One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 16: Live Your Own Path and be Cool

CHAPTER 16

Live Your Own Path and be Cool

           

Cool people are charismatic. Jordan Peterson is charismatic; ergo, Jordan Peterson is cool. This is an irrefutable syllogism. So, how did Jordan Peterson become cool? And, better still, can his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos make one cool?

Is this why his message is so attractive to the younger generation, especially wayward young men (to date, about 80% of his youth audience is male), because they find him cool and want to know his secret? And when he tells them the secret is to simply shoulder the responsibility for their own life— “You can start be cleaning your damn room!” —why do they not flee in horror but instead want more? That’s the mystique of Jordan B. Peterson.

The concept of cool fascinated me no less than it did David Brooks, whose column I follow in The New York International Weekly that’s inserted into my weekend Toronto Sunday Star (along with The New York Times Book Review section), so much so that I wrote a spiritual musing inspired by him which I posted on my blog Saturday, October 7, 2017:

The Essence of Cool

I really didn’t want to, but I jotted the idea down in my notebook just in case I ran into a dry spell (which happens rarely) and needed an idea to explore just to keep the creative juices flowing, and I forgot about it until this morning when I noticed the highlighted passage in David Brooks’ op-ed piece in the folded newspaper page that I had on my desk which I intended to explore but never got around to until it caught my eye this morning as I was going through notebooks and papers on my desk.

Brooks’ piece is titled “What Has Replaced Cool in America” (The New York Times International Weekly, Wednesday, July 30, 2017), and I highlighted in blue marker the passage that inspired the idea for a short spiritual musing on the essence of cool: “The cool person is stoical, emotionally controlled, never eager or needy, but instead mysterious, detached and self-possessed. The cool person is gracefully competent at something but doesn’t need the world’s applause to know his worth. That’s because the cool person has found his or her own unique and authentic way of living with nonchalant intensity.”

How cool is that? Given that description of what a cool person is, I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to be cool; but that’s why the idea for a spiritual musing on cool seized me, because not everyone can be cool. That’s what makes one cool, if one can appreciate the irony. But just in case, let me explore the irony of being cool in today’s spiritual musing…

For some reason known only to my oracle, I was nudged to browse through one of the bookcases in my writing den yesterday morning, and as I sorted through the top shelf I came upon The Seasons of the Soul, a collection of poems by Hermann Hesse previously unpublished in English, translated and with a commentary by Ludwig Max Fischer and a forward by spiritual activist Andrew Harvey, and even though I had read it already, I felt  strongly nudged to read it again, which I did throughout the day in the pleasant comfort of our front deck; and this morning I was called to read My Belief, essays on life and art, also by Hermann Hesse, which I had read two or three times already, and only upon reading the introduction again did I make the connection with Hermann Hesse and the idea for my spiritual musing on the essence of cool, and I had to smile at the remarkable “inspired” coincidence.

I had highlighted one more passage in David Brooks’ article, a single sentence that summed up what I felt to be the essential quality of a cool person, which popped into my mind while reading the introduction to My Belief, and I knew instantly why I was called to re-acquaint myself with the writer I had read many years ago while on my own spiritual quest like Hermann Hesse. The sentence that I highlighted said it all: “The cool person is guided by his or her own autonomous values, often on the outskirts of society.”

That was Hermann Hesse, a man guided by his own autonomous values and on the edge of society, a definition which, at the risk of sounding immodest, applied to me no less than Hermann Hesse, because my whole life I’ve always lived by my own guiding inner light which set me apart from everyone; so, there it was then, my reason for being called to write a short spiritual musing on cool—to demystify the je ne sais quoi of this elusive quality of being cool.

In truth, I already have a gnostic awareness of what constitutes the essence of cool; but it would be presumptuous to state this up front without providing the context that gave birth to my realization of this alluring character trait, because it’s in the context of my own quest for my true self that pulled Hermann Hesse into my life with his book Journey to the East first and then his novel Magister Ludi, also known as The Glass Bead Game.

I had already highlighted the passage, in yellow highlighter this time, but it jumped out at me again as I read the introduction to My Belief this morning: “Hesse maintains that the idea of the underlying unity of all being is a synthesis that can be achieved only through a reconciliation of conflicting opposites. This dialectical process shows up over and over again in Hesse’s novels.”

