One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 38: My Mandala, My Mandate

CHAPTER 38

My Mandala, My Mandate

“Each life has a natural built-in reason for being. Purpose

is the creative spirit of life moving through you from the inside out.

It is the deep mysterious dimension in each soul, which carries

with it a profound sense of personal identity.”

THE KEYS OF JESHUA

—Glenda Green

            I went to university to study philosophy to find an answer to the question that compelled me to go on a quest for my true self, who am I? And in my second year of studies I began to feel myself cast adrift in a sea of endless philosophical speculation, and I feared drowning; that’s when my oracle came to my assistance and serendipity introduced me to Gurdjieff’s teaching through Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous; that’s what engendered the miraculous experience of “my mandala, my mandate,” which I echoed in a spiritual musing that I wrote last year for my third volume of spiritual musings, The Armchair Guru:

           

The Hedgehog Knows One Big Thing

Just for fun and out of intellectual curiosity, the renowned Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay inspired by one line attributed to the ancient Greek poet Archilochus who died in 645 BC: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

Isaiah’s essay, published in book form as The Hedgehog and the Fox, is both enlightening and entertaining; and just for the fun of it also, I’d like to explore his application of the hedgehog/fox metaphor to my own writing in today’s spiritual musing…

I hadn’t heard of Isaiah Berlin’s book The Hedgehog and the Fox until a month or so ago when Colin Wilson (whose precocious book The Outsider influenced me in my youth) referred to it in his talk with Jeffrey Mishlove on his program Thinking Allowed, and I knew immediately what Colin Wilson meant when he said that he belonged to the category of hedgehog writers, because that’s how I saw myself also.

“I’ve written the same book seventy times over,” said Colin Wilson; which put him squarely in the hedgehog camp of writers, because according to Isaiah Berlin hedgehog writers focus on one all-embracing idea for understanding life. They possess “…a central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel—a single, universal, organizing principle.” And for Colin Wilson that one all-consuming central preoccupation was, in Jeffery Mishlove’s words, “reconciling this issue of the heights of consciousness and the depths of despair.”

Berlin made no huge claims for his hedgehog/fox metaphor, calling it a “starting-point for genuine investigation,” with the added benefit of being an “enjoyable intellectual game” by which one could classify writers and thinkers into either camp, as he did by placing Plato, Dante, Pascal, Proust, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and many other classical writers into the hedgehog camp; and Aristotle, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Goethe, and Joyce among others in the fox camp of writers and thinkers, but focusing his attention mainly upon Tolstoy.

According to Berlin’s application of the metaphor, fox writers pursue many ends, often unrelated, “seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experience and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing…unitary vision.”

In short, Berlin defined a hedgehog writer as someone who relates everything to a single vision, an organizing principle that seems to cover all of history, or a single dynamic of polar opposites like Colin Wilson’s lifelong study of the depths and heights of human consciousness; and a fox writer, on the other hand pursues many ideas, not necessarily related, and often contradictory, like the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.

Two camps, two types of writers; and according to this hedgehog/fox classification, I’m definitely a hedgehog writer because I have pursued one central idea my whole life; an unrelenting idée fixe which can be summed up by the simple question, who am I?

This became my organizing principle, and everything I did in my life was colored by my efforts to find the answer to this haunting question. I didn’t talk about it openly, because that would have been a foolish thing to do, unless one was Shirley MacLaine who confessed in her memoir I’m Over all That, “no matter where I went I was always looking for myself” and always brought it up in interviews to expand the paradigm of conventional wisdom; but whether one talks about it or not, everyone will one day ask, who am I?

There were many things in my life that I longed for, and many avenues that I wanted to explore; but because of my hedgehog preoccupation, I focused my attention on what I felt would help me answer my haunting question. So, I was fox-like by inclination, because of my many interests; but I was a hedgehog by inner imperative, because I had to find my true self.

This caused me considerable anxiety, because I couldn’t have it both ways; until I made a commitment one day and vowed to find my true self or die trying. And the more I focused on my idée fixe, the more laser-like attention I brought to my quest; which confirmed Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog/fox metaphor, because the hedgehog writer would be better disposed to a deeper insight into his preoccupying single interest than the fox writer who has many interests, because the hedgehog writer is by instinct a centripetal thinker (tending to move toward a center), and the fox writer is a centrifugal thinker (tending to move away from a center); but whether hedgehog or fox, both types play out life’s drama of becoming who they are according to their own nature, thereby fulfilling their essential purpose in life.

Of course, this presupposes that life has an essential purpose; but it was because of my hedgehog conviction that I managed to answer the question who am I? which granted me an insight into life’s essential purpose of realizing our true self, as I expounded upon in my most intimate memoir The Pearl of Great Price that tells the story of how I found the greatest treasure in the world, my true self.

