One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 13: There Are No Right or Wrong Paths in Life

CHAPTER 13

There Are No Right or Wrong Paths in Life

            If life itself is the way, it follows logically that there are no right or wrong paths in life; but this only makes sense from the perspective of the third and final stage of evolution which transcends the unresolved paradox of one’s nature; this is what can make Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life so damn infuriating—because it’s right without knowing why!      

And that’s the irony of the human condition. Conscience tells us what is right and what is wrong, but if there are no right or wrong paths in life what does it really matter? The nihilists tell us that morality is relative, so one way is as good as another—which is only true from the perspective of one’s unresolved nature (“I am what I am not, and I am not what I am,” said Jean-Paul Sartre, which led him to the nihilistic conclusion that “man is a useless passion”); so, what does it mean then that there are no right or wrong paths in life? And if this is the case, why are so many young people resonating with Jordan Peterson’s message?

On his book tour in Los Angeles, he gave a talk on his12 Rules for Life, and the following day he was out walking in the city with his wife when a car pulled over and a young Latino jumped out. He recognized Jordan Peterson and told him he had been to his talk and had been following his lectures on YouTube and had to thank him for what he had done for him and his father, and excitedly he got his father who was in the car with him and full of emotion they hugged and both thanked the good professor for reconciling their broken relationship; and there are many similar stories.

In a conversation with John Anderson, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, he shared a story of young man who had come up to him at the book signing after his talk but who was so overwhelmed with gratitude that he had to thank him for getting him back together with his father whom he hadn’t seen in ten years. Peterson was so moved when he shared this with John Anderson that he choked up and broke into tears.

So, it’s no wonder that he’s been described as a prophet for his message of hope. But not everyone would agree. Cynical critics have called him a “a prophet, for profit,” because he’s making loads of money from his book tour talks, which always sell out, the sales of his book which have hit the million mark and soon to be translated into forty languages, plus his Patreon platform that generate a monthly revenue of thousands; but he smiles at his resentful detractors and continues to march to the beat of his own drum. Bravo, Jordan!

In his epilogue to How to Read and Why, professor Harold Bloom, who calls himself a Gnostic Jew, brings his uniquely brilliant and staggeringly comprehensive life-long study of literature to the simple, but unresolved conclusion with the words of Rabbi Tarphon: “It is not necessary for you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”

The work? What work? Life? To live life with purpose and meaning? Is that the work? And if so, how? But more to the point, why? All of his life, professor Bloom sought an answer to life’s purpose and meaning in the great literature of the world (he was born with  preternatural reading skills, reading up to one thousand pages an hour in the early years but only five hundred or so pages an hour in his eighties, and he was also gifted with a “scandalous memory” and can recite poetry at will), and of all the thousands of writers that he read, studied, and taught at Yale University for more than half a century, he declared William Shakespeare to be his god of literature; but for all of his genius, even Shakespeare could not satisfy the longing in his soul for wholeness and completeness, which is why he concluded his book How to Read and Why with Rabbi Tarphon’s saying: “It’s not necessary for you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it,” which leaves us hanging.

But the wise Rabbi also said: “The day is short and the work is great, and the laborers sluggish, and the wages are abundant, and the master of the house is demanding,” which, when decoded, gives us a clue to the gnostic wisdom of his cryptic saying.

Work is life itself, which bears its own meaning and purpose; the day is short means that we have to get the most meaning out of life in the short period of time we have to live it;  work is great means that life is hard; the laborers are sluggish means that life can get weary and fatiguing; the wages are abundant means that life is rich and rewarding in meaning and purpose; and the master of the house is demanding means that the imperative of our life, our guiding inner self, demands that we do our best in life. But again, this leaves us hanging.

It certainly left professor Bloom hanging, because it did not resolve his life-long need to know the meaning and purpose of life that literature could not satisfy; and he brings How to Read and Why to closure by turning to his god of literature, William Shakespeare.

“Why, if the work cannot be completed, are we not free to desist from it?” he asks, puzzled by what seemed like a contradiction; and he goes on: “To answer that is not a simple matter, particularly since the greatest of all writers, Shakespeare, did desist from his marvelous labor of reinventing the English language and human personality (Bloom credits Shakespeare for much of Freud’s psychology). It fascinates me and saddens me that Shakespeare gave up writing, after his collaboration with John Fletcher on The Two Noble Kinsmen in 1613. Shakespeare was just forty-nine, and he lived another three years. Perhaps illness dimmed Shakespeare’s final years, but the Shakespearean parts of The Two Noble Kinsmen show a new style and a new consciousness, which should have been developed. In the remainder of this epilogue, I want to contrast Shakespeare’s abandonment of the work with Tarphon’s insistence that we are not free to abandon it,” and then professor Bloom sums up Shakespeare’s “new consciousness” with the moral injunction to live out one’s life with equanimity, because that’s the best that we can do.

“Does it matter whether one is required to complete the work or whether one is free to desist from the work if you must meet a final appointment (death) that certainly you did not make?” asks professor Bloom. “Is bearing yourself with equanimity sufficient?”

“At sixty-nine, I do not know whether Tarphon or Shakespeare is right. And yet, though the moral decision cannot be made merely by reading well, the question of how to read and why are more than ever essential to help us decide whose work to perform,” Bloom writes, bringing to closure How to Read and Why but never really penetrating the secret of the work.

He was sixty-nine when he wrote How to Read and Why, and he continued to read and write and teach well into his eighties (The Daemon Knows, written in his mid-eighties, is my favorite); but literature still could not satisfy the longing in his soul for wholeness and completeness, and good old Bloom had to satisfy his longing for wholeness and completeness by adopting a Falstaffian attitude to life.

Shakespeare’s Falstaff had an enormous appetite for life, whom professor Bloom explores in Falstaff: Give Me Life that was published in April,4, 2017; but it saddens me that such an unbelievably gifted reader and literary scholar and teacher who has been called “the world’s greatest literary critic” could not satisfy the longing in his soul with all the wisdom to be found in the great literature of the world and had to resign himself to “take what time remains pretty much as it comes,” but dignified with equanimity.

And this is why the short story writer Katherine Mansfield sought Gurdjieff out at his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France to satisfy that longing in her soul that literature could not satisfy either. “Literature is not enough,” she said to her editor of the New Age journal in London, Alfred R. Orage, who also became a follower of the enigmatic mystic/philosopher, because Gurdjieff’s teaching, which strangely enough he called the Work, promised to fill the hole in Katherine’s soul; but I’ve written about this in Gurdjieff Was Wrong, But His Teaching Works and need not bother here. I simply want to emphasis that life is not enough to satisfy the longing in our soul for wholeness and completeness; but life can make one ready, which brings me back to professor Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life and a spiritual musing that I wrote a month or so ago:

What Does Life Expects of Us?

