CHAPTER 39
Not a Prophet or Reformer,
Just a Writer…
A poet speaks not
only of their own individuation process, they speak for the collective
individuation of the whole world, and when my poem What the Hell Is Going on Out There? came to me unbeckoned and word
perfect, I knew that it spoke for me and the collective psyche of the world;
and one year later professor Jordan Peterson was called to his destiny and
provided an answer to my angry question, and he became the prophet and reformer
that the collective psyche of the world was calling for, giving talks around
the world on his book 12 Rules for Life: An
Antidote to Chaos. “One of the most important thinkers to emerge on
the world stage for many years,” said The
Spectator.
Two days ago, November 29, 2018, Jordan Peterson was
interviewed by Joe Rogan on his show, which was live-streamed on YouTube (Joe Rogan Experience #1208-Jordan Peterson),
and when Jordan Peterson said that he had completed his 100-city global book
tour (with more cities still to come), I knew
that it was time to bring this story home.
In just two days the
Rogan interview got a million and half views, which speaks to the Jordan
Peterson effect; but when I finished watching the interview, I hadn’t learned
anything new from Jordan Peterson that I hadn’t heard before, despite the
exciting new iteration of the same hierophantic message that his professorial gift
for public speaking always brought to the table, and I called upon my muse to
bring One Rule to Live By: Be Good to
closure…
When I was called
to write One Rule to Live By: Be Good,
I never felt compelled to expound upon Jordan Peterson’s hierophantic message, carefully
analyzing each of his 12 rules for life and offering my understanding, one can
explore this through his book, online lectures, podcasts and many interviews
(and if one wants to dig deeper, they can also read his Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief); my creative directive
was to offer a key to the door of the secret
way that Jordan Peterson’s hierophantic message brought one to, should one
be conscientious enough to take his shadow-dismantling, character-building message
to heart—the same directive that compelled me to send Jordan Peterson four of
my memoirs to read, two before he came into public prominence and two more when
he was catapulted onto the world stage three years later to offer him insights
and inspiration for his own courageous, and now quite challenging individuation
process.
I sat and pondered
how to bring this book to closure when to my surprise a spiritual musing that I
wrote this past summer popped into my mind, and as irrelevant as it may appear
to be, it speaks directly to the central issue of One Rule to Live By: Be Good:
A Pouring from the Empty into the Void
The
highly respected staff writer and book critic for The New Yorker James Wood said something to inveterate book lover
Michael Silverblatt on a Bookworm podcast
that called for a spiritual musing. I don’t remember his exact words, but in
essence James Wood said, ‘When an
apprentice gets hurt on a job, there’s an old saying that the trade is entering
his body,’ (upon reflection, he may have said this during a reading of his
new book of essays, The Nearest Thing to
Life, at the Politics and Prose
Bookstore in Washington, D.C.), which reminded me of Leo Tolstoy’s comment
about writing his novels in his own blood, as illustrated by the oft-quoted
line from his famous novel Anna Karenina:
“All happy families are alike; each
unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
In
effect, we pay for the gnostic wisdom of our life’s path, which I can vouchsafe
with the blood that I spilled learning
my own trade of painting and drywall taping (my vocation, which cost me plenty
of spilled blood as I learned my trade with no-one to guide me) and the craft
of writing (I’m still bleeding from the
blood I spilled with my first novel, What
Would I Say Today If I Were to Die Tomorrow? that so upset my hometown that
Penny and I had to relocate to Georgian Bay for peace of mind); but as I listened to James Wood
talking about literature, which for an articulate atheist like himself was the
closest thing to religion, I got the same feeling that I got listening to the iconic
literary critic professor Harold Bloom that literature was not enough to
satisfy the longing in our soul for wholeness and completeness, and an old
quandary popped into my mind— the
existential dilemma of modern life.
I cannot
for the life of me get a read on social media, especially the daily posts on my
Facebook feed that desperately cry out for attention like an Andy Warhol
painting, as if the more “Likes” one gets on their posts the more relevant they
will be to the cosmic scheme of things, and I cannot fathom whether society is
overwhelmed with too much existential reality or too little, and I keep asking
myself: are we drowning in the deep end of the pool, or the shallow? Has our
life become a reality show for social media, an endless quotidian stream of daily
living like the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “hypnotically
spellbinding” (James Wood’s words) six volume autobiographical novel My Struggle?