 But this is a personal realization, and I don’t expect the world to see it; because, as Gurdjieff used to say, “There is only self-initiation into the mysteries of life,” and the only way to confirm that our purpose in life is to become our true self would be to initiate oneself into the sacred mystery of life`s purpose. This is what the ancient alchemists meant when they said, “Man must complete what nature has left unfinished.”

I’m glad I was born to be a hedgehog writer, then; because it disposed me to devote my life to finding my true self and write about my journey, and as many regrets as I may have for not satisfying the longings of my many interests (I would have loved to become a Jungian analyst specializing in past-life regression therapy), I’ve accomplished what I came into this world to do; and I couldn’t have asked for more.

———

          I went to university then because I was driven by an inner imperative that I had no control over. I could have gone any which way, to be sure; but I vowed to find my true self or die trying, and I felt impelled to study philosophy for an answer to my haunting question.

But by the middle of my second year of studies I began to have an uneasy feeling that philosophy was not the path for me, and panic began to set in. That’s when for no apparent reason I asked a fellow student who was going home to Toronto for Christmas to bring me back a book of his own choosing from his favorite little book store, and he brought me Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous that cracked open the door to the secret way that was to change my life forever; but why did I ask him to bring me a book of his own choosing? What kind of strange request was this?

Upon reflection these many years later, I can see there was always a kind of reckless abandon about me, which was both adventurous and foolish; and in my request of my fellow student, I abandoned to this adventurous/foolish spirit in me, which no doubt was the inspiration for my “letting go and letting God” experiment that became the premise of my novel The Golden Seed many years later; but as attracted as I was to Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work one oneself” that Ouspensky had introduced me to, I could not quite “get” it.

Gurdjieff fascinated me, mystified me, provoked me, and terrified me all at the same time; but I had the strongest feeling that his teaching (made even more alluring by him also calling it “the way of the sly man”) was what I had gone to university for, and it got under my skin; that’s when panic really set in, and I didn’t know what to do.

Should I continue my philosophy studies and get a degree, or leave and find another path? What the hell was I to do? I had no idea whatsoever, and terror possessed me. And that’s when it happened, the miracle of my mandala experience…

There’s an old Zen Buddhist saying: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” Professor Jordan Peterson, whose own obsession to find an answer for “the general social and political insanity and evil of the world” also made him a hedgehog writer, brought his Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief as far as the logic of his inquisitive mind could take him; not quite to the enlightened stage of passing through the eye of the needle, but to thematic resolution in his book’s Conclusion: The Divinity of Interest, with a quotation from his guiding light C. G. Jung, which explains why he was called by the oracle of life to become a prophet and reformer with the message of his global bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos:

“The central ideas of Christianity are rooted in Gnostic philosophy, which, in accordance with psychological laws, simply had to grow up at a time when the classical religions had become obsolete. It was founded on the perception of symbols thrown up by the unconscious individuation process which always sets in when the collective dominants of human life fall into decay. At such a time there is bound to be a considerable number of individuals who are possessed by archetypes of a numinous nature that force their way to the surface in order to form new dominants.

“This state of possession shows itself almost without exception in the fact that the possessed identify themselves with the archetypal contents of their unconscious, and, because they do not realize that the role which is being thrust upon them is the effect of new contents still to be understood, they exemplify these concretely in their own lives, thus becoming prophets and reformers” (Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, Jordan B. Peterson, p. 456, bold italics mine).

Professor Jordan Peterson became possessed by the archetypal imperative of his own “crucifix symbol”  that manifested to him in his prophetic cathedral dream one night while working on his book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, which mandated him to resolve his dilemma by placing him in the center of Being; and that’s exactly what happened to me when the unconscious process of individuation thrust upon me an archetypal symbol in the “squaring of the circle” mandala that I consciously experienced one night in the darkness of my bedroom in the house that three male friends and I rented in my second year at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

The mandala symbol that the unconscious process of individuation manifested before my eyes possessed me with all the daemonic imperative of the archetypal hero whose sole purpose was to unite the opposites of my dual nature, and as Carl Jung said, I had no idea of the role that was being thrust upon me (neither did Jordan Peterson, who was called by his own unconscious imperative to answer his own haunting question); and although I did not know it then, my unconscious had just made up my mind for me: I was “destined” by the symbolic imperative my own unconscious need for wholeness and completeness to drop out of university and forge a new path for myself with Gurdjieff’s teaching, which is why I came to call this miraculous experience “my mandala, my mandate.”

I was mandated by the archetypal hero’s spirit to unite the opposites of my dual nature, but I had no cognitive awareness of my own dual nature until I began “working” on myself with Gurdjieff’s teaching, which I did not “get” yet; and that’s the irony of the hero’s journey—they do not know the way until they find the way. And that was my quandary.