I picked up an old Psychology Today magazine (June 2012) from the stack of magazines on my book shelf by the door of my writing room on my way to the john this morning, because I cannot go to the john and not read something. I get some of my best ideas in the john, and as I read an old article, which I had highlighted in blue marker, titled “The Atheist at the Breakfast Table” by Bruce Grierson, one of my highlights jumped out at me and an old idea for a spiritual musing grabbed me with daemonic intensity because this idea has tried to grab me before but not quite enough to compel me to explore it; but like all of my ideas for poetry, stories, and spiritual musings, when its time has come to be given expression I have no choice but to see it through. So, what was the highlight that set the idea for today’s musing free?

This is the paragraph that grabbed me: “Tepley was raised by observant parents who celebrated the holidays and kept a kosher home. He and his brother were bar mitzvahed. But cognitive dissonance soon ensued. ‘In religious school, God was frequently presented as just and merciful. But how could a just and merciful God allow the Holocaust? I know I wasn’t unique in asking that.’”

“Why cognitive dissonance?” I asked myself, and my idea for today’s spiritual musing was set free. I’ve put the sentence that liberated the idea into bold italics, the idea that people are puzzled by a just and merciful God allowing such horrendous suffering in the world like the Holocaust, which seemed like a contradiction in terms (hence the cognitive dissonance), and when I finished my business in the john I jotted the idea down in my notebook to expound upon in today’s spiritual musing…           

I sense that this is going to be another one of those dangerous musings, because it’s going to step so far outside the box of conventional thought that it will make some readers uneasy; but this is what writers do, explore new pathways for the mind to pursue. Isn’t this what Shelley meant in his essay “A Defense of Poetry” when he wrote: “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration”?

This is what makes writers dangerous, because every now and then they are blessed with “an unapprehended inspiration” that threatens conventional thought, as I was blessed with the idea for today’s spiritual musing that opened a window onto human suffering that defies man’s disbelief that a just and merciful God would allow such devastating suffering like the Holocaust, a cognitive dissonance that paralyzes the mind and keeps one a prisoner to himself.

But as serendipity would have it, once I committed myself to writing today’s spiritual musing I was blessed with the surprising coincidence of two movies on Netflix which addressed my “unapprehended inspiration” of today’s spiritual musing: God’s Not Dead, Part 1, and God’s Not Dead, Part 2, both movies speaking to the issue of God’s existence (just and merciful, notwithstanding), which the truculent atheist Professor Radisson does not believe in but which his Christian student Josh does because his faith won’t allow him to deny the existence of God and sign a statement for Professor Radisson’s philosophy class stating that God is dead. All the other students in the class have signed the statement denying God’s existence, and Professor Radisson challenges Josh to defend his position to the class; and the ensuing drama of their conflicting points of view makes for a surprisingly engaging movie.

So, just what was my “unapprehended inspiration” for today’s spiritual musing? What did I see about man’s relationship with God and suffering that is so far outside the box of conventional thought that it will be sure to take readers so far beyond their comfort zone they may might just think I’m crazy?

This insight did not come to me without a history, because no idea is born ex nihilo; it has a history, and its history was born of my quest for my true self, which I happily realized and wrote about in my memoir The Pearl of Great Price, a history that delves into the mystery of the evolutionary process of man’s paradoxical nature—our real and false self, or being and non-being as the case may be; because in the resolution of my outer self (my ego/shadow personality) and my inner self, I came to the realization that human suffering is Nature’s way of resolving the enantiodromiac dynamic of man’s paradoxical nature and making our two selves into one, which absolves God of all responsibility for tragedies like the Holocaust, and personal suffering as well, like professor Radisson’s mother’s death by cancer which drove him to abandon his Christian faith and embrace the doctrine of atheism. This also happened to a Canadian writer and social activist that I’m familiar with whose precious pride gave me the insight I needed to know why someone would become an atheist, and I wrote a poem to articulate my insight:

The Making of an Atheist

She stared out her living room window

lost to the world she knew and loved; three

hours later she returned from the farthest

regions of her mind where the great void had

swallowed her whole, and she gave the rest

of her life to helping others, founding a home

for unwed mothers and an AIDS hospice for

gays among many other charitable causes,

and all because a drunken driver had run

over her golden boy. She went to church and

knelt for hours begging God to tell her why

her twenty-year old son had to die, but God

did not respond, and she walked away with

her unyielding pride leaving her simple faith

that she had inherited from her caring mother

and philandering father who had abandoned

her when she was twelve behind her. “Saint

Joan,” they called her, for all her good works,

and they named a street after her when

she died of inoperable cancer.

Vanity dies hard. That’s what makes this spiritual musing dangerous, the unbearable realization that human suffering serves Nature’s purpose for man’s evolution, which is to resolve the dual consciousness of our paradoxical nature and make us whole. As each plant grows from a seed and becomes in the end an oak tree, so man must become what he is meant to be. He ought to get there, but most get stuck,” said Carl Jung; but this can only make sense in light of karma and reincarnation, because man cannot possibly realize his true self in one lifetime alone. It may be impossible to comprehend, but suffering is our friend.

My “unapprehended inspiration” for today’s spiritual musing then came to me again while reading the article “The Atheist at the Breakfast Table” the other morning, which was creatively consolidated with the coincidence of the two God’s Not Dead movies that delved into the lives of believers and non-believers alike; but as informative as the Psychology Today article and the movies were, I drew upon my own life to flesh in today’s spiritual musing, because like the student Jason and professor Radisson in the movies, the only truth that matters is the truth of one’s own experiences, and mine initiated me into the divine mystery of human suffering that speaks more to a just and merciful God than it does to the non-existence of God. And what a relief it is to know that even atrocities like the Holocaust serve Nature’s purpose of bringing man’s evolving self-consciousness to spiritual resolution. But only within the context of karma and reincarnation.

That’s the answer that Victor Frankl, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning, was seeking for all the brutal suffering that he and his fellow inmates in the Nazi concentration camps had to endure, the merciful answer to the question that haunts everyone, what does life expect of us? Because suffering that appears on the surface to be senseless and gratuitous resolves our paradoxical nature and makes us whole. And that’s probably where the gnostic saying that suffering is good for the soul came from.

———

            I may be stretching it, but I don`t think it was a coincidence that Gurdjieff called his teaching the Work, which he simply defined as “work on oneself” (a transformative teaching of making our two selves into one) because, as he tells us in Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous, he assembled his teaching from esoteric sources that he sought out in his indefatigable  search of an answer to the meaning and purpose of life in general and man’s life in particular, and Rabbi Tarphon’s saying, “It’s not necessary for you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it,” because my instincts tell me that Gurdjieff’s meaning of the Work and Rabbi Tarphon’s the work are the same; and, in the simplest terms possible, the meaning of the work for both of these mystic philosophers is the fulfillment of the imperative of our inner self, which is to realize wholeness and completeness; this is why Gurdjieff said that man must complete what Nature cannot finish and Rabbi Tarphon said that man must not desist from doing the work.

