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…
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