I cannot
tell, and I have to explore my quandary in today’s spiritual musing. But in all
humility, I don’t know where to begin, and I have to call upon my muse to
assist me…
I woke up
this morning with a spiritually fatiguing issue on my mind, the archaic mediaeval
face-covering niqab and burqa apparel that a minority of Muslim women here insist
on wearing for “religious reasons,” a politically sensitive issue that has
polarized the people of Quebec, and I cannot help but feel that this is my
entry into my spiritual musing that I could not resolve yesterday; but what
does it mean?
I’ve
already written a spiritual musing on this issue (“A Tempest in a Teapot,”
which I’ve included in my book The Armchair Guru), and I could quote it
here to make my point about our journey through life much easier; but I feel I
have to explore my quandary from another angle for a greater understanding, and
the only way to do this would be to revisit my feelings on the dilemma of the
irreconcilable outer and inner journey of our life, the conflicted nature of our
existential
outer self and our essential inner self.
What I’m
getting from social media is an endless stream of information on the outer
journey of contemporary life, that aspect of society’s preoccupation with the existential
dimension of reality—politics (sexual harassment is the hot topic of the day
that has exploded in the #MeToo movement), personal relationships,
nostalgic memorabilia, always new selfies and endless recipes and health tips
and cartoonish re-posts and other trivia, what in his creative genius the prodigious
writer of his own contemporary world John Updike would have called “lower
gossip,” leaving one with the strongest impression that this fleeting life is
all we have and we’d better make the most of it, and dread possesses everyone.
Life has
sped up with digital technology, and whatever happens out there is instantly
vented (and vetted) on social media, giving one the nauseous feeling that “the
world is too much with us,” as Wordsworth wrote in his eponymous poem while in
the throes of the First Industrial Revolution two hundred years ago—another
vicious terrorist attack and raging forest fires and more senseless shootings and
freakish storms and floods and consequent social upheavals that will take years
to recover from, blaming religious zealotry, climate change, and recalcitrant
karmic obtuseness; every day a new catastrophe, the world going to hell much
more quickly than anyone expected, and we grasp at life a little tighter as
writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard vainly try to make sense of the human condition,
the outer becoming the inner and the inner the outer, a never-ending enantiodromia of self-individuation teleologically
driven to personal wholeness and completeness but never quite getting there.
After
listening to James Wood on Bookworm (who
helped launch Knausgard’s career in America with his optimistic review of the
first volume of My Struggle),
engaging in his erudition but no less disappointing than the great professor Bloom’s
sublime nihilism, I listened to Silverblatt talking in another podcast with the
new literary genius of Infinite Jest
and messianic hope for literature before Knausgaard came along with his six
volumes of My Struggle, David Foster
Wallace, who also could not find a way to reconcile his outer and inner journey
and was driven to suicide at the age of 46 to end the pain of his existential
dilemma and crippling depression, I shook my head and said, in Gurdjieffian jest,
“It’s all a pouring from the empty into the void,” and I went off Facebook for
a month or so to give myself a break.
———
And that’s what has made Jordan Peterson “the most
influential public intellectual in the Western world today” (The New
York Times), because his hierophantic message is not a pouring from the
empty into the void; it’s a pouring of the Logos of his own gnostic wisdom into
the spiritual vacuum of today’s crazy world of postmodern nihilism and identity
politics and political correctness gone loony that religion, science, and
politics cannot resolve, which is why hundreds of people (predominantly young
men) have gone up to him after each of his 100-city book tour lectures to thank
him for helping them get their life together—proof positive of the redemptive
message of the hierophantic imperative of his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
Professor Peterson told Joe Rogan that he never gave
the same lecture twice on his global book tour, but that’s not quite true; he always
gives the same hierophantic message but packaged in a new and refreshing format,
always allowing for the free flow of the Logos that speaks to the needs of his
respective audiences, because he has the gift of being open to the Logos. Which
is why he never gets tired of delivering his message to a world that is hungry
to hear what he has to say (he himself
can’t wait to see what’s going to come out him with each new talk); but
just what is his hierophantic message? Can it be reduced to a single sentence,
a single phrase, or word?
