New Spiritual Musing: "Reflections on Tuesdays with Morrie"

Reflections on Tuesdays with Morrie

“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn

Is just to love and be loved in return.”

“Nature Boy”

Nat King Cole

I read my 10^th Anniversary Edition of Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom about nine years ago, around the same time that I had open-heart surgery, no doubt because I was having serious thoughts about my own mortality and Tuesday’s with Morrie was a compact little paperback about a sociology professor named Morrie Schwartz dying of ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, who shares his journey to the final frontier of life with a former student named Mitch Albom, and for some strange reason known only to my muse I felt compelled to read it again; so I hunted it down in my library and read it in four or five days over my morning coffee that I spiced with a jot of honey and Napoleon Brandy.

After I read it, I loaned it to a friend who read it twice during the week between my Sunday morning visits, and both times she was brought to tears by Morrie’s dying experience; and when she returned my copy after we discussed it, I read it again so it would be fresh on my mind for today’s spiritual musing on Tuesdays with Morrie…

Not everyone is born with a calling. Morrie Schwartz was. He was born to be a teacher, and he taught sociology courses at Brandeis University in the city of Waltham, Massachusetts; but how could he possibly know that the final course of his life would be teaching a class on death and dying with only one student, Mitch Albom? Life’s funny that way, but very few people think about these mysteries. I do, because that’s my literary calling.

That’s the irony of my call back to Tuesdays with Morrie. I was called to audit the class again with Morrie and Mitch on soul’s archetypal journey through life; that’s why I felt compelled to re-read it, so I could explore everyman’s journey to the sad, lonely end which I had already explored in my twin soul book Death, the Final Frontier but only this time I was called to open the door to the other side where life continues with meaning and purpose.

Morrie Schwartz began his journey to the final frontier of his life a confirmed agnostic, believing that death was cold and final, with no afterlife, God, or grand design; life was random and had no meaning and purpose other than the meaning and purpose that we gave it, a lugubrious and despairing existential philosophy with no happy ending.

“The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves,” Morrie told Mitch, when taking attendance in preparation for their First Tuesday Talk About the World. “And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.” That’s why Professor Schwartz chose to make his own culture long before he fell victim to Lou Gehrig’s disease, a personal culture that nourished his life with meaning and purpose.

“So many people walk around with a meaningless life,” Morrie taught Mitch in his attendance class that day before their First Tuesday Talk About the World. “They seem half asleep, even when they’re doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way to get meaning in your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you meaning and purpose.”     

That’s why Morrie Schwartz loved life so much, especially dancing; he squeezed every moment of its precious goodness, which were exponentially intensified the closer he came to dying; but Morrie’s precious life moments were poignantly concentrated by his soul-constraining personal paradigm that that was all he had, no more life after death, no rebirth, just a cold grave waiting to embrace his mortal remains.

And then something magical happened, which is why I was called by my muse to write today’s spiritual musing; Morrie’s suffering transformed him and opened him up to see what his old agnostic self could not see before, that “this is too harmonious, grand, and overwhelming a universe to believe that it’s all an accident…”     

         

And now about Mitch Albom, Morrie’s former student; what was his story? Why did he reconnect with his old professor, whom he affectionately called “Coach” when taking his sociology courses at Brandeis? That’s the key to this story, if one can see it.

Young Mitch Albom graduated from Brandeis University full of dreams and ideals, hoping to make it in the music industry. “My dream was to be a famous musician” he said (he played the piano); “but after several years of dark, empty nightclubs, broken promises, bands that kept breaking up and producers who seemed excited about everyone but me, the dream soured,” and Mitch went back to school and earned a master’s degree in journalism and took the first job offered, as a sports writer; and after bouncing around from New York to Florida, he landed a job in Detroit city for the Detroit Free Press, and thus began his ascent up the social ladder of personal and material success—new house on a hill, cars, and stocks to build up a nice little portfolio—“and it might have stayed that way, had I not been flicking through the TV channels late one night, when something caught my ear…”

          Mitch was on the fast track of the existential journey of life, making it in his chosen profession; but something was missing which his flourishing career could not give him, and he floundered in the silent despair of his hollow feeling. Then life intervened, as it always does when a soul gets stuck on its destined journey to wholeness and completeness. “On such small things your life can turn,” Mitch would later describe it to a reader’s question.

