One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 25: Integrating the Sacred Back into Society

CHAPTER 25

Integrating the Sacred Back into Society

I went online the other evening to see if any new videos on Jordan Peterson had been posted, and I came upon a new podcast by Rebel Wisdom (The Peterson Paradox, May 28, 2018), hosted by David Fuller, who used to work for Channel 4 News and BBC; and he said something to Rafia Morgan, the newest member of the Rebel Wisdom team, that captured the imperative of Jordan Peterson’s message. “For me,” said David Fuller, “he symbolizes the potential reintegration of the sacred into a society that I think has really lost its way in this kind of materialism and has cut us off from a really deep part of ourselves—the religious, the mythological, the spiritual, all these sorts of ways that we used to make sense of the world and I think speak to something really deep in ourselves…”

I couldn’t agree more. How, when, and why society began to compromise its spiritual values for the security of the material life does not really matter to me (that’s for academics like professor Peterson to work out, which he attempted to do with his ground-breaking book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief); what has always concerned me was the purpose of my existence, the same question that haunts every soul that has evolved as far as nature can take them. But in today’s world of postmodern nihilism and political correctness gone mad, to even mention the word “soul” seems to violate some unwritten code; and this is the reason Jordan Peterson has drawn such a massive following—because he’s waking people up to their disconnection from the ground of Being and self-transcending values that will reconnect them with their essential self. But Jordan Peterson is far too wise to be so specific about God, soul, and the afterlife; and like his hero Carl Gustav Jung, the good professor has couched his hierophantic message in the safe paradigm of behavioral science and psychology, which he taught for many years at Harvard and U of T. This is why he hesitates to admit that he believes in God, soul, and the afterlife, which only adds to his mystique.

Jordan Peterson knows that reconnecting with the Logos is a personal responsibility, which he addressed in his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos; but because this reconnection with the source of our essential being (see how difficult it is even for me to use the word God in this nihilistic climate of today’s crazy world?) is a personal responsibility, we will all eventually come to the realization of our immortal self and the Logos in our own individual way, like the poet William Wordsworth who awakened to the life principle of the Logos through his love of nature, as he tells us in The Prelude:

To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower,

Even the loose stones that cover the highway,

I gave a moral life: I saw them feel,

Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass

Lay bedded in some quickening soul, and all

That I beheld respired with inward meaning.

          This is why I came to believe that life is an individual journey, despite how one comes to this enlightened realization, whether it be through poetry, professor Peterson’s lectures and/or his book 12 Rules for Life, or Gurdjieff’s teaching that awakened me to the moral imperative of the Logos (the secret way that Jung saw in his practice and recognized in the ancient Chinese teachings of the Tao); because, when all is said and done, there really is only self-initiation into the mysteries of life. And if I may, let me illustrate with a spiritual musing that I wrote for my fourth volume of spiritual musings (The Armchair Guru) how my own individual way kept me connected with my essential self, and the Logos:

The Longings of Our Soul

It’s curious, how life works; one day we find ourselves being pulled to a new interest, as though we need the knowledge of this new interest to satisfy some longing in our soul, and when we have explored this new interest we find ourselves being pulled to another interest to satisfy another and perhaps deeper longing in our soul that beckons our attention.

This insight came to me yesterday as I listened to the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist/author Chris Hedges as he was interviewed by Bill Moyers. I came upon Chris Hedges by chance online, and his political perspective fascinated me so much that I had to explore what he had to say, as though his iconoclastic point of view revealed the deep dark shadow side of politics that I longed to know more about; and I watched half a dozen or so interviews of him speaking about one or another of his best-selling books—The Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, Days of Destruction, and Days of Revolt and others; and he was so articulate on the dark side of human nature (especially corporate America) that I couldn’t stop watching, however depressing his worldview proved to be.

In the Bill Moyers interview, Hedges reveals that the dark shadow side of life has made him an angry man, but he is a good man who wants to do his part to help set the record straight; and he paid a heavy price for his journalistic integrity, like losing his job at New York Times for being too honest. But that’s his calling, and he has the courage to walk his talk; which got me thinking about the longings in our soul that keep calling us to new interests. This, then, is the subject of today’s spiritual musing…

In my novel Healing with Padre Pio, which was inspired by my new interest in spiritual healing that initiated ten spiritual healing sessions with a gifted psyche medium who channeled St. Padre Pio for my novel, he told me that “life is all about growth and understanding,” which to anyone over forty should be so obvious that it could almost be considered tautologous; but to what end? That’s the question everyone wants answered, and one remarkable man did answer it.

C. G. Jung, one of the founding fathers of depth psychology (the other was Sigmund Freud, but Jung went much deeper than Freud with his discovery of the collective unconscious), said: “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.” Given this realization, which took me many years to affirm with my own journey of self-discovery, it appears that the teleological purpose of our life is to become what we are meant to be, complete unto ourselves like an acorn seed becoming an oak tree; but how can we become what we are meant to be if we do not satisfy the longings in our soul?

“He ought to get there, but most get stuck,” said Jung, speaking to the natural process of individuating our own identity through life experience; and it seems to me that we get stuck when we don’t take the initiative to satisfy the longings in our soul by exploring new interests that will help us to grow into the person we are meant to be and realize our destined purpose of wholeness and completeness.

“Nature will only evolve you so far, and no further,” said Gurdjieff, an enigmatic mystic philosopher who introduced the western world to a radical teaching of self-transformation that I lived for years and wrote about in Gurdjieff Was Wrong, But His Teaching Works, and the only way to become the person we are meant to be is to take evolution into our own hands to complete what nature cannot finish, and we take evolution into our own hands by taking the initiative to explore new interests; that’s how we satisfy the longings in our soul to become what we are meant to be, our true self whole and complete.

