haven’t published it yet, and I honestly don’t know when I will get back to it because my muse keeps calling me to write other books, like this new book One Rule to Live By: Be Good that beckoned me like a siren; but as I got back into Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, I couldn’t help thinking of a spiritual musing I had written that was inspired by Shirley MacLaine’s movie The Last Word that Penny and I had seen last summer, and I made the connection with Jordan Peterson’s book because his 12 Rules for Life prepares one for the final journey of their life, the journey that Shirley MacLaine was on:

Still Ahead of Her Time

“So far I like this lifetime the best.”

—Shirley MacLaine

In Stupidity Is Not a Gift of God,, I wrote a spiritual musing called “A Cheap Shot at Shirley MacLaine,” because I wanted to come to the defense of her belief in reincarnation which was ridiculed by the brilliant writer Ken Wilber whose belief in the Buddhist perspective on reincarnation negated the “kooky” actress/writer’s perspective, which I happened to share (we both believe in the autonomous, individual self; Buddhism doesn’t); and upon reading a review of MacLaine’s recent movie The Last Word in last weekend’s National Post  (Saturday, March 11, 2017), which Penny and I went to see in Barrie this weekend, I was strongly nudged to write another spiritual musing on Shirley MacLaine because of my admiration for her unflagging courage, a feisty independent thinker not afraid to speak her mind just like the role of Harriet Lauler that she played in the comedy-drama The Last Word.

Harriet/MacLaine (the role was written for Shirley) is a feisty eight-one-year-old retired very successful advertising executive whose failed attempt at suicide led her to re-examine her life, which by happy coincidence was sparked by the obit pages of the newspaper that she was using to sop up the wine she had spilled onto her dining room table in her second attempt at suicide as she was about to wash down another handful of Clonazepam before she accidentally tipped over her glass of wine.

In her attempt at suicide, the ER doctor questions whether taking a handful of Clonazepam with a bottle of red wine was really an accident, and Harriet, true to her brazen, take-no-prisoners personality, snapped back, “Yes, I was sleepy and I was thirsty.” But as she read the obituaries in the newspaper she was using to sop up the wine she had spilled, she got a shocking glimpse into how she might be remembered when she died, which snapped her back into executive control mode; and taking charge of her life like she was accustomed to, she marched over to The Bristol Gazette office building and demanded the publisher to have their obit staff writer work out her obituary by interviewing the 100 people on the list she had drawn up because she wanted to see what they would have to say about her when she died.

Anne, the young obit writer (played by Amanda Seyfried), accepted her assignment with strong reservations (after meeting Harriet, Anne said, “She puts the bitch in obituary”); and she interviewed everyone on the list that she could get hold of and wrote up a draft of Harriet’s obituary, but it proved unsatisfactory to the feisty Harriet Lauler.

Harriet didn’t want to be remembered that way, so she embarked upon what proved to be the last adventure of her life—refashioning her image so she would be remembered for who she really was and not the person everyone took her to be, assigning Anne to rewrite her obituary in the process, and the result is an entertaining comedy-drama that called for several Kleenex tissues…

I’ve read most of Shirley MacLaine’s books and seen many of her movies, and true to my conviction that a writer does not choose the books they write nor does an actor choose the roles they play, rather they choose the writer and the actor, I can’t help but marvel at Shirley MacLaine’s inordinately successful career as an actor/writer, because I believe she chose her current lifetime to expand the paradigm of social consciousness with her “kooky” view of the world that she realized while looking for herself. 

“The truth is that no matter where I went, I was always looking for myself. The journey into myself as I evaluated my beliefs and values, whether living at home or in far-flung corners of the world, has been the most important journey of all. That journey is what led to my search to understand the true meaning of spirituality. I was learning that I was truly creating everything. I was learning to understand the character I had created as myself in the theater of life,” said Shirley MacLaine in her tell-it-as-I-have-lived-it memoir I’m Over All That and Other Confessions.

