One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 9: The View from Where I Am

CHAPTER 9

The View from Where I Am

A writer is not fledged until he finds his own voice. Until then, he is only doing what most writers do—learning the craft until he finds his writer’s voice, if he`s lucky; only then can he take flight and claim a point of view that is uniquely his own.

I heard the call to writing in grade school, and in high school I fell in love with the romantic ideal of becoming a writer like Earnest Hemingway, who became my high school hero and literary mentor; but my call to writing was supplanted by my call to become a seeker like Larry Darrell in Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge, and my life no longer became my own because I had forfeited my call to writing to the guiding principle of my life that kept dragging me by the scruff of the neck to find the right path that would fulfill my soul contract to find a way out of the recurring cycle of life and death through my own efforts—an unbelievably foolish demand I made of myself; and I chose the family I was born into, because my family shadow was deeply rooted in what I needed most to realize my true self.

But who would believe this but another soul with a point of view from that state of consciousness where one is both what he is not and not what he is, a fully integrated soul self, that state of resolved self-consciousness that Jesus pointed to with his saying that the kingdom of God would come when one has made his two selves into one, neither male nor female with no hypocrisy? But one might well ask, can there really be such a person?

“Ye shall know them by their fruits,” said Jesus. “Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can an evil tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them…” (Math. 16-20).

What, then, would be the fruit of a self-realized person if not the consummate goodness of their individual virtue—the best music from the musician, the best poetry from the poet, the best from the physician, the best of one’s chosen field? A fruit so sweet in its individual goodness that one cannot help but see their difference, people of destiny like Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and Mahatma Gandhi, highly evolved souls that have realized wholeness and completeness and returned to serve humanity with the gift of their highly evolved individual virtue—Mozart, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Einstein, and countless unsung heroes who affected the world with the ripened fruit of their goodness.

Given the logic of the individuation process, which I’ve been studying since I began “working” on myself with Gurdjieff’s teaching, the more conscious I became the more I saw the various shades of good and evil in people; and then one day I became acutely aware of the connection between good and evil and the values that people lived by.

So, I had a difficult choice to make; and I chose to live by values that made me the best person that I could possibly be. And I made it the ethic of my life to be a good-kind-honest-truthful person, idealized by Wordsworth’s poem “Character of the Happy Warrior.”

That was my path, my virtue. And then one summer day, to my surprise, while standing in the doorway of my mother’s kitchen while she was kneading bread dough on the kitchen table, I had the most astonishing experience of my life. A feeling washed over me that I was immortal and would never die. That’s it. No angels singing, no heavenly choir, no golden trumpets, just a quiet feeling that I was immortal and would never die.

And all fear of death vanished. As did the longing in my soul for wholeness and completeness. And I no longer longed to be me. I just was.

I was me, whole and completely myself, a feeling that has never gone away some forty years later; and as much as I wanted to share this with my mother, I could not. She would not have understood. I did not understand either. And it took twenty years to work out what happened to me that day in my mother’s kitchen, but I finally solved the mystery.

By “working” on myself with pathological commitment to Gurdjieff’s discipline of conscious effort and intentional suffering (including his techniques of non-identifying and self-remembering), plus my Royal Dictum (my edict of self-denial), and my Wordsworthian ideal of laboring good on good to fix, I created enough virtue to shift my center of gravity (my “I”) from my existential outer self (my ego/shadow personality) to my essential inner self (I coincided with myself and become one self, whole and complete; that`s when I experienced my own immortal nature that Jesus referred to as being “born again”); and from that moment onward, I lived my life from the perspective of my true self, which is the viewpoint of the third and final stage of human evolution, and everything that I wrote from that day to this I wrote from this unique perspective, my own writer’s voice, like the spiritual musing that I posted on my blog Wednesday, December 20, 2017:

A Room of My Own

I’ve been meaning to write a spiritual musing on my writing room for years, but the idea never possessed me until I read Lindall Gordon’s biography, Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Life, while I was in the middle of painting my writing room this summer; and, of course, the idea was set free by Virginia Woolf’s Victorian convention-breaking comment that sparked a fire in the soul of women everywhere and set the stage for the modern feminist movement, and which became the theme of her iconoclastic little book A Room of One’s Own: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

That would apply to any writer. And if they have the money to be free to write, all the more power to them. But life doesn’t work like that. Ask Alice Munro, who had to squeeze in her writing time whenever she could between household chores (she was married with two small children); but she persevered and wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and at the respectable age of 82 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 for her “mastery of the contemporary short story.”

