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…
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