I took the initiative many, many times; but sometimes taking the initiative to explore a new interest can cost one dearly, like the time I explored an offshoot Christian solar cult teaching that did irreparable damage to my eyesight by practicing the solar techniques of looking into the sun (mornings and evenings) whose rays were said to be imbued with the sacred Logos which one needed to nourish their spiritual body, a very dangerous teaching which one day I may have the courage to write about in a novel I’m going to call The Sunworshipper; but only if my oracle insists. Otherwise I don’t think I’ll ever write it.

Being a truth seeker, it was my nature to take the initiative wherever my new interests pulled me, like my interest in studying philosophy at university which led to Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” that sparked my interest in the sayings and parables of Jesus, the mystical teachings of Sufism, Gnosticism, Buddhism, Taoism, Jung’s psychology of individuation, and a New Age spiritual teaching that I lived for many years but which I finally outgrew to devote myself to writing, a fascinating journey of self-discovery that I wrote about in The Summoning of Noman, followed by The Pearl of Great Price that  brought my journey of self-discovery to personal, and literary resolution.

But the pull of an exciting new interest that went a long way to transforming my life was long distance running, which I did for seven and a half years on Highway Eleven along the shoreline of Lake Helen in my hometown of Nipigon, Northwestern Ontario before I burnt out on a housing contract on the native reserve near my hometown that was too big for me to handle, and try as I may, I was never able to get back into running again which I miss dearly to this very day, because it was the most satisfying way to resolve my daily stress and grow in the consciousness of the person I was meant to be; but I did keep a journal from August 1, 1988 to January 8, 1989 to capture the daily flavor of my running experience, which I called Thoughts in Motion: Diary of a Holistic Runner, so I know from personal experience that taking the initiative to explore new interests nourishes the longings in our soul, and  I`m convinced that the more we nourish the longings in our soul, the more we grow into the person we are meant to be.

But one day we will all see that exploring new interests won’t be enough to satisfy the deepest longing in our soul for wholeness and completeness, as I painfully learned when I desperately needed to satisfy my deepest longing and did irreparable damage to my eyesight with that offshoot Christian solar cult teaching that promised instant nourishment of the Logos with its solar techniques; and that’s when the omniscient guiding principle of life calls us to complete what nature cannot finish by teaching us how to live our life unselfishly, learning to give back to life instead of always taking from life, because this is the only way we can resolve the paradoxical consciousness of our being and non-being and transcend our primal selfish nature that keeps us bound to our ego/shadow personality.

“He labors good on good to fix, and owes /To virtue every triumph that he knows,” said William Wordsworth, whose poem Character of the Happy Warrior became my ideal, because in the end all paths in life lead to the simple virtue of goodness; but that’s another spiritual musing for another day.

———

            When asked by David Fuller in the Rebel Wisdom podcast what he thought of Jordan Peterson, Raphia Morgan, who is deeply involved in spiritual growth work and is the co-founder of Path of Love, replied: “I think he’s somebody who gets the bigger picture and can weave things that would address real life concerns for lots and lots of people,” to which Fuller replied: “He’s carrying more than his fair share of the burden. He’s carrying a sort of flame for this reintegration of the sacred, for this great tradition, for all this stuff that has to be integrated for us to move forward. We have to get past this sort of naïve materialism, naïve scientism that someone like Sam Harris represents. It’s like, religion is stupid, and everyone else is stupid who doesn’t think like this. Whoa. Grow up. The arrogance. That is just ridiculous. And he’s carrying this. He’s the hero of the moment for this other way of looking at the world,” and Raphia Morgan responded: “We need a bigger wisdom that is more inclusive and that is not giving up taking a stand. It’s taking a stand for a higher wisdom that is more inclusive, that is willing to look at the right, that is willing to look at the left, that can find some kind of synthesis out of all that and stand on that and address the real issues and not just get lost in a kind of name-calling polarity that has been going on forever. It’s just so tiring,” and both Fuller and Morgan felt that Peterson was burning out because he had taken upon himself the burden of reintegrating the sacred back into our crazy world which he didn’t have to do alone, and they both felt that he was beginning to get dangerously polarizing in his message (hence their podcast, “The Peterson Paradox”); but again, if Jordan Peterson is getting dangerous it’s only in the most ironic sense, because he has to rally the Logos to bring some measure of respectable order back into the chaos of our world of moral relativism and power-crazed political correctness. That’s why he was called to his destined purpose; and as much as I fear for what the evil forces of the shadow side of life will do to keep him from integrating the sacred Logos back into society, I have great faith in his oracle…

One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 24: If Jordan Peterson is Dangerous, God Help Us!

CHAPTER 24

If Jordan Peterson is Dangerous, God Help Us!

I was surprised to see a picture of Jordan Peterson covering three quarters of the front  page of the INSIGHT section of the Toronto Star (Saturday, May 26, 2018) to highlight a piece by Jordan Peterson’s former colleague and friend Bernard Schiff (who claims to be responsible for hiring Peterson’s at the University of Toronto), Jordan Peterson in a three-piece suite in the midst of emphasizing a point with his arms in the air and a look on his face that reflected the gravity of his message, and the picture had the arresting headline: “I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous.”