This speaks to what C. G. Jung called the individuation process, the founding premise of his psychology (it can’t be a coincidence that Hermann Hesse underwent Jungian therapy during the most trying period of his life); but not until one learns how to reconcile the conflicting opposites of their personality can one achieve what Jung called “wholeness and singleness of self.” That’s why Hesse became a cult figure for the mind-expanding, paradigm shifting counterculture movement of the mid-1960s, because his novels spoke to the longing in one’s soul for wholeness and completeness.

Hesse’s best-known works include Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game, each of which explores an individual’s search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946; and it was their search for a way to reconcile the conflicting opposite aspects of one’s ego/shadow personality with one’s inner self that preoccupied both Jung and Hesse their whole life, with Jung succeeding and Hesse dying unresolved.

This is the context that awakened me to the secret way of life that both Jung and Hesse had become aware of, which Miguel Serrano alludes to in his short memoir C. G. Jung and Hermann Hesse, A Record of Two Friendships; and like Jung and Hesse, I came to the same realization that self-reconciliation is the only way to one’s true self, and I embarked upon this perilous journey to authenticity that essentially makes a person cool. In short, the more true one is to oneself, the more cool one will be; but it wouldn’t be cool to vaunt this because the cool person just is, and that’s the irony of being cool.

———

          A cool person, says David Brooks, “is guided by his or her own autonomous values, often on the outskirts of society,” which describes the outlier Jordan Peterson, who stands just outside the mainstream with his personal worldview that he expressed in his runaway bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos that David Brooks, in his July 18, 2018 op-ed in The New York Times, says are “joyless and graceless calls to self-sacrifice.”

But despite how harsh professor Peterson’s 12 rules may be, they speak to the young people, especially to young men who are so desperate to find a way out of the existential vacuum of this crazy world that they will do anything to fill the hole in their soul, and they take Peterson’s stern message seriously because he made it painfully clear that the alternative would be more of the same soul-sucking nihilism that gorged the archetypal shadow of the world that gave rise to the brutal dictators Stalin, Hitler and Mao who murdered millions and millions of people for the sake of delusory utopian dreams.

          “Stop doing what you know to be wrong,” says Peterson. “Say only those things that make you strong. Do only those things that you could speak of with honor.” Stern advice from an outlier whose personal imperative is to help young people find their own way out of the social pressure cooker that’s responsible for all their stress and anguish; but not to give the wrong impression, David Brooks’ piece on Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life was not negative by any means, because from what I’ve read David Brooks is not that kind of writer. He tries to be honest and fair in his opinions.

“Parents, universities and the elders of society have utterly failed to give many young men realistic and demanding practical wisdom on how to live. Peterson has filled the gap,” Brooks wrote in his July 18, 2018 New York Time’s column, which he brings to an honest and fair resolution: “The Peterson way is a harsh way, but it is an idealistic way—and for millions of young men, it turns out to be the perfect antidote to the cocktail of coddling and accusation in which they are raised.”

Curiously enough, David Brooks wrote his own book on self-improvement called The Road to Character, and he was interviewed on CBC’s Tapestry, which by another one of those strange coincidences I happened to listen to one Sunday afternoon.  “I wrote it to save my own soul,” he told Mary Hynes, the host of the show; and I made a point of putting The Road to Character on my Amazon wish list but never got around to ordering; but I will now, along with Peterson’s Maps of Meaning, just to see how they compare in their separate journeys to wholeness and completeness, because no matter what path one takes in life they all end up to the place that Jesus called “the eye of the needle,” which takes special wisdom to pass through. Maybe this is why rumor has it that Jewish born and bred David Brooks may be converting to Christianity? Life is strange, and when it calls it calls…

One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 15: The Sacred Individual Self

CHAPTER 15

The Sacred Individual Self

          In his first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, professor Jordan Peterson wrote: “Every culture maintains certain key beliefs that are centrally important to that culture, upon which all secondary beliefs are predicated. These key beliefs cannot be easily given up, because if they are, everything falls, and the unknown once again rules. Western morality and behavior, for example, are predicated on the assumption that ever individual is sacred.” This is why young men are reading Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos and flocking to his talks in droves and viewing his lectures online, because his message confirms the sacredness of their being which they are desperate to hear; this is why young men shout “We love you Jordan!” during his book tour talks.

