One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 21: Expanding the Existential Paradigm

CHAPTER 21

Expanding the Existential Paradigm

          When I first read Jess Stearn’s book The Search for a Soul: Taylor Caldwell’s Psychic Lives, the story of some of the historical novelist’s past lives that she was regressed to under hypnosis, I knew that one day I would have my own past-life regressions, which I did when Penny and I moved to Georgian Bay fifteen years ago, and I got the answers that I was looking for to my haunting questions: why I was born into my family, why I had an attraction for older women, and why I felt an inexplicable familiarity with the secret way of life in Gurdjieff’s teaching which serendipity had introduced me to in my second year of philosophy studies at university; and as I lived Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself,” I reconnected with the secret way of life that I had lived in several of my past lifetimes, the first time as a student of Pythagoras, and the second time as a mendicant Sufi in ancient Persia, and I finally managed to satisfy the longing in my soul for wholeness and completeness in my current lifetime that the natural way of evolution through karma and reincarnation cannot realize.

This is why my oracle wanted me to re-read my Edgar Cayce literature, because no one—and I mean no one!—can satisfy the longing in their soul for wholeness and completeness until they expand the existential paradigm of their life and embrace (and if not embrace, at least entertain) the idea of a way out of the existential dilemma of the human condition which keeps soul trapped in the endless cycle of karma and reincarnation; this is why I’m so moved by professor Peterson’s commitment to share his message to the world, because his message in 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos will consolidate one’s energies and make one ready for the final stage of soul’s evolution through life, which I intimated in a spiritual musing that I was called upon to write last summer:

The Circumference of Our Life

It was something I read two or three weeks ago, which I haven’t been able to trace yet, but I think it was a Sufi saying that was quoted by a new poet I was researching online, and it went something like this: to walk the path one must first realise that one’s own life is the path. But wherever I came upon this saying, it set free the idea for today’s spiritual musing.

As I wrote in my spiritual musing “The Outer and Inner Journey,” when one is ready for the inner journey they will be called by life to look for the path to their true self. This is the mystery that has taken my whole life to resolve, a resolution which came to me only after I journeyed through the world of many teachings, all of which served their purpose of bringing me closer and closer to my own path; and that’s the irony of the secret way of life.

The secret way of life is what Jesus called the way. The way is life itself, and a path is an individualized expression of the way of life, like the teachings of Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Rumi, or John Doe and Mary Jane; this is why the Sufis say that there are as many paths to God as there are souls. But this is all very abstruse and difficult to understand, and it behooves me to explain the logic of the way. But how?

Once again then, into the breach…

“Where are you?” Penny Lynn asked me this morning, noticing my far-away look as I paused to talk with her when she put her book down for our usual morning chat.

“Somewhere between here and there,” I replied.

“Where’s that?” she asked.

“Somewhere between the resolve and unresolved. I’m working on a new spiritual musing, but I don’t have a point of entry. I’ve got the inspiration, but I haven’t quite apprehended it yet. That’s what John Keats meant when he wrote in his essay ‘A Defense of Poetry’ that ‘poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration.’ I can see the idea of my spiritual musing, but until I apprehend it it’s not mine.”

For reasons which I can never fathom but which I know are choreographed by divine agency, in our little chat about this and that Penny responded with a non sequitur to something our friend Sharon had said to her friend Jennifer the other night when they were talking on the phone; Sharron said she didn’t have anything more to talk about and bid her friend Jennifer goodnight, and knowing what I knew about Sharon, who has been living the inner journey for the past thirty-six years, and her friend Jennifer who is stuck in the outer journey of her life and has little to no awareness of the inner journey (or doesn’t want to know for fear of the commitment to the moral imperative of the inner journey), I replied to Penny’s non sequitur: “That doesn’t surprise me. What do they have to talk about when Jennifer’s world is so small? The circumference of Jennifer’s life is limited to the material world, to the outer journey of her life. Sharon has expanded her horizons beyond the material world, so it doesn’t surprise me that Jennifer would exhausts Sharon’s interest. It’s all about expanding the circumference of our life, sweetheart; that’s what makes life interesting—”

And the moment I said this, I apprehended my inspiration and thanked Penny for her non sequitur, which I knew was inspired by the omniscient guiding principle of life to give me the entry point that I needed for today’s spiritual musing…

 I could look it up in half a dozen books in my library and find references from renowned spiritual teachers, poets and mystics to confirm my own realization that life is the way, but that would only clutter today’s spiritual musing with pedantic references; but I can’t help myself, I have to quote at least one remarkable person whose resolute commitment to the way brought me to tears.

