One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 19: All Paths Lead to the Sacred Self

CHAPTER 19

All Paths Lead to the Sacred Self

“There is nothing but the self and God.”

THE KEYS OF JESHUA

—Glenda Green

      After I finished writing the previous chapter, “The Crossroad of Jordan Peterson’s Life,” I sat on my front deck and finished reading the rest of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (I’ve been reading it slowly to savor the unique flavor of JBP’s individuation process), and I could not believe how he brought his book to resolution with the simple question in the Coda that he added at the end of his book to sum up where his call to be a hierophant for today’s crazy world had taken him—right to the sacred sanctums of his inner self, exactly where Carl Jung’s journey had taken him and mine took me.

“What will you write with your pen of light?” Peterson asks the reader, bringing climactic closure to the hierophantic message of his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos; but, as ironic as this question was for me, I cannot answer it until I bring One Rule to Live By: Be Good to resolution; which, or course, will be entirely up to my muse.

My muse is my oracle, my inner guiding light, and I have learned to trust my oracle implicitly; this was my inspiration for the creative experiment that Carl Jung called “active imagination” that I put to practice in several of my books with St. Padre Pio who spoke for my oracle, a technique that Jordan Peterson used when he wrote with his Pen of Light.

As he tells us in the Coda, this Pen of Light was “LED-equipped and beamed light out its tip, so that writing in the dark was made easier.”

This pen was a gift from his friend in California, and, being highly imaginative, Jordan Peterson saw the symbolic implications of such a special light-equipped pen: “Since I had been given, of all things, a Pen of Light, which could write Illuminated Words in the darkness, I wanted to do the best thing I could do with it. So, I asked the appropriate question—and, almost immediately, an answer revealed itself: Write down the words you want inscribed on your soul.”  And he asked a series of questions and his oracle answered them, using his special pen as his medium to bring his hierophantic message to resolution.

          This was his way of engaging his transcendent function (his higher self) to answer his questions; a form of automatic writing, but not quite. It was something like what Neale Donald Walsh did when he wrote his Conversations with God books; letting go and letting God, as it were. But all it is really is a way of engaging one’s creative unconscious.

I write all of my spiritual musings with my own Pen of Light—be it whatever pen I am using to jot down my ideas for spiritual musings, which I then complete on my word processor (I used to write my books in longhand, but I could never go back there again). I get an idea out of the blue, and then I engage my creative unconscious to work it out with me.

Sometimes it takes a lot of thought to work it out, and sometimes it just flows out of me with very little or no rewriting, like my poem “What the Hell Is Going on Out There?” and the following spiritual musing that illustrates why one is called to the destined purpose of their inner journey, just as professor Jordan Peterson was called to be a hierophant for today’s crazy world when he spoke truth to power in defense of free speech:

The Outer and Inner Journey

Talking with our new friend Sharon on our deck the other evening as we sipped on a glass of wine, which she had brought over for dinner, she revealed that none of her friends had any inclination about her inner journey, and I said: “That doesn’t surprise me. Most people are on their outer journey. But in time, they too will be called to their inner journey,” and I made reference to our new neighbors who had just built their retirement home down the street from us and who had just left on a trip in their motor home because they’re caught up in their outer journey (they plan to travel in their motor home for the next ten years, and winter in the southern states with the occasional cruise vacation), and that’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing.

Sharon cried when she read my twin soul book Death, the Final Frontier, because it confirmed her inner journey and satisfied her need to know why she was, and she read my twin soul book The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity and was brought to tears again, and I had to ask her why she cried.

“Because I know why I am now,” she said, a simple realization that took me most of my life to arrive at and many years to articulate in my writing, and all because I was called to the inner journey much earlier than most people (I was in high school when I was called), and I fulfilled my life’s purpose; but what do I mean by outer and inner journey?

