CHAPTER 10
The Jordan Peterson Phenomenon
“Know then thyself; presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is Man.”
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.
———
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 Frog), 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…
No comments:
Post a Comment