I lived Gurdjieff’s teaching and “worked” on myself with pathological commitment, and it awakened me to the secret way of life, and I realized my true self; so I know what it means to realize wholeness and completeness, and I can say with gnostic certainty what Gurdjieff meant by the Work and what Rabbi Tarphon implied with his saying that one must not desist from doing the work; but neither Gurdjieff nor Rabbi Tarphon spelled out the vital fact that one simply cannot complete the work in one lifetime alone, because Nature can only take one so far in their destined purpose to wholeness and completeness. One has to take evolution into their own hands to do this, and this is what Gurdjieff’s teaching is all about and why Rabbi Tarpon said that it was not necessary to complete the work but neither was one free to desist from doing the work. And this is the context from which I drew the inspiration for my musing “What Does Life Expect of Us?”

But I would be remiss if I did not also credit Victor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning for the question of my spiritual musing, because while in the concentration camp Victor Frankl came to the paradigm-shifting realization that to survive the horrific conditions in the camp they had to change their attitude about life. The suffering was so unbearable that many inmates gave up on life and wanted to die. “I have nothing to expect from life any more,” many inmates said; and Victor Frankl, who was already a psychiatrist when imprisoned and working on his new method of healing which he called Logotherapy, had to do something to lift the spirit of his fellow inmates; and he tells us in Man’s Search for Meaning how he stepped out of the paradigm that kept them trapped in a perspective that simply could not make sense of all their suffering. He writes:

“What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual” (Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor E. Frankl, p. 98; bold italics mine).

I highlighted that sentence because it’s the core message of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. The good professor came to see that we are all trapped in the existential paradigm of life that is (please, pardon the comparison) not unlike a concentration camp, and the inevitable suffering of life can get to the best of us; and we despair.

Professor Peterson had the wisdom—which he drew from Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and especially from his hero Alexander Solzhenitsyn who also suffered in the Soviet Gulag and chronicled in his own book The Gulag Archipelago—to articulate this unbearable truth and confront it with the courage of the archetypal hero that he was called upon by life to become when he could no longer suffer the coercing forces of political correctness and had to speak to Bill C-16 that threatened free speech and thought. This was professor Peterson’s tipping point, and the world finally got the hierophant that the collective voice of my poem “What the Hell Is Going on Out There?” was calling for…

One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 12: The Mystique of Jordan B. Peterson

CHAPTER 12

The Mystique of Jordan B. Peterson

          Our life gives birth to its own wisdom through personal experience. By wisdom, I mean the sacred knowledge of life that nourishes our soul with meaning and purpose, and which for all intents and purposes can simply be called the Logos.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines Logos as the divine wisdom manifest in the creation, government, and redemption of the world. Logos is also defined as the Word of God, or principle of divine reason and creative order, identified in the Gospel of John with the second person of the Trinity incarnate in Jesus Christ, which is why Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

By Father, Jesus meant Logos. This is why he said, “I and my Father are one.” Which did not make Jesus the sole savior of the world as Christianity contends; it made him one with the way, the redemptive wisdom of the Logos. In the most esoteric language possible, Jesus became his own way when he became one with the Logos; just as anyone can become their own way when they become one with the Logos. This was Christ’s message to the world.

In my efforts to become one with the Logos, I “worked” on myself with such a pathological commitment to my personal ethic (made up of Gurdjieff’s teaching, my Royal Dictum (my edict of self-denial), and my personal ideal of being good and kind and honest and truthful (God, was this ideal difficult to live by being in business for myself, which often called for Herculean moral integrity, and my conscience still stings with pain at the times I compromised my ideal for my business!) that I developed a sixth sense for hearing and seeing the Logos whenever it spoke to me through life experience, regardless of what I was doing—working, reading, writing, watching TV, or whatever; and I grew to understand what Jesus meant when he said that his sayings and parables were for those who had ears to hear and eyes to see, which became the inspiration for my intensely personal but highly imaginative novel Jesus Wears Dockers.

I never knew when the Logos (I didn’t call it Logos then; I simply recognized the sacred knowledge of life as the way, which I later discerned to be the secret way and omniscient guiding principle of life that became the imperative of my memoir The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity) would speak to me, but the more I nourished my soul with the sacred knowledge of the way, the more I grew in spiritual consciousness and put myself in danger of becoming infected with what I came to identify as the salvation bug, or  messiah virus.

Many people become infected with this treacherous virus, and there’s no shortage of stories of cult leaders that have seduced people with their teaching, like the leader of an offshoot Christian solar cult teaching that I lived for three years which did irreparable damage to my eyesight (the solar techniques burnt two tiny pin holes in the retina of my right eye and one pin hole in the retina of my left eye) before I recognized it for what it was when I flew to Reno, Nevada for a weekend seminar where I met the cult leader for the first time and shook his hand and instantly saw him for the deceitful manipulator that he was.

 But that’s a story I’ve reserved for my fiction (my working title is The Sunworshipper), if ever I get the courage to write it, as well as another spiritual teaching that I lived and studied for many years when Gurdjieff’s teaching had done all it could for me.

This was a New Age spiritual teaching that I finally walked away from when it had nothing more to teach me about the seductive power of Spiritual Masters, and I’m waiting impatiently to write about it (it plays a thematic role in my memoir The Pearl of Great Price); and the point of these humiliating disclosures is that gnostic wisdom comes with a heavy price, as the spiritual musing that I was called to write last year sadly illustrates:

Chemistry of the Soul

Friday, April 21, 2017, not yet summer but nearing the end of what the poet T. S. Elliot called the cruelest month of the year, a dull grey dismal day too cold to sit on the deck to have a tipple, or finish reading my book Paris Without End, The True Story of Hemingway’s First Wife, so I asked Penny if she wanted to watch a movie in the cozy comfort of my writing room.

She said yes, and I found a movie on Netflix called The Light Between Oceans, starring Michael Fassbender as the lighthouse keeper, whose portrayal of C. G. Jung in A Dangerous Method completely won me over, Alicia Vikander as the lighthouse keeper’s wife, whom I didn’t know, and Rachel Weisz who played the birth mother of the infant child in this poignant drama, and whom I fell in love with the first time I saw her starring with Ralph Fiennes in The Constant Gardner, and we cozied up in our two sofa reading chairs and watched the movie that so moved me to tears it stirred up the root of an idea that I’ve had gestating in my unconscious for several years, and that’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing….

I had unfinished business with Hemingway since I wrote The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway three years ago, or I would not have been called back to Hemingway by my relentless muse to write the sequel My Writing Life, Reflections On My High School Hero and Literary Mentor Ernest “Papa” Hemingway; and all of my new reading on the iconic writer whose simple prose introduced the modern world to a new style of writing was giving me a deeper insight into the enantiodromiac process of Hemingway’s conflicted ego/shadow personality, which was brought to light with spontaneous delight when the lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne in The Light Between Oceans had to wrestle with a moral dilemma that he knew in the pit of his stomach would one day come back to haunt him if he did not choose wisely, just as Hemingway did when he was torn between his deep love for his wife Hadley and the other woman he had fallen in love with, Pauline Pfeiffer who ended up becoming his second wife.