I began to sense that philosophy was not the path for me, and my creative unconscious confirmed this with the spontaneous manifestation of the “squaring of the circle” mandala that appeared before my eyes that memorable night when out of sheer frustration with Gurdjieff’s teaching I angrily threw Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous down on my desk and sat back in my chair and pouted in deep despair.

Try as I may, I just did not “get” the gist of Gurdjieff’s teaching despite how much it “spoke” to me, and it “spoke” to me so loud and clear that it got under my skin—another  immortal wound that set my soul on fire with a pathological wonder that possessed me to read everything that I could get on Gurdjieff and his teaching when I finally summoned the courage to drop out of university in the second semester of my third year and forge a path for myself in the wooded forest of my life with his transformative system of “work” on oneself with conscious effort and intentional suffering, which awakened me to the simple truth that to find the way one has to live it…

So, there I was then, in my second year of studies when the omniscient guiding principle of life came to my assistance to set me free from a path that had served its purpose in my serendipitous discovery of the secret way in Gurdjieff’s teaching, and it was only a matter of time before I made the conscious decision to walk away from university.

Philosophy was pulling me out into a sea of endless mentation that I feared would not promise me an answer to my haunting question, and my creative unconscious offered me the solution to my problem of resolving my dual nature in the symbolic squaring of the circle, which was the only way I would ever answer the question that had called me to university in the first place, who am I?

            I shut off the lights in my bedroom and flopped my body onto the bed and put my hands behind my head and stared into the darkness wallowing in my despair. I was so mad I did not know whether to scream or cry. I stared and stared, thinking and despairing; and the more I thought about my dilemma, the more I despaired. Philosophy was not giving me the answer, and Gurdjieff’s teaching puzzled me; I saw no light whatsoever, and I despaired.

And then it happened: A tiny dot of blue light appeared before my eyes at the foot of my bed, just above eye level, and it rested there suspended in mid-air long enough for me to rub my eyes to see if it was real. I shut my eyes and opened them again, and it was still there; and then the tiny dot of blue light began to expand and grow into the shape of circle until it was about three feet in diameter, and it sat in mid-air like a donut of shimmering blue light. Dumbfounded, I just stared; and then a tiny dot of yellow light appeared within and at the top of the circumference of the blue circle, and it also expanded and grew, forming a perfectly straight line of bright yellow light within the circumference, and then it stopped, made a ninety degree turn, and formed another straight line, stopped again and made another ninety-degree turn and formed another straight line, and another, joining with itself to form a perfect square of bright yellow light within the circumference of shimmering blue light—which, though I did not know it then, was a symbolic squaring of the circle. Nonplussed, I just stared at the circle of bright blue light with a square of bright yellow light within its circumference; and then, just as miraculously as it had appeared, it disappeared, and my bedroom was in darkness again…

It took many years to make sense of this miraculous experience, and had I not been called to read and study C. G. Jung and his Gnostic-inspired psychology of individuation, I would never have come to understand the meaning of my mandala experience; but I had to “work” on myself long and hard day and night to resolve the opposites of my dual nature—what Jesus called making the two into one—before the puzzle of my life finally fell into place for me.

To square the circle, one has to do the impossible, and the task that I had set for myself in my quest for my true self was not possible within the paradigm of my philosophy studies; but I did not know this cognitively. I sensed that philosophy wasn’t the path for me, but I didn’t know what to do about it, and deep anxiety possessed me. Please God, tell me what to do, I pleaded silently.

Then divine serendipity kicked in with Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous, and the door to the secret way cracked open for me; but I had to drop out of university to forge my own path in life by “working” on myself with Gurdjieff’s teaching, and my despair of not knowing what to do forced my unconscious to resolve my problem by manifesting the symbol of “squaring the circle” of blue and yellow light before my eyes, the mandala of the “impossible” quest for my true self—hence, “my mandala, my mandate,”  the unconscious imperative of my individual way.

When the mandala symbolizing my successful quest for my true self literally manifested before my eyes that night, I didn’t know what  it meant; but after I did the impossible and “worked” my way through the eye of the needle and gave “birth” to my true self, I understood that I had unconsciously mandated myself to find my true self (I did, after all, vow to find my true self or die trying), hence the symbolic squaring of the circle that my unconscious manifested in my bedroom when I did not know what to do to find my true self; and in my enlightened perspective today, I’m right back to where I started, “chopping wood and carrying water...”

One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 37: The Call to the Inner Life

CHAPTER 37

The Call to the Inner Life

“Fate is the death we owe to Nature. Destiny is the life we owe to soul,” wrote Jungian therapist Marian Woodman in her Foreword to Bone: A Journal of Wisdom, Strength, and Healing, an intimate chronical of her miraculous journey through cancer to healing; which was why I gave this book to a neighbor who was diagnosed with cancer this summer and instantly fell into deep despair because both her mother and brother had died of cancer.