Which suggests much more than having a room of one’s own to write in, and the money to be free to write; it suggests that a writer will write no matter what, because if they do not write they will feel like they have betrayed themselves, something that my high school hero and literary mentor Ernest Hemingway explored in his story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and which haunted me most of my life too because my call to creative writing was superseded by my call to find my true self, and only when I had satisfied the longing in my soul for wholeness and completeness was I free to devote more time to creative writing, which brings me to my writing room in the two-story house that Penny and I built in beautiful Georgian Bay, Southcentral Ontario…

I’ve always wanted a room of my own to write in, and I went out of my way three  times to  build a room of my own; the first time when I built an addition onto my parents home in Nipigon, Northwestern Ontario when I opted to stay at home for my mother’s sake after I left university to start my own contract painting business, and for the next fourteen years I stayed at home in my attached but separate apartment unit and worked my trade and read and wrote until my father died; and the second time I built a room of my own was in the triplex that I built in Nipigon by converting the loft of the top apartment unit of our triplex into my writing room where I wrote every morning for fourteen years until Penny and I built our new home in Tiny Beaches, Georgian Bay (on STOCCO CIRCLE, a street named after me no less!) in which I converted the empty space above our double garage called the “bonus room” into my writing room but which I never got to finish painting until this summer, fourteen years after our house was built.

So, a room of my own to write in was precious to me, despite the fact that my writing room was my sanctuary and haven of safety while searching for my true self which began in high school when Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge struck me with the immortal wound that called me to become a spiritual seeker like Maugham’s hero Larry Darrell; and I did most of my seeking through reading in the privacy of my writing room until I found my lost soul that I had come into this world to find and which I wrote about in The Summoning of Noman and The Pearl of Great Price. And after I found my true self and wrote all the books that my quest called me to write (the last being my twin soul books, Death, the Final Frontier and The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity), I was finally free to do justice to creative writing that I was called to in high school by the writer who became my high school hero and literary mentor, Ernest “Papa” Hemingway whom, ironically, I’ve just finished writing about again in My Writing Life, which was inspired by the gift of an Indigo Hemingway Notebook that I got from Penny’s sister last Christmas and which morphed into a sequel to my literary memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway that I wrote three years ago.

Not that I didn’t write creatively all these many years (my novel Tea with Grace is still my favorite of all my fiction), I simply could not devote all of my precious time and energy to creative writing (which, as any writer knows, demands complete attention); I had to work my trade to make a living first and foremost, and I had to also heed the call to write the books that my quest for my true self demanded of me, which to date numbers fifteen and counting; so I had little time for creative writing.

But now that I’ve finally told the story of how I found my true self, I am free to write all the poetry and short stories and novels that I am called to write (not to mention my spiritual musings which always come to me unbeckoned, like today’s musing on a room of one’s own); and, in all honesty, I could not wait to finish painting the faded and boring white-primed walls of my writing room, because after fourteen years it deserved to be dignified with a color best suited to the creative writer in me, a colour that my life partner Penny Lynn chose—HOPEFUL BLUE.

            And why did Penny choose this colour, other than the fact that we both loved it? As she said to me, without a trace of irony: “I just hope it gets on the walls, that’s all.”

———

Not only do I have a room of my own to write in (I love the metaphor of “bonus room,” which in our house plans referred to the empty space above our double garage), I also have the “bonus” of a voice of my own in the point of view that I realized in my quest for my true self; a unique vantage point from that state of resolved self-consciousness that can only be realized in the third and final stage of evolution, and it goes without saying that writing from this outside-the-box perspective can be threatening to conventional wisdom.

But why? What can be so threatening about a perspective that reflects life from a state of resolved self-consciousness that takes God, the immortal soul, and the afterlife for granted? Why would the world be threatened by this point of view?

The short answer is RESPONSIBILITY, because the only way to resolve the dual nature of our false and real self is by taking responsibility for our own evolution, and this is not an easy responsibility to bear; but despite how hard we try, we cannot deny the imperative of our inner self to wholeness and completeness—and that’s our dilemma!

So there we are, driven by the teleological imperative of our inner self to grow and evolve and become what we are meant to be, “a bliss peculiar to each one by individual existence,” as the poet John Keats described the identity of our soul self, trapped in our physical body that is biologically driven by the selfish imperative of our ego/shadow personality; it’s no wonder that man is torn in two, because we cannot realize the one without sacrificing the other. And that’s the dilemma of the human condition.

“Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast, /And each will wrestle for the mastery there,” wrote the philosopher/poet Goethe; and I spent the best and most creative years of my life resolving this conflict in my breast, and I know just how threatening my point of view can be to those who are not yet ready to bear the burdensome responsibility of taking evolution into their own hands and become what they are meant to be.

That’s why my heart goes out to Jordan Peterson. His maps of meaning have taken him as far as they can take him in his profound study of human nature, and as always happens when one’s path can take them no further on their journey to wholeness and completeness (which he rendered into 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos), life calls them to a higher path; and the good professor was called to the hero’s journey in his defence of free speech—an impossible imperative to be a shining light for this crazy world; and I just love watching him slaying all those pesky postmodern nihilists and politically correct dragons out to take him down, like Cathay Newman on Britain’s Channel 4 News and Nellie Bowles in the New York Times, to name only two, because I’ve never seen the hero’s journey play itself out with such passionate, daemonic intensity. It’s no wonder that he lives in “constant existential terror.” But he’s a “deeply, deeply good man,” and the Logos impels him…

One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 8: The Unbearable Anguish of Being Called

CHAPTER 8

The Unbearable Anguish of Being Called

While going to high school I had four or five past-life recollection dreams. I didn’t know they were past-life recollection dreams until I began reading books on “the Sleeping Prophet,” as America’s greatest psychic Edgar Cayce was called, two or three years after high school, but I always knew that there was something different about me that I could not explain to anyone, especially my own family.

