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…
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