I loved Marion Woodman’s book, and I especially liked her title Bone because it dared to “de-flesh” her life and pare it down to the bare bone of her existence, a courageous confrontation with herself that awakened her to the life-altering realization that we have a fate we owe to Nature and a destiny we owe to soul, which was the same conclusion that my own confrontation with myself had awakened me to, and the basic theme of One Rule to Live By: Be Good; that’s why I said to our neighbour, who had just taken an early retirement to get the most out of the rest of her life, when she told me she had cancer and was terrified of dying like her mother and brother, “Everything happens for a reason, Tracy. Maybe life is trying to tell you something with your cancer?”

“This book is about living, not dying,” wrote Marion Woodman. “It’s about dying into life. With cancer, I discovered how much dying it takes to get here, here into my body, here onto Earth. It’s about the soul work required to heal both,” an extraordinary insight into that special way of conscious living that is necessary to transform our existential outer self and make us whole and complete; this is why I gave this remarkable book to my neighbor to read, it was the most precious gift that I could give her in her most desperate time of need.

But why does it take something like cancer to wake us up to our destined purpose, or whatever tragic loss that shocks us out of our comfortable paradigm and hurls us into chaos and confusion—the loss of a child by accidental drowning, marital betrayal, a stroke? Why does it take a tragedy to wake us up to our mortal nature? It is a quandary; but it was this thought that inspired a spiritual musing that I wrote last summer, long before Tracy informed me that she had cancer and was terrified of dying like her mother and brother:

The Quandary of Our Modern World

Unquestionably, the pace of life has quickened today with the onslaught of the Internet, smart phones, and social media; but are we any closer to where we want, or ought to be?

That’s the quandary of our modern world that I reflected upon as I re-read some of my Edgar Cayce literature that grabbed my attention in my basement library when I went downstairs the other day to look for a book that I couldn’t find, which I took to be a sign from my oracle to re-acquaint myself with the literature on karma and reincarnation that called out to me from one of the dusty shelves; but why? That’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing…

I make no pretense to the fact that I believe in karma and reincarnation, which given the abundance of documented information we have on the subject makes me wonder why society is still so resistant to what Socrates called “a doctrine uttered in secret” —reminding me of a letter that Carl Jung wrote on his startling insight on man’s “resistance to understanding” (Letter to Hans Schmid, 6 November 1915), which I may refer to later as I work my way to a solution to the quandary of our modern world; but it was Jess Stearn’s book The Search for a Soul: Taylor Caldwell’s Psychic Lives that inspired my re-reading of the  Edgar Cayce literature, because it gave me the perspective I needed to make sense of our modern dilemma, and by dilemma I mean the paradoxical fact that the quicker the pace of our modern world gets (and it seems to be speeding up exponentially with the advances in artificial intelligence), the greater the distance we seem to be from where we want, or ought to be. It’s a whirlwind of activity out there, but where are we going?

I read an article in one of my weekend papers recently about a ritzy resort hotel that offered luxury suites at exorbitant rates because they were architecturally engineered so their clients could not access the outside world with their laptops and smart phones, thereby offering them a box of time for disconnected rest and relaxation. How ironic, that our modern world has become so self-indulgent that we can no longer say no to our obsessive need to be connected with what’s going on out there.

I chuckled at the irony, because it’s not what’s going on out there that has our modern world in a schizophrenic frenzy, but what’s going on in here—in the little universe of our own private world; and that’s the crux of our dilemma, because what’s going on out there can’t seem to satisfy the irrepressible longing in our soul for wholeness and completeness, and we’re always left wanting.

As serendipity would have it (I just love it when the merciful law of divine synchronicity kicks in to assist me in my writing), just to confirm my point about our modern world’s obsessive need to be connected with what’s going on out there, I just happened to inadvertently check my email and Facebook page a moment ago (how ironic!), and a writer friend from Texas had just posted a cartoon depicting children sitting on the front steps of a house and other  children walking by on the sidewalk, all with their eyes locked onto their smart phones and a yellow caution road sign with the warning: SLOW, CHILDREN TEXTING. And the caption read: “PLAYING OUTSIDE THESE DAYS.” What more proof does one need for our obsessive need to be connected with what’s going on out there?

This is the disease of our modern world that has infected our young generation—the obsessive need to be connected with what’s going on out there, whatever out there may be for each afflicted person—be it email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or whatever digital window on the world that one may be locked into; and time fritters by as we hungrily try to satisfy the irrepressible longing in our soul with the empty social calories of what’s going on out there. No wonder some enterprising individual has offered exorbitantly priced weekend retreats for those who can afford to pay to get away from what’s going on out there.

I had read The Search for a Soul: Taylor Caldwell’s Psychic Lives many years ago, which was the inspiration for my own seven past-life regressions many years later that became the basis of my novel Cathedral of My Past Lives, but I was strongly nudged to read Stearn’s book again, because I felt a need to re-acquaint myself with how our current life is unconsciously affected by our past lives, as Taylor Caldwell’s life certainly was because her novels were drawn from those ancient times in which she had lived and where she drew her vast knowledge and information for her stories, like her historical novel Great Lion of God, the fascinating story of St. Paul life and his miraculous conversion to Jesus Christ’s teaching.