This is how it happened: the merciful and omniscient guiding principle of life, which knows our destined purpose and is always there to assist us when we get stuck, inspired Morrie Schwartz to ask the crucial question when he learned that he had ALS: “Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left?” And Morrie, being the consummate teacher that he was, decided to make death his final project, the center point of his days, and he began to record his thoughts and feelings on the final journey of his life.

This is how Morrie’s inner self and guiding principle planted the seed for what was to be his legacy to the world, the unexpected little book Tuesday’s with Morrie that passed on the wisdom he would accrue in his hastened journey: “Since everyone is going to die, he could be of great value,” he reasoned to his class-to-be. “He could be research. A human textbook. Study me in my slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me,” was Morrie’s working premise, which gestated into the idea that set Tuesdays with Morrie free in the mind of his former student; but Mitch Albom had to be called to his destiny first, and that’s when divine synchronicity stepped into his life to liberate the successful sports writer/broadcaster from the despairing impasse of his personal malaise by inspiring one of Morrie’s friends and fellow colleague from Brandeis University to send all the personal aphorisms that Morrie had recorded, which had grown to forty by this time, to a Boston Globe reporter who wrote a long feature story on Morrie Schwartz with the headline: A PROFESSOR’S FINAL COURSE: HIS OWN DEATH. This story caught the eye of one of the “Nightline” producers, who brought it to the host of the show Ted Koppel in Washington, D. C. Koppel followed up with an interview with Morrie Schwartz, and as Mitch Albom was casually flipping channels one night he heard a voice from his TV ask the fateful question, “Who is Morrie Schwartz?” and Mitch went numb…

This has to be one of the most remarkable synchronicity stories ever recorded, but that’s just how life works for those who have eyes to see. There was Mitch Albom’s old professor seven hundred miles away whom he hardly thought about since he graduated from Brandeis University and hadn’t seen in sixteen years being interviewed by Ted Koppel on the late-night show “Nightline,” what were the odds of Mitch catching his old professor’s name on TV?

Truth be told, there were no odds because it was meant to be; Mitch Albom got stuck on his own destined journey to wholeness and completeness, and life intervened to get him unstuck; and the rest of the story is history.

Mitch looked up his old professor who was wasting away with ALS, and after a warm reconciliation they began to talk every Tuesday, recording Morrie’s journey to his final destination; but what a journey, what life lessons, what a wonderful little book that was born of their mentor-student relationship that continues to teach the final course of Professor Morrie Schwartz’s class—how to live life with meaning and purpose. 

——

New Spiritual Musing" "Why People Don't Believe in God, the Immortal Soul, or Afterlife"

Why People Don’t Believe in God,

the Immortal Soul, or Afterlife

“Tell it unveiled, the naked truth!

The declaration’s better than the secret.”

—Rumi

For years I puzzled over why some people believe in God, the immortal soul, and the afterlife and some people don’t, but in my long journey of self-discovery I finally found an answer to this bedeviling riddle; if not for the world (which would be a presumption), at least for myself. But having said this, I can’t help but be reminded of something that the philosopher Schopenhauer once said” “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”

It’s not without irony then that I expect what I’m about to say in today’s spiritual musing to be ridiculed first, then violently opposed, and finally (long after I have shuffled off this mortal coil, to be sure) be accepted as self-evident; but then, what’s a writer for if not to explore the imponderable mysteries of the human condition…

          From the earliest age, I never doubted in the existence of God, my immortal soul, and the afterlife; on the contrary, it was because of my inborn belief that I suffered the existential dread, anguish, and despair that I did growing up Catholic. I felt trapped and had no idea why. All I knew was that I was born with a purpose, but I had no idea what that purpose was.