“That’s it!” I exclaimed, when the lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne chose against his gut feeling to comfort his grieving wife who had just suffered her second miscarriage, jarring Penny from her comfort. “That’s the human condition in action! That’s the grinding of the soul that makes for great literature! That’s the chemistry of the soul!”

Penny was puzzled by my outburst, but I was excited, as I always am when an idea for a spiritual musing springs free from my unconscious, and I shot out of my chair and jotted down the title of today’s spiritual musing in my Indigo Hemingway Notebook that Penny’s sister had given me for Christmas— “Chemistry of the Soul.”

But what was the lighthouse keeper’s moral dilemma that set this idea free, a moral dilemma that by miraculous happenstance was no less soul-wrenching and life-changing than Ernest Hemingway’s marital dilemma that I was just reading about again in Paris Without End, The True Story of Hemingway’s First Wife?

First, let me spell out what I mean by this exciting, gnosis-laden idea “chemistry of the soul,” and then I will explain how it was set free by the lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne’s moral dilemma that instantly brought to mind Hemingway’s marital dilemma that I was all-too familiar with and coincidentally just happened to be reading about again in Gioia Diliberto’s biography Paris Without End, The True Story of Hemingway’s First Wife.

The phrase “chemistry of the soul” just came to me out of the clear blue when I made the connection between the lighthouse keeper’s moral dilemma and Ernest Hemingway’s marital dilemma, but this is the phrase that my creative unconscious gave me to capture my spontaneous insight of what a moral dilemma can do to one’s soul, because I knew from all the reading I had done on Ernest Hemingway what his marital dilemma had done to him when he chose to betray his wife Hadley for his lover Pauline, which gave me the insight to foresee what the lighthouse keeper’s moral dilemma would do to him if he made a decision that went against his gut feeling; that’s why I burst out: “That’s the human condition in action! That’s the grinding of the soul that makes for great literature! That’s the chemistry of the soul!” Because I knew, I simply knew that the lighthouse keeper was going to put his soul through the grinding mill of life if he chose against his gut feeling, and he was going to suffer just as Ernest Hemingway suffered for choosing to go against his better nature when he chose to betray his loving wife for his seductive, inveigling lover.

“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,” said Shakespeare; but why? Why would conscience, man’s moral center and guiding star, make cowards of us all if not for the onerous responsibility that goes with making a decision that conscience demands of us?

Hemingway’s conscience demanded of him the moral imperative to be true to his wife Hadley, which meant that he would have to fight off his sexual/romantic attraction for Pauline Pfeiffer; but he couldn’t. He wanted it all, and he was too weak to fight off his attraction for his lover.

That’s what made the budding young writer, who would one day win the Nobel Prize for Literature, a coward. Ironically, his moral cowardice caused the fatal wound in his soul that gave him the daemonic fuel for some of his best stories; that’s what I meant by “chemistry of the soul,” because Hemingway’s fatal wound ground his soul from lover to lover until he could bear himself no longer and he killed himself, and I knew that the lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne would put his soul through the same grinding mill if he capitulated to his grieving wife’s desire to keep the infant child that they found in the boat with her dead father that had washed up on the shore of Janus Island in Western Australia where he was the lighthouse keeper; he knew in his gut that they should seek out the infant child’s birth mother, but they didn’t, and that decision came back to haunt them. A story that made for a great novel by M. L. Stedman, which became a great movie by the same title, The Light Between Oceans.

Ernest Hemingway left his wife for his lover, and that decision haunted him for the rest of his life, which he sadly owned up to in his bitter/sweet memoir A Moveable Feast that he was still working on just before taking his own life with his favorite bird shotgun at his home in Ketchum, Idaho: “When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.” He was reflecting on the decision he made to leave Hadley for Pauline, and he regretted it so much that he would rather have died had he known what his moral cowardice would do to him.

  I watched The Light Between Oceans with anxious anticipation, because I knew that once Tom Sherbourne and his wife Isabel decided to keep the infant child and raise it as their own instead of notifying the authorities that one day life would call them to account for their moral transgression; and that’s what I meant by “chemistry of the soul,” which is a poetic way of saying that life has a way of grinding down the moral grist of one’s soul, and I was no less angry at the lighthouse keeper for not being true to his conscience as I was for my high school hero and literary mentor Ernest Hemingway for betraying his faithful, loving wife Hadley for his calculating, seductive lover Pauline Pfeiffer. But then, where would we get our great literature from if not for the moral grinding of our soul?

———

            When Carl Jung wrote in The Red Book, “This life is the way, the long sought-after way to the unfathomable, which we call divine. There is no other way, all other ways are false paths,” I understood exactly what he meant, because I had exhausted many paths before I realized that life itself is the way to one’s true self; but how? And why?

These are the question that underlie the message that professor Jordan Peterson points to in 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos; and because he does not yet know the how and the why of the imperative of the way to one’s true self, his message bears the existential anxiety of unknowing. But the imperative of the way is and has always been to reconcile one’s outer life with one’s inner life to resolve the paradox of one’s enantiodromiac nature.

“Get your life in order!” exclaims the good professor to the young people who attend his lectures, and they resonate with the implicit redemptive message of the way but can’t quite apprehend the imperative of the way; and that’s the mystique of Jordan B. Peterson that imbues him with a charisma that mystifies everyone, including himself…

One Rule to Live By: Be Good. Chapter 11: On the Effect of Jordan Peterson's Message

CHAPTER 11

On the Effect of Jordan Peterson’s Message

“God,” said I, “be my help and stay secure;

I’ll think of the Leech Gatherer on the lonely moor!”

           

“Resolution and Independence”

—William Wordsworth

I’m not one given to despair, though I’ve had more occasions than I care to remember to do so; but whenever the spirit of this soul-sucking demon tries to possess me, I turn to one of my favorite poems to chase this demon back to hell where it came from—William Wordsworth’s devastatingly personal poem, “Resolution and Independence.”

Wordsworth was given to mood swings— “But, as it sometimes chanceth, from the might /Of joy in minds that can no further go, /As high as we have mounted in delight /In our dejection do we sink as low…” And it so happened that one morning when he went for a walk in the moors, as was his habit, he began full of cheer; but then despair began to set in, a despair so deep that it cast a devastating pall over his creative spirit— “We Poets in our youth begin in gladness, /But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.”

And here the poem takes a turn that speaks to the mystery of the merciful law of divine synchronicity (why the world refuses to see the miraculous choreography of the omniscient guiding principle of life continues to beggar my mind!), the poet comes upon a stranger, “The oldest man he seemed that ever wore gray hairs” whose indomitable spirit would chase  Wordsworth’s cursed demon back to hell where it came from, a lonely Leech Gatherer who seemed to the poet “Like one whom I had met with in a dream; /Or like a man from some far region sent, /To give me human strength, by apt admonishment…”

One has to read the complete poem to appreciate he healing grace that Wordsworth experienced from his synchronous experience with that decrepit old man “with so firm a mind” conning for leeches in the lonely moor just as his black demon possessed him but which could not withstand the might and dignity of that decrepit old man’s noble spirit and had to flee back to hell where it had come from, an experience that affected William Wordsworth so deeply that he made a point to remind himself of the Leech Gatherer on the lonely moor whenever his black demon tried to possess him again—“God,” said I, “be my help and stay secure; /I’ll think of the Leech Gatherer on the lonely moor!”