I don’t know what relevance this may have just yet, but yesterday I was nudged to watch Laurens van der Post’s documentary online on C.G. Jung’s life (I’ve read his book Jung and the Story of Our Time several times), and I was brought to tears at Jung’s commitment to his inner journey, bringing to the world a new psychology that helps man make sense of his purpose in life, a psychology of individuation that facilitates the natural process of man becoming what he was meant to be, and I also watched a video on the literary scholar professor Harold Bloom and I was brought to tears again, but these were tears of sadness and not joy because professor Bloom’s outer journey of teaching literature at Yale for fifty-plus years and writing more than forty books of literary criticism had not brought his inner journey to resolution as Jung’s journey did, and now I understand why these two remarkable men were called to my attention for today’s spiritual musing, because they represent the two extremes of man’s outer and inner journey.

Three days before he died in the 86^th year of his life, Carl Jung had a dream which confirmed that he had achieved “wholeness and singleness of self,” but in the 87^th year of his life Professor Bloom is still wandering in the labyrinthine world of literature which he describes as “a breathtaking kind of nihilism more uncanny than anything Nietzsche apprehended” (he’s referring to his god of literature, William Shakespeare), unable to come to resolution for the purpose of his being; that’s why he brought me to tears, and why I was so happy for our new friend Sharon who cried when my twin soul books brought some measure of resolution to her inner journey that she began thirty-six years ago with Jane Roberts book Seth Speaks, which is why she revealed in her Amazon review of my twin soul books, “I can now see the sky through the trees and will go on.” I could not have asked for a more heart-warming review.

I’ve quoted the following prescient words many times, but I can’t help but quote them again here because they speak to man’s outer and inner journey: “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 in a rare recorded interview; but one may well ask, what is man meant to be?

“Why am I here?” Sharon asked, thus initiating her inner journey; and she read book after book hoping to find an answer to the question that everyone will ask one day when their outer journey can no longer satisfy the longing in their soul to be what they are meant to be. “Man must complete what Nature cannot finish,” said the ancient alchemists, keepers of the sacred knowledge of the secret way; but why cannot the natural process of evolution satisfy soul’s longing to be what we are meant to be?

Actually, it can satisfy our soul’s longing to be what we are meant to be; but this is a mystery for another musing, which I happily bought to resolution in my book Death, the Final Frontier with my closing chapter “The Winning Run” that brought Sharon to tears, but only when man realizes that his outer journey cannot satisfy the longing in his soul for wholeness and completeness and is called to their inner journey.

“He’s about ten years away from being called to his inner journey,” I said to Sharon, as we sipped on another glass of wine and talked about the inner and outer journey; I was making reference to our new neighbor Lenny whose wife had just taken an early retirement so they could travel and enjoy the rest of their life together doing what they had dreamt and planned on doing when they were both retired.

“How do you know,” Sharon asked me, her eyes alight with curiosity.

“I saw it in his eyes,” I replied, with an impish smile. “One day, about ten years from now, after they’ve had their surfeit of travel and the good life, he will catch himself, perhaps in the middle of a barbeque, watching TV, or just talking with friends or his wife over breakfast, and he will stare into space with a blank expression on his face and ask himself, ‘Is this all there is to life?’ That’s the call, and as faint as it may be, it will be his call to the destined purpose of his inner journey…

———

         

It takes a long time for life to make one ready for their inner journey to wholeness and completeness (many lifetimes, in fact), and when one is ready they are called by life to a path that will help them resolve the paradoxical nature of their outer and inner self; this is why Jordan Peterson was called to speak truth to power, so he could bring his message of hope and meaning through personal responsibility to a world that seems to have lost its way.

Why else would he have such a massive following, with millions viewing his online lectures and a rapidly expanding number tuning in to his Patreon platform and thousands of people, mostly young men, attending his book tour talks? A phenomenon, indeed!

Why? Because, as Carl Jung said, like the acorn seed that must become an oak tree, so too are we born to become what we are meant to be; but most get stuck, and Jordan B. Peterson was called to help get the world unstuck. That’s why his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos has become a phenomenal bestseller, because by practicing these 12 rules for life one can get unstuck and continue on their journey to wholeness and completeness…

         

One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 18: The Crossroad of Jordan Peterson's Life

CHAPTER 18

The Crossroad of Jordan Peterson’s Life

I should have been startled by Jordan Peterson’s life-altering experience that he relates in “Rule 8: Tell the Truth—Or, at Least, Don’t Lie,” but I wasn’t; I laughed with joy, because I knew that he would’ve had to have a similar experience to mine in his own journey of self-discovery, because that’s just the way life works. But what was his life-altering experience, and how was it so eerily similar to mine that it made me laugh with joy?