And then in high school I read Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge and was inflicted with what Professor Harold Bloom called an “immortal wound,” a wound of wonder, and I became an inveterate truth seeker like Maugham’s hero Larry Darrell.

But that was long ago, and I’ve covered a lot of ground since I began my quest for what I came to realize was my lost soul, which, ironically, I had presciently foreseen in my poem “Noman” that I wrote that same year for my grade twelve English teacher (who found it perplexing, to say the least) but which I finally resolved many years later in my parallel life memoir The Summoning of Noman; but in my awareness that I was a lost soul whose purpose in this life was to find my true self, I solved the riddle of the human condition which I worked out in My Writing Life, a sequel to my memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway.

And herein lies the mystery of why some people believe in God, the immortal soul, and afterlife and others don’t; it all has to do with where one’s “I” is centered. And by “I” I mean the reflective consciousness of one’s individuating soul self, which is the central problem of the human condition that the great writer Leo Tolstoy explored in The Death of Ivan Ilych, a problem that stems from the paradoxical consciousness of our soul self—our existential self and essential self, as the German mystic and teacher of the sacred gnostic way of life Karlfield Graf Durckeim came to describe the double consciousness of our soul self.

“We are citizens of two worlds, an “existential” one which is a conditioned reality, limited by time and space, and an “essential” one unconditioned and beyond time and space, accessible only to our inner consciousness and inaccessible to our powers,” said K. G. Durckeim in Alphonse Goettmann’s book The Path of Initiation. And he goes on to say: “Only this union of the existential self with the essential self, dealing with the whole of man, carries him to his full maturity and bears fruits, the first and most important of which is to be able to say “I am” in the full meaning of the word. From this becoming of the “I” in the full blossoming depends the relationship between man and the world, man and himself, man and Transcendence. At the beginning and at the end, at the origin and in the development of all life is found this transcendent “I am.” At the heart of all that is, man secretly senses this great “I Am” from which comes and to which returns all life. Each being is called to realize in his own way to this divine “I am” which seeks to express itself in modalities as varied and diverse as are all creatures of the universe” (The Path of Initiation, An Introduction to the Life and Thought of Karlfield Graft Durckeim, by Alphonse Goettmann, pp. 33, 36, 37).

And now comes the tricky truth; which is to say, the gnostic truth of our soul self as I have come to experience it that will be subject to ridicule and resistance before it will ever be accepted as an incontrovertible fact of the human condition: As K. G. Durckeim realized (as have many mystics, poets, and God knows who else), it would appear that we have two selves; one self, or “I” that is born of our life in the world, which makes it our ephemeral existential self, and an a priori essential and immortal self that we are born with. But what Durckeim did not express in his prescient apperception of the double self of man, was the dual consciousness of our ego/shadow existential self that I spent most of my life studying and resolving as I lived my own gnostic path of self-initiation and chronicled in The Pearl of Great Price, the story of the self-realization of my own individuated “I am” consciousness.

Without going into detail, which I’ve done already in my twin soul books Death, the Final Frontier and The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity, suffice to say in today’s spiritual musing that we all come into the world as sparks of divine consciousness, embryonic souls pre-destined to grow and evolve through life into fully self-realized souls, which K. G. Durckeim defined as the blessed fruit of the “I am” consciousness of God; but to bear the fruit of our own individuation process, we have to make one “I” out of our existential ego/shadow self and our essential soul self, one “I” whole and complete unto itself just as C. G. Jung realized in his own gnostic path which was confirmed by his unconscious in a dream he had several days before his death at the ripe old age of 85. In his dream he saw, high up on a high place, a boulder lit by the full sun, and carved into the illuminated boulder were the words: “Take this as a sign of the wholeness you have achieved and the singleness you have become.” This was the blessed fruit of his life, his precious pearl of great price.

