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…
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