Driven by the imperative of her essential nature to realize what C. G. Jung called “wholeness and singleness of self,” at the age of eighty-two she may not have realized her goal to her satisfaction, but Shirley MacLaine is still true to her calling to find herself; which was why I had to see The Last Word, because the title of her latest movie (she was one of the executive producers) spoke to what I believe to be her most sagacious view on life and which Harriet/MacLaine passed on to the young staff writer who wrote up Harriet’s new obituary which we get to hear at her funeral because Harriet Lauler does die of congenital heart failure, thus bringing The Last Word to a sad but satisfying closure.

The essence of Harriet/MacLaine’s wisdom that she passed on to the young obit writer who kept a notebook of personal essays in her dream of becoming a real writer one day and who by the end of the movie is completely won over by the feisty octogenarian who challenged Anne’s life premise, was for her to be true to herself, something that sounds like an shopworn  cliché but which holds as much truth today as it did when Polonius uttered those famous words of advice to his son Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “This above all to thine own self be true, /And it must follow, as the night the day, /Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

That sums up Shirley MacLaine, a woman who risked her professional reputation for her belief in reincarnation and UFOs which labelled her “kooky” but which only confirmed that she was decades ahead of her time; and in her role as the uncompromising Harriet Lauler, I think Shirley MacLaine gets the last word, confirming my belief that the movie The Last Word chose her to play the role of Harriet Lauler and not her the role, and I honestly think I can hear Shirley MacLaine laughing.

———

There’s not much about Jordan Peterson that bothers me, I too think he’s “a deeply, deeply good man” with a mission to fulfill; but his casual dismissal of the New Age movement does rankle me a little. Not enough to taint my impression of the hierophant who was called by life to answer the angry question of my poem, but enough for me to comment.

Despite some of the obvious flaky elements of the New Age movement, which Oprah claimed Shirley MacLaine helped launch by being so open about her beliefs (but which she refused to take credit for), the New Age movement helped to open the way in the western world for our final journey through life that Jordan Peterson has intuited but never entertained in his talks and lectures because it would damage his credibility as a professor of psychology and clinical therapist, if he has even taken his thought-process that far, which I don’t think he dares to for propriety’s sake; he has been called, but he’s yet to make the choice.

I don’t doubt that the good professor has skirted around the edges of the New Age movement, because he’s such a deep and passionate thinker he would have had to look into it for professional reasons; but not until one is ready will one be called to step out of their recurring cycle of karma and reincarnation, as Shirley MacLaine was and revealed to the world in such books as Out on a Limb and The Camino, which is why I admire and respect her for being so public about her quest for her true self; and that’s what I find so ironic about professor Peterson, because I know he’s ready to step out of the mesoteric circle of life and into the final stage of evolution. He’s got one foot in and one foot out, and that’s what’s excited all the interest in his hierophantic message to our crazy world…

One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 29: Jordan Peterson Is No Ordinary Psychologist

CHAPTER 29

Jordan Peterson Is No Ordinary Psychologist

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

—William Shakespeare

I never quite appreciated what the venerable Capuchin monk, who suffered the holy wounds of Jesus for fifty years before dying and to whom thousands of healing miracles have been attributed, said to me during one of my spiritual healing sessions with the gifted psychic medium who channeled him for my novel Healing with Padre Pio, perhaps because I was much too humble, or naive, but when he told me that my writing will provide “a new way of thinking, a new way of perceiving, a new way of understanding,” I did not make the connection with something else that he said to me in another session: “You have transcended yourself and your community.” By community, he meant both the New Age spiritual community that I belonged to at the time but subsequently left shortly after I wrote my novel, and also the entire human community; but I’ve written more than half a dozen books since I wrote Healing with Padre Pio, and I understand what he means now.