As incredible as it may seem (this would be the resistance stage of my gnostic truth), I also experienced wholeness and singleness of self, which I creatively spelled out in my memoirs Gurdjieff Was Wrong But His Teaching Works and the sequel The Gnostic Way of Life; that’s how I came to solve the riddle of our paradoxical nature that bedevils everyone, especially philosophers and scientists, and it all has to do with what Jesus revealed in his cryptic teaching about making our two selves into one.

In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, the master was asked by someone when the kingdom would come, and Jesus replied: “When the two will be one, and the outer like the inner, and the male with the female neither male nor female.” And Thomas goes on to say, “Now the two are one when we speak truth to each other and there is one soul in two bodies with no hypocrisy” (The Unknown Sayings of Jesus, by Marvin Meyer, p. 95); which simply means, at the risk of inviting ridicule and violent resistance, that we have to reconcile the false ephemeral consciousness of our ego/shadow personality with our inner soul self, which we can only do by living by values that are inherently self-transcending, as all the great spiritual teachers of the world like Jesus, Socrates, and Rumi have revealed.

“These leaves, our bodily personalities, seem identical, /but the globe of soul fruit /we make, /each is elaborately /unique,” said Rumi, which speaks to what C. G. Jung came to call the individuation process of the archetypal self of man; and herein lies the quandary that bedevils the world about God, the immortal soul, and the afterlife…

This is going to be a hard truth to swallow, but there is no other way of saying it: our essential self is our inner, true soul self, and our existential self is our outer, false self; and  those of us who have an innate belief in God, the immortal soul, and afterlife have been born centered in our essential self, or shift our “I” to our essential self in the course of living our life; and those of us who have doubts about God, the immortal soul, and afterlife have been born centered in our ephemeral self, or shift our “I” to our ephemeral self in the course of living our life, and by ephemeral self I mean the unresolved ego/shadow consciousness of our individuating essential soul self. In effect, we only have one I, but it is bifurcated; and our destined purpose is to reconcile our false ego/shadow self with our inner, true self.

This of course presupposes a belief in reincarnation (again, subject to incredulity if not violent resistance by some quarters like Christianity), because our ephemeral self is the unresolved consciousness of all the ego/shadow personalities that we have created over the course of our reincarnational history which we bring with us in our unconscious mind with every new life that we are born into; and it’s to the nature of our ephemeral self that determines why people have doubts about God, the immortal soul, and afterlife.

But why? What is it about the consciousness of our ephemeral self that grows and evolves with the existential self of the ego/shadow personality of each new incarnation that leads one to not believe in God, the immortal soul, and afterlife? Why why why?

That was the quandary of my lost soul self that I expounded upon in The Summoning of Noman, but the short answer for today’s musing can be distilled from my experience of finding my lost soul, which should be convincing in itself but won’t be because, as Gurdjieff liked to say, “There is only self-initiation into the mysteries of life.” Nonetheless, the answer is simple enough, if totally incomprehensible to the cognitive mind; but how can one possibly believe in God, the immortal soul, and the afterlife if their ephemeral self is the I-consciousness of one’s non-being, the paradoxical self of one’s essential self?

The ephemeral self that everyone experiences in moments of despair as the unbearable sense of their own nothingness is ipso facto incapable of believing in God, the immortal soul, and afterlife because it is the false self of one’s own nothingness, and one cannot possibly believe in God, the immortal soul, and afterlife if they are centered in the consciousness of their non-being; the ontology one one’s own nothingness precludes it.

Our ephemeral self is the self of who we are not, the self of who we are yet-to-be, the unresolved non-being of our being, the consciousness of our existential self that is only conscious of its own mortality and the meaninglessness and absurdity of life that Shakespeare described as “a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” This is the same self that the existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre gave voice to when he said, “I am what I am not, and I am not what I am.” This is why he called man “a useless passion,” because he could not resolve the enantiodromiac dynamic of soul’s individuation.

