One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter Two: "The Imponderable Myth of My Life"

CHAPTER TWO

The Imponderable Myth of My Life

         

Of course, I ordered 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos from Amazon (as well as several books on Alzheimer’s for research I’m doing for a novel I’m working on modeled on my unique relationship with one of my readers who fears getting Alzheimer’s like her mother), and I also put Jordan Peterson’s first book Maps of Meaning on my Amazon wish list because I have to read it to fully appreciate the brilliant hierophant who’s answering the question of my angry poem; and when Peterson’s book came in, I immediately read the Forward by Dr. Norman Doidge, MD, author of The Brain that Changes Itself (whom, curiously enough, I had quoted in my book The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity), as well as the first chapter, “Rule 1: Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back,” and this gave me the entry that I needed to work my way into One Rule to Live By: Be Good; and I couldn’t wait to finish reading Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.

In the meantime, I kept watching the good professor on YouTube, because the more I listened to what he had to say the more he satisfied my need to know what the hell was going on out there, and one of his interviews with philosophy professor Stephen Hicks, which was labelled Postmodernism: History and Diagnosis, brought to mind my spiritual musing “BEWEL 262,” and I knew that my oracle wanted me to tell the story of the imponderable myth of my life to lay the groundwork for One Rule to Live By: Be Good, which is the only rule that one needs when one has evolved enough to take evolution into their own hands to complete what Nature cannot finish and realize wholeness and singleness of self.

“Man must complete what Nature cannot finish,” said the ancient alchemists, which spoke to C. G. Jung’s psychology of individuation that he drew from ancient alchemist and Gnostic texts and his own life experience as a practicing psychotherapist who saw up to eight clients a day most of his life; but that’s what brought Gurdjieff’s teaching into my life, because he said that Nature can only evolve man so far and no further, and to complete what nature cannot finish man must take evolution into his own hands to realize his true nature. This is why my muse called me to write One Rule to Live By: Be Good, to illustrate with the imponderable myth of my own life the three stages of soul’s evolution through life:

BEWEL 262

“Watch the synchronicities, the coincidences,

because they will bring you goodness.”

HEALING WITH PADRE PIO

—Padre Pio

When I left my philosophy studies at university in my third year, I left for one reason only: philosophy had cast me adrift in a sea of endless speculation, and I had to get back to “terra firma” or risk drowning; so I made a vow to build my life upon the truth of my own experiences and not what other people thought, however sophisticated and brilliant, and year by year my worldview grew out of the gnostic truth of my daily life; that’s how I came to believe that our life is choreographed by an omniscient guiding principle. I didn’t want to believe it, but it was forced upon me by my own life experience.

True, we have free will, and we choose the life we live; but as free as we may be, our life is still choreographed by an unseen force beyond our control. It took most of my life to work my way through the dilemma of this conundrum, but I caught my first glimpse of this paradox in my teens when I read Hymn to Zeus by the Stoic philosopher/poet Cleanthes:

Lead me, Zeus, and you too, Destiny,

To wherever your decrees have assigned me.

I follow readily, but if I choose not,

Wretched though I am, I must follow still.

Fate guides the willing, but drags the unwilling.

This is the paradox, then: we are free to live our destiny, or be dragged by it. But how can we be sure that we even have a destiny, let alone be free to live or be dragged by it? That’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing…

I’ve explored this question in my autobiographical novel Healing with Padre Pio, so I need not elaborate here; but I do have to explain how I came to my belief that we are all destined for a purpose, which the poet John Keats caught a glimpse of in a letter to his brother that he titled “The Vale of Soul Making.”

“There may be intelligences or sparks of divinity in millions, but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself,” he wrote in his letter; and then with poetic genius, he answers his own question and solves the riddle of our destined purpose: “How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them? How but by the medium of a world like this?” Which is why Carl Jung said in The Red Book, the chronicle of his quest for his lost soul: “This life is the way, the long sought-after way to the unfathomable, which we call divine. There is no other way, all other ways are false paths.” In short, our own life is the way to our true self. “Life is a journey of the self,” said Padre Pio.