If natural evolution can only take us so far in the consciousness of our individuating self, as ancient wisdom would have us believe and which I confirmed with my own journey of self-discovery, where does one turn when the natural process of self-individuation through karma and reincarnation can take them no further? This was the question that my poem “What the Hell Is Going on Out There?” shouted from the depths of my unconscious—

Hierophants of the world,

I’ve lost all faith in religion, science,

and politics, but not in the better nature

of my fellow man, so please tell me:

what the hell is going on out there?

This was my cri de coeur. But it was also a desperate plea from the collective psyche of the world, because religion, science, and politics have failed to provide a way out of the existential dilemma of the human condition that has become so confused from the blind and treacherous moral relativism that Nietzsche proliferated with his de-stabilizing Zarathustran God-is-dead philosophy, and no one knows what to do to save the world from imploding; but the Universe heard my plea, and along came Jordan B. Peterson, a U of T professor of psychology and clinical therapist who refused to disabuse his conscience and took a stand for free speech that was compromised by our government’s amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act, Bill C-16, and he was catapulted onto the world stage where he was given a global platform to answer my question “What the hell is going on out there?”

There have been plenty of articles written on Jordan Peterson since he stepped onto the world stage, some wickedly intent on destroying his career for the serious threat he poses to postmodern neo-Marxist nihilism and political correctness gone made, like Nellie Bowles’s hit piece in The New York Times (May 18, 2018: “Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy”); but the more he was heard by good and decent people genuinely concerned with the conditions of our crazy modern world, the more the imperative of his message appealed to them, especially to wayward young men, and many have come to his defense; like Heather R. Higgins, an American businesswoman, political commentator, and non-profit sector executive who wrote a very insightful editorial on Jordan B. Peterson for The Hill (May 30, 2018): “How philosopher Jordan Peterson will change the world.”

Heady stuff, to be sure; but Jordan Peterson has been put through the ringer many times and is wise enough to not let praise and adulation go to his head, and Heather Higgins hits the mark with her keen and honest perspective on the intrepid hierophant who was driven from the earliest age by a fiercely obsessive daemon to understand “the general social and political insanity and evil of the world.” Higgins writes:

“The first reason that Peterson had such impact is that this is no ordinary psychologist or professor, staying in his narrow lane. Peterson not only is extraordinarily intelligent, but also widely learned. Listening to him is like wrapping your mind with a Paul Johnson history (coincidentally, I just happen to be re-reading Paul Johnson’s book Intellectuals, a brilliant expose on the hypocrisy of intellectuals who left their mark on the world, like Karl Marx, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Sartre and others), an interdisciplinary, intercultural, time-traveling tapestry of transcendent themes and truths — where evolutionary biology, history, literature, philosophy, psychology, music, art, religions, culture and myth are all interwoven…for many individuals, he reconnects them with responsibility for their lives, giving them agency and purpose — and not just for themselves, but in the effect they will then have on the world around them. Peterson is very insistent that each individual decision moves the entire world closer to either heaven or a bottomless hell. Because those aren’t just theoretical places we may go to after we die, but apt descriptions of the worlds we create around us (bold italics mine) … But those who like orthodoxies that would limit the speech, ideas, and freedoms of others in order to enforce a social construction of their own should be afraid. Like the boy who had the courage to tell the emperor he had no clothes, or like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose lone voice of truth helped topple a totalitarian empire, when this too crumbles, Jordan Peterson will be seen as the courageous catalyst that exposed the lies and made us a wiser people…”

Bravo, Heather Higgins! But just what is this “impact” that Jordan Peterson is having with the imperative of his message? What’s Peterson doing that’s so effective?

Not an easy question to answer. Ironically, not even the good professor knows why he has attracted well over 100 million viewers to his YouTube lectures and Patreon platform and thousands of people to his book tour talks (which he expanded from 60 to 100 cities) and why his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos has sold over a million copies and counting, and which shot his Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief  to the Amazon bestseller list); but I believe I know the answer, and it has to do with what St. Padre Pio told me about my writing being “a new way of thinking, a new way of perceiving, a new way of understanding,” and it all boils down to what Emily Dickinson discerned to be our soul’s greatest need, it’s own identity, which  I explored in another one of my favorite spiritual musings:

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 that I was called to write on the natural process of soul-making through suffering, “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…

Once I am blessed with an idea for a spiritual musing (or a poem or story), I never know where I’m going to find my entry point. 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 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, as John Keats did when he caught a glimpse of it in a letter to his brother that he 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 Emily Dickinson’s cryptic poem—

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 into 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 Dialogue the 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 Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel of self-integration? Was there even room for virtue in her self-obsessed life?

