Saturday, March 9, 2019

One Rule to Live By:Be Good, Chapter 40: My Call to the Final Surrender


CHAPTER 40

My Call to the Final Surrender

“Behold, be grateful, and forgive that which you did not
understand or control. For life is divine, it is perfect,
and it naturally manifests the will of its creator.”

Love Without End, Jesus Speaks…
Glenda Green
           
My call to the final surrender happened in the waiting room of the ICU unit of St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto this September where my Penny Lynn had just been operated on for a brain aneurysm and was, in the words of one of her doctors, “somewhere between here and there and very lucky to be here,” a miracle which I attribute to St. Padre Pio; but this is a story in itself, which I hope to write when I have more distance from this whole experience that brutally shifted my world from comfortable order into terrifying chaos, and back again.
I’m the same person that I was before Penny’s brain aneurysm and miraculous healing, but completely different; and it’s from this difference that I’ve been called to bring closure to this story, because from my state of consciousness of the final surrender, the world makes infinitely much more sense to me now in all of its chaos and confusion; and when I listen to professor Peterson today, still out there crusading to save the world with his talks on 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, I have to smile at his mission, because from where I stand today I can see that the world does not to be saved, but understood. “Each life has a natural built-in reason for being,” said Jesus in Glenda Green’s book The Keys of Jeshua. “Purpose is the creative spirit of life moving through you from the inside out. It is the deep dimension in every soul, which carries with it a profound sense of personal identity.” And life after life after life, we keep coming back to learn this. This is what needs to be understood.
Ironically, this is the divine imperative of Jordan Peterson’s hierophantic message of the sacred individual self that John Keats pointed to in a letter to his brother. In a moment of poetic genius, Keats caught a glimpse of the big picture; but he never realized his “unapprehended inspiration” because he died too young to fulfill his destined purpose to wholeness and completeness. But he did inform us that this life is the medium by which soul acquires its own identity (just as Jung and I realized that this life is the way), and that’s the genius of professor Peterson’s message—to become whole and complete by taking moral responsibility for our life, which 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos helps one do; 12 carefully wrought rules that offer a personal way to realize the gifted poet’s “unapprehended inspiration”—

“I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive—an yet I think I perceive it. That you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible.  I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read. I will call the human heart the horn-book read in that school, and I will call the Child able to read the Soul made from that School and its horn-book. Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school and Intelligence and make it a Soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways. Not merely is the Heart a horn-book, but it is the Mind’s Bible, it is the Mind’s experience, it is the text from which the Mind or Intelligence sucks its identity. As various as the lives of men are, so various become their Souls; and thus God makes individual beings, Souls, identical Souls, of the parts of his own essence. This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of salvation which does not offend our reason and humanity” (The Vale of Soul Making, John Keats).

“There is nothing but the self and God,” Jesus confirmed to the gifted artist Glenda Green while painting his portrait that she called “The Lamb and the Lion” when he appeared to her for almost four months between November 1991 and March 1992, the sacred mystery that professor Peterson caught a glimpse of with his Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief which he artfully rendered into his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos that has taken the world by storm (global sales have reached three million, and he’s lectured in 150 cities and not done yet, and I understand that he’s working on his next twelve rules for life book which will prompt another global book tour which may bring him and the world closer to soul’s destined purpose of wholeness and completeness); but not until one has been initiated into the sacred mystery of the self (the I Am consciousness of God) will one understand his hierophantic message, which, by happy coincidence, Jesus revealed in Chapter 2 of Glenda Green’s The Keys of Jeshua,RECOVERING THE AUTHENTIC SELF”:

“Things were not created from nothing. Everything was created from ‘Being.’ The ultimate state of pure being is the totality of energy and potential, resting in stillness and peace with itself. In such a state all ideas for creation are formed, and these ideas are merely extensions of the self. Creation is the consequence of I Am moving into action, or life, through multiplying ITSELF. There was no instrument of creation outside of Divine Being. I AM THAT I AM is God. So too with yourself. The truth of who you are will not be found in actions or personal history, but in the simplicity of who you are within the stillness and peace of your inner being…In the beginning and forever ‘I Am is the way; I Am is the word.’” (The Keys of Jeshua, by Glenda Green, p. 13).

