CHAPTER 28
Jordan Peterson and the Authentic Life
“One man who stopped
lying could bring down a tyranny.”
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It’s much more
difficult to live the authentic life than people think, as I painfully learned
in my own journey of self-discovery, a terrifying truth that I spent the best
part of my writing life trying to articulate; and here I am again faced with
the same dilemma of man’s irreconcilable nature, because I will never bring One Rule to Live By: Be Good to
resolution until I demystify the mystery of being true to oneself, because one can be true to oneself and not know
that they are being true to their false self.
I never knew that
I was being true to my false self until I heard a voice in my mind ask me the
question that alerted to my false self,
“Why do you lie?” And Jordan Peterson thought that he was being true to
himself until he had the realization that his life was a lie, which began his own
long and difficult journey to authenticity; but how much must one suffer the
oppressive weight of their own falseness before they wake up to their false
nature?
That’s the essential
theme of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s monumental work The Gulag Archipelago in which he mindfully explores his own
complicity in the Soviet system that led to the unbearable suffering and deaths
of millions of innocent people, his willful capitulation to the great lie of the
utopian dream of socialism, one innocuous little lie at a time until he got
swallowed whole by the great lie of socialism and was himself imprisoned by the
system that he himself helped make possible; and as he examined his own
conscience and listened to the stories of hundreds of inmates in the Gulag, he
finally saw through the great lie of the Soviet system and had to share his
truth with the world, which he did with his books on the Soviet Gulag that
garnered him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, “for the ethical force with
which he has pursued the indefensible tradition of Russian literature.”
This is why professor
Peterson found in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn a hero to model his own life; and it
was the on-going soul-making suffering of the Russian people that Svetlana
Alexievich recorded in her own writing that also garnered her the Nobel Prize
in Literature in 2015 and which, to my surprise, inspired one of my favourite spiritual
musings:
The Tremor of Eternity
“Suffering is a
special kind of knowledge.”
—Svetlana Alexievich
Svetlana
Alexievich, “historian of the soul,” won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015
for her “polyphonic writing, a monument to suffering and courage in our time,”
as the Nobel citation put it; but I could not finish reading her last book Second Hand Time, The Last of the Soviets.
It was too Dostoevskian in its existential density and I had to put it aside.
That was last
year. This year I picked up the September 2017 issue of The Atlantic magazine in Barrie (the day of my auto accident, which
put a damper on my browsing in Chapters) and noticed an article on Svetlana
Alexievich which was prompted by the English translation of the book that
launched her career, The Unwomanly Face
of War. The article was written by Nina Khrushcheva, the granddaughter of
the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s son, and I read something that sparked
the idea for today’s spiritual musing:
“Her goal was not
modest: to listen to “specific human beings, living in a specific time and
taking part in specific events,” while remaining ever alert to “the eternally
human in them. The tremor of eternity. That which is in human beings at all
times.”
Svetlana
Alexievich’s books transcend journalism. By the magic of creative effort,
Svetlana managed to distill “the eternally human” out of the story of every
person that she interviewed for her oral history of the Soviet people, and the
question that I want to explore in today’s spiritual musing is this: what is
this “tremor of eternity” in the human soul?
Coincidence or not
(I believe it was a meaningful coincidence, because whenever I get an idea for
a spiritual musing the merciful law of
divine synchronicity kicks in to flesh in my musing), I just happened to
select the movie Fences on Netflix
for Penny and I to watch the other evening, staring Denzel Washington and Viola
Davis, and the existential density of this unbearably poignant story brought to
mind Svetlana’s ambitious literary goal of recording the story of “specific
human beings, living in a specific time and taking part in specific events,”
and I could feel “the tremor of eternity” in the lives of the black people in
the movie Fences, specific lives
oppressed in their own specific way no less than the lives of people under
Soviet rule that Svetlana recorded in the oral histories of her books.
The existential
density of the movie Fences strongly
suggested to me that it had been adapted from a play, so I did a Google search
and learned that the screenplay was
written by the playwright August Wilson who had adapted it from his Pulitzer
Prize-winning play Fences, just as I
had suspected; but that didn’t help me resolve the question of “the tremor of
eternity” that I saw in the soul of his characters, and I had to ponder deeply.
I knew with intuitive certainty that this
“tremor of eternity” had to do with existential suffering brought about by the
oppressive conditions of one’s life, whether it be the life of the Soviet
people living under socialism or the life of black people in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania; and I went back to the article in The Atlantic and found confirmation in Svetlana’s own words, which
reflect the wisdom that she accrued from recording thousands of stories from
specific people living in a specific time and taking part in specific events:
“Sometimes I come
home after these meetings with the thought that suffering is solitude. Total
isolation. At other times, it seems to me that suffering is a special kind of
knowledge. There is something in human life that is impossible to convey and
preserve in any other way, especially among us. That is how the world is made;
that is how we are made.”