It always tickles me whenever another person’s journey brings them to the crossroad of their life and they don’t know which path to take to continue on their journey to wholeness and completeness, which Robert Frost epitomized in his poem The Road Not Taken that he summed up with poetic genius in the following lines: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— /I took the one less travelled by, /And that has made all the difference.”

So, which road did truth-seeking young Jordan Peterson take that made all the difference in his life? He tells us in “Rule 8: Tell the Truth—Or, at Least, Don’t Lie”:

“I had a strange set of experiences a few years before embarking upon my clinical training. I found myself subject to some rather violent compulsions (none acted upon), and developed the conviction, in consequence, that I really knew rather little about who I was and what I was up to. So, I began paying much closer attention to what I was doing—and saying. The experience was disconcerting, to say the least. I soon divided myself into two parts; one that spoke, and one, more detached, that paid attention and judged. I soon came to realize that almost everything I said was untrue. I had motives for saying these things: I wanted to win arguments and gain status and impress people and get what I wanted. I was using language to bend and twist the world into delivering what I thought was necessary. But I was a fake. Realizing this, I started to practice only saying things that the internal voice would not object to. I started to practice telling the truth—or, at least, not lying. I soon learned that such a skill came in very handy when I didn’t know what to do. What should you do when you don’t know what to do? Tell the truth. So, that’s what I did my first day at the Douglas Hospital.” (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, p. 205, bold italics mine).

When I stopped laughing in joyful recognition of Jordan Peterson’s dilemma, both his hero and mine, C. G. Jung, came to mind, because he too came to see the dual nature of his own self-consciousness, which he called Personality No. 1, and Personality No. 2, as everyone must see their dual self when their path can take them no further on their destined purpose to wholeness and completeness; and I reflected on the coincidental similarities of our paths.

Carl Jung had to live out his Personality No. 1 in his chosen path of psychiatry to grow in self-consciousness enough to take him to the crossroad of his life (which was in the fortieth year of his life, as he tells us in The Red Book), just as Jordan Peterson had to grow in his own chosen profession and I had to grow in my own path (contract painting), which brought us both to the crossroad of our life that would make us ready for the secret way as it did our respective hero C. G. Jung; and this brings to mind the spiritual musing that I posted on my blog Saturday, July 20, 2017 that speaks to the inability of the natural process of evolution to take us all the way to our destined purpose of wholeness and completeness:

An Old Chinese Proverb

There`s an old Chinese proverb, which is attributed to the Taoist Master Lao Tzu (author of the Tao Te Ching), that goes like this: “Those who know, do not speak; those who speak, do not know.” Tao means the way, and the way is what C. G. Jung called the secret way in his commentary to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the ancient Taoist text The Secret of the Golden Flower, and reflecting upon this proverb, which took me years to resolve, one can see that Lao Tzu was referring to a secret knowledge of the Tao, or way.

Given this, this cryptic proverb can be broken down into the following less enigmatic saying: Those who know the way do not speak about the way, and those who do not know the way speak about it as if they know the way. Still, the unyielding mystery of this wisdom saying is the way; and this is the subject of today’s spiritual musing…

Ideas for my spiritual musings can come to me from anywhere, and today’s idea came from something that I read in my weekend paper, Saturday, July 15, 2017 Toronto Star Book section, in James Grainger’s review of Fiona Barton’s new novel, The Child.

The first paragraph arrested my attention, and one sentence kept buzzing around in my head and would not go away; and this morning I felt compelled to abandon to my creative unconscious and explore this thought in a spiritual musing. I will quote the paragraph and highlight the sentence:

“In a culture where peace, political stability and relative prosperity have been the norm for over 50 years, the aspiring suspense or horror author may well ask: what is there left for readers to fear? Not only are people living longer, healthier lives, they’ve stopped believing in an all-seeing God who punishes their transgressions. The resounding answer, if the bestseller lists (and the plot lines of binge-worthy TV series) are anything to go by, is the fear of losing a loved one, especially a child.”