 In effect, this is what a lost soul is, a soul born centered in its ephemeral self; and if not born this way, it becomes this way according to the values it has been brought up with or chosen to live by, values that compromise one’s destined journey to wholeness and completeness, values that serve the ego/shadow personality and not one’s inner, true self.

And, at the risk of offending the non-believer again, not until one has grown enough through the natural individuation process of karma and reincarnation and is ready to take evolution into their own hands to complete what nature cannot finish will one be free to reconcile their ephemeral self with their essential self and become one self whole and complete; only then will this truth become self-evident. That’s the mystery of the human condition that the poet Emily Dickinson spoke to when she wrote: “Adventure most unto itself /The Soul condemned to be; /Attended by a Single Hound— /Its own Identity.” 

——

New Spiritual Musing: "On the Cusp of a New Spiritual Awakening"

On the Cusp of a New Spiritual Awakening

“For the times they are a-changin’…”

—Bob Dylan

This is a spiritual musing that I look forward to writing. The idea came to me this morning as I was reading my own newly minted memoir My Writing Life, the sequel to The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway, while drinking my first cup of coffee.

Just as I finished reading Chapter 29, “Hemingway’s Brain,” which I concluded with stinging irony that suicide might be genetically encoded (this was a satirical put-down of psychiatrist Dr. Andrew Farah’s theory that Hemingway’s suicide was induced by chronic traumatic encephalopathy from the nine blows to Hemingway’s head over his life-packed life), because Dr. Farah’s theory rested upon the unproven scientific premise that our personality is a by-product of our brain and can be affected by repeated blows to the head, which certainly can happen as extensive studies of football player head injuries have proven, but our personality is an aspect of the individuating consciousness of our essential self, which is not an epiphenomenon of the brain; it is our true and immortal self, independent of our biology, and although our personality may certainly be affected by our brain chemistry, our essential self imbues our brain with our evolving identity but is independent of our brain, and no sooner did I read the last line of Chapter 29, “Hemingway’s Brain,” and the title of today’s spiritual musing popped into my mind— “On the Cusp of a New Spiritual Awakening.”

As I said, I look forward to writing today’s spiritual musing; but before I do, I have to watch a YouTube video again where the exceptionally gifted Australian psychic Alison Allan channels the higher self of living people—Oprah, Shirley MacLaine, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Jim Carrey, George Clooney, Bill Murray and others, which proved to be not only shockingly mischievous and pruriently fascinating to watch, but absolutely visionary in its serendipitous discovery because it opened the psychic door to the higher self of every living person, which was totally new to the mysterious phenomenon of spirit channeling.

Here’s how it happened. Alison had written down a list of names of departed souls for her to channel on the Afterlife Interview segment of the Alison and Keri’s Shiny Show (as advertised on YouTube: “Kari Mena, Energy Healer and Alison Allan, Medium, are two like-minded people who want to share the experience of the spirit world”), and by mistake Alison wrote down Shirley MacLaine’s name, but as she went over her list she realized that she wasn’t dead yet; and when she discussed this with her co-host Keri, they were given the inspiration to try channeling the higher self of famous living people, and that’s how they “chanced” upon what will undoubtedly be a new frontier of the spiritual awakening that’s taking place in the world today, and which they even became aware of as Alison channeled the higher self of those famous people still living, because they both recognized that what they were doing was not unlike what the old pioneers did as they explored their new country (in Keri’s case, America, and in Alison’s case, Australia)—only they were exploring the undiscovered far country of the soul!

