CHAPTER THREE
Why Rules to Live By, Anyway?
Rules are
organizing principles, and they put one’s life in order; and unless we put our own
life in order, life can be very, very difficult. As Dr. Jordan Peterson
painfully learned through his twenty years of clinical practice, life can break
a person down; that’s why rules to live by are necessary, they make one stronger
for life.
“To stand up
straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of
life, with eyes wide open,” he writes in 12
Rules for Life. “It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of
potential into the realities of habitual order. It means adopting the burden of
self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise
of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It
means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive
and meaningful reality. (It means acting to please God, in the ancient
language)” (12 Rules for Life: An
Antidote to Chaos, by Jordan B. Peterson, p. 27).
One would not
believe the rules that I chose to live by when I lived Gurdjieff’s teaching of
“work on oneself.” I even had to create one rule in my Royal Dictum (my edict of self-denial, inspired by Sophocles’
tragic play Oedipus Rex and the
Preacher’s opening words in Ecclesiastes)
that was so insufferably difficult to live by that it bore a hole right through
the impenetrable wall of the mesoteric stage of evolution and gained me entry
into the esoteric third and final stage of evolution where life finally gave up
the secret way to me; so, believe me, I know what it means to live by rules. It
was this experience that gave birth to the meanest saying of my entire life: “The shortest way to God is through hell.”
That’s why I look
forward to reading the rest of Jordan Peterson’s book, because I know that every one of his twelve rules
for life was born of his own journey of self-discovery, and his individuation
process fascinates me for its honesty, integrity, and desperation; like a lone
voice crying in the wilderness that has finally been heard around the world.
But as Padre Pio
said to me when the gifted medium channelled him for my novel Healing with Padre Pio, “Life is a
journey of the self,” which was enhanced by Christ’s comment in Glenda Green’s
book Love without End, Jesus Speaks
(a book that Padre Pio suggested I read), “There is only the self and God.” However,
long before I wrote Healing with Padre
Pio and read Green’s book, I had learned that life is an individual
journey, which all added up to the same thing: all paths lead to the self, and not until one takes responsibility
for their own evolution will life give up its secret.
This is why
Gurdjieff said, “There is only self-initiation into the mysteries of life,” and
I knew that Jordan Peterson’s valiant
perspective in 12 Rules for Life: An
Antidote to Chaos would open one up to life’s mysteries, because taking
responsibility for one’s life makes one more conscious, and consciousness is
the key that opens the door to the final stage of evolution where one can
complete what Nature cannot finish and be
one’s true self.
But opening the
door to the third stage of evolution is not easy. Not because one is not
intelligent enough, many exceptionally brilliant people have tried and failed
and will continue to fail to open this door, because intelligence is not
sufficient for entry—Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Bertrand Russell,
Richard Dawkins, Ayn Rand, Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie, Sam Harris &
company, all brilliant in mind but tragically arrogant in spiritual obtuseness;
it takes a special kind of energy to open this door, and that’s the real
mystery of the human predicament.
And I would never
have known this had not my oracle spoken to me (by way of inspired thought, in
this case) when Gurdjieff’s teaching could do no more for me and I created my Royal Dictum, which bore through the mental
impasse that Gurdjieff had brought me to because my edict of self-denial
resolved the consciousness of my paradoxical nature (my being and non-being,
which constitute one’s inner and outer self) enough for me to pass through the
eye of the needle and realize my true, eternal self.
“He that loveth
his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it
unto life eternal,” said Jesus (John 12:25); but who is willing to “die”
to the false consciousness of their outer self to realize the eternal
consciousness of their inner, soul self? Not many. Only those who have gone as
far as life can take them and have nowhere else to go; that’s why my heart goes
out to anyone whose path has taken them as far as it can, like the good
professor Jordan Peterson. And this is not an arrogant presumption; it’s a hard,
cruel fact of the teleological imperative of soul’s individuation through life
which, if I had any good sense at all, I would keep to myself but can’t because
like Rumi my oracle has also shouted into my ear, “Tell it unveiled, the naked truth! The declaration’s better than the
secret.”
