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…