          Of course, Jordan Peterson blushes from all the adulation; he’s much too modest to vaunt the effect he’s having on them, which, in his own words, is simply speaking his truth. Here’s what he said in an interview that I saw online. The YouTube interview was labelled Jordan B. Peterson Spring 2017 full-length interview (IDEOLOGY, LOGOS & BELIEF, Two-part interview with Dr Jordan B. Peterson, April 2017, in Vancouver, Canada):

          “What I’m trying to do is say what I think as clearly as I possibly can and to listen to the feedback and modify my message when that seems to be necessary; and apart from that I’m willing to let the chips fall where they may, because that’s also part of the decision. The decision is, if you believe, if you choose to believe, if you choose to act as if the truth brings Being into existence in the best possible manner, then you speak your truth, you examine your conscience, you listen to feedback, and you allow the events to unfold as they will.”

Jordan Peterson is a firm believer in the Logos, which I’ve identified as the omniscient guiding principle of life, and he has brought himself, through courageous commitment to his own obsessive individuation process, to the point where he trusts that speaking the truth brings the eternal reality of the Logos into Being; this is why he made it Rule 8 in his book of character-building guiding principles, the premise being to consolidate one’s life and stave off the nihilistic darkness of chaos: “Tell the truth—or, at least, don’t lie.”

The individual self is sacred to Jordan Peterson, as it was to his hero C, G. Jung, and as it is to everyone who has the courage to look at life squarely; but because our vision has become obfuscated by moral relativism and the unhealthy inflation of the ego/shadow personality of our existential self, which the modern world panders to by granting our every want and desire, the omniscient guiding principle of life had to intervene—as it always does when the sacred individual self is in need of help to get back on its destined track to wholeness and completeness; that’s why professor Jordan B. Peterson was called by life to give his hierophantic message of self-reconciliation to the world.

“I’m really trying to help a person find his or her own way,” he said, in all sincerity; and this is the imperative of his message, which was my own inspiration when I wrote the spiritual musing that I posted on my blog April 8, 2017, but only I went much deeper into the metaphysics of the individuation process than professor Jordan Peterson:

The Mathematics of Life

Over coffee in my writing room this morning, Penny and I shared our dreams and tried to decode their message (like C. G. Jung, we both believe that “dreams are the guiding words of the soul”); and in the course of our discussion my transcendent function (what Jung called “superior insight”) kicked in, and I was given a magnificent metaphor to help explain my literary hero’s existential dilemma.

I had just finished reading professor Harold Bloom’s book The Western Cannon again and was well into my second reading of his book The Daemon Knows, and professor Bloom’s existential dilemma was fresh on my mind, and it just happened to relate to Penny’s dream and mine because they both spoke the omniscient guiding words of our superior insight.

Penny’s dream was about someone stealing her Singer sewing machine. A man had put it into his yellow truck and was driving away, and Penny shouted, “Hey, that’s my sewing machine!” And in my dream, I had just written five or six pages of a new story which I was showing to an old acquaintance, and the first sentence of my story read: “He was different.”

My story was autobiographical, and I knew what my fictional self meant by that first sentence “He was different”—true to my literary mentor Ernest Hemingway’s credo to begin every story with “one true sentence,” as Penny vouchsafed with her comment, “You’re different, alright!”

 In my dream, I let an old acquaintance from my hometown read the first few pages of my story because I wanted to introduce him to the mystery that eluded the great literary scholar professor Harold Bloom his entire life—the mystery of the secret way of life implicit to the archetypal imperative of literature, the secret of our becoming which resolves the existential dilemma of our dual nature.

I saw Penny’s dream as a good sign, the yellow truck symbolizing the mobility of Divine Spirit (yellow is always associated with the spiritual dimension of life), and I saw her sewing machine as a symbol for “stitching things up,” which Penny has been doing all of her life (a metaphor for “making do”), so I said to her: “That’s a good dream. Your dream self is telling you that the theft of your sowing machine means you will have more mobility and won’t have to stitch things up anymore. Your dream augurs good fortune, because you will no longer have to make do.”

Penny looked at me quizzically, but I didn’t explain further because symbolic dreams take time to sink in; and my dream augured well for me also because I’ve been called back to creative writing and am working on a new book of short stories with the conscious guiding principle of the resolution to man’s existential predicament that literature cannot supply, and by letting a retired grocer read the first few pages of my new story my dream was telling me that my stories will find public consumption (food for the soul, if you will; hence, the retired grocer); that’s why professor Bloom popped into my mind.

