New Spiritual Musing: "The Sanctity of Individual Experience"

The Sanctity of Individual Experience

“Life is a journey of the self.”

—Padre Pio

One of the most difficult decisions of my life was dropping out of university in the second semester of my third year of philosophy studies, but I had to; I had been called to the gnostic path of my own individual way with Gurdjieff’s teaching, which the merciful law of divine synchronicity had provided for me with the serendipitous gift of P. D. Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous in my second year at university. I didn’t know this at the time, though; that’s what made my decision of dropping out of university so excruciating, because the humiliation of being perceived as a failure can be devastating.

I began to feel it around the middle of my second year of studies, a terrifying feeling of being cast adrift in a sea of endless philosophical speculation, brilliant but speculative all the same, and then I began to feel a growing sense of panic that I would be cast so far adrift that I would lose my way and drown before I found what I had gone to university to find, the way to my true self; and by the second semester of my third year I heard the call of the way so loud and clear in Gurdjieff’s teaching that I had to severe my relationship with academia because philosophy had done all it could for me, and that’s not where I was meant to be.

“What am I doing here?” I asked myself in the darkness of my bedroom of the house that I shared with three other men in the winter of my second year of studies, but I persisted in the hope that I would find the path to my true self in philosophy; and that’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing, the path that we are called to in our journey through life.

I didn’t want to write this spiritual musing, because it meant dredging up all those excruciating feelings of dropping out of university; but, as Albert Camus said in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” (though I did not agree with his conclusion that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”), “crushing truths perish from being acknowledged,” and only by coming to terms with my humiliation for dropping out of university will I resolve those still-anguishing feelings; but let me first explain how I came to be called to today’s spiritual musing…

I went on YouTube the other night and came upon a video that caught my attention, “The C.G. Jung Foundation presents: The life and work of Dr. Anthony Stevens - Dr. Anthony Stevens at 80, " which I watched with growing fascination when I learned that Dr. Stevens had serendipitously come upon his life’s path through his research on attachment behavior in infants for his doctoral thesis, which in turn brought him to the Jungian therapist who analyzed him when he was a student because he wanted to ask her if Jung’s theoretical approach of the archetypes would help him in his doctoral research on infant attachment behavior, and he was so taken by what she said that this led him to become a Jungian analyst himself and the author of many books on individuation, starting with Archetype: A Natural History of the Self.

Dr. Stevens set free the idea for today’s spiritual musing (though the title that came to me was “One of the Most Difficult Decision of My Life,” which I changed instantly when I heard the phrase “The Sanctity of Individual Experience” in a follow-up video because it honored the gnostic wisdom of personal experience);  and when I finished watching the tribute to Dr. Stevens, I went on Amazon.com and put Archetype: A Natural History of the Self on my wish list; but because serendipity had provided Dr. Stevens with the discovery of his life’s path in Jung’s psychology of individuation just as serendipity had provided me with mine in Gurdjieff’s teaching of self-transformation, I felt compelled to watch a video of a talk on synchronicity by Frank Joseph, which gave me exactly what I needed to help make the point of today’s spiritual musing: the disconcerting realization that the only truth we can really count on in life is the gnostic truth of our own experience.

That’s why I dropped out of university. I could no longer trust what the great thinkers of the world—Sartre, Nietzsche, Camus, Schopenhauer, Kant, Russel, Kierkegaard et al—had to say, because it finally dawned on me that that was their truth and not mine, and in the final analysis it was all very personal and speculative; and for me to find my true self I had to build my life upon the only truth that I could count on, and that was the truth of my own life; and I could only do that by going out into the world and living my life with the guidance of Gurdjieff’s teaching, because the call of his teaching was strong enough to severe me from the path of philosophy that I had grown to distrust. But why not pursue my degree in philosophy and still employ Gurdjieff’s teaching to help me find my true self? Wouldn’t that have been the prudent thing to do? Then my efforts would not have been for nothing.

That would seem reasonable, but I couldn’t do that. I went to university because that’s where my quest for my true self had taken me, and in my second year down the lonely  philosopher’s path the merciful law of divine synchronicity introduced me to the gnostic way of life through Gurdjieff’s teaching, because in its infinite wisdom the omniscient guiding principle of life knew that this was the path to my true self, and even though I did not know this consciously, I felt it so deeply in my soul that I had to leave; that’s why it was so painful to drop out of university in the second semester of my third year.

I knew that if I pursued my philosophy studies I would have gone down a path that was no longer right for me; and this brings me to Frank Joseph’s riveting talk on synchronicity, which was drawn from his book Synchronicity and You: Understanding the Role of Meaningful Coincidence in Your Life…

As original as Frank Joseph’s paradigm-shifting synchronicity experience was, it did not come as a surprise to me because I’ve long been aware of how the omniscient guiding principle of life works, and the wilful young atheist was summoned to his gnostic path of self-discovery by a mind-blowing meaningful coincidence late one afternoon while driving home from work in the spring of 1992 in Chicago where he lived and worked as a courier.