This is where we are today, then; locked into an existential matrix where human life is characterized by the mortal limits of our biology and not by an expansive spiritual paradigm that embraces the concept of an immortal soul that animates our body and continues to exist after our body has expired, as ancient wisdom teachings would have us believe, like the Tao Te Ching for example. It’s no wonder then that the fear of death has such power over us!

It was because of this fear that I was called to write Death, the Final Frontier, which was immediately followed by my twin soul book The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity, to relieve the insufferable pressure upon social consciousness exerted by the existential dread of our mortality; but—and this is the but that gave me the impetus to take on the challenge of today’s spiritual musing—it has become painfully clear to me that man today does not want to know if there is more to life than our five senses, because the answer is much more frightening than the fear of death itself, as difficult as this may be to believe.

Happily, there is much more to life than what we experience with our five senses, which the more intuitive among us can discern, as Psychologist Dr. Teresa DeCicco points to in her timely book Living Beyond the Five Senses: The Emergence of a Spiritual Being (which, as coincidence would have it, was the inspiring factor that called me to write Death, the Final Frontier), and the creative imperative of today’s spiritual musing beckons me to spell out why man fears to expand the parameters of our existential paradigm of personal meaning that society, for whatever ungodly reason, cannot seem to transcend.

It happened innocently enough, as these kinds of insights usually do. I was having a chat with my retired neighbor, who was out walking his two little terriers and saw me reading on my front deck and stopped by to say hello, and he was telling me about his wife’s early retirement and all the time she would have on her hands, and by happy coincidence I had just read a review in The Walrus magazine of a book called The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life that Matters, by Emily Esfahani Smith, and I tore the page out of the magazine for his wife to look into, if she so desired; but, as coincidence would have it, my neighbor with his feisty little terriers and forlorn look of repressed sadness in his pale blue eyes, revealed (whether it was a defensive response to the book I suggested his wife look into, or from a deep feeling of emptiness that he hoped would be filled by the good life that he and his second wife were embarking upon in her early retirement, I don’t know) that he didn’t think there was an answer to life’s big question.

“This is all we got,” he said, reigning tight his aggressive little terriers.

“Not so!” I reacted, with the instincts of a mongoose. “There is an answer, Lenny. I know there is, because I found it. But no one wants to know what it is, because with the answer comes the responsibility of living it; and that scares the shit out of people—”

I startled myself with my instinctive response, and Lenny was taken aback also; but this has happened to me many times before, as though I have an instinctive need to react to the pernicious archetypal shadow of the soul-crushing spirit of man’s nothingness, which was best expressed by William Shakespeare’s Macbeth’s much-too famous, albeit exquisitely lugubrious soliloquy:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

            But if Shakespeare, whose worldview the eminent literary scholar professor Harold Bloom called “a breathtaking kind of nihilism more uncanny than anything that Nietzsche apprehended,” could not expand the existential paradigm of life beyond the values “that we create or imbue events, people, things with,” then what hope was there for the rest of us to see the light at the end of the tunnel? It’s no wonder that people are crushed by the weight of existential dread. But I could never imagine Sisyphus happy, as the iconic philosopher of the absurd Albert Camus did, because there is meaning and purpose to our existence.

That’s the irony. But when one finds the way, one refuses to speak about it. For two reasons: 1, for fear of scaring people with the responsibility that goes with living the way; and 2, out of the knowledge that one will find the way eventually when life has made them ready, because that’s just the way life works.

That’s what Lao Tzu meant by his cryptic saying, and why I said to my friendly neighbor with his feisty little terriers that people don’t want to know the answer to life’s big question, because the responsibility of living the way would be too great to bear.