Of course, the materialistic scientific community pooh-poos this field of inquiry, but the social paradigm of personal meaning is shifting so quickly today—what with all the mind-expanding shows in the movie industry, television, Netflix and other social media networks with themes dealing with reincarnation (Cloud Atlas, starring Tom Hanks), recurring parallel lives (Before I Fall, modelled on Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray), and numerous SF movies that extend human life beyond our five senses—that the recalcitrant spirit-denying scientific community is beginning to cave, which books like Proof of Heaven  by Dr. Eben Alexander, M. D. and Many Lives, Many Masters by Dr. Brian L. Weiss, M.D., written by established medical doctors who once held onto the theory that we do not have an autonomous self that exists independent of our physical body are proving, with more personal stories of OBEs (out of body experiences), NDEs (near-death experiences), and after-death memoirs like My Life After Death: A Memoir From Heaven, by Eric Mendhus, coming out every day; and, at the risk of sounding immodest, I can even cite my own parallel life story in my memoir The Summoning of Noman and my autobiographical novel Healing with Padre Pio, which was inspired by the spiritual healing experience I had with the gifted spiritual intuitive who channeled the departed spirit of St. Padre Pio. The times are changing so rapidly that I can almost hear Bob Dylan’s squeaky voice singing in my ear: —

Come gather ‘round people

Wherever you roam

And admit that the waters

Around you have grown

And accept it that soon

You’ll be drenched to the bone

If your time to you

Is worth savin’

Then you better start swimmin’

Or you’ll sink like a stone

For the times they are a-changin’…

          But old dogs die hard, and it will take time for the higher frequency energy of this new spiritual awakening to break up the stifling consciousness of fossilized belief systems that keep souls trapped in the seductive matrix of the mind, and there’s really nothing anyone can do about this because life is an individual journey of self-discovery and not everyone can make the shift in their personal paradigm to this new awakening; but it’s happening all the same, as adventurous souls like Alison Allan and Keri Mena are proving.

The Internet is here to stay, and however it evolves in this rapidly changing world it will continue to expand the horizons of man like nothing before. When Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the mid 15^th Century, it ushered in the modern period of human history, playing a key role in the development of the Renaissance, Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific revolution; and it laid the material basis for the modern knowledge-based economy and spread learning to the masses. But the Internet, a highly evolved technological version of the Gutenberg press, opens us up to a whole universe of learning, giving us instant information as it springs forth from the deep founts of human consciousness, like the serendipitous discovery that Alison and Keri made less than two years ago in 2016 by daring to channel the higher spiritual self of famous people still living; and as surprised as I was in their discovery, so were the spirits that they channeled…

For the record, the Alison and Keri YouTube video that inspired the idea for today’s spiritual musing is titled: Shiny Show E6: Contacting Higher Selves of Famous People; and just to show how surprised these people were when the gifted Alison intruded into their spiritual space by calling upon their higher self, let me quote their exact words:

The comedian and actor Jim Carrey’s higher self was called first, and Jim Carrey, one of the fractals (personalities) of his higher self’s multiple fractals, responded to what Alison and Keri were doing: “How naughty this is,” he said, somewhat amused; and Alison got the distinct impression that Jim compared it to making love with the neighbor’s wife…

When Alison called Oprah Winfrey’s higher self, Keri being the annoying spiritual brat that she is, asked Oprah if she would plug her Shiny Show, and Oprah replied: “Baby steps, baby steps.” And just as she was leaving, because she didn’t want to reveal any more than she had to and only appeared out of courtesy, she said to the girls that she was going to be one hell of an interview when she crossed over, if the Shiny Show was still around…

And then Alison called Shirley MacLaine’s higher self (whose books I had read and loved, my favourite being Sage-ing While Age-ing with The Camino a close second), and Shirley MacLaine, being her characteristic feisty self, said: “What the hell do you think you’re doing? This is ridiculous. Good fun, but ridiculous. You’re busting the chops of all the rules by doing this; and it’s fun, but—it’s funny, but it’s naughty.” And when Keri asked her how she felt about how the world had finally embraced her spiritual views (on reincarnation and UFOs), Shirley MacLaine replied: “It’s about bloody time…”

And then Keri asked Alison to call the heartthrob actor George Clooney’s higher self, and he simply said, “Seriously girls? Come on? Moving on, girls,” and he left…

Steven King’s higher self was called next, and the famous author crossed his arms and furrowed his brow and gave the girls a studied look, and said: “There’s a book in this…”