And if that wasn’t enough to pull the reader into the article, at the bottom of the picture was written: “Former U of T colleague examines the bestselling author’s increasingly controversial positions and concludes that the teacher has become a preacher—using fear to unleash ‘dark desires.’” Wow!

I dove into Schiff’s opinion piece and read it through without highlighting anything as I often do when reading about Jordan Peterson (I did that in my second reading), just to see what kind of impression his former colleague would have on me, and I was stunned.

I had to read it again to confirm my first impression, but from everything that I knew about Jordan Peterson from all the lectures I had seen online plus all the articles I read on him and his talks and interviews and his book12 Rules for Life that I had just finished closely reading, I could not believe how his former colleague and friend could have drawn the conclusion that he was dangerous. “If Jordan Peterson is dangerous, God help us!” I said to myself; but I refused to read the Schiff piece again until I had some distance from it…

I have home delivery for the Saturday and Sunday Toronto Star, and I drive into Midland to pick up my weekend Globe & Mail and National Post; but I couldn’t stop thinking of Bernard Schiff’s article as I drove into Midland later in the day to pick up my papers, and I made some mental notes to check out when I re-read the article, one point in particular which got under my skin—Schiff’s comment about Pankaj Mishra’s review in The New York Review of Books of Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.

Schiff called Mishra’s review “a thoughtful and informed critique of 12 Rules for Life,” which only confirmed his bias and misunderstanding of Jordan Peterson, suggesting that Mishra’s review was objective and fair; but I had to read Mishra’s review again (“Jordan Peterson and Fascist Mysticism”), which I did, and it only re-enforced my initial impression that it was a malicious hatchet job on Peterson’s book, with a cheap shot on Jordan Peterson’s character thrown in for good measure. But I had to read Bernard Schiff’s piece once more to confirm my feelings about these two disaffected men, one a former colleague and friend of Jordan Peterson and the other a resentful critic with a big axe to grind.

But when I got home from my morning jaunt into Midland (I often do some grocery shopping also when I pick up my papers), instead of diving back into Schiff’s article as I had intended, I went straight to Conrad Black’s column in the National Post first because I can’t resist what he has to say, regardless of what he’s writing about; that’s how much respect I have for his new perspective on life that was born of his metanoic change of heart after serving time in a Florida prison for fraud and obstruction of justice; and as coincidence would have it, Black’s column was on the recent Munk Debate on political correctness.

It was as obvious to Conrad Black as it was to most viewers that Jordan Peterson and Stephen Fry had won the debate in their argument that political correctness has gone too far, and as always with his editorials, Conrad Black left me smiling; a feeling of goodness that I always get whenever he calls a spade a spade, especially on indigenous issues. And that’s the problem that I have with most of Jordan Peterson’s critics; they seem to exhibit a tragic flaw that they are completely oblivious to, their self-deception and resentful nature.

But to confirm my impression of the unconsciously biased Peterson critic, I re-read Bernard Schiff’s opinion piece again, slowly and carefully and with my blue highlighter, and the first thought that came to me upon completing the article was that Jordan Peterson’s former colleague and friend wanted to have his cake and eat it too. 

And this is what disturbs Bernard Schiff and other resentful critics about Jordan Peterson’s fundamental message that one cannot have their cake and eat it too, because that’s a misperception that flies in the face of life and common sense.

It’s a hollow claim for one to believe that they can have their cake and eat it too without the sacrifice that life demands of us in order to have our cake and eat it too, and for Bernard Schiff to call Jordan Peterson dangerous for spreading the message that you cannot have you’re your cake and eat it too misses the whole point of Jordan Peterson.

All weekend long I watched videos on Jordan Peterson and read the latest reviews of his book and opinion pieces, and I couldn’t get over the devastating effect that his message was having as he went from city to city (60 in all, across North America, Europe, and Australia) promoting his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos; and my initial impression was confirmed that today’s crazy world desperately needs someone to clear the way of all this pernicious postmodern nihilism and radical political correctness to help society transcend itself, which religion, science, and politics have failed to do; and if his former colleague and friend sees this as dangerous, it’s only dangerous in the most ironic sense.

Jordan Peterson was called to his destined purpose, as everyone will be called when life has made them ready for their path to wholeness and completeness, like the celebrated poet Adrianne Rich for example, who inspired the following spiritual musing:

The Two Hands of Life

“Adventure most unto itself /The Soul condemned to be;

      Attended by a Single Hound— /Its own Identity.”

—Emily Dickinson

It happened on Country Road 6, another perfectly-timed coincidence that confirmed the reality of the moment, a conversation that we were having on our way to Midland to pick up my weekend papers and a few items for the Spanish Chicken and Rice recipe that Penny was making for dinner; I was telling her about the American poet Adrienne Rich who wrote something that inspired today’s spiritual musing.

She wrote: “A life I didn’t choose to live chose me.” And this radically different life that chose the gifted young wife and mother of three was the life of a lesbian poet activist that David Zugar described in Poet and Critic as “a life of prophetic intensity and ‘visionary anger’ bitterly unable to feel at home in a world ‘that gives no room /to be what we dream of becoming.’”

“Robert Frost meets Emily Dickinson in Adrienne Rich,” I said to Penny, as we drove into Midland; but I had to explain what I meant by my insight into the lesbian/activist poet’s life.

This insight came to me the night before while watching an online video of a memorial tribute to Adrienne Rich shortly after her passing at the age of 82, the impression forming in my mind that she was a natural amalgam of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson, and I said to Penny, “I’m glad I’m not going to my grave angry. That’s my gift to myself.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, intrigued by my comment.