I could have told him that one would find the answer eventually, but I didn’t want to introduce the concept of reincarnation which would only have opened up a whole new conversation and scared him further. And yet, the mystic poet Rumi, who knew the way, shouted with clarion certainty: “Tell it unveiled, the naked truth! The declaration’s better than the secret.” Which threw me into a tricky situation, because I didn’t know whether to speak or keep silent.

But my neighbor plucked up his courage, as his feisty littler terriers circled around his legs anxious to walk some more, and asked me the dreaded question: “What’s the answer?”

“Consciousness,” I instinctively responded, with no less intent than a deadly cobra. “The purpose of life is to grow in the consciousness of what we are, and what we are is more than our mortal body; but to grow in the consciousness of our essential nature demands much more than we’re willing to pay. That’s the premise of a book I wrote called The Pearl of Great Price that was inspired by one of Christ’s most cryptic parables. But we’re getting into some deep waters here, Lenny. Rest assured that there is an answer to life’s big question, and one day, believe it or not, it will all make sense to you.”

Again, he looked at me quizzically. “Well, I can’t see it.”

“Few people can. But it’s there, I assure you,” I responded.

“Would you stake your life on it?” he said, with a sly little grin.

“I already have. That’s the price one has to pay to find it,” I replied, and broke into an ironic laughter that puzzled my neighbor even further as he held tight the leash to his feisty little terriers.

———

In his book In Search of the Miraculous, Ouspensky quotes Gurdjieff, whose teaching I had taken up when I dropped out of university: “To speak the truth is the most difficult thing in the world; and one must study a great deal and for a long time in order to be able to speak the truth. The wish alone is not enough. To speak the truth, one must know what the truth is and what a lie is, and first of all in oneself. And this nobody wants to know.”

There I was then, several years of living Gurdjieff’s teaching with a commitment that I could hardly bear when I came to a crossroad in my life and could go no further until I found a way that would take me to wholeness and completeness—but I had no idea whatsoever what way to go, because I had banked my whole life on Gurdjieff’s teaching; but I hit a brick wall with Gurdjieff’s teaching, and I came to a stop so disconcerting that it shook me to the core of my being. Where do I go, what do I do?

The sad truth is that I did not even know that Gurdjieff’s teaching could take me no further; and that’s when the inner guiding principle of my life intervened with the question that burned a hole like a white-hot laser through the impenetrable wall of my vanity for me to pass through and continue on my ineluctable journey to wholeness and completeness.

I was sitting in my bedroom one evening, so forlorn and dejected that I had to put on Beethoven’s Ode to Joy (his Ninth Symphony) to pick up my spirits, and (I can’t be sure, but in my mind, I seem to think it happened just as Beethoven’s Ode to Joy exploded in that bombastic crescendo that always, always brings me to tears of joy), I heard a voice in my mind ask me the question, “Why do you lie?”

          Startled into awareness, I just stared, bewildered and dumfounded. I heard the voice as distinctly as someone sitting in the room beside me, but in my mind. It was a male voice, and I waited for it to say something more; but nothing more came, and I was beside myself.

          What, me lie? How could I lie? I’m a truth seeker. I gave up everything to become a truth seeker; what do you mean, why do you lie?”

          That disembodied question changed my life forever, no less than Jordan Peterson’s shocking realization that his life was a lie also, despite his belief in himself (neither him nor I would ever have imagined that we were so inauthentic); and not until one comes face to face with the false self  of their ego will they find the way to their true self…

One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 17: Outside the Box, or Cloud-cuckoo-land?

CHAPTER 17

Outside the Box, or Cloud-cuckoo-land?

          As I said, I never fit in with my family, and I found out why when I had my first past-life regression; but truth be told, not only did I feel out of context with my family, but with my very own life and society as well—a strange feeling that I had my whole life and did not resolve until just a few years ago when I went for a spiritual healing with a gifted psychic medium who channelled St. Padre Pio for my novel Healing with Padre Pio.