Virginia Woolf failed to discover “it,” that “great & astonishing sense of something there” that Socrates couched in his philosophy and which Cezanne and Hemingway sensed in art 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 way of life and shared it in her “letter to the world,” which the world failed to discern. Even the eminent literary scholar professor Harold Bloom who taught literature for more than half a century at Yale University got headaches trying to decode the secret in 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 my puzzled readers; 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 individual life experience; and not until one learns the art of soul-making will one resolve the longing in their soul for wholeness and completeness.

Socrates couldn’t help himself and couched the secret in his philosophy, but which ultimately got him tried and condemned for sedition and heresy by the Athenian elite; 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 Hemingway and professor Bloom and every soul destined to satisfy their deepest longing in their soul to be all they are meant to be, which Emily Dickinson spelled out in her riddling poem—

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?

This 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 great creative thinkers of the world like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus, to name but a few; 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. No politics. Just being a good person resolves the paradox of our dual nature, because being a good person is the sum of all ways in life and makes our two selves into one. That’s why I felt such a satisfying feeling of goodness when I wrote “The Tremor of Eternity,” because when I brought my spiritual musing to resolution, I tasted the sweet fruit of my own tree, and it was good. A tad saccharine perhaps, but no less satisfying.

———

          This is professor Jordan Peterson’s appeal. His message has taken the best of religion, science, and politics and rendered the wisdom of the ages into the simple truth that there are no free rides in life. “Sort yourself out, bucko,” he admonishes the wayward young men who come to his book tour talks by the thousands, and then he lays his Rule 6 from his 12 Rules for Life on them: “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.”

Or, to quote from Ecclesiastes, the Preacher sums up the essential wisdom of Peterson’s core message: “…of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgement, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.”

In short, life is all about soul-making; and soul-making is a personal responsibility, which is all the good professor is really saying…. 

One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 28: Jordan Peterson and the Authentic Life

CHAPTER 28

Jordan Peterson and the Authentic Life

“One man who stopped lying could bring down a tyranny.”

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It’s much more difficult to live the authentic life than people think, as I painfully learned in my own journey of self-discovery, a terrifying truth that I spent the best part of my writing life trying to articulate; and here I am again faced with the same dilemma of man’s irreconcilable nature, because I will never bring One Rule to Live By: Be Good to resolution until I demystify the mystery of being true to oneself, because one can be true to oneself and not know that they are being true to their false self.

I never knew that I was being true to my false self until I heard a voice in my mind ask me the question that alerted to my false self, “Why do you lie?” And Jordan Peterson thought that he was being true to himself until he had the realization that his life was a lie, which began his own long and difficult journey to authenticity; but how much must one suffer the oppressive weight of their own falseness before they wake up to their false nature?

That’s the essential theme of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s monumental work The Gulag Archipelago in which he mindfully explores his own complicity in the Soviet system that led to the unbearable suffering and deaths of millions of innocent people, his willful capitulation to the great lie of the utopian dream of socialism, one innocuous little lie at a time until he got swallowed whole by the great lie of socialism and was himself imprisoned by the system that he himself helped make possible; and as he examined his own conscience and listened to the stories of hundreds of inmates in the Gulag, he finally saw through the great lie of the Soviet system and had to share his truth with the world, which he did with his books on the Soviet Gulag that garnered him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indefensible tradition of Russian literature.”