I intended to start this chapter with a thought that came to me on my drive to my hairstylist’s home yesterday morning, a thought which strangely enough was coincidentally confirmed by something she said to me while cutting my hair; but the creative impulse has a mind of its own, and I was compelled to introduce Wordsworth’s experience with the Leech Gatherer instead, and as preposterous as it may seem, I think I know why now.

On my drive to my hairstylist’s home (I can’t call her my barber, or hairdresser; so I opted for hairstylist), the thought came to me that the reason professor Peterson’s message—and there’s no doubt about it now, he does have a core message that he’s rendered from all of his maps of meaning and psychology lectures and years of clinical practice, a message of hope to stave off and transform the disruptive forces of chaos—has affected so many young people that have followed his lectures on YouTube and read his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos and listened to his book tour talks and interviews, was not unlike the message that Wordsworth revealed in his poem “Resolution and Independence,” a message of how to deal with the influence of the dark shadow energies of one’s personality and the dark shadow energies of these crazy times. As a matter of fact, that’s why I suspect that the choreographer of life arranged for Donald Trump to become president of the United States (the odds were so against him that no one believed he would win without divine intervention), so the people of America could get a good hard look at the dark shadow side of the archetypal American personality that Donald Trump ensouled ad nauseum—the beam in their own eye, as it were; because only then can one integrate one’s shadow energy into one’s ego personality and become a whole person, because we have to see the shadow energies of our own life before we can deal with them, which is not easy to do because it takes moral courage to look into the dark corners of one’s own soul; and if I were to distill professor Peterson’s message for the world, and in particular to the wayward younger generation, it would be this: your shadow is real, and here’s how to integrate your shadow with your ego personality; ergo, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chao. This is why I was compelled to introduced this chapter on the effect of Jordan Peterson’s message with Wordsworth’s poem, because it spoke the same hierophantic wisdom of Wordsworth’s poem and the good professor’s message to always try and be resolute and independent in one’s life. Bravo, Jordan!

But because the shadow is such an illusive creature, it behooves me to shine more light on the dark side of our personality with a spiritual musing that I wrote for my fourth volume of spiritual musings whose ironic title Penny provided for me, The Armchair Guru:

The Shadow Personality

            The best piece of advice that I got in my life came from a source I would never have imagined, because that just wasn’t my reality at the time; and although it pierced my heart with the deadly accuracy of a skilled swordsman, I had to laugh at the blissful sweetness of the humble monk’s advice that was revealed to me through a gifted psychic medium who channeled St. Padre Pio for my novel Healing with Padre Pio: “He told me to tell you to resist the urge to be right,” said the psychic medium.

In one blinding flash of insight, I saw through my tragic character flaw that was responsible for so much aggravation in my life; and every time I got the urge to correct someone, the Good Saint’s words popped into my mind and I had to bite my tongue.

I went to this gifted medium for a spiritual healing, and out of this experience came my novel Healing with Padre Pio; and had I not personally experienced what I did with the departed Capuchin monk who suffered the stigmata most of his adult life (fifty years of daily anguish), I would have questioned the reality of the whole experience. This is why I have taken Gurdjieff’s words literally that “there is only self-initiation into the mysteries of life.” But why did I have the urge to be right all the time? What was this compulsive need to correct people whenever I felt they were wrong?

I did it without thought, and it always got me into trouble because it set me apart as arrogant and insensitive; but I couldn’t help myself and did it anyway, because I was the victim of my own shadow. And that’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing, the shadow side of our personality…

The shadow is a Jungian concept. It is the dark, repressed side of our personality, and it is not who we think we are. The shadow is our false self, and it is both our damnation and salvation; but because our shadow resides in the unconscious part of our psyche we are blind to it, and we even resist the slightest hint of being made aware of our false shadow self because it threatens our perfect self-image

“The shadow by nature is difficult to apprehend. It is dangerous, disorderly, and forever in hiding, as if the light of consciousness would steal its very life,” wrote the co-editors Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams in Meeting the Shadow, The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature; but not until we become aware of our shadow and integrate it into our conscious personality will we ever be a whole person, and happy. But where does the shadow come from, and why does it have so much power over us?

In all honesty, I had no awareness of my compulsion to be right all the time; but after the humble saint (no one can suffer the holy wounds of Jesus Christ for fifty years and not be humbled) brought it to my attention, I began to notice that I was not alone in my compulsive need to be right, and I soon began to see that this was a defining trait of the shadow personality.

Why, for example, would that Muslim woman that made the national news risk sabotaging her Canadian citizenship just to wear her niqab during the oath-swearing part of the ceremony if she did not believe that she was right in her religious conviction? What compelled her to take such a dangerous risk of not getting her citizenship if she was not under the influence of her shadow personality? Would her faith have collapsed had she shown her face while swearing allegiance to her new country during the oath-taking ceremony? Why would she do what she did if she wasn’t convinced that she was right in her conviction?

“The shadow personality develops naturally in every young child,” said Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams; and they explain that children identify with ideal personality traits in their respective cultures to create a socially acceptable persona, and they repress all those qualities that their culture rejects into the shadow part of their personality because they don’t fit into their evolving self-image. So, “the ego and the shadow develop in tandem, creating each other out of the same life experience.”

But not only do we create our own ego and shadow personality out of our own life experiences, we also inherit our family shadow—the archetypal matrix of unresolved family karma, the consciousness of all those experiences that one’s family has repressed to the unconscious family psyche; and this can make our life very difficult depending upon our family’s karmic history, which is why it is written that the sins of the parents are visited upon the children. But, still, the mystery remains; why the urge to be right?

The Sufis have a saying: “There are as many ways to God as there are souls.” Which simply means that every soul is its own way to God. Would this be the source of my compulsive need to be right? Would this be why the Muslim woman risked her Canadian citizenship, because she believed her way was more right than the simple decorum of showing her face for the oath-swearing ceremony?

I suspect so, but I cannot solve this mystery on my own; and so, I’m going to call upon my muse to help me work out the answer…

Can a person live a lie and still be authentic? Let’s, for argument’s sake, say that we do not live one lifetime only but many lifetimes; and let’s further say that there is no eternal damnation in hell, that this is just a prop used by Christianity to keep people on the straight and narrow. And let’s say that one believes in sin and eternal damnation in everlasting hellfire, like I did in my Roman Catholic youth; wouldn’t that be my personal reality, then? But given my argument, my personal reality wouldn’t be real; it would be false. And by living a false reality, would I be authentic?

