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…
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