This is why professor Peterson found in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn a hero to model his own life; and it was the on-going soul-making suffering of the Russian people that Svetlana Alexievich recorded in her own writing that also garnered her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015 and which, to my surprise, inspired one of my favourite spiritual musings:

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 Khrushcheva, the granddaughter of the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’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 meaningful 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 evening, 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 William Wordsworth in his poem “Intimations of Immortality,” but these were thoughts born of the anguished joy of life and not the anguished pain of suffering like that of the oppressed Soviet people in Svetlana books, or of the oppressed black people in 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 spiritual 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 soul making; 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.

“That is how we are made,” she said. 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 marriage and life circumstances, 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 suffering of the Soviet people and which I saw more and more clearly in Troy Maxson and his wife Rose in the movie Fences?

Through suffering we grow in that “special kind of knowledge” that nourishes the longing in our soul to be all that we are meant to be; 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 alchemists 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 in he movie Fences 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, if I’m ever called to write it…

———

            Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s legacy to the Russian people and the world began when he examined his conscience and realized that his own lies contributed to the great lie of the Soviet system, and dismantling his life-lie was the inspiration for professor Jordan Peterson’s own journey to authenticity, which is why Rule 8: Always tell the truth—or, at least, don’t lie, is his favorite rule in his shadow-dismantling book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, because always telling the truth and not lying transforms one’s life-lie and goes a long way to making one whole; and by consequence, society as well.

This is why professor Peterson’s message to the younger generation can be so harsh, because dismantling one’s life-lie is the first step on one’s journey to authenticity; and unless one takes this first step, one will never know which self they are being true to…

One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 27: Jordan Peterson's Most Important Rule

CHAPTER 27

Jordan’s Peterson’s Most Important Rule

          If I heard it once, I heard it three or four times; when asked by interviewers on his international book tour which one of his 12 rules for life he thought was the most important, professor Peterson always replied, with a thoughtful look on his face that conveyed the gravity of his choice, that it would have to be Rule Eight: Tell the truth—or, at least, don’t lie. And I totally comply with his choice, because telling the truth keeps our false shadow self from growing into the monstrous beast that it can become, like it did in my high school hero and literary mentor Ernest “Papa” Hemingway. “He’s a pathological liar and the cruelest man I know, and I have known some very cruel men,” said his third wife, Martha Gellhorn.

This is why I sent the good professor my book The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway (“lion” symbolizes his ravenous shadow), and my sequel My Writing Lif, Reflections on my High School Hero and Literary Mentor, Ernest “Papa” Hemingway three years later, because I wanted to share with him my own insights into the shadow-possessed personality, which he was very familiar with given his clinical practice and in-depth research into the Soviet system and Nazi regime; and I also sent him The Pearl of Great Price and The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity, because they tell the story of how I integrated my shadow self with my ego personality and became one self whole and complete.

This, of course, is next-to-impossible to do when one’s ego personality is so thoroughly imbued with one’s false shadow self that one cannot tell the one from the other, which is why it is impossible to break free of the human predicament in one lifetime alone; but how can one break free of their false shadow self when the consciousness of their own nothingness denies the divine imperative of the transformative process of karma and reincarnation?

It’s only because I know this that I can tolerate the unconscious bad faith of some of Jordan Peterson’s most cynical critics, like Channel 4 News’s Cathy Newman. But as disappointing as Cathy Newman was, none of Peterson’s critics annoyed me more than the fiendishly devious Philip Dodd in the podcast Jordan Peterson & Philip Dodd on Free Thinking BBC May 2018. This man was so evil in his intent to paint Jordan Peterson a “Fascist mystic” that I had to hold myself back from screaming; that’s how much I detest the bad faith of the shadow-possessed personality. But was Philip Dodd aware of himself? Was he aware of his own false nature as the good professor and I and all good people were?

No, he wasn’t; he was being true to himself. But sadly, it was his false self that he was being true to. And it was this perception that inspired the following spiritual musing that will take me around the corner and begin the process of bringing this book home:

A Very Big Thought

“The good is the purest energy of God. Be good, do good,

and you will satisfy your longing for God.”