I didn’t belong in my family. I was so different from my parents and siblings that I felt I had been born into the wrong family; but from all of my reading on reincarnation, I learned that we choose the family we are born into. But why did I choose my family?

Then I read Jess Stern’s book The Search for the Soul: Psychic Lives of Taylor Caldwell (Taylor Caldwell was the hugely successful historical novelist who received her information for her novels from the Akashic Records), and I knew that one day I would write a book on my own past lives, which I did when Penny and I moved to Georgian Bay and I had seven past-life regressions and wrote my novel Cathedral of My Past Lives; and though it’s not published yet, with this experience I connected the dots and saw the big picture of life, and my own life in particular because I finally knew why I had the persistent feeling growing up that I was going to be “the last of my own line.”

At first, I thought this feeling of being the last of my own line meant that I would not have any children (I don’t); but the more I studied what Socrates called “a doctrine uttered in secret,” the more I began to suspect that my current lifetime was going to be my last incarnation. Which led me to believe that the “gadfly” of Athens, who was tried and condemned for defending free speech (see how far we have evolved, Jordan?), was only telling half the story when he said that the unexamined life was not worth living, because in light of my understanding of karma and reincarnation I came to see that every lifetime we live is necessary for our destined purpose of becoming what we are meant to be, a realization that inspired the spiritual musing that I posted on my blog Tuesday, January 20, 2018:

The Sanctity of Individual Experience

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, seductively 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 look for; 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 adult students in the winter of my second year, 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 when we are ready to be called by 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 him that one must imagine Sisyphus happy in his punishment of rolling a rock up a hill forever), “crushing truths perish from being acknowledged,” and only by coming to terms with my humiliation for dropping out of university will I finally resolve those still-anguishing feelings; but let me explain first how I was called to write today’s spiritual musing…

I went on YouTube one night and came upon a video that caught my attention, titled The C.G. Jung Foundation Presents, which I watched with growing fascination when I learned that Dr. Stevens had serendipitously come upon his own life path through his research on attachment behavior in infants for his doctoral thesis, which in turn brought him to the Jungian therapist who had 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 told him that this led him to change his course and become a Jungian analyst himself; and he went on to write many books on the individuation process, starting with his best known book, 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 instantly changed when I heard the phrase “the sanctity of individual experience” in a follow-up video, because this phrase honored the gnostic wisdom of personal experience);  and when I finished watching the tribute to Dr. Stevens, I went on Amazon 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 new life path in C.G. Jung’s psychology just as serendipity had provided me with mine in Gurdjieff’s teaching, I felt compelled to watch a video link 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 only truth that 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, Camus, Nietzsche, 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, however true or false it may have been; and to find my true self I knew that I had to build my life upon the only truth that I could count on, and that was the truth of my own life experience; 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, and I tortured for days over my decision to drop out of university.

But why not pursue my degree in philosophy and still employ Gurdjieff’s teaching to help me find my true self? Would not that have been the prudent thing to do?

That would have been the logical thing to do, but I couldn’t. 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 in the world, and the wilful young atheist Frank Joseph 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 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, a novel that had stirred the ire of the Muslim world enough to threaten Rushdie’s life and force 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 in life, 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 synchronicity principle led Frank Joseph to believe that it was not a random event at all but providentially designed, and this compelled him to pursue his new path 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 of those coincidences he wrote a book on the subject, and as he wrote about those coincidences he began to see a pattern emerge out of every persona’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 guiding principle; and that’s when Frank Joseph shed his willful atheism and became a believer in a benevolent guiding principle of life, and I couldn`t help but smile when I read this because that was the same conclusion that I had come to about synchronicity which I wrote about in my own 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 Lives); 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, 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 by living his own path, which was confirmed by a dream he had several days before dying, a gnostic truth that became the premise of my own book The Pearl of Great Price but which I need not expound upon here. Suffice to say that the more true one is to their path, the more they will grow in gnostic wisdom and personal meaning that satisfies the longing in their soul for wholeness and completeness.

This is why I had to drop out of university. Philosophy wasn’t giving me what I needed to satisfy the longing in my soul for wholeness and completeness, and the omniscient guiding principle of life called me to live my own life with the guidance of Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself,” which is why I chose the title “The Sanctity of Individual Experience” for today’s musing. As Carl Jung said in The Red Book, which chronicles his heroic quest for his lost soul, “The way is and always will be an individual path.”

POSTSCRIPT

This is pure conjecture, but as I reworked this spiritual musing to make it as reader-friendly as possible for my Spiritual Musings blog (not easy to do, given the subject matter), it dawned on me why the name Rushdie popped into Frank Joseph’s mind the day he had his life-changing experience. Everything happens for a reason, and synchronicities do not just drop out of the blue 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 self had to be brought into alignment 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 own 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 willfully defiant path of atheism had blinded him to his destined purpose of wholeness and completeness as it had done to Salman Rushdie who got stuck in the closed paradigm of atheism, and Frank Joseph was ready to move on to a new path, which he discovered as he dug deeper and deeper into the mystery of the synchronicity principle that began to erode his belief in the closed belief system of atheism.

