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 86th year of his life, Carl Jung had a dream which
confirmed that he had achieved “wholeness and singleness of self,” but in the
87th 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…
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