“That’s it,” I exclaimed to myself, not with the
excitement of a mind-shattering epiphany, but with the quiet calm of
unsurprising coincidental confirmation.
Svetlana had intuited
one of the deepest mysteries of the human condition, that the human soul is
made through pain and suffering—an insight much too deep for tears, as the poet
Wordsworth would say; which was why she found it “impossible to convey.” But
Svetlana did her creative best, which the Nobel Prize committee recognized as
“a new kind of literary genre,” describing her work as a “history of emotions…a
history of the soul.”
“To me the meanest flower that blows can give
/Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” said William Wordsworth
in his poem “Intimations of Immortality,” but these were thoughts born of the
anguished joy of life and not the anguished pain of suffering like that of the
oppressed Soviet people in Svetlana books, or of the oppressed black people in Fences; which confirmed my gnostic
understanding of the growth and individuation of the human soul through the enantiodromiac process of natural
evolution.
This is the core
idea of today’s spiritual musing, then; but like Svetlana Alexievich, I find it
impossible to convey the sacred mystery of this idea, and I have to abandon to
my creative unconscious to bring today’s spiritual musing to satisfactory
resolution...
I pondered deeply.
What did Svetlana Alexievich mean by calling suffering “a special kind of
knowledge”? Listening to thousands of people tell their personal story of
suffering for her oral history of the Soviet people who were conditioned by the
inflexible ideology of socialism, she felt “the tremor of eternity” in each
person’s soul, “that which is human in all of us,” which was why she was called
a historian of the soul in the Nobel Prize citation.
And as I watched
the movie Fences, I also felt “the
tremor of eternity” in the soul of Troy Maxson (Denzel Washington) and his wife
Rose (Viola Davis), and I knew with
gnostic certainty that the “tremor of eternity” that I felt in their anguished
soul was that “special kind of knowledge” that was created out of the enantiodromiac process of soul making;
but this is such a deep concept to explain that I have to defer to my twin soul
books, Death, the Final Frontier and The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity,
which tell the story of how I came to see in my own journey of self-discovery
that human suffering is Nature’s way
of satisfying the longing in our soul to be all that we are meant to be.
“That is how we
are made,” she said. This is the mystery that Svetlana Alexievich caught a
glimpse of as she listened to the Soviet people tell the story of their
personal suffering and which I caught a glimpse of in the movie Fences as I watched Troy Maxson and his
wife Rose suffer the existential anguish of their marriage and life
circumstances, a glimpse into the sacred mystery of suffering that has puzzled
the world since the dawn of man; but without suffering, where would we be?
Would we have that
“tremor of eternity” in our soul? Would we even be aware of our immortal nature
that Wordsworth caught a glimpse of in his poem “Intimations of Immortality”
and Svetlana Alexievich caught a glimpse of in the suffering of the Soviet
people and which I saw more and more clearly in Troy Maxson and his wife Rose
in the movie Fences?
Through suffering
we grow in that “special kind of knowledge” that nourishes the longing in our
soul to be all that we are meant to be; but is there any other way to grow in
our immortal nature other than through the existential pain and suffering of
the human condition?
The ancient alchemists
knew that Nature will only evolve us
so far, and then we have to take evolution into our own hands to complete what Nature
cannot finish; this is the mystery that Svetlana Alexievich confronted in her
quest to record the oral history of the Soviet People and which Troy Maxson and
his wife Rose were up against, and this is the mystery that I sought to resolve
in my lifelong journey of self-discovery.
I felt the “tremor
of eternity” in the soul of the Soviet people that Svetlana Alexievich
creatively recorded in her oral histories, and I felt the “tremor of eternity”
in the soul of Troy Maxson and his wife Rose in he movie Fences as I watched them suffer in their existential anguish, but
I also knew with gnostic certainty
through my own journey of self-discovery that there was a way out of
existential suffering; but that’s a subject for another musing, if I’m ever
called to write it…
———
Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn’s legacy to the Russian people and the world began when he
examined his conscience and realized that his own lies contributed to the great
lie of the Soviet system, and dismantling his life-lie was the inspiration for
professor Jordan Peterson’s own journey to authenticity, which is why Rule 8: Always tell the truth—or, at least,
don’t lie, is his favorite rule in his shadow-dismantling book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos,
because always telling the truth and not lying transforms one’s life-lie and
goes a long way to making one whole; and by consequence, society as well.
This is why professor
Peterson’s message to the younger generation can be so harsh, because
dismantling one’s life-lie is the first step on one’s journey to authenticity;
and unless one takes this first step, one will never know which self they are
being true to…
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