That’s the issue of the shadow personality: I would be authentic in my Roman Catholic belief, but my personal reality would be false (as I literally proved for myself with my quest for my true self); it would be my life-lie, which characterizes the shadow personality that is real in its falseness.

This is the mystery of human nature, which is paradoxical in its ontology because we are a complex mixture of the consciousness of the real and false, the being and non-being aspect of our ego/shadow personality; but some of us are more real than false, and some of us are more false than real, and if we are more false than real then our shadow has unconscious power over our conscious ego and can make our life difficult, like the Muslim woman whose religious convictions compelled her to risk her Canadian citizenship for her religious belief. No doubt she was genuine in her conviction that she had the right to wear her niqab while swearing the oath of allegiance to her new country, but was her personal reality real or false?

As someone wrote into the National Post, it seems that “her religious/cultural practices are more important than the cultural norms of her newly adopted country,” and although she was granted the right by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to not show her face during the public oath-taking ceremony for her citizenship, her behavior flew in the face of our Canadian Prime Minister, and many Canadians; myself included. But why, if not because she was a victim of her own recalcitrant shadow personality?

“If we don’t acknowledge all of who we are, we are guaranteed to be blind-sided by the shadow effect,” said Debbie Ford in her introduction to The Shadow Effect, co-written with Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson. “Our shadow incites us to act out in ways we never imagined we could and to waste our vital energy on bad habits and repetitive behavior,” she adds, which can throw one’s life into disarray as it did mine and the Muslim woman with our blind and foolish need to be right; but not since I became aware of that aspect of my shadow personality and began to integrate it into my conscious ego.

But, again, why does the shadow have this need to assert itself, which in my case was compulsive? Why did Padre Pio tell me to resist the urge to be right?

 “How can you find a lion that has swallowed you?” asked the psychologist Carl Jung, with playful humor; which is why he added that it takes great moral courage to see our shadow. By lion, Jung meant our unconscious shadow that has taken control over our ego personality, which I explored in my memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway; and the conclusion that I came to was that the shadow has to assert itself to prove to the world that it is authentic and real, as Ernest Hemingway did ad nauseum to the despair of everyone who knew him, especially his third wife Martha Gellhorn who described the great writer as an apocryphiar and pathological liar and cruelest man she knew. And the more power the shadow has over our ego, the more real we think we are. This is why Debbie Ford wrote, “The conflict between who we are and who we want to be is at the core of the human struggle,” which was why my compulsive need to be right made my life miserable, and why St. Padre Pio told me to resist the urge to be right.

“The shadow,” said Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams, “is both the awful thing that needs redemption, and the suffering redeemer who can provide it,” and not until we smelt the gold out of the dross of our shadow personality will we be whole, and happy.

———

I’m not quite finished reading his book yet, but without reading the rest of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos I can sum up Jordan Peterson’s core message in the same two words that reveal the message of Wordsworth’s poem: RESOLUTION & INDEPENDENCE, a moral imperative to take charge of one’s life and be resolute and independent; that’s how one can transform and stave off the inevitable forces of chaos. Hence the first rule of Twelve Rules for Life: ‘Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulder’s Back,” a vernacular and less poetic iteration of William Shakespeare’s aphoristic “Assume a virtue, if you have it not.”

I have no idea if Jordan Peterson writes poetry (like most creative people, I’m sure he’s dabbled in the genre), but given how he expresses himself in his lectures and talks, forever looking upward into the heavens whenever he’s stuck for a word or thought, it strongly suggests to me that he has the probing mind of a poet that he stretches to the limits of cognition and into the limitless horizons of his imagination; that’s why I see him as a hierophant.

In his brilliant essay, “A Defense of Poetry,” which he concludes with a line that has been rendered into a golden precept, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote: “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Why did Jordan Peterson speak up against Bill C-16, the amendment that now legislates Canadians to use gender neutral pronouns upon the request of the LGBTQ community, if not because he had the probity to refute that morally bankrupt amendment that was driven by identity politics and political correctness?

Professor Peterson may not be a poet by natural imperative, but he’s certainly a magnanimous poet in spirit; and it’s a blessing for the world that he should be speaking against legislation that curtails free speech. Shelley must be smiling in his grave…

One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 10: The Jordan Peterson Phenomenon

CHAPTER 10

The Jordan Peterson Phenomenon

“Know then thyself; presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is Man.”

—Alexander Pope

I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting on my poem “What the Hell Is Going on Out There?" since I began writing this book on only one rule to live by (while reading Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, and watching his online lectures plus his talks and podcast interviews), and it didn’t occur to me how woefully ignorant I was of the political reality of the world today until I was drawn into the Jordan Peterson phenomenon, because the more I listened to him defending our inherent right to free speech, the more I became aware of what the hell was going on out there? But why was I so frightfully ignorant?

It’s not that I didn’t follow the news. I watched TV and listened to CBC regularly (Michael Enright defaulted to becoming my favorite host when Charlie Rose fell from grace for his arrogant sexual indiscretions) and I read the Globe & Mail, National Post, and Toronto Star every weekend (not to mention the occasional Walrus, Maclean’s, Atlantic, Harper’s, and New Yorker magazines), and I saw what was going on in the world, but I was truly puzzled by the logic of man’s behavior, especially the political circus playing out in the United States with Donald Trump at the helm, which is why my creative unconscious brought my bewilderment to my attention with the poem “What the Hell Is Going on Out There?

My poem came to me spontaneously and word perfect; and upon reflection, I realized that my poem not only voiced my bewilderment, but the collective bewilderment of society, because that’s what inspired poetry does. It speaks for one’s time and place, and this explained the sudden and unexpected meteoric rise of professor Jordan Peterson’s popularity.

When he spoke truth to power with his recalcitrant defense of free speech (which not only threated legal action for not complying with Bill C-16, but his position at U of T and twenty-year clinical practice as well), Jordan Peterson woke everyone up to the toxic spirit of postmodern neo-Marxist nihilism and the in-your-face idiocy of identity politics and radical political correctness that have permeated our western culture; and this catapulted him onto the world stage. And then he published his pull-no-punches character-building book 12 Rules for Life, which became an overnight Amazon bestseller that landed him an interview with Cathy Newman on Britain’s Channel 4 News that instantly endeared Jordan Peterson to the world for his skillful slaying of Cathy Newman’s tendentious leftist persona that ferociously tried to take him down. The interview with Cathy Newman went viral, and millions more gravitated to the good professor’s irrefutable dragon-slaying logic.

The Jordan Peterson phenomenon was explaining to me and everyone listening how our crazy world worked from his profoundly studied point of view, and I began watching his Maps of Meaning lectures on YouTube, which were drawn from his book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief that took him fifteen years to write working three hours a day (how many hours of reading he must have done for that book, one can only guess); and that’s when the penny dropped, and I saw why I was called to write One Rule to Live By: Be Good.

In Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, he works out a comprehensive theory for how people construct meaning in a way that is compatible with modern scientific understanding of how the brain functions. Peterson examines the “structure of systems of belief and the role these systems play in the regulation of emotion, using multiple academic fields to show that connecting myths and beliefs with science is essential to fully understand how people make meaning,” which gave the good professor the well-researched and studied understanding of his complex subject (“The proper study of mankind is Man,” said  the poet Alexander Pope) that instantly appealed to what the author of The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway, were he alive today, would probably call “today’s lost generation.”

This is Jordan Peterson’s appeal to the wayward generation, especially young men; they are the angry voice of my poem shouting “What the hell is going on out there?” They are today’s lost generation that has given up on religion, science, and politics that cannot provide the guidance and direction they need to negotiate their way through life; and their hunger to satisfy the desperate longing in their soul for wholeness and completeness has pulled them into the good professor’s energy field with such magnetic appeal that he’s still reeling from the tsunami effect of his polyphonic answer to my poem’s angry question “What the hell is going on out there?” And after watching his online lectures and talks and interviews, I finally made sense of why the world was listening to what he has to say.

There’s an old saying, which has been attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, that Nature abhors a vacuum, and for years now the hole in the soul of the world has grown larger and larger, and no one seems to know how to fill it (religion, science, and politics have failed miserably); but along comes a fledgling hierophant from the northern prairie town of Fairview, Alberta with cowboy boots and outlier attitude, a professor of behavioral psychology and clinical therapist with an existential philosophy wrought out of  a lifelong obsession with man’s capacity for evil who dares to risk his career and stand up to the wicked spirit of malevolence in Canada’s Bill C-16, and his Solzhenitsynian pushback caught the attention of the world because decent people everywhere are sick and tired of political correctness gone mad and postmodern neo-Marxist ideology responsible for the death of million of innocent people, and the more he pushed back at these evil forces, the more he explained what the hell was going on out there, and the more the world listened.

But that isn’t to say he never got his share of criticism, of which there seems to be no limit for good people like Jordan Peterson whose view on life dares to address the evil spirit of malevolent nihilism, like Tabatha Southey’s article in Maclean’s (November 17, 2017: “Is Jordan Peterson the stupid man’s smart person?”) that disparages him with typical Southey mock irony— “It’s easy to assume Peterson is deserving of respect. A lot of what he says sounds, on the surface, like serious thought. It’s easy to laugh at him; after all, most of what he says is, after fifteen seconds’ consideration, completely inane. But in between his long rambling pseudo-academic takes on rambling self-help advice and his weird fixation on Disney movies, is a dreadfully serious message…”  

Really? “Sounds like serious thought?” “Pseudo-academic?” “Rambling self-help advice?” “Weird fixation on Disney movies?” And all of this coming from a man with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology who lectured at Harvard for six years and at the U of T for much longer and is a twenty-year veteran psychotherapist who treated people in their most desperate time of need and who traced the narrative of mankind in his pioneering work Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief that revolutionized the psychology of religion? And what are your qualifications, Tabatha? There really are none so blind as those who refuse to see, and it puzzles me how people can be so resentful and willfully pernicious! But then, that’s precisely what Jordan Peterson was explaining to the world with his profound understanding of political extremism, toxic feminism, and soul-crushing postmodern nihilism.

I read a few more of these bad-faith reviews (even more resentful than Tabatha Southey’s), which were more revealing of their author than they were of Jordan Peterson; but he’s taking all of this hostile resentment in stride and marches on triumphantly, rendering his maps of meaning narrative into a simple message of taking responsibility for one’s own life that the world is hearing loud and clear in his 12 Rules for Life book tour talks and interviews and online lectures that have attracted a million YouTube followers and counting, a message of hope for today’s crazy world that. as “chance” would have it, reflects the inspired message of a spiritual musing that I posted on my blog Tuesday, October 10, 2017:

The Two Ends of the Stick,

Shania Twain and P. D. Ouspensky

I woke up at 2:30 yesterday morning with Gary Lachman’s book In Search of P. D. Ouspensky on my mind and with a very strong compulsion to read it, so I got up and read the book until 4 A. M., and then I put on coffee and continued reading until Penny got up at 7 A. M. and joined me for coffee in my writing room, coughing and wheezing.

I had read In Search of P. D. Ouspensky once already, finding it an engaging rehash of material I was familiar with from my extensive library on Gurdjieff, but for some reason I took a greater interest this time around in the author who introduced me to Gurdjieff’s teaching with his book In Search of the Miraculous, as though I had missed something about Ouspensky’s life the first time, little realizing that my oracle had called me to read In Search of P. D. Ouspensky for today’s spiritual musing which had not yet conceptualized as an idea in my mind and would not do so until later in the day after I had read the National Post (Wednesday, October 11. 2017) that I picked up in Midland when I drove in to get some Benylin cough syrup and lozenges for Penny who had come back from her niece’s wedding in Ottawa with a bad cold, and the article in the Post that set the idea free for today’s musing was on the singer Shania Twain, headlined in bold caps, IT’S HER TURN NOW, which brought forth the third connecting factor that set my idea for today’s musing free, something that the mystical Jeshua said in Glenda Green’s book Love without End, Jesus Speaks: “There is no other time or place to find yourself. Now is your only context,” because these words spoke directly to Shania Twain’s and P. D. Ouspensky’s life-journey; but I would not be free to write my musing until I had finished reading In Search of P. D. Ouspensky, which I did throughout the day

But before I get pulled into today’s spiritual musing, I feel compelled to say something about how my spiritual musings come to be, which speaks to the mystical nature of the creative process (and, as coincidence would have it, to the very theme of today’s musing which centers upon our journey through life to wholeness and completeness, in this case the disillusioned teacher of Gurdjieff’s System, P. D. Ouspensky, and the iconic singer Shania Twain), because this is the first time that I’ve actually caught a glimpse of my creative unconscious at work as it coalesces the requisite variables into an idea for a spiritual musing, and, believe me, I know that the idea for today’s spiritual  musing is going to demand the most of me because it impels me to give gnostic clarity to the meaning and purpose of our existence and which definitely falls into the category of a very dangerous spiritual musing. Why very dangerous, though? What is it about this spiritual musing that makes me uneasy? Let me pause for thought, if I may…

Misoneism. That’s the word that my oracle popped into my mind. According to my sidebar Merriam-Webster dictionary, misoneism means: “a hatred, fear, or intolerance of innovation or change,” and I first became acquainted with this word in C. G. Jung’s book Modern Man in Search of a Soul; that’s why today’s spiritual musing can be very dangerous, because I have to step far outside the paradigm of conventional thought to give gnostic clarity to the meaning and purpose of our existence. This is why Padre Pio, the Roman Catholic Saint who makes his presence in my novel Healing with Padre Pio through a gifted psychic medium who channeled him, said that my writing will provide “a new way of thinking, a new way of perceiving, a new way of understanding,” just as all creative thinkers do who blaze a new trail for man to follow, as C. G. Jung did with his psychology of individuation that addresses man’s longing for wholeness and completeness, and which just happens to be the subject of today’s spiritual musing.