As professor Bloom came to see with terrifying clarity, literature is all about individuation, the realization of self-identity—his best example at the center of his cannon being William Shakespeare’s conflicted Prince Hamlet of Denmark, which he expounds upon in his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and with deeper conviction in his book Hamlet: Poem Unlimited; but in the American bard Walt Whitman, professor Bloom found his most poignant expression of individuation, especially in Whitman’s signature poem “Song of Myself” which professor Bloom described as “a psychic cartography of three components in each of us—soul, self, and real me or me myself.”

The great tragedy of literature, and personally for professor Bloom, who suffers from what he calls a Shakespearean kind of breathtaking nihilism, is that literature cannot resolve the three aspects of man’s nature—soul, self, and real me or me myself; and that’s what Penny and I discussed over coffee this morning, because the central theme of all my books has to do with reconciling the separate aspects of our nature, thereby resolving professor Bloom’s existential dilemma.

“The unconscious is neutral. It’s neither good nor bad, neither right nor wrong; it just is what it is, a magnificent process of becoming,” I said to Penny this morning.  “Let me give you a metaphor to explain what I mean. This is what professor Bloom figured out about literature, but he got stuck in the labyrinth of his own brilliant mind and couldn’t find his way out. Let’s consign a number to every variable of life. Let’s say one experience is consigned a number, and another experience, thing, thought, idea, or emotion are all consigned a number. Let’s say that all of life is mathematical in nature, which is what the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras believed; so, when the variables of our life are put together in a certain way, there will be a mathematical truth to them. One plus three plus seven has to equal eleven. That’s a mathematical certainty. That’s life in a nutshell. It just is. But we have free will. We are primarily responsible in how we arrange the variables of our life, and when added up these variables make up who we are, the mathematical certainty of our life if you will. But what if we get stuck in our life and can’t move on? What happens then?”

“Life can get pretty boring,” Penny said, and laughed.

“Yes, or tragic,” I added. “And this is where I part company with professor Bloom, because I happen to believe in an omniscient guiding principle of life that comes to help us get unstuck from the existential dilemma of life. That’s what my book The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity is all about. And I believe this was the message of our dreams last night; yours to get you unstuck from your fear of always having to stich things up to make do, and mine confirming my call back to creative writing with stories that will expand not only my own literary horizons, but hopefully the horizons of literature as well.”

“I’ve been telling you that for years,” Penny said, with a generous smile.

“I know, sweetheart; but you know me, I have to do what I have to do to do what I’m called to do. That’s why I’m different.”

“You’re different, alright!” Penny said, with a mirthful chuckle.

———

Perhaps we can better understand now what Rabbi Tarphon meant by the work, which we must not desist from doing, in light of professor Harold Bloom’s perception of the individuation process that he discovered to be the imperative of all literature, which is to reconcile “the three components in each of us—soul, self, and real me or me myself.” 

But herein lies the tragedy, because the most that literature can do is reflect the human condition (in poetry and stories) that traps the self in the existential paradigm of our becoming which cannot reconcile the three components in each of us. But let me spell out what professor Bloom meant by “soul, self, and real me or me myself” that he intuited with literary genius but could find no resolution for in literature, which was responsible for his melancholy.

Soul is the spark of divine consciousness we are all born with, which is teleologically driven to realize wholeness and completeness; self is our ego/shadow personality that we create with each new incarnation; and real me or me myself is our self-actualizing soul, which is created through the natural process of individuating the paradoxical nature of our inner and outer self that we experience in our daily life, like the lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne’s moral predicament in my spiritual musing “Chemistry of the Soul” which taught him the lesson of his life that self-betrayal always comes with a price.

But because the natural individuation process of our daily life cannot resolve the paradoxical dilemma of our inner and outer self (our real and false self), the sacred individual self needs help to become whole and complete. This is what Rabbi Tarphon pointed to, as does professor Jordan Peterson with his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.

Rabbi Tarphon’s messages speaks to the imperative of the work that we must not desist from doing, which is to become whole and complete, but he doesn’t tell us how; and professor Jordan Peterson’s message in 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos tells us how to do the work to become whole and complete but doesn’t tell us why. Which is why I was called to write One Rule to Live By: Be Good, because from my perspective of having resolved the paradoxical nature of my inner and outer self, I can see both the how and the why of the work that one must do to honor the divine imperative of our sacred individual self to become whole and complete, and then one will realize that state of resolved consciousness that I articulated in my journal in the following words: I am what I am not, and I am not what I am; I am both but neither: I am Soul. And this was confirmed by a dream that I had one night.