And then the celebrated scientist Stephen Hawking’s higher self was called, who didn’t mind appearing, and Alison asked him a question that had been on her mind ever since she read his book A Brief History of Time. Stephen Hawkins was born 300 years to the day that the famous Galileo Galilei died, and Alison felt that Stephen was the reincarnation of Galileo, which he confirmed; then Keri asked him about his theory that there was no God, and he replied, “It’s just a game…just because you say there is no God does not change the fact that there is a God,” and he told the girls that he would be back in the not too distant future…

After Stephen Hawking, the actor William Shatner’s higher self was called, and the first thing Captain Kirk said to the girls was, “To boldly go where no-one has gone before, ladies,” a reference to that famous line from his Star Trek show. And then he added, “Wait till you get over here. This is the real Star Trek…”

And then Keri asked Alison to call up the actor of the SF Matrix series, Samuel L. Jackson’s higher self, and he said to them: “Whatcha you girls doing now? What the hell you doing? Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should.” And Keri asked if they were breaking some spiritual law with their playful foray into the far country of the soul, and Jackson replied: “You’re breaking some big spiritual butt. You’re opening doors that are never going to close, girls. Once the word is out there, every f—r is going to be doing it…”

And then, to my absolute delight, Alison called up the three candidates that were running for the American presidency, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Bernie Sanders, and they all confirmed what Stephen Hawking said, that it was all just a game; but Donald Trump said something that puzzled the girls but spoke to me: “All is not what it seems, ladies. Don’t be fooled by what’s in the brochures…”

Donald Trump won the presidency and has been stirring the pot ever since, shaking up the American political system like no other president before him which, for my money, is the best thing that could have happened to the befouled American democracy; but that could be a whole musing in itself, if I’m ever called to write it. Suffice to say, there’s an electrifying spiritual awakening taking place today, and I’m happy to be part of it… 

——

New Spiritual Musing: "Quandaries of My Life"

Quandaries of My Life

Yet another quandary. But I don’t know where to begin to explain it, so outlandish is my predicament. And yet, it’s perfectly reasonable given my personal paradigm, which has been considerably expanded since I wrote my twin soul books, Death, the Final Frontier and The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity; and to come to terms with my new predicament, I’ve decided to explore my quandaries in today’s spiritual musing…

For the longest time I floundered in one predicament, unable to see where the world was headed, and I had to write a poem to vent my frustrations:

What the Hell

Is Going on Out There?

Hierophants of the world,

what the hell is going on out there?

Your antennae are out of whack,

and all you report is madness,

madness, and more madness, or

am I too blind to see?

Hierophants of the world,

tell me the truth, has the world

gone mad or is this some new sanity

beyond my ability to process

and understand?

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?

          What with all the social upheavals today, climate change disasters, and unfettered moral relativism, it really bothered me not knowing where the world was headed; and I reflected and reflected, but to no avail. And then one day out of the blue something popped into my head, one incredible revelation that I had read in Glenda Green’s book Love without End, Jesus Speaks, something that Jesus said to the artist who had been called by divine inspiration to paint his portrait, which she did and titled “The Lamb and The Lion.”

Jesus appeared and was with her for almost four months (between November 1991 and March 1992), and while working on his portrait one day he said to her: “Behold, be grateful, and forgive that which you did not understand or control. For life is divine, it is perfect, and it naturally manifests the will of its creator.” And the moment these words popped into my head, I shouted “EUREKA!” because I had just been set free of my predicament.

I did not understand where the world was headed, nor did I have any control over it, and I felt impotent; but Christ’s words set me free of my false concern, because what Jesus said to Glenda let me know that the world wasn’t mine to measure. It was the creator’s, and Jesus informed Glenda that life was divine and perfect and not hers to judge, and she had to forgive herself for not understanding, as did I. And that was my epiphany!

Years later, I found myself in another predicament. My quandary this time was much more personal.  I had grown to believe that our life was divinely choreographed, and it took me a long time to resolve my free will with my destined purpose. As I explained in my twin soul books, we are all born to become what we are meant to be (which is our destined purpose), but we have free will; and it took me a long time to reason it out, but as free as we are to live our own life, we will always be teleologically driven to become our true self. This is how I came to see that our life is choreographed by the will of our creator.