My declaration then
is that my truth, in all of its vulnerable nakedness, presupposes that we are all sparks of divine
consciousness that come from the infinite Body of God; that karma and reincarnation
are an incontrovertible fact of life; and that the purpose of life is to individuate
the un-self-realized I Am consciousness of God, presuppositions
that would tax anyone’s credulity; but when all is said and done, the only
reality that really matters in the end is the truth of one’s own experiences,
and mine have brought me to this astonishing perspective outside the paradigms
of cognitive thought. As my hero Carl Gustav Jung (who privately believed in
reincarnation but could never admit to it openly to safeguard the scientific credibility
of his psychology) would say, this is what I was meant to be. This is who I am.
This is my personality. And I have to be true to who I am no less than Professor
Jordan Peterson had to be true to who he was when he stood up for free speech.
As I experienced
in my seven past-life regressions, we come from God as embryonic souls, un-self-conscious
seeds of divine consciousness encoded with God’s DNA to realize our own identity
through the evolution of our karmic destiny, and the only way we can do this is
to align our karmic destiny with our spiritual purpose; and this is the mystery
that baffles the world, because one has to “square the circle” to resolve the
paradox of the dual consciousness of their inner and outer self that Jesus spoke
to in the Gospel of Thomas when he
was asked when his kingdom would come and he replied: “When the two will be one, the
outer like the inner, and the male with the female neither male or female,” to
which Thomas added: “Now the two are one when we speak truth to each other and
there is one soul in two bodies with no hypocrisy”—one self, whole and complete;
the divine fruit of evolution.
God is merciful, then;
and this is not a cliché with me. My journey of self-discovery awakened me to
the secret way that finally revealed itself to me as the omniscient guiding principle of life, which throughout history has
been called the Creator, God, Holy Spirit, Logos, Providence, Baraka, Chi, Tao,
vital life force, and the way; and it
is the same spark of divine consciousness that we are all born with.
This is why Jesus
said that the kingdom of God was within, and which Carl Jung caught a glimpse
of in his own journey to wholeness and completeness, as he points to in his
essay “The Development of the Individual”: “The undiscovered vein within us is
a living part of the psyche; classical Chinese philosophy names this interior
way ‘Tao,’ and likens it to a flow of water that moves irresistibly towards its
goal. The rest in Tao means fulfillment, wholeness, one’s destination reached,
one’s mission done; the beginning, end, and perfect realization of the meaning of existence
innate in all things. Personality is Tao” (The Essential Jung, by Anthony Storr. p. 210; bold italics mine).
Just as the acorn
seed is an oak tree in potentia, so
are we the potential realization of the seed of our true self; which is why I
look forward to reading the rest of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules to Live By: An Antidote to Chaos, because in his book I
can see the organizing principle of
life that will harness that special energy one needs to awaken to the secret
way that will take one to the third and final stage of evolution where one can
complete what Nature cannot finish and realize one’s destine purpose to
wholeness and completeness.
The good professor
is frantically knocking on the door of inner growth and evolution, and the
world has heard him loud and clear; that’s the mystery of his sudden popularity
and irresistible appeal to the young generation (especially young men) looking
for guidance and direction, which brings to mind something that Jesus said: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and
ye shall find; knock, and it will be opened unto you. For everyone that asketh,
receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh, it shall be
opened.”
My creative
unconscious asked the question, “What the Hell Is Going on Out There?” and the
Universe heard my plea; and out of the
shadows of academia a brilliant hierophant by the name of Jordan B. Peterson stepped
into the light with his maps of meaning and began answering my angry question
with his valiant defense of free speech and his character-building book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos that
knocked on the hermetically sealed door of the secret way so loudly that my oracle
summoned me to write One Rule to Live By:
Be Good which, hopefully, will open the door to one’s soul, if only a
sliver…
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