—Pythagoras

I have a very big thought that’s taken hold of me, and I fear being called to work it out in a spiritual musing. I don’t want to go there, because if I do I’ll be pulled into the deepest end of the pool; and that terrifies me no less than when I’m called to write a poem that sends chills up my spine, like my poem “Soul of a Liar” that captured the true spirit of the shadow personality—

Soul of a Liar

It’s not true, what they say about you,

it’s a lie like all the other lies that they say

about everyone they talk about, because

nothing they say can be trusted, —

Why is that?

They mean well, but they continue to lie

despite their good intentions, and they

never stop lying even when they

know that they are lying, —

Why is that?

They lie best when they tell the truth,

which is the mystery of the liar’s nature,

and not until they can no longer suffer

what they are will they stop lying, —

Why is that?

The central concept of this poem, which my muse worked out for me to apprehend the soul of a liar, was revealed in the paradoxical sentence: “They lie best when they tell the truth.” My insight pinned the devil down and forced it to yield its power, an insight that I could not quite articulate until I wrote this poem, thus confirming Zen poet Jane Hirshfield’s contention that poetry does our thinking for us.

I’ve always known that a shadow-possessed personality cannot be trusted, and by shadow-possessed I mean a person like my high school hero and literary mentor Ernest “Papa” Hemingway whose menacing shadow took over his ego and drove him into deep depression and suicide (his third wife Martha Gellhorn called him an apocryphiar and pathological liar, and all his friends knew he could not be trusted), which I explored in The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway and my sequel My Writing Life; but I could never quite give my gnostic awareness of the shadow-possessed personality the literary clarity it deserved (as far a poetry can be clear, that is) until I worked it out in “Soul of a Liar,” and this is what I’ve being called to do in this spiritual musing with my big thought on the gnostic way of life that has taken hold of me.

My big thought presupposes my life’s quest for my true self, and because my journey of self-discovery was born of my own life-experiences which I creatively worked out in more than twenty books into the quintessential gnostic truth of my life, I fear that by giving literary clarity to my big thought I may jolt the reader into a perspective they may not be ready to apprehend; but I am a servant of my muse.

It seems then that the quintessential gnostic truth of my life is what I’ve been called upon to explore in today’s spiritual musing, despite my trepidations; but where’s my point of entry? What gate will open to let me into the deep mystery of this simple gnostic truth?

No sooner did I ask this question and a quote from Albert Einstein popped into my mind, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler,” and I know beyond a shadow of doubt that this is my entry point into the quintessential gnostic truth of my life; because, after years of inspired reading, studying, and living and writing about the secret way of life, I’m left with the simple gnostic truth that the ultimate purpose and meaning of life is to simply be a good person, because being a good person embodies all ways in life, both secular and spiritual, into one’s destined purpose of wholeness and completeness.

There, I’ve said it; now all I have to do is unpack it. And that’s where trepidation sets in, because the simplicity of this gnostic truth can burn a hole in one’s mind like a laser beam of pure intention that cuts through all the precious vanities of one’s life and set soul free from the all the delusions of one’s ego/shadow personality, and this no one wants to do for fear of self-negation (“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” said Jesus); hence my apprehension. But why? Why must one fear being good a person? What is it about being good that terrifies people?

No sooner did I ask this and Saint Augustine popped into my mind with his famous supplication, “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.” But just to make sure that I remembered the quotation correctly, I Googled St. Augustine and learned that the original Latin translation of his famous saying was, “Make me good, god, but not yet.” Which is even better yet, because the original Latin translation gives synchronistic confirmation to the theme of today’s musing, which I can render into one simple question: why be good?

Why was St. Augustine torn between being good and not being good? What was this dilemma that tortured his soul? He did not want to sacrifice his concupiscence (he loved sex too much), but to be good he had to tame his beast of lustful desire; that’s why he was torn in two, and he suffered unbearable anguish and soul-wrenching torment: hence his famous Confessions.