“My gift to myself is that I’m not going to die angry,” I replied, with an ironic smile at the price that I had to pay for my precious gift. “I’ve been doing some research on the poet Adrienne Rich, and I understand now why she was so angry at life. That’s why I wrote Old Whore Life: Exploring the Shadow Side of Karma. I know her anger well, sweetheart. I was no less angry, if not a thousand times more; but I managed to resolve my anger. Adrienne Rich did not.”

“How do you know she didn’t?” Penny asked.

“Her poetry doesn’t speak resolution. On the contrary, it speaks to the messy human condition, especially the life of women. That’s why she became an outspoken feminist. But hers is a strange story. Her father was a Jewish doctor who taught at Johns Hopkins University, and her mother was a Christian concert pianist who gave up a career in music for her husband. Her father encouraged his daughter to read and write poetry, though; and she graduated with a degree in English from Radcliffe College. She married an economics professor when she graduated and had three children, but her marriage was so strained that she had to leave her husband. The same year she left her husband he committed suicide, and a few years later she moved in with her lesbian lover. Adrienne Rich experienced the whole gamut of a woman’s life: gifted young poet, housewife, mother of three boys, and confirmed lesbian; not to mention being Jewish and Christian. She had a lot of issues to work through, that’s what fueled her poetry with so much passion.”

“We all have issues,” Penny said, with a wry smile.

“True. But some of us have more karmic baggage than others. That’s life. But it doesn’t matter who we are, unless we learn to resolve the two sides of our nature we’re always going to be in conflict with life. That’s the human condition. That’s what Adrienne Rich’s poetry is all about—the messy human condition. “The war poetry wages against itself,” she wrote in one of her poems. That’s why she was so angry. Robert Frost said, ‘Poetry grabs life by the throat.’ Adrienne Rich grabs life by the throat with her poetry, just like Robert Frost did; but she was also driven like Emily Dickinson to find her own identity. But you can’t find your true identity until you resolve the two sides of your nature, and the only way to do that is to make our two selves into one, the inner like the outer neither male nor female with no hypocrisy—” 

“The hands of life!” Penny exclaimed, excitedly.

“What hands of life?” I asked, confounded by her remark.

“Didn’t you see them?” she said.

“No. What?”

“There were two gloves on the side of the road. One up and one down. The two hands of life, just like you were saying—”

Penny’s not a great articulator, but she has amazing intuition. “What a coincidence,” I said, and smiled as I always do whenever synchronicity speaks to us; and I turned the car around and went back to confirm what Penny had just seen that symbolized what I was explaining.

And there they were on the side of the road: two discarded white gloves, one facing up and the other facing down, just like the two sides of our nature—our conscious ego personality and our unconscious shadow self, confirming with symbolic certainty what I was saying about Robert Frost meeting Emily Dickinson in the angry visionary poet whose shadow lesbian life chose her to help resolve the bifurcated nature of her identity— and what an adventure it proved to be as Adrienne Rich explored the alluring country of her conflicted soul with prophetic intensity and visionary anger.

———

          And whether he knew it or not, that’s the path that the good professor was called to when he spoke up for free speech, the path of a visionary hierophant compelled by his own oracle to point the way out of the nihilistic impasse of today’s crazy world of identity politics and radical political correctness; is it any wonder that his message is getting through to our disillusioned young people looking for direction and purpose?

          How many people today, especially young men, feel as Adrianne Rich did, “bitterly unable to feel at home in a world ‘that gives no room /to be what we dream of becoming’”? Isn’t this Jordan Peterson’s massive appeal? Aren’t they flocking to his talks because he explains with passionate intensity and good-faith logic why our world is so crazy?

          I’m not a stupid person, but I had no idea what was going on out there; that’s why my muse expressed my frustration in my poem “What the Hell Is Going on Out There?” My creative unconscious spoke the frustration of our crazy world, and professor Jordan Peterson was called to offer an explanation; but because his message cuts to the bone, the nefarious forces of the false shadow side of life that inhibit society from transcending itself have rallied to take the good professor down— “a mean, mad white man” Michael Dyson called him in the Munk debate—as they always do whenever someone dares to step outside the suffocating box of compromised thought and points a way out of the paradigm of our crazy world of moral relativism and political correctness gone mad.

          I can’t remember how many times young men have said “I get it now!” as they listened to Jordan Peterson’s message, sudden epiphanies that awakened them to the stark reality that they cannot have your cake and eat it too without sacrifice and hard work, an intensely passionate message that his resentful critics call alt-right, toxic, and dangerous.

What a crock! It’s no wonder the good professor loses his patience every now and then, like he did with Pankaj Mishra who wrote “Jordan Peterson and Fascist Mysticism” for The New York Review of Books; and, in all honesty, I really don’t know how he manages to stay so cool when he is brutally assaulted with malicious intent and bad-faith logic, like he was in the Cathy Newman interview and the hit piece by Nellie Bowles in the New York Times (“Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy”) that took Peterson’s words out of context to make him look like a misogynist—pernicious, unfair, and evil; the very thing that Jordan Peterson’s is unveiling with his iconoclastic message of hope.

Let’s just hope then that the “messiah virus”—the salvific imperative of the Logos that everyone who is called to a higher path can easily fall prey to—does not infect the good professor the way his former colleague and friend Bernard Schiff fears it has.

But I doubt it will, because anyone who stares into the face of their own false self and commits to the authentic life develops a healthy respect for the Logos, and professor Jordan Peterson has more than enough Jungian wisdom to ward off the “messiah virus.”