          Like C. G. Jung, who broke away from his mentor Sigmund Freud to establish his own discipline that he called Analytical Psychology, so too did psychiatrist Victor Frankl break away from the prevailing schools of psychotherapy to create his own discipline that he called Logotherapy; and as he tells us in his remarkable book Man’s Search for Meaning, his therapy has to do with accepting personal responsibility for one’s life (clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson owes much more to Victor Frankl than he likes to admit); and in the section of his book that he calls THE ESSENCE OF EXISTENCE, Frankl writes:

“The emphasis on responsibilities is reflected in the categorical imperative of logotherapy, which is: ‘Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!’ It seems to me that there is nothing which would stimulate a man’s sense of responsibleness more than this maxim, which invites him to imagine first that the present is past and, second, that the past may yet be changed and amended. Such a precept confronts him with life’s finiteness as well as the finality of what he makes out of both his life and himself” (Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor E. Frankl, pp. 131-2; bold italics mine).

This may be hard to believe (honestly, I never cease to marvel at the genius of the creative unconscious!), but I was called by my muse last year to write a spiritual musing that creatively expounds upon Logotherapy’s categorical imperative, offering a viable explanation drawn both from literature and the movies for why one should live one’s life responsibly, and I posted my spiritual musing on my blog Saturday, December 30, 2017:

What’s Life For?

Quantum physics theorizes that parallel worlds exist, and if they do exist so too would parallel lives, something that the German philosopher Nietzsche (1844-1900) posited as a central concept in his most popular book Thus Spoke Zarathustra and which the writer and student of Gurdjieff’s teaching P. D. Ouspensky explored in his novel Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, as well as the contemporary novelist Kate Atkinson with her novel Life After Life; but what if this theory were true? This is the conceit of the movie Before I Fall, a fascinating story of eternal recurrence and self-redemption that is worth exploring…

It was Boxing Day, and Penny and I watched the Netflix movie Before I Fall, based upon the best-selling eponymous novel by the prescient 26 year-old Lauren Oliver, a movie based upon the principle of eternal recurrence not unlike the movie Groundhog Day when Bill Murray keeps waking up to the same day, only in Oliver’s story her protagonist Samantha (Sam) Kingston not only wakes up to the same day for seven straight days, but she explores her life of moral impunity and then finally comes to the realization that to give her life meaning she has to improve and make her life better, a captivating story of self-redemption that called for a spiritual musing on parallel lives and the Sisyphean struggle; but where did the mind-boggling idea of living our same life over again originate?

This idea goes back to pre-Socratic times, but the idea of living our same life over again came to Nietzsche in a moment of inspired thought on August 1881 while out on a walk alongside Lake Silvaplana in Switzerland, and which he creatively introduced as aphorism 341, entitled “The greatest weight,” in Book IV of his book The Gay Science:

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust! 

“Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”

For Nietzsche, this inspired idea became a thought experiment that he made central to his prophet-like figure Zarathustra’s teaching, a philosophy of amor fati (love of one’s fate), a life-affirming yae-saying to life as opposed to Christianity’s life-denying nay-saying ethos because Christianity sees this world as inferior to another and this life as mere preparation for a life in paradise; but in the mind of imaginative writers like Ouspensky, Atkinson, and  Oliver one can change the recurring pattern of one’s life and move on to a more perfect life, which opens up this spiritual musing to the terrifying issue of moral relativism that haunted me for years, because for the life of me I could not see where society was going given that modern man was now free to posit his own personal sense of right and wrong, a ticking time-bomb that keeps exploding in the violent terrorism on social order and human decency; but I finally brought this issue to personal resolution in my spiritual musing “The Stupidity of Moral Relativism,” which I’ve included in my fourth volume of spiritual musings The Armchair Guru and need not explore here.

Suffice to say that moral relativism resists the teleological imperative of our destined purpose, which is to realize our wholeness and completeness; this is why the guiding spirit of our creative unconscious has introduced the principle of redemption through the concept of eternal recurrence in the medium of literature and the movies, with the anti-Nietzschean twist that we can change the soul-crushing recurring pattern of our same life if only we are willing to heed the redemptive principle of our destined purpose.