“But one thing you must know: the one thing I have learned is that one must live this life. This life is the way, the long sought-after way to the unfathomable, which we call divine. There is no other way, all other ways are false paths,” said Carl Jung in The Red Book, the chronicle of his self-initiation into the sacred mysteries of the way; and he spent the rest of his long and productive life working the sacred mysteries of the way into his psychology of individuation to help man realize his true self. But Carl Jung was called to the way because his outer life could take him no further on his journey to wholeness and completeness.

“At this time, in the fortieth year of my life, I had achieved everything that I had wished for myself. I had achieved honor, power, wealth, knowledge, and every human happiness. Then my desire for the increase of these trappings ceased, the desire ebbed from me and horror came over me…My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you—are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you, I am with you. After years of long wandering, I have come to you again…” confessed Jung in The Red Book, thus beginning his quest for his lost soul which he had forfeited to the world to satisfy the dreams and aspirations of his outer life—as does everyone, for such is the natural process of evolution; and this is the mystery of the way that calls for elucidation.

How I came upon the sacred knowledge of the way doesn’t really matter for today’s spiritual musing; I’ve written about this in The Summoning of Noman, The Pearl of Great Price and my book of poetry, Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys, so I know that the life one lives, whether it be a life of art, music, literature, politics, religion, science, prostitution, carpentry, academics, or whatever, is the way of life, albeit the way of life lived unconscious of the imperative of the way. But the unconscious way of life can only take one so far in their journey to wholeness and completeness, and then one is called to the inner journey and one must live their path consciously, which will initiate one deeper into the sacred mysteries of the way to help them complete what nature cannot finish and realize wholeness and completeness.

This is the core mystery of the way, then: through natural evolution we evolve unconsciously to our true self, and when natural evolution has made us ready to live the way consciously, we are called by life to find our own path and awaken to the way; so, the life we choose to live determines the circumference of our life, the parameters of our interests, passions, and dreams. But regardless how far we expand the circumference of our life, the natural way of life will never be enough to satisfy the longing inn our soul for wholeness and completeness, just as Jung came to realize; but then what?

What does one do? Where does one turn? Does one live their life in quiet desperation, as Henry David Thoreau said about the vast majority of mankind? Or does one take up arms against a sea of troubles and get sucked into the enantiodromiac vortex of life’s never-ending process of evolution, the tragic conundrum of the natural laws of karma and reincarnation? Or does one heed life’s call to the sacred mysteries of the way and embark upon the inner journey to wholeness and completeness as Carl Jung did, as I did, and every soul that embraces their destiny when life makes them ready? The choice is ours to make, life after life...

———

          This is why I sent Jordan Peterson my books The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway and The Pearl of Great Price, I heard him banging on the door to the third and final stage of evolution, and my heart went out to him; and three years later I brashly sent him My Writing Life and The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity, because his passionate defense of free speech compelled me to send him these books for encouragement on his own remarkable Solzhenitsyn-inspired journey through life that surprisingly catapulted him onto the world stage with his international best-selling book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.

And this is why my oracle called me to write One Rule to Live By: Be Good, because the imperative of my way may just crack open the door to the inner journey of one’s life and help one expand the paradigm of their existential life, as Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous helped me expand mine; but I do so, of course, with all the presumption of one who has found the way, lives the way, and makes no apologies for the way…

One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 20: The Dilemma of Evolution

CHAPTER 20

The Dilemma of Evolution

          After I finished reading 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, I was strongly nudged by to re-read Jess Stearn’s book The Search for a Soul: Taylor Caldwell’s Psychic Lives, which I finished reading in one day on my front deck, getting much more out of it this time than I did the first time I read it more than thirty years ago.  

