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…
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