At her friend Jess Stearn’s request, Taylor Caldwell was hypnotically regressed to some of her past lives to help her heal from her husband’s recent death, and it was enlightening to see how many of the people she knew back then that she met again in her current lifetime, like her husband whose recent  death had sent her into deep depression, and the vital role that they played in her life (her writer friend Jess Stearn, no less); all of which pointed to the karmic purpose of our life.

And that’s what’s missing in today’s world, the stubborn resistance to our karmic need for spiritual growth and self-fulfillment, which is displaced by our obsessive need for egoic gratification and social attention that we crave to satisfy with what’s going on out there.

I wrote a spiritual musing alluding to this obsessive need, which I titled “I’m On Facebook, Therefore I Am,” and as ironic as I was in my musing, the point I wanted to make was that social media cannot satisfy our inherent longing for self-fulfillment; but very few people make the connection between what’s going on out there and what’s going on in here, and our world today suffers the tragic malaise of spiritual emptiness more than any other age in human history. And that`s the irony of our modern world.

C. G. Jung, the founder of Analytical Psychology, foresaw this in his clinical practice, and in his book of essays Modern Man in Search of a Soul he spells out the problem: “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 number being Protestants, a smaller number of Jews, and not more than five or six believing Catholics. Among all of 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 not 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 really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook” (Modern Man in Search of a Soul, C. G. Jung, p. 229, bold italics mine).

Jung said that most people who came to him for therapy suffered from a sense of meaninglessness, and it was his duty to help them find a sense of purpose; this is how he developed his remarkable psychology of individuation—because the more one grew in the consciousness of their own identity, the more fulfilled they would be. “As each plant grows from a seed and becomes in the end an oak tree, so man becomes what he is meant to be. He ought to get there, but most get stuck,” said Jung; and that’s the problem of our modern world—we ought to get there, but we get stuck.

It appears then that modern man is stuck out there somewhere, and until we come to the realization that when all is said and done out there is not where it’s really at, but in here, in the little universe of our own private world; and until we see this, we will never satisfy the longing in our soul to be what we are meant to be, which is why I was drawn back to the Edgar Cayce literature on karma and reincarnation.

Edgar Cayce was one of the world’s most gifted psychics who went into a trance and did past-life readings, as well as health readings (which is how he got the name “the Sleeping Prophet”); and Jess Stearn helped bring Edgar Cayce to public attention with his books Edgar Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet and Intimates Through Time: Edgar Cayce’s Mysteries of Reincarnation, which I read again; and then I re-read his book Soul Mates because I enjoyed reading again about people who found their soul mate, quite often serendipitously, to fulfill their past-life relationships—which was how I met my Penny Lynn, because we had unresolved karma from our past life together as man and wife in Genoa, Italy when I broke her heart and dishonored our family name with my flagrant relationship with my raven-haired mistress who, as incredible, as it may be believe, came back into my current life as my past-life regressionist who tried to steal me again from my Penny Lynn. I didn’t know she was my past-life lover, but it soon became apparent.

We’re all born with a karmic purpose that determines our life, which is why I felt compelled to write today’s spiritual musing; because the only solution that I can see to the quandary of our modern world is to embrace a philosophy that will connect us with our karmic purpose. But to do this, we have to take pause from what’s going on out there and pay more attention to what’s going on in here, in the little universe of our own private world, because if we don’, life will do it for us through karmic suffering.

This brings me back to Carl Jung’s insight into man’s “resistance to understanding,” which is born of man’s fear of knowing himself, which I can vouchsafe because it’s also been my experience that when one is made conscious of their destined purpose the responsibility is often too great to bear—like resisting the urge to fall for my past-life mistress again that would have dishonored my love for Penny Lynn as I did in our past lifetime together in Genoa, Italy; and one flees into the world out there to escape karmic accountability, an insight that was confirmed by a dream I had during my open-heart surgery.

 In my dream, I was chased from one lifetime to the next by Nazi-like soldiers, which I discerned to mean my own past hunting me from one lifetime to the next until I came face to face with my own karma and took responsibility for my life, symbolizing the spiritual crisis of our modern world because our chickens are coming home to roost; and not until we connect with our karmic purpose will we ever hope of resolving the quandary of our modern world, a collective responsibility shared by every person.

———

That’s what Marion Woodman meant by soul work, the realization that by working on ourselves we can heal our wounded soul and the soul of the world, which her cancer experience had awakened her to just as I hoped my recently diagnosed neighbor would come to see.

