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…
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