“It doesn’t matter what we do,” I said to Penny one day; “when our number comes up, we’re going to die. We can eat all the right foods and exercise and do all the right things to ensure a long and healthy life, but our death is already marked on our calendar.”

And I believed it. It wasn’t just a silly superstition with me, as many people believe, but a gnostic conviction that was forced upon me by life experience, which became the theme of my new book The Gnostic Way of Life, and I floundered in my new predicament.

With free will we create our personal destiny; but we are also born with a teleological imperative to become what we are meant to be, which is our destined purpose that speaks to our soul contract that we all come into the world with, a karmic obligation to learn the lessons that we are meant to learn so we can grow in love and understanding; and the more we grow in love and understanding, the more discerning we will be in the choices we make, which in turn awakens us to the gnostic way of life that is the imperative of our destined purpose to become what we are meant to be, our true self divine and perfect.

It’s all very complicated and hard to explain; but essentially, we are free to live our own life. And if our life strays too far away from our destined purpose to become what we are meant to be, then life intervenes to pull us back, sometimes dragging our feet and screaming like in the Hymn of Cleanthes— “Lead me, O Zeus, /And thou, O Destiny, /The way I am bid by thee to go, /To follow I am willing, /For were I recusant, /I do but make myself a slave, /And still must follow.” This was the theme of The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity; and as logically sound as this was for me, it also gave birth to a new quandary.

If our life is choreographed to become what we are meant to be, our true self whole and complete like the acorn seed becoming an oak tree, which we do by fulfilling the obligation of every soul contract that we come into the world with, then it didn’t really matter when and how we died, because this was also written into our soul contract; and I floundered for several years in a state of physical lassitude, not taking care of myself the way I should have because it didn’t really matter to me. And, of course, my old Catholic guilt possessed me.

And then one day I went on YouTube and came upon an exceptionally gifted medium who channeled souls from the other side, an Australian woman by the name of Alison Allan, and I watched in fascination as she channelled historical figures like Alexander the Great, the Emperor Napoleon, Sir Winston Churchill, Carl Gustav Jung, Socrates, even Jesus and many more world-changing leaders, as well as famous singers and movie stars and ordinary people, and I couldn’t get over how they all confirmed what I already knew about the purpose and meaning of life; but what pleased me most was how invariably they all revealed how their own death was written into their soul contract, and why they had chosen to cross over the way they did, like President John F. Kennedy whose murder at the gunman Lee Harvey Oswald’s hands was written into their soul contract to help bring the nation closer together, or Bruce Lee whose soul contract was to die at the peak of his career to solidify the myth he had created with his personal style of martial arts and enormous self-discipline, which would be an inspiration for generations of young people the world over. And after watching a week or so of these afterlife interviews (I also discovered another highly gifted channeler, an American called Pamela Aaralyn who is also on the forefront of this new spiritual awakening), a thought came to me that lifted me out of my physical doldrums, because it didn’t matter that my death was already written into my soul contract, and it didn’t matter how much care I took of my body, what mattered was the quality of my life, and it was my choice to perpetuate my physical lassitude or take the initiative and bring back the self-discipline I once had when I used to run seven miles every day after work, and ten miles on weekends summer and winter.

I could never do that now, given my heart condition (two heart attacks damaged my heart irreparably, but open-heart surgery extended my life, and I’m sure this was also written into my soul contract); but I can ensure a better quality of life with moderate exercise and watching my diet, and it doesn’t really matter when I die as long as I feel content with myself getting there, which seems to me morally de rigueur now. But as I said, it’s still my choice; and now that I’ve spelled all this out in today’s spiritual musing, I just have to get started. Which brings me to my unresolved quandary, my lifelong proclivity for procrastination; but that’s a spiritual musing for another day, if I ever get around to writing it… 

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