“All I want to do is help young people make a better life,” he keeps iterating in his talks and interviews; and I take the good professor at his word…

DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLES?

DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLES?

         

A wise man once said, “There is only self-initiation into the mysteries of life,” but not until one experiences a miracle in their own life will they appreciate the truth of this statement, as I did when Penny Lynn, the love of my life, was suddenly struck down with a brain aneurysm and had to be flown by air ambulance from Georgian Bay Hospital in Midland to St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto for immediate surgery. In one blinding moment, my world went from order straight into chaos, and I turned to God for help. I’ve always believed in God, and I’ve always believed in miracles, and I was in desperate need of God’s help and a miracle. I turned to St. Padre Pio, about whom I had written in my novel Healing with Padre Pio, and this was my constant daily prayer: “Please Padre, bring her back home to me safe and whole,” and so close did my Penny Lynn come to passing over that one of her doctors said to her, “You were somewhere between here and there, and you are very lucky to be here.” But it wasn’t luck that brought her back to me; it was love and faith. Penny is home now, safe and whole, with full presence of mind and motor skills, and I thank God and St. Padre Pio for answering my prayers. Yes, I believe in miracles, because I experienced one in the miraculous healing of the love of my life; and in humble gratitude, I was nudged to share this with you.

Orest Stocco

Georgian Bay, Ontario

Sunday, November 11, 2018

One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 23: The Curse of Our Modern World

CHAPTER 23

The Curse of Our Modern World

The curse of our modern world is moral relativism, the nihilistic conviction that morality is relative, a “personal value judgement,” as the postmodernists would say; and it’s this pernicious belief that’s responsible for what Dr. Victor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning) called the “existential vacuum” that plagues our crazy modern world. But why, if not for the erosion of our spiritual values?

I have neither the learning nor interest to explore why this is so (that’s what academics like professor Jordan Peterson attempt to do), my concern has always been to find an answer to the haunting question of my life—who am I?

And having found the answer (which is the same for everyone, because we are all a divine spark of God), I can speak with the gnostic certainty of experience; and what I experienced flies in the face of postmodern thinking which, try as it may, cannot resolve the paradoxical riddle of man’s dual nature—our essential and existential self, if you will.

It’s not enough to simply dismiss the reality of our essential nature, because the longing in our soul for wholeness and completeness does not go away by denying the existence of our immortal self, it only makes it worse; because, like the mushrooms that have forced their way up through the solid asphalt of our new driveway that have caused me much consternation, so does our inner self have to force its way up through the fixed attitudes of our mind until it finally breaks through into the light of day where it can realize itself.

I could quote Wordsworth’s poem “Intimations of Immortality” to offer a poetic perspective on the state of man’s existential predicament— “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; /The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, /Hath had elsewhere its setting, /And cometh from afar; /Not in entire forgetfulness, /And not in utter nakedness, /But trailing clouds of glory do we come /From God, who is our home…”—but what good would that do? Who would care but the person who is so desperate to satisfy the longing in their soul for wholeness and completeness that they will grasp any straw that offers some measure of resolution; and that’s what I see today, that’s the cry I hear from authentic seekers like professor Jordan Peterson who’s pushing through the mindsets of our postmodern world.

It was a terrible presumption on my part to send him copies of my books which articulate my journey of self-discovery, and whether he reads them or not does not really matter to me (I have yet to hear from him, nor do I expect to); I was compelled by my inner guiding principle to send them to him, and I did. And then my oracle beckoned me to write One Rule to Live By: Be Good to build a bridge from the oppressive existential vacuum of our postmodern world to the undiscovered country of our soul, which I also do with every spiritual musing that I’m called to write, like the following musing on the bedeviling concept of moral relativism that retards soul’s journey to wholeness and completeness:

The Stupidity of Moral Relativism

Long before I began writing my spiritual musings, I wanted to write an essay on what I’ve always felt to be the bad faith of moral relativism; but yesterday afternoon, I don’t remember what time exactly, I was gripped by the thought of writing a spiritual musing on moral relativism, but instead of focusing on the bad faith I should focus instead on the false premise of moral relativism because it would be more reflective of the subjective/objective truth of morality that I realized in my own journey of self-discovery.

I say subjective/objective truth, because I had a singularly convincing experience that initiated me deep into the mystery of our essential nature, and it was because of this subjective experience that I came to realize the objective truth of our moral nature; and this is the premise of today’s spiritual musing…

Let me begin by addressing the central issue of moral relativism, the obvious objection that is sure to arise from what I’ve called the objective truth of our moral nature, which can be expressed in the following question that is at the very heart of the nihilistic philosophy of moral relativism: how can an objective truth come from a subjective experience? (Ergo, the false premise of moral relativism.)

A fair question. But one could discuss this issue until the end of time, which is why I dropped out of university in my third year of philosophy studies to find my own way in life, because I saw no end to the dialectical discourse that philosophy gives rise to, and in my quest for an answer to the question that set me on my journey of self-discovery (who am I?), I came upon Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” that initiated me into the mystery of our essential nature that became the objective truth and moral compass of my life; and although I have written about this in The Summoning of Noman and The Pearl of Great Price, it behooves me to offer a Reader’s Digest version for today’s spiritual musing.

The experience that initiated me into the mystery of our essential nature presupposes the principle of reincarnation, about which I have neither the desire nor inclination to prove; because, whether one believes in it or not, reincarnation is central to the objective reality of our essential nature, our immortal soul which returns from lifetime to lifetime for the teleological purpose of realizing its full potential, like an acorn seed becoming an oak tree, and although this may appear to be a circular argument which brings us right back to the subjective uncertainty of moral relativism, the very nature of my singularly convincing experience confirms the objective truth of our moral mature and disclaims the false premise of moral relativism; this is why Gurdjieff said, “There is only self-initiation into the mysteries of life.” 

