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…
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