Like my hero Carl Gustav Jung, who realized wholeness and completeness through his own remarkable individuation process, a dream he had a few days before dying confirmed that he had completed the work, and so did I. In his dream, Jung saw, “high up in a high place,” a boulder lit by the full sun. Carved into the illuminated boulder were the words: “Take this as a sign of the wholeness you have achieved and the singleness you have become.” It was carved in stone, which symbolically confirmed that he had achieved oneness of self.

In my dream, I was granted permission to look my name up in The Dictionary of Life, and this is how it defined me: Orest Stocco: Soul. Nothing more, just my name and the word Soul to define who and what I am; and it felt good to have inner confirmation that I also had completed the work and become Soul, my true self whole and complete, as had my hero Carl Gustav Jung; and as cryptic as Rabbi Tarphon was in his saying about not desisting from doing the work, I suspect he knew much more than he implied; and that’s why I have such respect and admiration for professor Jordan B. Peterson, whose hierophantic message to the world honors and preserves the integrity of the sacred individual self…

One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 14: The Existential Conundrum

CHAPTER 14

The Existential Conundrum

Professor Harold Bloom brought me to tears, again. For all of his literary genius, he could not transcend the existential paradigm that burdened him with the unbearable anxiety of unknowing; and by the logic of his own wisdom, drawn primarily from his unbelievably expansive knowledge of literature, he resigned himself to the Shakespearean inspired injunction to bear his life with equanimity, because he could not complete the work that Rabbi Tarphon’s injunction said he should not desist from doing; that’s why I was brought to tears again when I listened to the Harold Bloom Interview on RTE on YouTube the other day, his voice so full of longing that my heart went out to him, as it did to professor Jordan Peterson who was also up against the wall of his own unknowing. Here’s professor Bloom:

“William Hazlitt got it right, it is we who are Hamlet; women and men alike, we are all of us Hamlet. We are all of us, our mind struggling with the prospect, with the imminence or delayed, of annihilation. The rest is indeed silence for him, because he knows that whether you take the rest as remainder or as solace and sleep, that’s all there is, silence. But then, I differ from most people who write about Shakespeare these days. I think that ultimately the elliptical burden of what he gives us is a breathtaking kind of nihilism more uncanny than anything that Nietzsche apprehended. I think in the end he, among so much else, (is) telling us that there are no values, or value except those that we create or imbue events, people, or things with. Emerson beautifully said, no world; there is no next world. Here and now is the whole fact. And I think Hamlet understands that very well indeed that here and now is the whole fact; or (in) that beautiful phrase, is it a Victor Hugo that the sublime Walter Pater repeats? ‘We have an interval and then our place knows us no more.’ But that I think is what the highest literature is finally about. I tell my students that appreciation, to use Pater’s wonderful word, is what I think our stance towards the highest imaginative literature should be, and that what we have to appreciate are the only values that matter in the highest literature, which are cognitive and aesthetic values quite cut off from societal and even historical considerations. Immanuel Kant, I think it was in the first Critique, says that time and space are indeed appearances and therefore in a sense illusory. But nevertheless, he says there is something numinal, there is something permanent in these appearances, and I think you don’t need Kant if you have Shakespeare. Of course, Hamlet, among so much else, is telling you that. Our yearning is at least transcendental…”

What a conundrum! Good old Bloom, doomed by his own logic to be but an interval in time and space and then to be no more but whose yearning for the transcendental cannot be sated by literature, resigning himself to take the rest of his life as it comes, bearing it with equanimity; but what’s the difference from Bloom’s resignation and Camus’s “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”? Both have imprisoned themselves in the same existential paradigm of meaninglessness and absurdity, and it doesn’t matter if one bears life with equanimity or imagines Sisyphus happy, Sterling Professor of the Humanities or Nobel Laureate of Literature, one will never satisfy the longing in their soul for wholeness and completeness until they find a way out of the conundrum that man is born into. This is the dilemma that inspired a spiritual musing that I posted on my blog Saturday, January 27, 2018:

A Way Out of the Darkness

            I’ve been steered in this direction for quite some time now, and I went online the other day to research David Foster Wallace, who wrote the novel Infinite Jest that stirred up the literary world with the promise of a new literary light, but DFW committed suicide on September 12, 2008 at the age of 46, just when he was coming onto his own as a writer, and I wrote a poem to air out my feelings on this literary genius:

The Way of Literature

Deeper and deeper into the mix,

he’s the zeitgeist behind the chaos

of a tortured mind, exposing himself

like a trench-coated compulsive proudly

showing himself to strangers, an aberrant

tick, never telling us why he is this way

(wearing a bandana because he can’t stop

perspiring), only doing what he must do to

satisfy his self-obsession. DFW, what a

genius, what prophetic wizardry, what a

tortured soul you are; no wonder you chose

to exit to the other side, this world was too

much for your rapacious mind to process,

resolve, and understand, a joke, an infinite

jest; but your light will continue to shine

until another light shines brighter, and

there will always be another light from

the eternal fire of man’s struggle, a

new zeitgeist for a new time, for

such is the way of literature.

In David Foster Wallace, I saw the dilemma of life writ large, the same dilemma that Albert Camus (about whom I had recently heard on CBC’s Ideas, asserting to how much influence his philosophy still has in the world today) explored in The Myth of Sisyphus, the dilemma of man’s inner and outer self; and despite his literary genius, which was acknowledged by most critics who reviewed Infinite Jest (he also received a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 1997), David Foster Wallace, who saw life as a joke not unlike the fate of Sisyphus, was unable to resolve the dilemma that finally drove him to suicide, a fate that Camus considered to be the only truly serious philosophical problem; an act or courage, or desperation?

Of course, they blamed it on his life-long depression for which he took medication; but despite all the medication and therapy that he received for clinical depression and drug and alcohol addiction (which were central to Infinite Jest), he still got swallowed up by his shadow and hung himself to put an end to his suffering, which leads to today’s spiritual musing—that aspect of human consciousness that is responsible for inducing the insufferable conviction that life is meaningless and absurd, that dreaded state of consciousness that we all experience at one time or another in life as our own nothingness, and which in literature was given the most exquisite expression by Macbeth’s much-too-blithely quoted, “Life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”

This is not an easy state of consciousness to apprehend, let alone explain; but it’s felt by anyone who suffers from life-long depression, like David Foster Wallace. And even those who do not suffer from deep depression experience it, because this state of consciousness defines the dark shadow side of our personality. But herein lies the quandary, because who wants to believe that our shadow self is real? It’s much easier to repress our dark shadow self than to acknowledge it, until it’s too late.

Three years ago I wrote The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway in which I explored the shadow side of Ernest Hemingway’s personality, because I wanted to flesh in this concept of the elusive shadow with the real life story of my high school hero and literary mentor, but even after all the fleshing in that I did with Hemingway’s shadow-afflicted personality, I still feel some apprehension as I write today’s spiritual musing; but I must be true to my calling, because this unresolved state of consciousness is responsible for the existential dilemma that can pull one so deep into the despair of their own nothingness that it can drive one to desolation and suicide, like it did Ernest Hemingway and David Foster Wallace.

So, what is this consciousness of our own nothingness? How does it come about? This is the mystery of the repressed dark side of our personality. The novelist John Irving made a comment so arrogantly offensive that I had to respond to it by writing a spiritual musing, “Chicken Little Syndrome and the World According to John Irving,” that I posted on my blog; he said, “You don’t choose your demons, they choose you.” This is why I was never attracted to read any more of his novels after reading The World According to Garp that launched his career, because the central motif of his life was delusory, which I confirmed by quoting something in my John Irving musing that America’s greatest seer Edgar Cayce revealed:

“While we are all at different stages of development and may be working on different lessons, we do not make much progress until we can recognize our problems as opportunities. We begin to grow when we face up to the fact that we are responsible for our trials and misery. We are only meeting self. Our present circumstances are the result of previous actions whether long removed or in the recent past. So if we are beset with problems, blame not God, for they are of our own making. Our miseries are the result of destructive or negative thoughts, emotions, and actions. We can avoid trouble and misery if we live lives of noble thought and action” (Edgar Cayce’s Story of Karma, by M. Woodward, pp. 219-220; bold italics mine).

In Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, editors Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams tell us why we have a problem, especially writers who are always trying to come to terms with the human condition and the existential dilemma of life, the seemingly irreconcilable problem of our paradoxical nature: “Our shadow self remains the great burden of self-knowledge, the disruptive element that does not want to be known.”  And why does our shadow not want to be known? The editors of Meeting the Shadow tell us: “The shadow is by nature difficult to apprehend. It is dangerous, disorderly, and forever in hiding, as if the light of higher consciousness would steal its very life” (Meeting the Shadow, Introduction, pp. XVII and XXI).

But didn’t Edgar Cayce say, “We can avoid trouble and misery if we live lives of noble thought and action”? Doesn’t this suggest that there is a way out of the darkness of our own nothingness?

It certainly does for me, which is why I made this moral imperative the guiding principle of my life and my writing; but then, as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and unless one lives a life of noble thought and action one will never know why they are the author of their own misery, because living a life of noble thought and action makes one a good person, and the law of karma has to bring goodness into one’s life, not misery! This is the logic of life that every person must see to make sense of suffering.

            A tad presumptuous? But where does a writer go when they have come to the limits of their paradigm of meaning? Depression and suicide, like Hemingway and Wallace, both gifted but self-obsessed writers who wanted their cake and eat it too? “Literature is not enough,” said Katherine Mansfield, who tragically died of tuberculosis at 34 at the Gurdjieff Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France where she sought out a teaching to expand her paradigm of meaning, as did I with the same teaching; but to expand the paradigm of literature by including the principles of karma and reincarnation as Cayce deemed would seriously tax the credulity of the literary world, which is why the light of literature will never be bright enough to resolve the consciousness of our nothingness, and one must imagine Sisyphus happy in his struggle as the celebrated philosopher of the absurd was forced by his own egocentric logic to do.

But we keep hoping against hope; because, as the dystopian writer Margaret Atwood said in one of her poems, “All we have is hope, but what hope is there?” And another brilliant writer will always come along, like the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard with his six-volume angst-ridden autobiographical novel that he, ironically, called, “My Struggle.”

———

         

          Perhaps one can now understand the gravitational attraction that Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos has for today’s crazy world; his message has awakened the world to the existential vacuum that religion, science, and politics can no longer address with conviction, and with the passion and certainty of an ancient prophet the good professor has dared to stare the archetypal shadow of life in the eye and make it blink.

          In the Overture to his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, he tells us that while he was working on his book Maps of Meaning, he had what his hero C. G. Jung called a “big dream” that gave him the insight he needed to break through his unknowing. “Dreams shed light on the dim places where reason itself has yet to voyage,” he explains, with Jungian conviction (if anything, Jordan Peterson owns his knowledge, and he speaks with a gnostic certainty that gives him the authority of the hierophants of old), and he writes:

“My dream placed me at the centre of Being itself, and there was no escape. It took me months to understand what this meant. During this time, I came to a more complete, personal realization of what the great stories of the past continually insist upon: the centre is occupied by the individual. The center is marked by the cross, as X marks the spot. Existence at that cross is suffering and transformation—and that fact, above all, needs to be voluntarily accepted. It is possible to transcend slavish adherence to the group and its doctrines and, simultaneously, to avoid the pitfalls of its opposite extreme, nihilism. It is possible, instead, to find sufficient meaning in individual consciousness and experience.

“How could the world be freed from the terrible dilemma of conflict, on the one hand, and psychological and social dissolution, on the other? The answer was this: through the elevation and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and take the heroic path” (Overture to 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, by Jordan B. Peterson, p. xxxiii; bold italics mine).

This is pure Jungian logic, and it’s the same realization that the Logos (the omniscient guiding principle of life) grants to every person who has been made ready by life for the secret way (although I also had a number of “big dreams,” I also had an incredible visionary symbolic “squaring of the circle” mandala experience in my second year of philosophy studies at Lakehead University that confirmed my path to wholeness and completeness in Gurdjieff’s transformative teaching of “work on oneself” that I had been introduced to through Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous, which I wrote about in my memoir The Pearl of Great Price that I sent to the good professor to help him break through his own wall of unknowing); and Jordan Bernt Peterson, being true to his own oracle no less than his hero Carl Gustav Jung, accepted the challenge of his remarkable dream to make the individual self the sacred center of life when he was called to stand up for free speech, and he gave his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos to the world to help complete the work which the world cannot desist from doing, the work that satisfies the longing in one’s soul for wholeness and completeness; that’s why life came knocking on the good professor’s suburban home in Toronto “the Good” (how ironic) to be a hierophant for today’s crazy world…