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 17th 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…
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