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 teaching through the serendipitous gift of Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous when I got the uneasy feeling that philosophy could do no more for me, just as Frank Joseph’s belief in atheism could do no more for him and the merciful law of divine synchronicity kicked in to save him from himself.

It’s sweetly ironic then that the cynical atheist Salman Rushdie should pop into the defiant young atheist’s mind that day, but that’s the playful side of the synchronicity principle, which Frank Joseph was blissfully unaware of. Nonetheless, his is an amazing story of how he found his new path in life, just as all life-changing stories of synchronicity are, 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 a spiritual musing for another time.

———

So, I got severed from my academic life because I was called to forge my own path in life with Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself,” which was one of the most excruciating decisions of my life; but not the most anguishing. My most anguishing decision was being severed from my life when I became possessed by an inexplicably sexual desire that so horrified my conscience the moment my experience was over that I could not live with myself, and I dropped my life (I was twenty-two and doing exceptionally well in my pool hall and vending machine business) and fled to Annecy, France where I began my quest for an answer to the terrifying mystery of my dual nature—because the person who did what he did that godforsaken night was me, but not me; and I had to find out who this other me was.

As the Stoic poet Cleanthes said, we can walk alongside our destiny or be dragged by it, and I was not wise enough to walk alongside my destiny; I had to be severed from my life and be dragged by my destiny to the path that would best satisfy the longing in my soul for wholeness and completeness. That’s why serendipity provided me with Gurdjieff’s teaching just as I was beginning to get the uneasy feeling that philosophy was not the path for me; and by the second semester of my third year, I panicked.

That’s why I left university with nothing but Gurdjieff’s teaching to guide me through life; and, believe me, this was not an easy decision to make. It cost me, and it cost me in more ways than one. As professor Jordan Peterson would say, I stepped out into the chaos of life and I didn’t know what monsters were out there waiting for me.

So, I know a call when I hear it, then; and when professor Peterson put his career on the line when he stood up for free speech by refusing to comply to Bill C-16 that would have legislatively compelled him to use gender neutral pronouns, a courageous stand for free speech that would threaten his teaching career and clinical practice, I knew that he had been called by life to a higher path, and I knew just how terrifying it was going to be for him.

Sixteen months later, having survived all the horrors of the malevolent forces of political correctness that were out to destroy him, professor Peterson was asked a question by Dave Rubin on The Rubin Report (streamlined live January 31, 2018)—“As these last couple of years have happened, and as you both (Ben Shapiro, another staunch defender of free speech and enemy of political correctness, was Rubin’s other guest) have risen in profile, and you’re out there saying what you think all the time, and defending your beliefs, what’s been the most personal thing that you’ve struggled with along the way?”

And the good professor and clinical therapist Jordan Peterson, honest to the bone, replied: “Well, for me it’s two things. One is—it’s not so bad now. It’s still pretty bad. I’ve lived in constant existential terror of saying something that will be fatal…I’ve had to watch myself in a hyper-vigilant manner to provide those who regard me as their enemy with the tools to dispense with me…you know, I have my family resting on me as well as whatever else I happen to be doing; so, it’s been extraordinarily intense.  And the other thing is the persistent feeling of surreality of what’s happening to me…”

Given his millions of followers on YouTube and other venues (they line up by the hundreds to hear his talks), it’s only natural that he would find the effect he’s having out there surreal, especially the life-changing effect he’s having on young men everywhere; but Jordan Peterson was called by life for a reason, and in the depths of my soul I know he was called to answer the angry question of my poem, “What the hell is going on out there?” which not only spoke for me, but for the collective unconscious of society—as poetry tends to do.

I can feel his existential terror; and again, my heart goes out to this “deeply, deeply good man,” as one of his closest friends described him…

One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 7: The Mystery of Personal Identity

CHAPTER 7

The Mystery of Personal Identity

“These leaves, our bodily personalities, seem identical,

but the globe of soul-fruit we make,

each is elaborately unique.”

—Jalaluddin Rumi

Personal identity. That’s a hot topic today. Do we evolve in our personal identity existentially, through millions of years of natural evolution from the lowest life form all the way up to higher primates and then into human beings with a reflective self-consciousness? And if so, at what point did our “I” come into being? That’s the mystery of personal identity.

I began my quest for my true self because of an unexpected sexual experience I had in the twenty-second year of my life that shocked my conscience awake and I could not live with myself, but I knew that the person who did what he did that night was not me; it was me, but not me, and I vowed to find out who this other me was or die trying.

That was the real beginning of my journey of self-discovery, which I completed when I gave “birth” to my immortal self in my mother’s kitchen one fine summer day when my inner and outer selves became one self, whole and complete; but I’ve written about this already and need not expound upon it here. What I want to make clear now is that there is more to the “I” of our existential life than we can see, because the “I” of our existential life is imbued with the “I” of our evolving soul self; but who would believe this?