Which means, quite simply, that although my journey of self-discovery initiated me into the mystery of the objective truth of our moral nature, it is still a personal experience and the reason why I have called it a subjective/objective truth.

Here, then, is the experience that initiated me into the mystery of our essential nature and the objective truth of morality, an experience that will tax the credulity of most, if not all readers…

Following up on my belief in reincarnation, which was outside the inflexible paradigm of my Roman Catholic faith that I was born into and the source of years of personal conflict, I promised myself that one day I would explore my past lives like the historical novelist Taylor Caldwell did in Jess Stearn’s book that became the inspiration for my own past-life regressions, The Search for the Soul: Psychic Lives of Taylor Caldwell; and my opportunity came when my life partner Penny Lynn and I relocated to Georgian Bay, Ontario fourteen years ago when by “chance” I met a woman who did past-life regressions which inspired my novel Cathedral of My Past Lives that I’m going to publish when I feel the time is right.

I had planned to have ten past-life regressions, but I only had seven because seven regressions gave me more than enough information to answer the questions that haunted me about my current lifetime, questions like, why did I feel so out of context in my family? Why did I have a sexual fascination for older women? What was it about Gurdjieff’s teaching that compelled me to live it? And other questions about my life that I suspected were brought about by past-life experiences; and I was right.

I got the answers that I was looking for in my past lives, which cleared up why I felt the way I did growing up; but because I became a seeker at a very early age (in high school, actually; the spark combusting with Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge which I read in grade twelve), I became obsessed with finding an answer to the question who am I?

I cannot go into detail here, but in my early twenties I had a traumatizing sexual experience (impelled by my rakish past-life personality in Paris, France in 17^th Century; I was known as “le salaud de Paris,” and I had enormous sexual power over women in the aristocratic courts of Paris) that brutally shocked my conscience from its primordial slumber and catapulted me into my quest for my true self, because I knew that the person who did what he did that night was not the real me; it was me, but not me, and I had to find the real me or die trying. And so committed did I become to finding my true self that I was willing to pay whatever price was asked of me, which I wrote about in my memoir The Pearl of Great Price.

To my total surprise (and my regressionist as well), in my fourth past-life regression I went back to the genesis of my essential nature: I was an atom in the Body of God where all new souls come from, the great Ocean of Love and Mercy as mystics refer to the ground of all Being. I was an atom of God without self-consciousness. I had consciousness, but no self-consciousness; and in the same regression, I went back to my first primordial human lifetime where I had evolved up the ladder of evolution into a higher primate with group consciousness but no reflective self-consciousness, and then the miracle happened.

I was the alpha male of a group of ten or twelve higher primates when I experienced the birth of a new “I” of God in the dawning of my reflective self-consciousness. It was a very rudimentary and low-resolution sense of self-awareness, but I experienced my own identity for the very first time in my essential existence; and this changed my life forever.

From the moment the new “I” of God was born, I had a separate existence from all life, and this separate existence initiated my personal karmic destiny that began the individuation of my essential self-consciousness; and from lifetime to lifetime, I evolved in my reflective self until my current lifetime when I was ready to end my cycle of karma and reincarnation and realize my divine nature, which I did with the help of Gurdjieff’s teaching and the sayings and parables of Jesus that I wrote about in The Pearl of Great Price.

And from my regressions to some of my other past lives, I learned how I brought my karmic self with me from one lifetime to the next, and I came to understand why I was so out of context with my family and why I had a sexual fascination for older women, plus many other things about my life that I would never have understood without my regressions; and as I wrote my novel Cathedral of My Past Lives, I connected the dots and realized that we all have a karmic destiny that we create by the choices we make in life, as well as a spiritual destiny that is encoded in our essential nature to become spiritually self-realized souls of God.

And I learned something else about our two destinies that solved the mystery of our paradoxical inner and outer nature: we can only realize our teleologically driven spiritual destiny through the resolution of our personal karmic nature, which we can only do by taking evolution into our own hands to complete what nature cannot finish by becoming karmically responsible for our own life; and this was the objective truth that I discovered from the subjective reality of my past-life regressions, because it finally dawned upon me that the immutable karmic law of corrective measures was an objective principle of life that governs all behavior, whether we are conscious of it or not, and this makes moral relativism stupid.

Nietzsche wrote, “You have your way, I have mine. As for the right way, it does not exist.” But he was wrong. The right way is implicit in all we do, and not until we learn to live our life with karmic responsibility will we be free of the curse of moral neutrality that blinds us to our essential nature; and learning the right way is what human evolution is all about.

———

Carl Jung was aware of the erosion of our spiritual values with the proliferation of our scientific worldview, which he addressed in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul. He wrote: “I am persuaded that what is today of vital interest in psychology among educated people will tomorrow be shared by everyone. I should like to draw attention to the following facts. During the past thirty years, people from all the civilized countries of the earth have consulted me. I have treated many hundreds of patients, the larger numbers being Protestants, a smaller number Jews, and not more than five or six believing Catholics. Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook. This of course has nothing whatever to do with a particular creed or membership of a church” (Modern Man in Search of a Soul, C. G. Jung, p. 229).