It was a warm spring day in Georgian Bay, and I enjoyed reading on my deck, but I had no idea why I was nudged to read Jess Stearn’s book again until it dawned on me that my oracle wanted to enhance the paradigm of karma and reincarnation that One Rule to Live By: Be Good prepares one for, because all paths in life lead to this perspective, however many lifetimes it takes; and Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, whose imperatives is to help one resolve the paradoxical nature of their inner and outer self, can only make one ready for the secret way that will lead them to wholeness and completeness, because 12 Rules for Life can only take one so far on their journey through life and no further.

This is the dilemma of evolution and the irony of Jordan Peterson’s book. For all of his  brilliance, passion, and good will the good professor cannot provide a way to negotiate the rest of the way to wholeness and completeness (I suspect he knows this intuitively, because there is only self-initiation into the mysteries of life), and after I read Jess Stearn’s book on Taylor Caldwell’s past lives, I was called to re-read his book Intimates Through Time: Edgar Cayce’s Mysteries of Reincarnation; and when I finished reading this book, I immediately began re-reading Edgar Cayce’s Story of Karma, by Hugh Lynn Cayce, to remind myself of the bigger picture of why we are the way we are and why we do what we do.

I had to read 12 Rules for Life: And Antidote to Chaos again to consolidate my impressions and make sure I got the facts right, but every time I tried to get into it I was called away by Jess Stearn’s books, and only after I finished reading them did I see what my oracle was trying to tell me—that no matter how hard we try, we cannot deny the imperative of our inner nature to align ourselves with our destined purpose, which is to be true to who we are, just as I explored in my spiritual musing that was inspired by a movie that Penny and I saw on Netflix last summer called The Intern, starring Anne Hathaway and Robert De Niro, which I posted on my Spiritual Musings blog August 28, 2017:

Being the Tao

The idea for today’s spiritual musing presupposes so much that I don’t know if I can do it justice; but I have to try, or why else would I have been called to write it?

Upon reflection, I can see now how the idea came about; but it wasn’t until I heard Jules (Anne Hathaway) say to her new intern Ben (Robert De Niro) in Nancy Meyers movie The Intern, “How is it that you always manage to say the right thing, do the right thing, and be the right thing?” that the words “BEING THE TAO” popped into my mind like a canon shot, because unconsciously I had picked up that Jules Ostin’s intern Ben Whittaker was in the Tao; and that’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing...

In the ancient Chinese teaching, Tao means the way, and the teaching of Taoism is all about living the way; but here’s where we run into a problem because, as I wrote in my spiritual musing “An Old Chinese Proverb,” defining the way of Tao is next to impossible to do. But because I know what the way of Tao is, I have to try; and I know what the way of Tao is, because I was initiated into the sacred mystery of the way while on my own journey to wholeness and completeness. This is why I said that this idea of BEING THE TAO presupposes so much that I may not be able to do it justice.

However, it behooves me to offer my personal definition of the way, which has been drawn from my life of living the way consciously from the moment I awakened to the way: the way is the inherent wisdom of the teleological imperative of life; and living one’s life with purpose and meaning, regardless what path one is on, is living the imperative of the way, which initiates one into the sacred mystery of one’s true self and the Tao. In short, the way is the self-reconciling factor of life.

But why did the phrase BEING THE TAO pop into my mind and not BEING IN THE TAO, which would seem to make more sense? This, I believe, is the central mystery of the way that I’ve been called upon to explore in today’s spiritual musing—to draw the distinction between the two.

I’ve learned to have implicit trust in my muse (my creative unconscious), so I know that I’ve been called to elucidate upon the difference between BEING THE TAO and BEING IN THE TAO; and this difference speaks to the journey and the destination, because to be the Tao one must become the Tao, and that’s what living the way is all about.

For clarity’s sake, I’m going to simple refer to the Tao as the way, because my sidebar Merriam Webster dictionary defines way as: a thoroughfare for travel or transportation from place to place; the course traveled from one place to another: route; a course (a series of actions or sequences of events leading in a direction or toward an objective), which implies that the way is a process that leads to a destination; but what destination does the way lead to?