There are any number of theories about the “I” of our personal identity. Carl Jung told me in a dream one night that the burning question of his life was the alpha and omega of the self—where does the self come from, and where does it go? That’s why I dropped out of university in my third year of philosophy studies, because I found myself drifting out into a sea of endless speculation on man’s existence, the why and where and when and how of man’s being, an endless mentation that would have drowned me; and I made up my mind to leave university and find the answer to the question that compelled me to go to university in the first place to study the great thinkers of the world—the haunting question, who am I?

Etymologically speaking, philosophy means love of wisdom, and I needed all the wisdom I could get to find my true self; so, where else would I go to find the answer to my haunting question but to the mother of all disciplines? But I did not leave university empty-handed. I found Gurdjieff’s system while studying philosophy, and with his teaching of “work on oneself” I went out into the world and set my feet firmly into the “terra firma” of my own existential life, and I built my life upon the truth of my own personal experiences.

I knew in the depths of my soul that the me who did what he did that godforsaken night was me but not me, but how could this be? I did not plan to do what I did, I was suddenly possessed by this other me that compelled to do what I did; but it wasn’t the me I knew myself to be. It was another me, a false me; and I dropped everything and went on my quest to find out who this other me was. That’s how my quest for my real self began.

I boarded an ocean liner in New York City and sailed to Naples, and from there I took a bus to Paris and then a train to the Alpine city of Annecy in the Haute-Savoie region of France where I lived for a year. An Italian friend of mine in Canada had a brother and sister living in Annecy, who welcomed me; and that’s when my quest for my true self began in earnest, despite the fact that I had been called to become a seeker in high school when I read Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge. And I did go wherever I was called to find my true self, whatever price it cost me; until one day I was called to pay the final price, which I wrote about in my most excruciatingly personal memoir The Pearl of Great Price.

So I experienced the alpha and omega of my personal identity, from my embryonic un-self-conscious spiritual self in the Body of God to the birth of my reflective self-consciousness in my existential lifetime as a higher primate, which I confirmed in one of my past-life regressions, and all the way through many more incarnations to the happy resolution of my essential and existential self in my current lifetime, and when I hear all this talk today on the hot topic of personal identity and gender politics, which got professor Jordan Peterson into hot water, I find myself smiling at all the confusion that I could have been a part of had I completed my academic studies and garnered a doctorate in philosophy.

But I would never have ventured down the path I was called to had I not believed in God, the immortal soul, and the afterlife; this was implicit to my belief system, and in my quest for my true self I became more and more conscious of what I believed in. This is what inspired the spiritual musing that I posted on my blog Friday, February 2, 2018:

Why People Don’t Believe in God,

the Immortal Soul, or Afterlife

            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 innate belief that I suffered the existential dread, anguish, and despair that I did growing up Roman 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 that this purpose was.

And then in grade twelve 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 intrepid 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 the memoir of my parallel life, The Summoning of Noman; but in my awareness that I was a lost soul whose purpose was to find my true self, I solved the riddle of the human condition which I worked out in book My Writing Life, the 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 the afterlife and others don’t; and 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 Tolstoy unsuccessfully explored in The Death of Ivan Ilych, a problem that stems from the paradoxical nature of our soul self—our existential self and essential self, as the German mystic and teacher of the gnostic way of life Karlfield Graf Durckeim came to describe the dual 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 unrealized truth of our soul self as I have come to experience it and which will no doubt be subject to the ridicule and resistance of arrogant incredulity 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 existential ego/shadow personality that I spent most of my life studying and resolving as I lived my own gnostic path of conscious self-individuation inspired by Gurdjieff and chronicled in my memoir The Pearl of Great Price, the story of the self-realization of the “I am” consciousness of my soul self.

Without going into detail, which I’ve done 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 that the world will have to the gnostic truth of my spiritual rebirth), I also experienced wholeness and singleness of self, which I creatively spelled out in my memoir Gurdjieff Was Wrong, But His Teaching Works; that’s how I came to solve the riddle of our paradoxical nature that bedevils everyone, especially philosophers and scientists alike, and it all has to do with what Jesus revealed in his cryptic teaching about making our two selves into one.

In he 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; values like truthfulness, kindness, and goodness.

“These leaves, our bodily personalities, seem identical, /but the globe of soul fruit /we make, /each is elaborately /unique,” said the mystic Sufi poet Rumi, which speaks to what Carl 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 soul self.

This of course presupposes a belief in reincarnation (again, subject to the 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 the 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 life we are born into that leads one to not believe in God, the immortal soul, and the 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 spiritual 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 deep despair as the unbearable sense of their own nothingness is ipso facto incapable of believing in God, the immortal soul, and the afterlife because it is the 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 of one’s own nothingness simply precludes it. Which explains why one would be an atheist.  

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 own being, the consciousness of our existential self that is only conscious of its own mortality and the consequent 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 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 imperative to wholeness and completeness.

 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 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 soul 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.”

———

          This is why I simply cannot get caught up in the gender politics and identity confusion of the LGBTQ community that called Professor Peterson to refute Bill C-16, the amendment to the Human Rights Act that would have compelled him to use gender neutral pronouns to identify whatever the gender variations wished to call themselves, because he felt—and rightly so, as most of us believe—that it was a violation of our freedom of speech, and he refused to be compelled by government fiat to use gender neutral pronouns that weren’t organic to the language. It was an obscene piece of badly reasoned legislation.