The gifted Romantic poet and prescient Swiss psychologist came to the same conclusion, that we are all sparks of divine consciousness destined to realize our own individual identity through life; and whether we like it or not, like the acorn seed that has to become an oak tree so are we destined to become what we are meant to be. But this was John Keats’s truth, and Carl Jung’s; how in the world did it become mine?

As one would expect, it’s a long and complicated story, which I worked out in my novel Cathedral of my Past Lives first and then in my memoir The Summoning of Noman; but for brevity’s sake, let me just say that this truth came to me by way of an incredible personal experience when the merciful law of divine synchronicity introduced me to a past-life regressionist who unexpectedly brought me back to the Body of God where all souls come from, and which became the inspiration for my intensely personal novel Cathedral of My Past Lives that was based upon my seven past-life regressions.

It was my fourth past-life regression, and to my astonishment I was brought back to the Body of God, what mystics and poets have called the Great Ocean of Love and Mercy, where we all come from; but what shocked me was that I did not have reflective self-consciousness.

I was an un-self-realized atom of God in an unfathomable sea of souls that constituted the un-self-realized nature of God, and in the same regression I was sent to Earth to acquire my own identity for the purpose of individuating the consciousness of God through the evolution of my essential nature. There I was, in my first primordial human lifetime, the alpha male of a group of ten or twelve higher primates, and I actually experienced the dawning of my own reflective self-consciousness—the birth of a new “I” of God, if you will; and from that moment on I was separated from the un-self-consciousness of life and initiated into the divine mystery of my pre-destined purpose, which was to realize my essential nature through the natural evolution of my newborn reflective self-consciousness—“a bliss peculiar to each one by individual existence,” as John Keats expressed it in his letter “The Vale of Soul Making.”

Now that I had given birth to my own dawning sense of reflective self-consciousness, I became the author of my personal karmic destiny which was initiated by my newborn self-conscious will, however rudimentary; and from lifetime to lifetime, I grew and evolved through the natural process of karmic individuation until I was conscious enough in self-reflection to realize that there had to be more to life than what I experienced with my five senses; and I became a seeker of life’s purpose and meaning.

In one regression, I was brought back to ancient Greece where I began my quest for my true self as a student of Pythagoras, who taught the secret way of life; and in another regression I was brought back to my Sufi lifetime in ancient Persia where I tried again to achieve my destined purpose of realizing my true identity (what Jung called “wholeness and singleness of self” and Jesus called our “eternal life”), but I failed miserably by going out of my mind trying to live the teachings of a secret Sufi sect called The Order of the White Tiger, and I had to live a few more lifetimes before I had evolved enough to take up the secret way again, which I did in my current lifetime with Gurdjieff’s  teaching of “work on oneself.” And this brings me to the point of today’s spiritual musing—the paradox of free will and our destined purpose.

However questionable it may be (and there will be skeptics who will think I’m crazy), through personal experience I came to see that we all come from God as un-self-realized souls divinely encoded to become fully self-realized souls through natural evolution, and from the moment we give birth to a new “I” of God we become the author of our own karmic destiny and grow and evolve through karma and reincarnation until we have evolved enough to take evolution into our own hands and complete what Nature cannot finish; only then can we fulfill our destined purpose and realize our true self; but it took years of living the secret way to reconcile my personal karmic destiny with my pre-destined spiritual purpose, which I could not have done without divine guidance—hence the belief that was forced upon me by all the perfectly timed coincidences throughout my life that our life is choreographed by forces beyond our control, like the way I was introduced to the secret way of life with Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself.”

In my second year at university, I asked a fellow philosophy student who was going home to Toronto for the Christmas break to bring me back a book of his choosing from his favorite little book store; and for reasons which he could not explain, he brought me a book that he felt I had to read. The book meant nothing to him, but it changed the course of my life. It was In Search of the Miraculous, by P. D. Ouspensky, who was a student of the enigmatic mystic/philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff.