That’s the sacred mystery of the way, because the way leads to itself; that’s why my muse popped the words BEING THE TAO into my mind instead of BEING IN THE TAO, because Jules Ostin’s new intern Ben Whittaker was his own Tao, or way. And I knew this instinctively, because I too had become my own way in my self-initiation into the sacred mystery of the way; and being his own way, Ben Whittaker was BEING THE TAO.

This sounds like esoteric gobbledygook, but all it means is that seventy-year old intern Ben Whittaker was his own man; that’s why his young boss Jules Ostin, founding owner of the hugely successful e-commerce business called “About the Fit,” called him “cool.” Ben Whittaker played the game of life, but he played the game by his own rules; that’s what made him cool.

In my spiritual musing “The Essence of Cool,” I quote David Brooks (columnist for the New York Times and author of The Road to Character): “The cool person is stoical, emotionally controlled, never eager or needy, but instead mysterious, detached and self-possessed. The cool person is gracefully competent at something but doesn’t need the world’s applause to know his worth. That’s because the cool person has found his or her own unique and authentic way of living with nonchalant intensity.”

 That’s Ben Whittaker to a tee, a self-possessed septuagenarian widower with a moral center; well-seasoned, balanced, and sensitive enough to care about people who come into his life. “The cool person,” said David Brooks, “is guided by his or her own autonomous values, often on the outskirts of society,” which was what fascinated me about the easy-going Ben Whittaker in Nancy Meyers deceptively simple, feel-good comedy The Intern.

The morning after Penny and I watched The Intern, I went online to read the reviews; and it didn’t surprise me that every review missed the core message of the feel-good comedy which Ben Whittaker personified with easy-going charm and aplomb, the edifying principles of Tai Chi which are founded on the Taoism, the way to wholeness and completeness; that’s what led me to see Nancy Meyers, the writer-director of The Intern, as the female Woody Allen of movie-making sans Woody Allen’s moral vacuity, which was why Nancy Meyers had The Intern open with a scene of Ben Whittaker doing Tai Chi exercises in an open park with a group of seniors, and why she brought The Intern to symbolic  closure with another scene of Ben Whittaker doing his Tai Chi exercises, but this time with his young boss Jules Ostin joining him, thus implying that she was embracing the edifying philosophy of Taoism to help center herself in the Tao like her cool intern Ben Whittaker.

The premise of today’s spiritual musing rests upon my perception that the seventy-year-old widower intern personified the principles of Tai Chi, and my feeling is that the script writer/director Nancy Meyers succeeded brilliantly; otherwise my creative unconscious would not have picked up on it and inspired me with the words BEING THE TAO when Jules, albeit inebriated, said to her intern Ben: “How is it that you always manage to say the right thing, do the right thing, and be the right thing?” Which is nothing more, or less, than BEING THE TAO; which, in effect, simply means being one’s own way.

———

This is precisely how I see professor Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, as a Tai Chi exercise of the mind to help center the self in the Tao, a way to consolidate the energies of one’s life into a personal path, a guiding principle of 12 self-transformative rules that will give direction and purpose to one’s existence and fill the hole in one’s soul that religion, science, and politics cannot address in today`s crazy world; but why the inner nudge to re-read some of my Edgar Cayce literature?

Is this where my oracle wants One Rule to Live By: Be Good to go, to the frontiers of cognitive thought and into the deeper mysteries of soul’s purpose in life, a subject that not even the “Intellectual Dark Web” would dare explore for fear of derision and ridicule? They have yet to resolve the issue of God, let alone the question of the self—epiphenomenon of the brain or not; but where else can one go to satisfy the longing in their soul for wholeness and completeness when they have reached the limits of cognitive thought?

Just listen to professor Peterson’s talks and lectures and watch his inquiring mind desperately trying to break through his wall of unknowing, a deeply nuanced creative thinker who takes his thoughts as far as his mind can take them.

This is the irony of his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos; it brings one to the edge of the existential paradigms of the mind, but no further. The rest of the way to one’s true self has to be negotiated individually, not with cognitive thinking but with personal commitment to a way of life that opens the door to the secret way of life; this is why I was called to write One Rule to Live By: Be Good, because this is the only rule that one needs to complete the rest of the journey to wholeness and completeness…