And this, ironically, is professor Jordan Peterson’s massive appeal today, especially to the wayward younger generation that has become uprooted and disconnected from the spiritual values that give life meaning and purpose; his lectures, talks, and immensely popular 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos have a way of burrowing through the mind and into one’s soul and planting seeds of hope that promise a better future.

Dr. Norman Doidge, who wrote the Forward to his good friend’s book, cleverly rendered Peterson’s12 rules for Life into one foremost rule that has the power to cast out the malicious spirit of moral relativism that has scourged our modern world and intimates the objective truth of my spiritual musing “The Stupidity of Moral Relativism”— “And the foremost rule is that you must take responsibility for your own life. Period.”  Now, if we only had a new paradigm to live by…

One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 22: The Hope of Jordan Peterson's Message

CHAPTER 22

The Hope of Jordan Peterson’s Message

          After I finished reading 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, I went on YouTube and watched some new interviews that Jordan Peterson did while on his international book tour, and I also listened to a few new podcasts on Jordan Peterson and his message, and I was finally beginning to understand why he posed such a perilous threat to both the extreme right and extreme left of the political spectrum; and then I watched the Munk Debate on political correctness, and this sealed his hierophantic message to our crazy world.

          The Munk Debates were established in 2008 as a charitable initiative of the Aurea Foundation co-founders Peter and Melanie Munk. The semi-annual debates take place at the Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto; and on Friday, May 18, 2018 the motion of the debate was political correctness: “Be it resolved, what you call political correctness, I call progress.”

          Arguing for political correctness: Georgetown University professor of sociology Michael Eric Dyson. Dyson has written more than a dozen books on race, culture and politics in the United States; and he was joined by Michelle Goldberg, a journalist, New York Times columnist, and bestselling author who writes about identity, culture and politics. And speaking against political correctness: English actor, author, comedian and film director Stephen Fry (who with charm and wit argued well but who still annoyed me), and Jordan Peterson, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, practicing clinical psychologist of twenty years, and bestselling author whom The Spectator called “one of the most important thinkers to emerge on the world stage in many years.”

I listened to the debate with rapt attention. Then I went online the following day to get the reaction to the debate, and it was the consensus that Peterson and Fry won the debate, which was a forgone conclusion because Dyson and Goldberg’s case was not only weakly stated, but also argued in odious bad faith because of their blatant biases and prejudices.

But the impression I came away with from the whole un-Socratic dialectic—Dyson played the race card and called Jordan Peterson an “angry white man,” and Goldberg distorted a Peterson interview to deliberately advance her case for political correctness; bad-faith logic if ever I saw it, because I was familiar with the interview she referred to—essentially, but not quite the same reason that I dropped out of university, my growing distrust of the intellect to find a way out of the conundrum of man’s existential predicament.

For a long time, I could not articulate why I felt compelled to drop out of university, but I trusted my gut feeling and had to leave; and over the years I came to see why the mind can only take one so far on the journey to wholeness and completeness, regardless how brilliant and compelling one’s logic may be; because, as John Milton tells us in Paradise Lost, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven,” and not until one sees the mind for what it is will one find the way to complete the journey to wholeness and completeness. This was the inspiration for my spiritual musing on the three great lies of life that trap one’s soul in the illusions of the mind:

The Three Great Lies of Life

It could have been something that I heard on the radio, bur more likely it was my chapter “Afterlife Interview with Plato” that I had just started working on for my new novel Sundays with Sharon that set free the idea for today’s spiritual musing as I drove to Midland to pick up my weekend papers; from the depths of my unconscious, the idea sprouted, “The Three Great Lies of Life,” and I had to pull over to jot the idea down in my notebook that was resting on the passenger seat of my car.

I did not know what the three great lies of life were yet, all I knew was that this was the idea my muse gave to me as the title of my new spiritual musing; but by the time I found a safe place to pull over to jot the idea down, which happened to be the entranceway to the Wyevale Fire Hall on County Road 6, the idea opened up to me; and the three great lies of life were revealed: 1, Atheism; 2.Christianity; and 3. Buddhism; and along with this unexpected amplification, I also saw why this idea was set free.

In the afterlife interview with Plato that I had recently seen online, the exceptionally gifted Australian psychic/ medium Alison Allen channeled the spirit of the ancient Greek philosopher’s simple explanation for his allegory of the cave that his inimitable teacher Socrates revealed in Plato’s Republic; and it was Plato’s explanation in his afterlife interview with Alison Allen that gestated the idea for my spiritual musing “The Three Great Lies of Life,” and so fecundly that it sprouted no less than an hour after I started my chapter “Afterlife Interview with Plato” and was on my way to Midland to pick up my newspapers.

In the famous allegory of the cave, Socrates describes a group of people who lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. These strange prisoners watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners’ reality. Socrates explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not reality at all, for he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the manufactured reality that is the shadows seen on the wall by the prisoners.

The inmates of this strange place do not even desire to leave their prison; for they know no better life. But some prisoners manage to break their bonds one day, and they discover that their reality was not what they thought it was. They discovered the sun, which Plato uses as an analogy for the fire that man cannot see behind. Like the fire that cast light on the walls of the cave, the human condition is forever bound to the impressions that are received through the senses. Even if these interpretations are an absurd misrepresentation of reality, we cannot somehow break free from the bonds of our human condition and liberate ourselves from the phenomenal state just as the prisoners could not free themselves from their chains.