Isn’t this why I was called by the omniscient guiding principle of life to write One Rule to Live By: Be Good? Isn’t this
what professor Jordan Peterson’s message boils down to, just being a good
person? And isn’t his book 12 Rules for
Life: An Antidote to Chaos simply a pathway to being a good person? Isn’t this the divine imperative of his
hierophantic message?
If there’s one thing that I have learned in my unbelievable
quest for my true self, it’s the simple truth that a personal pathway (path + way = pathway) is both a process and a destination, and one has to forge
their own way to their true self,
which 12 Rules for Life helps one do;
because, in the words of my hero Socrates, 12
Rules for Life : An Antidote to Chaos
gets one into “the habit of soul gathering and collecting herself into herself,”
and the more one “gathers and collects” their soul (which is trapped in the ego/shadow
consciousness of their personality), the more their true self they will be—true
to the Mathew Principle, much gathers
more.
This is why the core tenet of Peterson’s message contends
that taking responsibility (both moral and practical) for one’s life fills the
spiritual vacuum of their life and gives one meaning and purpose; and it
doesn’t matter how the good professor dresses this up in his lectures and interviews,
it’s always the same redemptive message of self-reconciliation, as he iterated yet
again to a group of young men in London, England who got their life together by
taking up the sport of boxing.
“Of all the things I’ve been talking to people
about,” said professor Peterson to the tightly knit boxing club community, “probably
the most useful to help people understand that you need a meaning in your life
to buttress the tragedy and the malevolence and betrayal, and that you find
that fundamentally in the adoption of responsibility…”
And this is the appeal of professor Jordan Peterson’s
message; it’s always the same, but it speaks to each person’s individual need
for wholeness and completeness. One of his 12 rules for life will speak to one
person more than the other rules, but the more one “gathers and collects” oneself
into oneself, the more they will resonate with the other rules, which in the
end makes one a good person whose only guiding principle will be their own
conscience and free will, which brings to mind something that my oracle revealed
to me when I fled from my comfortable life in my hometown of Nipigon, in
Northwestern Ontario to set my feet upon my own path to my true self.
I was twenty-three years old and living in Annecy,
France. I was so culturally shocked and unbearably distraught that I went for a
walk one afternoon to think things through; and I came back from my snowing and
freezing walk feeling so lost and lonely that I did not know what to do. With a
sad and heavy heart, I sat at my desk and picked up my pen and the following
words came to me, which became my guiding light in my unbearably lonely quest
for my true self:
“Steadfast
and courageous is he, who having overcome woe and grief remains alone and undaunted.
Alone I say, for to be otherwise would hardly seem possible, for one must bear
one’s conscience alone. He must fight the battle and he must win the battle,
odds or no odds. He must win to establish the equilibrial tranquility of body
and soul, and sooner or later he will erupt as a volcano of unlimited confidence
which will purpose his life hereafter; and having given birth to such
magnificence, he will no longer be alone alone, but alone in society, and he
will see the mirror of his puerile grief in the eyes of his fellow man.”
I had no idea where those
words came from (the word “equilibrial” isn’t even in the dictionary, but it’s
the right adjective, or mot juste to
be pedantic), but so fraught with meaning
were these words that they gave me the inspiration I needed to continue my
quest for my true self; and upon reflection today, I can see that those words
were bursting with the squaring of the circle mandala that appeared to me in my
bedroom one night while studying philosophy at Lakehead University three years
after my creative unconscious gave those words to me to encourage me to set my
soul free from the prison of my own ego/shadow personality. And now, half a
century later, from the enlightened perspective of my true self, I know that those sacred words came from
my higher self, which I acknowledge to be the Logos, my muse, my oracle, and the omniscient guiding principle of life;
and, at the risk of being more personal than I have ever been in all the books
that I have written, I have just been summoned by my oracle to bring One Rule to Live By: Be Good to closure with
the most sacred experience of my entire life, my call to the final surrender…
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