The established pronouns for the male and female genders (he/him/his, she/his/hers, they/them/theirs) were sufficient to define the gender binary reality of human nature, and he shouted NO! to the amendment Bill C-16 and was heard loud and clear by the common-sense folk who are sick and tired of all this identity politics and political correctness nonsense that has made a travesty of truthfulness and good-faith logic; and that’s what catapulted citizen Peterson onto the world stage. And then he published 12 Rules for Life: And Antidote to Chaos to push back the poisonous tide of postmodern neo-Marxist bad-faith logic that has fostered the mind-boggling chaos that is fueling identity politics and political correctness.

Of course, I’m speaking from a perspective that presupposes the reincarnational history of one’s personal identity, the many lifetimes of growth and individuation of one’s essential self that is genetically imbedded in the cellular memory of each new incarnation; this is why I’ve come to believe that this whole LGBTQ gender confusion issue has less to do with nature and nurture and more to do with the history of one’s own past lives.

In Seth Speaks, The Eternal Validity of the Soul, by Jane Roberts, the psychic who channeled the higher collective entity called Seth, Seth verifies this perspective:

“As I mentioned earlier, each person lives both male and female lives. As a rule, conscious memory of these are not retained. To prevent oversimplification of the individual with his present sex, within the male there resides an inner personification of femaleness. This personification of femaleness in the male is the true meaning of what Jung called the ‘anima.’

The anima in the male is, therefore, the psychic memory and identification of all the previous female existences in which the inner self has been involved. It contains within it the knowledge of the present male’s past female histories, and the intuitive understanding of all the female qualities with which the personality is innately endowed…Maleness and femaleness are obviously not opposites, but merging tendencies…The animus and anima are, of course, highly charged psychically, but the origin of this psychic charge and the inner fascination are the result of a quite legitimate inner identification with these personified other-sex characteristics. They not only have a reality in the psyche, however, but they are imbedded in genetically codified data by the inner self—a genetic memory of past psychic events—transposed into the genetic memory of the very cells that compose the body.

Each inner self, adopting a new body, imposes upon it and upon its entire genetic makeup, memory of the past physical forms in which it has been involved. Now, the present characteristics usually overshadow the past ones. They are dominant, but the other characteristics are latent and present, built into the pattern” (Seth Speaks, The Eternal Validity of the Soul, by Jane Roberts, pp. 219, 220, 221).

So, there’s more to personal identity than meets the eye then; and I’ve come to believe that this whole LGBTQ gender confusion issue stems from our past lives, as Seth confirmed.

But I worked this out for myself long before I found confirmation in my reading, and I’ve come to the conclusion that a soul that lives three or four consecutive lifetimes as a woman and is reborn as a male will have overshadowing memories of being a woman, and these memories of its female gender will push up into the mind of its male body; this is why a gay man will say, “I was born in the wrong body. I should have been a woman.” And the same with a soul that lives three or four consecutive lifetimes as a man and reincarnates as woman; it will have such strong memories of being a man that it will say, “I was born in the wrong body. I should have been a man.” This is what causes gender confusion; and as offensive as this may be to some people, I believe this is a deep soul-betrayal of one’s sexual identity and morally torturous for the LGBTQ person who cannot resolve their feelings of being the opposite gender. This is why Dr. Peterson calls trans people confused.

But to come to this perspective, one has to take evolution into their own hands and resolve their inner and outer self and become one self, whole and complete; and that speaks to the imperative of One Rule to Live By: Be Good, which has a way to go yet before I have enough context to do the noble virtue of goodness the justice it deserves…

One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 6: The Paradox of Our Shadow Self

CHAPTER 6

The Paradox of Our Shadow Self

          Carl Jung came up with the word shadow in his study of the human personality. In his essay “On the Psychology of the Unconscious” he speaks of the shadow as the other in us, the unconscious personality of the same sex, the reprehensible inferior, the other that embarrasses or shames us.  “By shadow I mean the ‘negative’ side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and the content of the personal unconscious,” says Jung; which makes the shadow “both the awful thing that needs redemption, and the suffering redeemer who can provide it,” as the editors of Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature  Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams describe the hidden dark side of our personality.

In a word, our shadow self is who we are not that desperately wants to be who we are. It is our paradoxical self that we don’t want to acknowledge. It is the hidden, repressed dark side of our conscious ego personality, and just because we refuse to acknowledge our dark shadow self does not mean it does not exist. We behave as though it doesn’t, but it exists despite our refusal to acknowledge it. This is why Jung said that it takes great moral courage to see our shadow, which points to the imperative of One Rule to Live By: Be Good—the redemptive power of the most noble virtue.

But it’s much too soon yet to get to the point of my imperative, both personal and literary. I need sufficient context to make the point relevant, let alone credible. So, let me quote a spiritual musing that I posted on my blog Saturday January 20, 2018 that speaks to the reality of the self that is who we are not but desperately wants to be who we are:

The Eyes Behind Her Eyes

“The poet is the seer; the poem is the act of appropriation.”

SOUL at the WHITE HEAT

—Joyce Carol Oates.