For no apparent reason, as he was driving home the name Salman Rushdie popped into his mind and would not go away. “Rushdie, Rushdie, Rushdie,” over and over again, and he couldn’t figure out why the author of The Satanic Verses, which had stirred the ire of the Muslim world enough to threaten his life and forced him to go into hiding, would pop into his mind and not go away until he willed it to go away; but just as he willed it out of his mind, a dark blue Buick drove up along the off-ramp on his right and pulled out in front of him, and that’s when he had the synchronicity experience that set him on the course to his new path, because, believe it or not, the licence plate of that Buick read: RUSHDIE.

The odds of those two events—the name suddenly popping into his mind for no apparent reason and then reading it on that licence plate—were astronomical, if the event was even mathematically possible, which after much research on the principle of synchronicity led him to believe that it was not a random event at all but providentially designed, and this compelled him to pursue his new path of self-discovery wherever it took him.

Without going into detail, which he does in his book Synchronicity and You, after he had that meaningful coincidence with the licence plate he kept a journal of his own and other people’s coincidences, and after six years of recording all those coincidences he was inspired to write a book on the subject, and as he wrote about these coincidences he began to see a pattern emerge out of every person’s coincidence experiences, which blew his mind again because the pattern of each person’s coincidences spelled out the script of their life story, as if one’s life was being choreographed by an invisible guide; and that’s when Frank Joseph shed his atheism and became a believer in a benevolent guiding principle, and I couldn`t help but smile to myself when I read this, because that was the same conclusion that I came to and wrote about in my twin soul book, The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity…

Robert H. Hopcke, the author of There Are No Accidents: Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives, wrote: “…our lives have a narrative structure, like that of novels, and at those moments we call synchronistic this structure is brought to our awareness in a way that has a significant impact on our lives.” And in The Power of Coincidence: How Life Shows Us What We Need to Know, David Richo wrote: “Synchronicity shows us that the world orchestrates some of our life events so they can harmonize with the requirements of our inner journey.” Which was the same conclusion that Frank Joseph came to while writing his book Synchronicity and You (to be followed with The Power of Coincidence: The Mysterious Role of Synchronicity in Shaping Our Live)s; but this begs the question: what does the narrative structure of our life lead to?

We all have our own individual story, and these authors came to the conclusion that the imperative of our story compels us—in the words Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with A Thousand Faces—to be true to ourselves and follow our own bliss; but all this means is that one must be true to the path they have been called to live, like Dr. Anthony Stevens and Frank Joseph were; but again, why?

This is the real mystery, and not until one gets to the end of their own story will one resolve it as Carl Jung did, which was confirmed by a dream he had several days before he died and which became the premise of my own story that I wrote about in The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity but need not expound upon here; suffice to say that the more honest and true one is to their own path, the more they will grow in gnostic wisdom and personal meaning. This is why I dropped out of university. Philosophy wasn’t giving me what I needed to satisfy the longing in my soul for wholeness and completeness, which is why I chose the title “The Sanctity of Individual Experience” for today’s spiritual musing. As Jung said in The Red Book: “The way is and always will be an individual path.”

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POSTSCRIPT

This is pure conjecture, but as I reworked this spiritual musing to make it as reader-friendly as possible (not easy to do, given the subject matter), it dawned on me why the name Salman Rushdie popped into Frank Joseph’s mind the day he had his life-changing experience. Everything happens for a reason, and synchronicities don’t just drop out of the sky for nothing; they happen to startle our mind and wake us up to the deeper mystery of our life’s purpose, and Frank Joseph’s life needed re-alignment. In effect, his outer life had to be brought into agreement with the destined purpose of his inner self.

Salman Rushdie was a confirmed atheist and gifted writer who had the courage to be true to his calling, and he was called to write The Satanic Verses that shocked the Muslim community out of its spiritual complacency; but that’s what writers do, shine the light of creative insight into social consciousness to break up inflexible patterns of thought to help expand old paradigms of meaning that have long served their purpose.

That’s why Rushdie’s name popped into Frank Joseph’s mind, his higher self gave him a symbolic, albeit ironic imperative in Salman Rushdie’s name to explore a different path to his true self, because his defiant path of atheism had blinded him to his destined purpose of wholeness and completeness as it had done to Salman Rushdie, and he was ready to move on to a new path which he discovered as he dug deeper and deeper into the mystery of synchronicity.

Every path in life serves its purpose, and when one’s path can do no more to satisfy the longing in one’s soul for wholeness and completeness the merciful law of divine synchronicity kicks in to reconnect one with their destined purpose, which is how I found my new path in Gurdjieff’s self-transformation teaching through the serendipitous gift of Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous when I realized that philosophy could do no more for me, just as Frank Joseph’s belief in atheism could do no more for him and divine synchronicity kicked in to save him from himself.

It’s sweetly ironic that the cynical atheist Salman Rushdie should pop into the defiant young atheist’s mind that day, but that’s the playful side of synchronicity, which Frank Joseph was blissfully unaware of. Nonetheless, his is an amazing story of self-discovery, just as are all life-changing stories of synchronicity, one of my favorite being how the pattern of meaningful coincidences wrote the script of Sir Winston Churchill’s life to become the Prime Minister of England who saved his country from the Nazi war machine; but that’s an idea for another spiritual musing, if I’m ever called to write it.