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…
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