            I knew I was being called to write a poem as I watched an interview with the writer Iris Murdoch on the program Modern Philosophy on YouTube, hosted by the eloquent professor of philosophy and author Bryan Magee, the topic being “Philosophy and Literature,” but I wasn’t called by what the Oxford professor and novelist Iris Murdoch had to say about philosophy and literature, but by the beguiling look of her eyes, a look that I often see in deeply shadow-afflicted people, but never as pronounced as it was in Iris Murdoch’s wary blue eyes that inspired my poem “The Eyes Behind Her Eyes” that I’ve been summoned by my muse  to expand upon in today’s spiritual musing—

The Eyes Behind Her Eyes

She had four eyes, two eyes

to look, and two eyes to see,

and she could not tell which

eyes were which.

Oxford Professor, writer, wife,

and childless by choice, a fluid

woman like no other, and the

breach of her eyes grew wider.

Tutoring young Oxfordian

minds by day, she stalked the

corridors of culture by night

to appease her hunger.

Danger abounded as she looked

for what she could not see,

and the harder she looked, the

more the danger grew.

Novel after novel, essay after

philosophical essay, but the

breach grew wider and wider

as her mind grew darker, —

And she died of Alzheimer’s.

The magic of poetry is its power to see into the mystery of life, and I had no idea what my poem was trying to tell me; all I knew was that the first two lines came to me unbidden and I had to work out the rest of the poem, which I did. I went online and researched Iris Murdoch’s life, and then I did some thoughtful editing and rewriting; but this did not alter the essential insight of my poem which had to do with giving visual clarity to the Jungian concept of the shadow that I saw in Iris Murdoch’s eyes, it only enhanced the poetic imagery. This is how the cognitive mind works with the writer’s creative unconscious.

Actually, the first two lines of my poem were not what they turned out to be in the finished poem; the first two lines went like this: “She had four eyes, /two up front, and two in the back.” This is how my muse captured Iris Murdoch’s shadow, which was so obvious to me that I could see her shadow as another personality with its own mind and emotions and distinct identity, hence the four eyes; and when the first lines of a poem come to me, I have to unpack them to see what my muse is trying to tell me. Nonetheless, I had to change the first two lines, because they created the wrong impression of having a set of eyes at the back of her head instead of having eyes within her eyes which was more accurate.

As I came to see after years of writing, our creative unconscious is infinitely wiser than our cognitive mind, but the cognitive mind has to do the work, and when the first lines of a poem come unbidden (sometimes, though rarely, a whole poem comes to me unbidden and nearly word perfect like my poem “What the Hell Is Going on Out There?)), I have no choice but to explore the given lines with thoughtful reflection, because if I don’t I will jeopardize my gift for writing poetry; which only means, really, that I’d have to work harder to pry out of my unconscious the glimmer of an insight.

But not with “The Eyes Behind Her Eyes.” This poem was easy to write once I had the first two lines, because they told me everything I needed to say about the shadow that I saw in Iris Murdoch’s eyes. Which isn’t to say that I was specifically given a poetic imperative to explore Iris Murdoch’s shadow, which I did anyway by researching her life online, but because the creative imperative of my poem was to introduce the idea that the shadow can be seen in a person’s eyes, and I had never seen the shadow as distinctly as I did in Iris Murdoch’s eyes. That’s why I had to write “The Eyes Behind Her Eyes.”

So, how did I know that she had such a distinct shadow personality? What made it stand out for me? What was its most distinguishing feature? What gave her shadow away?

This is almost impossible to answer, but I will try; and the best way to resolve this mystery would be to provide a context that allows for the shadow to be seen in a person’s eyes, a context that took me years to work out and which I creatively explored in my literary memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway and its sequel, My Writing Life: Reflections on My High School Hero and Literary Mentor Ernest “Papa” Hemingway, which brought my relationship with Hemingway’s paradoxical personality to resolution.

 In effect, then; like a mystery writer who knows the solution to his mystery before writing his novel, I will resort to the old saying that you can always tell a tree by its fruit. Let me say up front then, with all the gnostic certainty of personal experience and all the reading and writing and years of stalking the elusive shadow (my own primarily): the shadow is the unconscious persona of one’s most private, most selfish nature; and it follows that the more self-centered and selfish a person is, the more shadow-afflicted they will be. This is what inspired The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway and its sequel three years later, and what also gave Iris Murdoch’s shadow away in her conversation with Bryan Magee.

Selfishness is the essential nature of our shadow, and all of its consequent behavior (the most bitter fruits of the shadow tree are self-deception, vanity, and blind insensitivity), which I saw in Iris Murdoch’s eyes that set free the first two lines of my poem; so, I wrote my poem while I was in the grips of my daimon and then went online to research her life so I could flesh in my poem with biographical details that would confirm and expand my intuition, like the telling detail that Iris Murdoch had numerous sexual affairs before and after her marriage to the novelist and literary critic John Bayley, casual and passionate affairs with both men and women which were later verified by her posthumously published private letters.

I learned that Iris Murdoch was “gender fluid,” so I added the phrase “a fluid woman like no other” in my poem to reflect this detail of her private life, a critical detail that spoke to her voracious sexual appetite that compelled her to gratify her sexual desires over, and over, and over again.