Our destined purpose is to become who we are meant to be, and I don’t believe it was a coincidence that the motto BECOME WHO YOU ARE was shown on a poster in the high school student Kent’s bedroom in the movie Before I Fall, which caught Sam’s attention on one of her recurring days (and which quite possibly sparked her desire to improve her life and become who she was meant to be), and neither do I believe it was  a coincidence that the high school teacher in the classroom that Sam keeps returning to on the morning of the recurring same day writes on the blackboard the word HISTORY in caps (implying that history repeats itself) and the word Sisyphus underscored, and then says to his students: “Sisyphus. Not an STD (sexually transmitted disease). What’s he like? What does it mean when something is described as being Sisyphean? Does it mean pointless? Brave? Late? (Kent just walked into the classroom late, and the class laughs,) What’s his character like? Does he learn from pushing that boulder—” just then three girls walk into the classroom delivering roses for Cupid’s Day, the day before Valentine’s, and the story now has its theme of eternal recurrence that Albert Camus made famous by allegorizing Sisyphus’s fate with the drudgery of man’s daily struggle in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” the theme of Samantha Kingston’s recurring daily struggle.

Was there a point to Sisyphus rolling that rock up a hill only to have it roll back down of its own weight where he was fated to rolling it back up again, for eternity?

Albert Camus couldn’t see the point. The gods that condemned Sisyphus “thought that there was no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor,” wrote Camus, comparing Sisyphus’s fate with man’s daily struggle, and he brings his iconic essay to ironic resolution by arrogantly thumbing his nose at the gods that had condemned Sisyphus: “There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night…The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” which I could never do, because life for me was neither pointless nor absurd; it was the way to who we are meant to be, which Samantha finally figured out as she returned to live the same day over again and finally broke the pattern of her recurring life and was on her way to becoming who she was meant to be, her true self whole and complete, thereby resolving the conundrum of the Sisyphean struggle that she faced every morning of her recurring life.

But the question arises: why did Samantha want to redeem herself? What inspired her to change her recurring day into one that improved her life? Why not continue to live the same day over again doing whatever she wanted with moral impunity? Why improve her life, which she finally ended up doing, and by improving her life she meant becoming a better person?

The author Lauren Oliver answers this question in a letter that she wrote for the special enhanced edition of her novel Before I Fall; but before I reveal her answer, let me say something first about the creative spirit of a writer’s life, the all-knowing daimon of one’s creative unconscious that is infinitely wiser than our cognitive mind which Lauren Oliver makes clear in her inspiration for her novel Before I Fall, an inspiration that came from a childhood and adolescent ritual of putting herself to sleep when she had trouble sleeping by going over and over in her mind what made for a perfect day, a ritual which engaged the redemptive principle of life that seeks to reconcile one’s existential outer life with one’s destined inner purpose of realizing wholeness and completeness of one’s sacred self, a playful nighttime ritual that evolved into the idea of living one’s life over and over again to improve and better one’s life, which became the dynamic theme of her refreshingly iconoclastic, anti-Nietzschean and genuinely life-affirming novel Before I Fall.

Upon reflection on her novel years after she wrote it, Lauren Oliver came to realize that Samantha Kingston (her fictional self) was looking for personal meaning, what really mattered to her and what she wanted to be remembered for when she died, and she found this meaning by improving her life and becoming a better person; that was the driving aesthetic of her imagined but essentially autobiographical novel Before I Fall; but why meaning? Why not happiness and well-being? Material comfort, good health, pleasure, fame? Why meaning?

“Vanity of vanities, sayeth the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?” asked Ecclesiastes, essentially the same question that Samantha asked as she relived her same day over again, and the answer that she came up with was that she had to improve and perfect her life because this would give her life the meaning for which she wanted to be remembered; but why? That’s what the Preacher in the Book of Ecclesiastes was trying to figure out, and every other person who asks the question, “What the hell’s the point of it all, anyway?”

Albert Camus couldn’t figure it out (he came dangerously close in his novel The Fall), and he relegates life to an absurd fate not unlike the futile and hopeless labor that Sisyphus was condemned to by the gods. But Lauren Oliver came to a different conclusion, and she did so by allowing the wisdom of her creative spirit to work it out for her in her novel Before I Fall, an imagined, but intuitive expression of the redemptive principle of life in Samantha’s desire to become a better person, to make her recurring day as perfect as possible, which she did by acknowledging the worth and goodness in others; that’s how she gave her life the meaning she needed. But this is a very difficult concept to convey, which I’ve explored in other musings; suffice to say here that Before I Fall is a story that addresses what we all ask, What’s life for? To become who we are meant to be, our true self, intuited the author Lauren Oliver; that’s what life’s for.