 If, however, we were to escape our bondage, we would find a world that we could not understand, because the sun is incomprehensible for someone who has never seen it. In other words, we would encounter another "realm," a place incomprehensible because, theoretically, it is the source of a higher reality than the one we have always known; it is the realm of pure fact, the reality and truth of life sans the shadows and reflections projected on the walls of our mind, a reality that Plato called pure Form; and the explanation that he gave in his afterlife interview with Alison Allen—that his allegory of the cave was an elaborate metaphor for the ego—was the critical piece of information that I needed to set the idea for my spiritual musing free, because the ego is our individual viewpoint on life that is born of our upbringing, social environment, religion, education, relationships, biases, prejudices, and personal opinions, informed or ill-informed.

No two egos are alike. Each ego has a separate viewpoint on life, and according to the afterlife spirit of Plato the ego is our personal cave, the reality that we project upon the walls of our own mind; that’s why my unconscious sprung free the idea of the three great lies of life, because in my journey of self-discovery I managed to unshackle myself from the chains of my ego and set myself free to see that Atheism, Christianity, and Buddhism are nothing but illusory shadows projected upon the walls of the human mind.

It would be easy, but ultimately unconvincing, were I to say that my personal view on these three great lies of life was founded upon faith and/or reason alone, but it’s not; my understanding that these three great belief systems are illusory shadows was born of my quest to find my true self, which I could only have done by unshackling myself from the chains of my own ego; and as presumptuous as it may be to say this, the way to soul’s freedom from its own ego prison was established long before I was born.

“There is a doctrine uttered in secret that man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away,” said Socrates in Plato’s dialogue, the Phaedo; and he went on to say, “this is a great mystery which I do not quite understand.” But Socrates, being the great ironist that he was, was much too clever to reveal the secret way of life openly; which is why he couched the secret teaching of spiritual liberation in his philosophy:  For I deem that the true disciple of philosophy is likely to be misunderstood by other men,” said Socrates in the Phaedo; “they do not perceive that he is ever pursuing death and dying; and if this is true, why, having had the desire for death all his life long, should he repine at the arrival of that which he has always been pursuing and desiring?”

This is why Socrates was not afraid to drink the hemlock that ended his life, a choice he made when he was tried and condemned by the Athenian court for his heretical beliefs that the ruling elite felt corrupted the youth of Athens; but not before revealing the secret of spiritual liberation in the logic of his dialectic, the simple but yet difficult philosophy that by practicing the noble virtues one would purify one’s soul of ego’s illusions and realize one’s true nature.

Socrates’s philosophy frees the soul from its prison by purifying the consciousness of the ego with the transformative power of virtuous living. “And what is purification but the separation of the soul from the body, as I was saying before; the habit of the soul gathering and collecting herself into herself, out of all the courses of the body; the dwelling in her own place alone, as in another life, so also in this, as far as she can; the release of the soul from the chains of the body,” said the intrepid philosopher in the Phaedo; and a few centuries later, Jesus couched the same teaching of spiritual liberation in his cryptic teaching: “He that findeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.”

But as I came to realize in my own quest for my true self, the secret teaching of spiritual liberation is everywhere to be found, because this teaching is life itself, all the gnostic wisdom that we realize through personal experience from one lifetime to the next which eventually awakens soul to the secret way of life that is implicit to all human experience. This is how I came to see through the three great lies of life.

My initiation into the secret way of life started with my past-life regression to the Body of God where all souls come from. I was an atom of God without self-consciousness. I had soul consciousness, but no self-consciousness; and in the same regression I was sent into the world to evolve through life until I had constellated enough life-consciousness to realize my own reflective self, which I did in my first primordial human lifetime as the alpha male of a group of ten or twelve higher primates.

I actually experienced the birth of my own “I” in this past-life regression, and from one lifetime to the next I evolved in my reflective self-consciousness until I had grown enough to take evolution into my own hands and complete what Nature could not finish, which I did with a teaching that was introduced to the western world by a remarkable man called Gurdjieff, a transformative teaching that awakened me to the secret way of life that helped me to complete what Nature could not finish, just as Jesus promised in his cryptic teaching: “Lest ye be born again thou shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

This was my experience, and upon the basis of this experience I’ve come to see that Atheism, Christianity, and Buddhism are the three great lies of life, because they all contend an untruth about the immortal self of man—Atheism contending that the soul does not exist; Christianity contending that the soul is created at the moment of human conception and only lives one lifetime; and Buddhism contending that we do not have an autonomous, individual soul. This is why my creative unconscious sprouted the idea for today’s spiritual musing, because I know that Atheism, Christianity, and Buddhism are founded upon a misperception of our immortal self; this is why Socrates had the cheek to say, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” because not until we see through the illusions of ego will we realize our true self.

———

And this is the hope of professor Jordan Peterson’s message, because  his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is his “unapprehended inspiration” of the salvific way of liberation from the prison of ego that keeps soul fettered to Plato’s cave, an inspiration that the good professor is desperately trying to apprehended with his probing intellect; and although he’s as close as anyone can get with his brilliant dialectic to opening the secret door to the final stage of human evolution, the irony is that this door will never open without the right key.

 “The mind is the slayer of the real, let the disciple slay the slayer,” said Madam Blavatsky in The Voice of Silence; but how in the hell does one do that? How can one slay their own mind? And would one dare suggest that to a probing intellectual like Jordan Peterson who has taught psychology for thirty years and has twenty years of experience treating people in his clinical practice, “one of the most important thinkers to emerge on the world stage in many years”? Or is this just another one of those mystical metaphors for the kind of life that one should live in order to transform the consciousness of their false nature and realize their true self? And if so, isn’t this what Peterson intimates with his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos? As sweet as the irony may be, it brings me to tears…