St. Augustine’s Confessions is one of the most moving pieces of writing the world has ever seen, and to be honest I cannot bear reading this book. His abject sycophancy to God turns my stomach. Which is why I walked away from my Roman Catholic faith to become a seeker at such an early age; I could not prostrate myself in abject submission to the God of Christianity like St. Augustine, and I had to find my own way to my true self. And after years of living the secret teachings of the way that I first discovered in Gurdjieff’s teaching through Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous, my own eclectic individual way eventually wrought out the gnostic way of life by simply being a good person.

But this does not preclude any other way, either secular or spiritual, to one’s destined purpose of wholeness and completeness, because all ways lead to one’s true self eventually; and what my big thought is trying to tell me is this: all ways in life lead to the simple way of being a good person, because goodness engages the transformative process of reconciling one’s soul with one’s ego/shadow personality, which is the only way to wholeness and completeness.

I would never have arrived at this simple gnostic truth had I not had the experiences to support it, but it’s to the nature of these experiences that brings my gnostic truth into question, because my experiences were so far outside the scope of normal human experience that no one would believe me if I revealed them; but I have revealed them in my books Gurdjieff Was Wrong, But His Teaching Works and The Pearl of Great Price, and it behooves me to reveal them here to support the premise of today’s spiritual musing.

I had four inexplicable experiences in my life that connected the dots and solved the riddle of the meaning and purpose of our existence: 1: I had an experience in the early stages of my quest for my true self of going back through time where I experienced the inception of life on Planet Earth when Soul, the I Am consciousness of God, animated the amino acids, the first building blocks of life that were formed when gaseous vapors from the lifeless planet rose up into the air and mixed with gaseous vapors in the sky, thereby initiating the life process in the world. 2: Years later, I had a past life regression to the infinite Body of God where all souls come from. I was an atom of God with no reflective self-consciousness, an embryonic soul waiting to be born in the world. 3: In the same regression, I was sent into the world to process the vital life force, the un-self-realized I Am consciousness of God, into a new “I” of God through natural evolution, and I experienced the birth of my own reflective self-consciousness in my first primordial human lifetime as the alpha male of a small group of ten or twelve higher primates; and from lifetime to lifetime, I continued to evolve in my reflective self-consciousness until I was ready to take evolution into my own hands to complete what nature could not finish. And finally, 4: In my current lifetime, I found the secret way of life first in the teachings of Gurdjieff and then in the sayings and parables of Jesus, and I transformed the consciousness my ego/shadow personality and became my true self, thus completing what Nature could not finish.

These unbelievable experiences informed me that we are all atoms of God, sparks of divine consciousness as the poets say, souls encoded with God’s DNA; and we are all destined to realise a separate and distinct identity, a new “I” of God, which we do through natural evolution from one lifetime to the next until we are ready to take evolution into our own hands and complete what natural evolution through karma and reincarnation cannot finish. This is the meaning and purpose of our existence.

Every soul will eventually come to see that Nature cannot complete the process of self-realization, and one must take evolution into their own hands to fulfill their destined purpose of becoming what they are meant to be, which after years of living the secret way of life led me to see that being a good person will complete what Nature cannot finish, because goodness is the sum of all virtues which transforms our ego/shadow personality and makes our inner and outer self into one self, whole and complete; but to explain the individuation process goes beyond the scope of today’s spiritual musing, and if I’m called to expound upon the transformative power of goodness I will happily do so, but again with trepidation.

———

            Wouldn’t you know it, then! This is why I was called to write One Rule to Live By: Be Good. This book was born of my own creative imperative, and it doesn’t really matter that it was inspired by professor Jordan Peterson’s call to destiny with his defense of free speech that impelled him to share his own way in 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos; when one is called by life, one is called by whatever means necessary to fulfill their destined purpose. So, I’m grateful for the good professor’s inspiration; but I would have written a book like this regardless, because my oracle always has its way with me…