I’ve written about my relationship with Gurdjieff’s teaching in my books Gurdjieff Was Wrong But His Teaching Works and The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway, so I needn’t bother here; suffice to say that I have experienced the guiding hand of life many times in my quest for my true self (though I often didn’t recognize it until many years later), and to confirm my conviction that our life is choreographed by an omniscient guiding principle I’d like to share the latest miracle in today’s spiritual musing, the astonishing little saga of how we came to purchase our new 2015 Honda Civic LX; but before I do, let me explain what I mean by the secret way of life in light of my own journey of self-discovery…

Only now late in my life have I come to see how “Old Whore Life” (my metaphor for the shadow side of karma that I wrote about in Old Whore Life, Exploring the Shadow Side of Karma) continues to seduce the world with teachings, both ancient and modern, with exclusive claims to the secret way that lull believers into a spiritual stupor which inhibits their divinely encoded purpose of waking up to their true self, and I know this because I was  seduced by more than one of these teachings, starting early in my childhood with my Roman Catholic faith which contends that our immortal soul is created at the moment of human conception, that we only live one lifetime, and that Jesus died on the cross to save our soul from eternal damnation; and then with Gurdjieff’s colossal misperception that not everyone is born with an immortal soul but can create one if he knows how, which Gurdjieff did; and with the Buddhist teaching which contends that we do not have an autonomous soul self; and finally, with a teaching that I lived for more than thirty years which claims proprietary rights to the secret way by virtue of what it proudly calls the “Mahanta”, the Inner Master and Spiritual Leader of this New Age religion, marketed to the world as The Way of the Eternal.

In their own way, all of these teachings are true insomuch that life is an enantiodromiac process of our own evolution through the natural individuation of our being and non-being (our inner and outer self), and every teaching will over time give birth to its own opposite, but that’s far too abstruse for today’s spiritual musing; suffice to say that it took a long time for me to see that there is only one way to our true self, and that way is inherent to all paths in life, and I hope to illustrate this secret way with the curious saga of how we came to buy our new 2015 Honda Civic LX. But how the omniscient guiding principle of life led us to our purchase cannot be appreciated without explaining the divine logic of the secret way, which I would never have been able to grasp without the unbelievable experience of my seven past-life regressions.

I explained this in detail in my essay “On the Evolutionary Impulse to Individuate” in my book Stupidity  Is Not a Gift of God, so suffice to say that Divine Spirit,  the creative force of life that nurtures, sustains and guides souls back home to God, is the secret way that I came to call the omniscient guiding principle of life; and its divine purpose is to resolve the paradox of our personal karmic destiny and our pre-scripted spiritual destiny so we can continue on our journey to wholeness and completeness. And one way that the secret way of life speaks to us is by way of remarkable coincidences, like the kind Robert. H. Hopcke explored in his book There Are No Accidents, Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives. “Our lives have a narrative structure, like that of novels,” says Hopcke, “and at those moments we call synchronistic this structure is brought to our awareness in a way that has a significant impact upon our lives.”

Whether we are conscious of it or not, the choices we make in life create karma that has to be resolved; and whether we resolve it in our current lifetime or a future life does not matter—it has to be resolved, because it is the law of life. This is our personal karmic destiny that we forge with every choice we make; but our karmic destiny can only evolve us so far through the natural process of evolution, which is why the merciful law of divine synchronicity has to kick in to bring our karmic destiny into alignment with our pre-scripted spiritual destiny so we can fulfil our destined purpose.

This is where the secret way of life comes into play to assist us on our journey to wholeness and completeness, like it came into play in the contemporary poet David Whyte’s life when he was called to take up the path of writing poetry to realize his true self, which he explored in his autobiographical book Crossing the Unknown Sea, Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity and which I also wrote about in own memoir Do We Have an Immortal Soul? And more dramatic still, how it came into play in the incomparable jazz musician Herbie Hancock’s life while playing with the legendary Miles Davis.

Once experienced, the salvific energy of grace that synchronicity bestows upon one’s life can change the course of one’s karmic destiny, and young Herbie Hancock had come as far as his karmic destiny could take him on his musical journey through life; so, providence intervened with one of the most remarkable quirks of fate that one could ever experience on one’s path to their true self—a wrong chord that transformed Herbie Hancock’s musical career.