This, then, is what I caught a glimpse of with the idea for today’s spiritual musing: the creative unconscious is not bound by time. I know this, because of how the three factors that my creative unconscious brought together throughout the day to coalesce into an idea for today’s spiritual musing: 1., waking up at 2:30 A. M. yesterday with a very strong compulsion to read Gary Lachman’s book In Search of P. D. Ouspensky, the man who introduced me to Gurdjieff’s teaching that awakened me to the secret way of life; 2., reading the article on Shania Twain’s successful comeback in the National Post later in the day; and 3., a quotation from Glenda Green’s book Love without End, Jesus Speaks that popped into my mind later in the day that connected the other two dots to manifest into the idea for today’s spiritual musing on the gnostic way of life, which can be expressed in the realization: NOW is the only time and place to satisfy the longing in our soul for wholeness and completeness.

But what was the relationship between P. D. Ouspensky and Shania Twain’s comeback after a fifteen-year hiatus that my creative unconscious wanted me to explore in today’s spiritual musing? I knew that an idea for a new spiritual musing was forming in my mind, but I couldn’t connect the dots until I finished reading Lachman’s book on Ouspensky, which I did after I read the article on Shania Twain’s comeback with her new album, Now.

As I was reading the last chapter of Lachman’s book titled “The End of the System,” in which Ouspensky, the man whose book In Search of the Miraculous is considered to be the best book on Gurdjieff’s System, abandon’s Gurdjieff’s System after a lifetime of teaching it because it failed to satisfy the longing in his soul for wholeness and completeness, Shania Twain’s new album Now popped into my mind, which automatically called forth Christ’s words in Glenda Green’s book Love Without End, Jesus Speaks, “There is no other time or place to find yourself. Now is your only context,” thereby connecting the dots for today’s spiritual musing on the gnostic way of life, and by gnostic way of life I mean the natural way of life through personal experience to wholeness and completeness.

Ouspensky went to his grave a broken, disillusioned man. He spent his life teaching Gurdjieff’s System that failed to satisfy his longing for wholeness and completeness, but I knew from personal experience that Gurdjieff’s System worked because I had realized my true self with his teaching, which is why I wrote Gurdjieff Was Wrong, But His Teaching Works; and I knew, from my own apprehension of the secret way of life, that Shania Twain was living the gnostic way in her own journey of self-discovery which she courageously shared with the world in her music, as she did in her new comeback album Now that speaks to her “heartbreak, loss, and survival,” the continued narrative of her journey to wholeness and completeness, and I found it sweetly ironic that she should title her comeback album Now given that Jesus said, “There is no other time or place to find yourself. Now is your only context.”

Aside from her incredible singing voice, what makes Shania Twain so popular is her honesty about her life’s journey through struggle which touches the heart of the world in her songs, her courage to not give in to the soul-crushing nihilistic forces of life, as she poignantly illustrates with the first song of her new album Now: “I wasn’t just broken, I was shattered,” which leads to the triumphant chorus, “Life’s about joy, life’s about pain /It’s all about forgiveness and the will to walk away /I’m ready to be loved, and love the way I should /Life’s about, life’s about to get good.”

Since her last album, 2002’s Up, Shania Twain (whose parents died in a car accident when she was young, taking odd jobs to support her siblings and all the while writing songs to nurture her dream of becoming a singer),  has been through a heart-breaking divorce (her husband cheated on her with her best friend), battled Lyme disease, and overcame dysphonia (which she says forced her how to sing again); and she chronicles this harrowing phase of her journey through life in her album Now, and so personal and courageous is her spirit that her songs speak to the spiritual alchemy of the human condition, the natural enantiodromiac process of becoming whole and complete. That’s why she’s so popular; her songs are about her life, her story through her ups and downs, which is the impenetrable secret of the gnostic way of life that satisfies the longing in one’s soul for wholeness and completeness.

Gary Lachman’s book In Search of P. D. Ouspensky brought me to tears, because if such a great thinker and dedicated truth seeker as the philosopher/mathematician and foremost exponent of Gurdjieff’s System could become so disillusioned by life, what hope was there for the rest of the world? Which is why my muse wanted me to connect Ouspensky’s disillusioned life with the young (she’s 52) Shania Twain whose spirit cannot be broken, because I was called to explore in today’s spiritual musing what Gurdjieff referred to as “the two ends of the stick.” Specifically: Shania Twain’s hope and Ouspensky’s despair.

As gloomy and pessimistic as Gurdjieff’s teaching can be, because it’s founded upon his misperception that we are not born with an immortal soul, with “conscious effort” and “intentional suffering” we can “create” our own immortal soul (a teaching that broke the spirit of many followers, like P. D. Ouspensky), Shania Twain’s incorruptible  innocence offers hope for all the those souls caught in the wretched currents of life; and it doesn’t matter if one believes in the theory of eternal recurrence (as Ouspensky did), in one lifetime only as the Christian world believes, or in reincarnation and the autonomous immortal self as I do, NOW is the only context to satisfy the longing in our soul for wholeness and completeness, as long as one is true to themselves and the moral imperative of life to be all that we are meant to be; and that’s the message of Shania Twain’s new album Now, a truth that Ouspensky failed to discern because he could not break the gnostic code of the secret way of life with Gurdjieff’s System.

“Life’s about joy, life’s about pain /It’s about forgiveness and the will to walk away,” sings Shania Twain from her sacred place in the gnostic way of life. “I’m ready to be loved, and love the way I should /Life’s about, life’s about to get good,” she adds, glorifying the gnostic process of self-individuation that Gurdjieff’s System failed to do; that’s why Gurdjieff broke the heart of so many seekers, as he did his most famous student P. D. Ouspensky’s. But not mine. I took his teaching to heart and broke the code of the gnostic way of life and love him dearly, as I love Shania Twain’s indomitable spirit.

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          Shania Twain is living proof of professor Jordan Peterson’s message that life is full of pain and heartache as well as love and joy (chaos and order: the two ends of the stick) and what we do with our life is entirely up to us; that’s why my heart went out to him when life called upon him to share the hard-won gnostic wisdom of his own journey to wholeness and completeness and explain to our crazy modern world what the hell’s going on out there.

And like his hero Alexander Solzhenitsyn, he had to heed the call to his hierophantic purpose, because it simply wasn’t in his character to turn a blind eye to the resentful spirit of nihilism and radical political correctness that have infected our world like a mutated soul-sucking virus that has become immune to common sense truth and good-faith logic; and unlike the dystopian poet who asks  “what hope is there? the good professor shines a light into the darkest corner of our soul with his maps of meaning lectures and character-building antidote to chaos, offering a lifeline to every forsaken soul out there. “You saved my life,” said one young man to the good professor, reflecting the sentiment of thousands of followers.

Jordan Peterson may not have a golden voice like Shania Twain (actually, it’s rather raspy; more like Kermit the FrogerHe), but they’re both singing the same encouraging song of hope for these crazy times; that’s why the world loves Shania Twain and is listening with impassioned curiosity to the good professor’s hierophantic message…