“Memoirs by her husband, John Bayley, and Richard Eyre’s film Iris, in particular, defined her life around the poles of her defiant insistence on following her sexual desires where they took her,” wrote Sarah Churchwell in her review of Murdoch’s novel The Sea, the Sea.  Which isn’t to judge her morally; all that mattered to the imperative of my poem was the selfish nature of her private self, because the more rapacious one’s shadow is, the more distinct its identity will be, and I could see Iris Murdoch’s private shadow self as distinctly as I could see her erudite, sophisticated ego personality.

In my online research, it did not surprise me to learn that the basic themes of all her novels were “good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious,” because the more shadow-afflicted a person is, the more morally-conflicted they will be, and Iris Murdoch was a very conflicted woman which was revealed to me by the “breach of her eyes,” as I wrote in my poem, the distance between her two sets of eyes that was later confirmed by my research on her life, both private and public.

“Iris Murdoch is an odd and difficult subject. Both in artistic and personal terms, she is a one-off. She does not fit comfortably into any literary history and her life was a series of contradictions,” wrote Bryan Appleyard in his review of Iris Murdoch: A Life, by Peter Conradi, which is a perfect description of a deeply shadow-afflicted person, which Iris Murdoch’s eyes revealed to me.

Ironically, I’ve never read any of her novels or essays; but I did see the movie Iris based upon John Bayley’s first two memoirs of his wife, starring Kate Winslet as the young Iris and Dame Judi Dench as the older Iris who was ravaged and died of Alzheimer’s, a poignant portrayal of a philosopher/writer’s life who creatively explored truth through her novels, as novelists tend to do; and all I wanted to do with my poem was to give the reader a glimpse into the creative process of truth-seeking through poetry, which can be eerily revealing when inspired because there is often much more to a poem than even the poet can see; and in “The Eyes Behind her Eyes” I caught a faint glimmer of an insight into the possibility that Alzheimer’s disease may be as much psychologically induced as it is biologically based, an insight that is far beyond the scope of today’s science and far more telling about the shadow than even the most daring poet wants to imagine.

 Suffice to say then that I wrote my poem because it came to me unbidden to catch the shadow out, because the shadow is next-to-impossible to see. Only the inspired sight of a poet or mystic can see that the shadow is who we are not, the repressed and unresolved karmic energy of our ego/shadow personality, and what creates the “breach” between who we are not and who we are was what my muse was trying to tell me with “The Eyes Behind Her Eyes,” which I was called to expand upon in today’s spiritual musing.

——-—

There we are, then; a perspective on the shadow self from that state of consciousness that poets and mystics have access to. But who in the hell wants to believe that our shadow self is as real as our ego personality? And yet writers have always explored the shadow side of the human personality, like Dostoevsky did in his angst-ridden novel The Double; and as Oscar Wilde did in his soul-baring novel The Picture of Dorian Gray; and Robert Louis Stevenson in the best-known novel in the world on the deepest, darkest aspect of the human personality in his shocking tale of The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Those are the most obvious examples. But exploring the shadow side of life makes for the most compelling reading, and this theme can be found throughout literature; like in James Joyce’s Dubliners, specifically his story “The Counterpart,” or in Ernest Hemingway’s much more nuanced story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” that he said was his most autobiographical story, but which I seriously doubt because Hemingway was dangerously more revealing of his self-serving ego/shadow personality  in his most criticized novel Across the River and Into the Trees in which he projected his own pathetically besotted love for a 19-year-old Venetian girl called Adriana onto Colonel Cantwell’s infatuation with an 18-year-old Venetian girl called Renata, and I explored Ernest “Papa” Hemingway’s shadow-conflicted  personality in my book The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway that I sent to Professor Jordan Peterson, followed up three years later with my sequel My Writing Life in which I brought to resolution my understanding of my high school hero and literary mentor’s paradoxical personality.

I’ve been studying the shadow every since I became aware of my shadow in high school (around grade ten I began to sense my own falseness), and I’ve become very familiar with the psychology of the shadow self; but it’s next to impossible to expose the shadow to the light of day. I tried with my first novel What Would I Say Today If I Were to Die Tomorrow? and I paid dearly for my effort. My hometown was so disturbed—like an angry dog that had been rudely awakened—by my novel that Penny and I had to relocate to Georgian Bay for peace of mind; so, I know what it can cost a writer for exposing the dark shadow side of life in one’s writing. Look at what happened to James Joyce, who not only turned his home town of Dublin against him with his stories and novels, but his whole country; and now they celebrate him as one of Ireland’s greatest writers. Resentment runs deep, but it runs dry eventually.

This is why I admire professor Jordan Peterson for taking a stand and speaking truth to power to defend our inherent right to free speech and putting himself out there with his personally wrought 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos that scares the bejesus (the archetypal shadow) out of the nefariously mischievous spirit of postmodern nihilism and political correctness; but like everyone whose path can take them no further on their journey to wholeness and completeness, he was called to a higher path; and being painfully true to himself, he heeded the call and became a hierophant for today’s crazy world…