           

POSTSCRIPT

It occurred to me as I edited and reworked this musing that Lauren Oliver’s novel Before I Fall is an ironic, albeit unconscious literary response to Albert Camus’s novel The Fall, the story of a French lawyer racked with guilt at the vanity, selfishness and duplicity of his former life. Camus’s protagonist Jean-Baptiste-Clamence falls from grace and spends the rest of his remorseful life in Amsterdam wallowing in despair. Clamence recounts his story of woe and guilt to a stranger in a friendly bar called Mexico City in the red-light district that Camus metaphorically compares to “the last circle of hell,” hence the title of his novel The Fall. In Lauren Oliver’s novel Before I Fall, her protagonist Samantha Kingston safeguards her fall from grace by improving and bettering her selfish life. I’m only surmising, of course; but in my experience of how the creative spirit of a writer’s personal daimon works, it has an omniscient quality that can draw upon the collective unconscious of the human psyche to make the point of the writer’s story with an unconscious but all-knowing creative imperative, as it did with both Albert Camus and Lauren Oliver, only with Camus the point was the absurdity of life, and with Oliver the point was the meaning of life, two distinctly opposite perspectives, but one no less valid than the other, as I spelled out in my spiritual musing “The Two Ends of the Stick: Shania Twain and P. D. Ouspensky.” Both novels express the dual consciousness of human nature, one positive and one negative; and the choice is ours to make, as the young Samantha comes to realize in her recurring life of seven days. On a curious note, I wanted to know how Lauren Oliver came up with the title for her book; and in the special enhanced edition of Before I Fall she informs us that after she and her editor and agent went through a long list of titles, her editor Rosemary Brosnan “dreamed” (Oliver’s italics) the title Before I Fall, which just happened to be the opposite end of the stick to Albert Camus’s novel The Fall, confirming for me once again the guiding wisdom of the creative unconscious. I never cease to marvel at how the merciful law of divine synchronicity works!

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So, why did I feel out of context with my family, my own life, and society? Why did I feel like I was living a life apart? What could possibly explain this pervasive feeling?

I got an explanation late in life, but the seed was planted in a poem that I was inspired to write in grade twelve—no, that’s not the right word; I wasn’t inspired to write my poem “Noman,” I was possessed to write it with a daemonic intensity that I have never experienced since; and it took almost fifty years before I understood what my poem was telling me.

I worked out the answer to my poem in my very private memoir The Summoning of Noman, which was inspired by something that Padre Pio told me in one of my spiritual healing sessions. He said that I have lived my same life over again three times in my reincarnational history, and my current lifetime is one of those three times.

It blew my mind! I, Orest Stocco, returned to live my same life over again! How can this be? That’s what I had to find out, and for months I went online researching the theory of parallel lives, and finally I turned to the only source of information that I could trust: my own dreams. My inspiration was Carl Jung, who always relied on his dreams for guidance, and the result was The Summoning of Noman that tells the story of my parallel life.

So, Victor Frankl; your categorical imperative was well-founded, because I actually came back to live my same life over again to achieve a different outcome, just as Padre Pio told me in my spiritual healing session, which I wrote about in Healing with Padre Pio; and the different outcome that I achieved was to pass through the eye of the needle that I could not find a way of doing in my first lifetime as Orest Stocco. Unbelievable, but true!

          This means that Jordan Peterson’s got it right with his book 12 Rules to Live By: An Antidote to Chaos, because like Victor Frankl he too worked out a therapeutically healthy and self-transcending way of living one’s life responsibly, which creates the character that makes one ready for the secret way of life that leads to wholeness and completeness; and this makes Dr. Jordan Peterson a logotherapist, whether he wants to call himself that or not…