And that’s what excited me about professor Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, because his hierophantic message to the world was waking people up to their inner life and destined purpose, albeit with the psychological nuance of a clever therapist who, like his hero C. G. Jung, was well aware of man’s “resistance to understanding.”

And that’s the irony; we all want the cure but not the medicine. But there’s no other way to satisfy the longing in our soul for wholeness and completeness; and the sooner our crazy modern world realizes this, the better off we will be…

“Why?” Tracy asked, in teary disappointment. “I did everything right. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I eat right, I exercise. Why me?” she cried, when she revealed her situation; and a week or so later she said to me, in a moment of distressing self-awareness, “We’ve got everything. Maybe that’s why. Maybe it’s because we’ve got everything…”

Unconscious guilt for the comfortable life at the expense of the inner life? It was not for me to say. “If there’s one piece of wisdom that I can give you,” I said to her, drawing upon Marion Woodman’s gnostic wisdom of her own cancer experience; “it’s to make friends with your cancer. It’s not your enemy. It’s not an alien entity come to destroy your life. It’s your own body trying to tell you something. Listen to your cancer, Tracy. Keep a journal. Life’s trying to tell you something about yourself that you need to know…”

Befuddled and confused, Tracy began her journey through Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance; but being a Type A Personality, I knew she would get stuck in the anger stage before she moved on to the others, and my heart went out to her. But the fates were kind to her, and although her cancer turned out to be incurable, it was manageable with medication; and her anger defused.

“You can have all the money in the world, but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have your health,” she confessed, shortly after her first treatment; and I smiled as I witnessed her connection with her inner life, knowing that one day she too would come to the same realization as Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, as will every soul that begins their journey to wholeness and completeness, which Dr. Kubler-Ross tells us in her memoir The Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying: “…all destiny leads down the same path—growth, love and service.”  Essentially the same imperative of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos that Dr. Jordan Peterson was called to give to the world…

One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 36: The Brilliance of Friedrich Nietzsche and the Tragedy of his Teaching

CHAPTER 36

The Brilliance of Friedrich Nietzsche,

and the Tragedy of his Teaching

         

“I am Zarathustra, the godless; where do I find my equal? All those are my equals who determine their will out of themselves, and who push all submission away from themselves,” declared Nietzsche’s hero with no less hubris than Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost who cut off his nose to spite his face rather than bow to God’s will.

“Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven,” said Satan, and Nietzsche followed suite by declaring God dead rather than submit to God’s imperative; but—and this is the but that opened the gates of hell and set loose all those nasty heathen demons upon the world—did Nietzsche know what God’s imperative was, or did he misperceive Christianity for God’s will? That’s the brilliance of Friedrich Nietzsche and the tragedy of his teaching; by honoring man’s free will in his tendentious teaching of the Superman, he dishonored God’s imperative, because brilliant little Nietzsche had to have his cake and eat it too…

“I was fascinated…yet repelled at the same time. I found it difficult to discover the right attitude toward Nietzsche,” wrote Rudolf Steiner in his book Friedrich Nietzsche: Fighter for Freedom. And after much study, Steiner concluded: “This was the picture of Nietzsche that appeared in my thought. He revealed to me the personality who did not see the spirit, but in whom unconsciously the spirit fought against the unspiritual views of his age,” making of Friedrich Nietzsche a paradoxical man who drove himself insane rather than submit to the imperative of his divine nature and reconcile the dual consciousness of his  essential and existrential self, the being and non-being of his false and true self.

I never understood my fascination with Nietzsche either when studying philosophy at university, and it wasn’t until I found the answer many years later to the question that had called me to university (who am I?) that I learned that the Logos, the omniscient guiding principle of life, was responsible for the authors that changed my life, like P. D. Ouspensky, whose book In Search of the Miraculous introduced me to Gurdjieff’s teaching that awakened me to the secret way, C. G. Jung, whose Memories, Dreams, Reflections opened me up to a psychological understanding of the individuation process that helped resolve my deep-seated issues with Christianity, Dr. Victor Frankl, whose Man’s Search for Meaning confirmed my understanding of the gnostic way, and many more authors whose books were just what I needed at that time in my life; but never Friedrich Nietzsche, for whom I always had an instinctive antipathy and could never bring myself to read.

One can, and many have made a lifelong study of Nietzsche but never understanding why he turned on God and embraced the idea of eternal recurrence which justified his Satanic pride and trapped his soul in the recurring cycle of the same life forever; but having broken the cycle of eternal recurrence, which I explored in the memoir of my parallel life in The Summoning of Noman, I know that Nietzsche was wrong in the basic premise of his teaching that there is no God and we either embrace our fate or be crushed by it.