Herbie Hancock was in his early twenties, on stage playing the piano with the Miles Davis Quintet in a concert hall in Stockholm, Sweden in the mid-1960s, and “the band is tight—we’re all in sync,” he writes in his autobiography Possibilities, and they were playing one of Miles’s classics, “So What?” Herbie continues: “Miles starts playing, building up to his solo, and just as he’s about to really let loose, he takes a breath. And right then I play a chord that is just so wrong. I don’t even know where it came from—it’s the wrong chord, in the wrong place, and now it’s hanging out there like a piece of rotten fruit.”

And years later, in his autobiography the seasoned Herbie Hancock reveals how Miles Davis, who was himself an initiate of the secret way of life through music, took that “rotten piece of fruit” and built on it with the creative genius of his talent: “Miles pauses for a fraction of a second, and then he plays some notes that somehow, miraculously, make my chord sound right. In that moment, I believe my mouth actually fell open. What kind of alchemy was this? And then Miles just took off from there, unleashing a solo that took the song in a new direction. The crowd went absolutely crazy.”

It took Herbie Hancock years to understand what happened that moment onstage, which illustrates the spiritual alchemy of the secret way of life. In his mind, the young musician judged his chord to be wrong; but Miles Davis never judged it— “he just heard it as a sound that had happened, and he instantly took it on as a challenge, a question of How can I integrate that chord into everything else we’re doing? And because he didn’t judge it, he was able to run with it, and turn it into something amazing. Miles trusted the band, and he trusted himself, and he always encouraged us to do the same. This was one of the many lessons I learned from Miles.”

This is how an initiate of the secret way mentored a young musician to initiate himself into the mysteries of music so he could continue on his own path to wholeness, not as dramatic as what happened to the musical iconic and legendary bassist Victor L. Wooten, who tells the story of his own initiation into the secret way in The Music Lesson. A Spiritual Search for Growth Through Music; but Herbie Hancock’s story speaks to the synchronous power of goodness that came from a “wrong” note that shifted his paradigm and initiated him into the secret way of life that woke him up to his own path so he could fulfill his life through music; and this leaves me with one final point to clear up, and then I can relate the story of how we came to purchase our 2015 Honda Civic LX and bring my spiritual musing to closure.

I’ve gone to great lengths to show that our own life is the way to our true self, and whatever religion, teaching, or career path that we embrace can be a gateway to the secret way of life; but what I didn’t make clear is that it’s in how we live our life that initiates us into the secret way. This is what Gurdjieff taught me how to do. By “working” on myself with his transformative teaching, I learned how to live my life and wake up to the secret way that is inherent to all ways in life; which is how I came to see that our own life is the way to what we are destined to be, our true self whole and complete.

Herbie Hancock’s life was music, and Miles Davis taught him how to live his life as a musician to fulfill his life and destined purpose; that’s how Herbie Hancock initiated himself into the secret way of life through music, just as David Whyte learned how to live his life as a poet to initiate himself into the secret way of life through poetry; so it doesn’t matter which path one takes in life, as long as one knows how to live their life they will initiate themselves into the secret way of life and grow in their destined purpose.

The mystery lies in how we live our life, which took me many years to learn; and when all is said and done, this mysterious how depends upon our ability to bring our karmic destiny into agreement with our spiritual destiny, making one destiny out of our two destinies. That’s the secret way of every path in life, then; the wisdom, courage and commitment to keep our karmic destiny in co-operative agreement with the encoded purpose of our spiritual destiny, the inspired imperative of One Rule to Live By: Be Good, and which curiously enough speaks with symbolic imagery to what Penny and I experienced with the little saga of our 2015 Honda Civic LX, a life lesson that was forced upon us by the divine choreographer of life…

Penny and I did not choose to purchase our new 2015 Honda Civic LX, it chose us in that strange way that the omniscient guiding principle of life choreographs our life to assist us in our journey through life.

A Hallmark Representative for the past twelve years, Penny was working at the Real Canadian Superstore in Wasaga Beach; and having made an appointment to service our 2005 Honda Civic for the winter at Canadian Tire nearby, she was going to drop the car off and walk to the Superstore and pick it up later. I asked her to have new winter tires installed also, but when the mechanic put the car up on the hoist to do an oil change he noticed that the fuel lines were rusted and corroded, and the brake lines as well, and he told Penny to be careful braking because the brakes could fail at any time. In fact, he even cautioned her to not drive the car like that; so, Penny asked him for an estimate on new brake and fuel lines.

