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!
———
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…
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