Nietzsche was trapped by his fate in the meaninglessness of life until he was granted an insight of eternal recurrence while out on a walk one day in the Swiss village of Sils Maria, and he took up the intellectual challenge of the idea of eternal recurrence and grew to love his fate so he could overcome the oppressive spirit of nihilism, which gave birth to his Satanic hero Zarathustra who proudly justified why he had turned on God; but was it God the Logos that he had turned on, or the God of Christianity for whom he had a pathological antipathy? Wasn’t his amor fati just an ironic rationalization of his unhappy, miserable life?

I understand why he would believe that God was dead and that we had killed him (I also walked away from the God of Christianity), which drove Nietzsche insane trying to resolve the enantiodromiac nature of his dual self, but the teaching that his Satanic hero Zarathustra gave to the world has led the world down the garden path and left the world dangerously wanting; which brings to mind a spiritual musing that I wrote on how I resolved the issue of my own dual nature by adopting a special attitude to life that satisfied the longing in my soul for wholeness and completeness, and made me happy:  

My Secret to a Happy Life

Yesterday Penny and I made our first batch of Italian sausages in Georgian Bay, just like my parents used to make; well, not quite the same, because in this batch we did not add fennel seeds to our spices of salt, black pepper, chili pepper flakes, granular garlic, and paprika. We made the first batch without the fennel seeds, because I’m going to give some to my neighbor Tony who does not like fennel seeds in his homemade sausages; and today we’re going to make the second batch with fennel seeds, and with less paprika.

After we ground the meat and mixed in the spices, Penny fried up a couple of small patties to taste the result, and we found it a little dry; so, I added a cup or so of red wine that I had made last fall with Tony and mixed it into the meat, and Penny fried up two more patties and it tasted fine; and then we spent an hour or so stuffing the meat into the casings that we slid onto the funnel attachment of our electric meat grinder.

I like fennel seeds in my Italian sausages, but there was a time when I denied myself the pleasure of eating sausages altogether because I had taken up a special way of life that was inspired by the Sufi path that Gurdjieff’s teaching had introduced me to. Serendipity had introduced Gurdjieff into my life by way of Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous in my second year of philosophy studies at university, and as I “worked” on myself with Gurdjieff’s teaching I created what Gurdjieff called a “magnetic center” which attracted me to teachings of a similar nature, like Sufism and the sayings and parables of Jesus. Actually, Gurdjieff called his Fourth Way teaching “esoteric Christianity,” which was inspired by the secret teachings of the Essenes that Jesus was initiated into when he was a young man.

The premise of the Sufi Path is that one must “die before dying” to become their true self, which is a very difficult teaching to understand, let alone practice; but this is what Jesus meant with his paradoxical saying: “He that findeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” And since I was on a quest to find my true self, I took Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” to heart, which over time pulled the secret way of the Sufi Path and Christ’s sayings and parables into my life; and by secret way, I mean cultivating a special attitude with life that nourishes one’s inner self.

This, then, is the subject of today’s spiritual musing that came to me this morning while  “talking” with St. Padre Pio for my book A Sign of Things to Come, a creative exercise in what Jung called “active imagination,” not unlike Neale Donald Walsch’s “conversations” with God; and as I shared yesterday’s sausage making experience with my fellow countryman (Padre Pio was born in the village of Pietrelcina, not too far north from where I was born in the village of Panettieri, Calabria) I got the strongest feeling to write a spiritual musing on this special attitude that is essential for the growth of one’s inner self, an attitude of conscious living which is reflected in a poem that I wrote a number of years ago—

Sufi Sausages

The best sausages that I ever tasted

are made from a secret recipe that I found one day

while looking for the secret way.

I was so hungry for God that I would have eaten anything

to preserve my spiritual strength;

and I did, a cult concoction of sun and nonsense

that gave me spiritual cramps for many years.

Then I chanced upon a Sufi sausage maker who gave me

a secret recipe that changed my life forever.

“You take the casing that you have,” he instructed me,

“and stuff it with the meat of the last supper.”

I had no idea what he meant, until I re-read the Christian Bible; 

and from the moment I caught the light that Jesus shone,

I discerned the Sufi sausage maker’s wisdom,

and I began to practice the sacred art of Sufi sausage-making.

The first few batches that I made were much too spicy,

because I stuffed my casing with every esoteric meat

that I could find;

but with time, patience, and an ardent desire for God,

I learned to stuff my casing with the freshest meat of all,

the tender flesh of my own simple, daily life;

and the more I died to my mortal flesh,

the sweeter my sausages tasted, and the more strength

I gathered for my long journey back home to God.

            The most difficult aspect of my quest for my true self was decoding the language of the secret way, which is so well hidden that only the most devout seeker will ever decode the meaning of life’s purpose; but once I did, the secret way of the Sufi Path and Christ’s sayings and parables gave up their secret, and life finally began to make sense to me.

But I still had a lot more living and many years of writing before I could explain the secret way, until one day I realized that it all came down to a special attitude with life that reflected the essential truth of every spiritual teaching, and by special attitude I mean the secret of conscious living that Gurdjieff’s teaching made me wise to.