The mechanic came back from the office with an estimate of four thousand dollars, including service and new tires, which took Penny by surprise. The mileage on our car was 262000 kilometers, and the mechanic asked Penny if we had the timing chain replaced because at that mileage that would be the next thing to go. And then he said to her, “If it was my car, I wouldn’t pour that kind of money into it. It’s not worth it.” But he would fix it if that’s what she wanted. Then Penny called and asked if I was sitting down, and after she gave me the news we decided to wait on the service and discuss it when she came home.

It wasn’t a difficult decision, given that we had already just poured a thousand dollars into the car when we serviced it to go up north to attend to our triplex in my hometown of Nipigon and visit Penny’s family in Thunder Bay, and we decided to look at some used (or, as they say today, pre-owned) Hondas on the weekend; but a good pre-owned was almost as expensive as a new one, so we decided to bite the bullet and buy a new Civic instead.

Because the new 2015 models were already on the lot, we decided to buy a new 2014 model instead, because it would be a little cheaper; so, we arranged financing with Honda and made the deal. But we wanted a specific color, which they didn’t have on the lot, and the salesperson, a pleasant young woman who gave us one-thousand-dollar trade-in value for our old Civic, was going to bring one in from  an out-of-town dealer; but while waiting for our new vehicle to be brought in from a dealer in southern Ontario, our car broke down on her way to work in Wasaga Beach the following week, and Penny barely managed to pull into the Beer Store parking lot and park it because it was unsafe to drive.

She called me and I drove to Wasaga Beach with my work van, and then we called a tow truck and had the car towed to our Honda dealer in Midland; but because Penny needed a car for work, we decided then and there to purchase a new 2015 model off the lot, which turned out to be only a few dollars more for the monthly payments we would be making for the 2014 model; and, despite the breakdown of our car, the sales lady still honored the thousand-dollar trade-in for our old  Civic.

We waited while they serviced our new car, and when it was ready to be driven off the lot the sales lady went over the details and set the Blue Tooth for Penny’s cell phone; but when I walked around our new Honda Civic LX, I noticed our new license plate: BEWEL 262.

I loved the symbolic implications of BEWEL (in the language of life, it was telling us that everything was going to be well for us now); but when I shared this with Penny, she looked at our new licence plate and the number 262 jumped out at her instantly, and she said, “The mileage on our car was 262000. Our new plate is BEWEL 262. What do you think that means?”

I broke into laughter. “That’s even better yet. 262 is short for the mileage on our car when it died on you in the Beach, and the language of life is telling us that the spirit of our old car has incarnated into the body of our new Honda Civic and everything’s going to be well for us now. I know it sounds foolish, Penny Lynn; but good God, it feels good to get this kind of symbolic confirmation!”

———

I didn’t have to finish reading Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life to know where it was going. It was designed to reconcile one’s existential outer life with one’s essential inner life, just as the divinely choreographed experience of how we came to purchase our new 2015 Honda Civic that brought our outer life into greater harmony with our inner life and symbolically confirmed it by telling us that all was going to be well for us (until the next crisis); but I was looking forward to finishing 12 Rules for Life, because I loved watching how the good professor connected the dots to the perplexing riddle of the human predicament.

But try as he might, I also knew that he was stuck in the second stage of soul’s evolution through life. That’s why I was nudged to send him a copy of My Writing Life and The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity, because they spoke to my own individuation process through the third and final stage of personal evolution, and I felt my books might open him up to the omniscient guiding principle of life that secretly reconciles our outer and inner life.

This was my experience, and I didn’t expect anyone to believe me, least of all a critical research-oriented U of T professor of psychology and practicing psychotherapist whose own remarkable journey of self-discovery had taken him to the terrifying edge of the second stage of soul’s evolution but who was chomping at the bit to enter the third and final stage where the answer to the paradoxical nature of man’s existential predicament can be found; but, as Jesus said in his cryptic teachings of the secret way of life, the eye of the needle is difficult to pass through, and not many souls do. This is why my heart went out to the good professor, and probably why I was called to write this book, One Rule to Live By: Be Good…