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:
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…
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