Of course, we are all conscious despite what Gurdjieff said about man being asleep to life, but consciousness is relative to every person, and waking up to life is a matter of degree for everyone; but it was Gurdjieff’s purpose as well as the Sufi Path and the sayings and parables of Jesus to speed up the process of self-realization and waking up to life, which in the language of the secret way means taking evolution into our own hands to complete what Nature cannot finish.

Nature will only evolve us so far, said Gurdjieff; and to complete what Nature cannot finish we have to take evolution into our own hands by cultivating a special attitude with life that speeds up the process of becoming our true self, which is the essential meaning and purpose of our existence.

It took years for me to realize why Nature cannot evolve us to our full potential, but the more I “worked” on myself (which I encoded in my poem as the sacred art of Sufi sausage-making), the more I grew in truth and understanding, and it finally dawned on me one day that the secret way was all about resolving the consciousness of our dual nature; or, as Jesus expressed it in the secret language of his teaching, making our two selves into one.

In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus was asked by someone when his kingdom would come, and he replied, “When the two will be one, and the outer like the inner, and the male with the female neither male nor female.” And the two are one when we speak truth to each other and there is one soul in two bodies with no hypocrisy, as the saying is explained in The Unknown Sayings of Jesus, by Marvin Meyer.

This special attitude with life then is nothing more than learning how to live one’s life with conscious intention, which means karmic responsibility; because as long as we refuse to wake up to the governing principle of life, which in A Sign of Things to Come St. Padre Pio called “the law of corrective measures,” we remain trapped in the endless cycle of karma and reincarnation, which is why we have to take evolution into our own hands to complete what Nature cannot finish and become our true self. And if I were asked to define what I mean by this special attitude of the secret way, I’d be forced to say: simply be a good person, and let your conscience be your guide. That’s my secret to a happy life.

———

            For whatever reason Nietzsche lost his faith in God, he cut himself off from the spark of divine consciousness that he was born with and was never able to reconcile his existential self with the imperative of his divine nature; and in his effort to overcome the oppressive spirit of nihilism born of the emerging scientific age and his willful denial of God’s imperative to resolve the consciousness of his lower nature, he forged a teaching of “the eternal recurrence of all things” and embraced his existential self—over and over in a never-ending cycle of time eternal, a fate that he was forced to love by the imperative of his logic.

“And if you should die now, O Zarathustra: behold, we know too what you would say to yourself… ‘Now I die and decay…and in an instant I shall be nothingness…But the complex of causes in which I am entangled will recur—it will create me again! ...I shall return…not to a new life or a better life or a similar life; I shall return eternally to this identical and self-same life…to teach once more the eternal recurrence of all things, to speak once more the teaching of the great noontide of earth and man, to tell man of the Superman once more…” wrote Nietzsche, staking his salvation on an idea of eternal egocentrism (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Penguin Classics; translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Introduction, p. 24).

“Alright,” I imagine proud little Nietzsche saying to himself, after he walked away from his Christian faith—for whatever reason, we will never know; but it was enough for him to deny the existence of the God altogether (probably crystallized by the love of his life, Lou Salome, who drove him into deep despair when she refused to marry him)— “if this is the way it’s going to be, then I’ll embrace my fate and be done with it!”

And like Satan in Paradise Lost, who turned on God and embraced hell forever, Nietzsche’s unconscious gave birth to the compensatory idea of the eternal recurrence of life, and he made a sterile heaven out of his own miserable existence by embracing his fate like Milton’s proud Satan; and he created his own stagnant heaven by giving birth to the Superman, whose sole purpose for being was to “overcome” his miserable existence over and over again for time eternal. “Where I found a living creature, there I found will to power…And life told me this secret: ‘Behold,’ it said, ‘I am that which must overcome itself again and again,” wrote Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, echoing Milton’s Satan’s “The mind is its own place, and in itself /Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

“The Superman, the will to the Superman, the will to power and self-overcoming. Live dangerously! Amor fati, eternal recurrence, total affirmation of life. The great noontide. These are the slogans, the ‘signs’, by which Nietzsche surmounted his nihilism and resolved his crisis,” wrote R. J. Hollingdale; but it was a false resolution, because Nietzsche drove himself insane trying to satisfy the divine imperative of his inner self for wholeness and completeness by sacrificing his divine self to his existential self (eternally recurring or not), the obverse of Christ`s salvific teaching of making our two selves into one self whole and complete.

“He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal,” said Jesus, which proud little Nietzsche so wrongly misperceived that he violently denounces Christianity for its redemptive nay-saying to life (self-sacrifice is the secret way of Christ’s teaching, which Jesus symbolized with the death of his lower self on the cross); and that’s the brilliance of Friedrich Nietzsche and the tragedy of his teaching—the same dilemma that haunts the pages of professor Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, and my call to write One Rule to Live By: Be Good…