This was my journey of self-discovery, and though I had already passed through the eye of the needle and realized my true self, little did I expect to be called again by the divine imperative of the way to fulfill a higher purpose, just as Jordan Peterson was called to his higher purpose of delivering his hierophantic message of self-reconciliation with his 12 Rules for Life and book tour talks, interviews, lectures, and podcasts; but I was called to the final surrender when my Penny Lynn suffered a brain aneurysm, and I had to let her go for  her to come back to me.
That was the miracle that I prayed for. Never in my life would I have dreamt that I would be brought to my knees to pray like I did in my Roman Catholic youth, but so terrified was I of losing my Penny Lynn that I dropped to my knees and prayed for a miracle.
“Please Padre, bring her back home to me safe and whole,” was my constant plea to the healing saint who was the inspiration for my novel Healing with Padre Pio, and with Pastor Joel (the spiritual counsellor at St. Michael’s ICU ward, who was there to comfort me in my desperate time of need), we prayed for Penny Lynn’s recovery.
“She’s not out of the woods yet,” was the constant daily refrain, and every few hours they took her out of sedation to ask her: 1. What’s your name? 2. Where are you? 3. Can you move the fingers on your right hand? 4. Now your left hand, and the same with her toes on her right foot and her left foot, and each time the nurse asked, my heart jumped to my throat; and then Penny contracted pneumonia and had to be put on a respirator, and the Pastor and I prayed harder; and then, out of my deepest, deepest despair of losing her, I was called to the final surrender:

Pastor Joel and I had just prayed for Penny’s recovery, me first in my desperation praying to God that if she had to go I would understand but if was at all possible for her to come back to me, to please let it be so, and Pastor Joel  praying to God in his own way for Penny’s recovery, me on the left side of the bed holding Penny’s hand and he on her right side holding her other hand, and we prayed heart and soul, and then we went to the waiting room of the ICU ward and sat, but so emotionally wrought was I when it suddenly dawned on me that I might lose my Penny Lynn that it all came pouring out of me in a volley of unstoppable tears, and I cried like I never cried before, and probably will ever cry again, and in stark  awareness of  my desperate situation, I turned to Pastor Joel, who had his hand on my shoulder to console me, and said, “I’ve just been called to the final surrender…”

I hope one day write the whole story of Penny Lynn’s brain aneurysm and my call to the final surrender, but for reasons which only my oracle knows, this was the experience called for to bring closure to One Rule to Live By: Be Good; and now that I’ve had time to ponder why, I know that I was called to the final surrender to make good my karmic obligation to Penny Lynn for breaking her heart the way I did in our past life together in Genoa, Italy and to confirm God’s existence for this story with her miraculous healing; because after I surrendered my Penny Lynn to God, St. Padre Pio did bring her back home to me safe and whole, and good professor Jordan Peterson and renowned atheist Sam Harris, who have already discoursed on God and religion and morality in Vancouver, Canada and again to a hungry audience of 8500 people in Dublin, Ireland, and once more in London, England can argue until the cows come home about God’s existence or non-existence, because the sacred mystery of God will always come down to a question of self-initiation, and my call to the final surrender was the price that I had to pay for divine reconciliation…

A month after I brought Penny Lynn home from rehabilitation at Bridgepoint Hospital in Toronto, safe and whole (still very weak, but with full presence of mind and all of her motor skills), we got a call out of the blue from our friend in Orillia.
Penny was on the couch resting, and I was in the sunroom reading when the phone rang. Penny answered, and to our surprise it was our friend from Orillia whom we hadn’t seen in seven or eight years. She was packing books into boxes for her move to a new apartment when she got an urge to call us, and Penny told her about her brain aneurysm and miraculous recovery, and after talking for a few more minutes Penny handed the phone to me and I shared my call to the final surrender with her; but no sooner did I share the most sacred experience of my life when our friend excitedly said, “That’s when her healing started! You had to let her go for her to be healed! That was the miracle!” And just then—as if to seal my final surrender with Penny Lynn’s miraculous healing—a vision appeared to her of a beam of golden light streaming down into my body from heaven!
Our friend is gifted. When I had to have triple bypass surgery nine years ago, she called to tell me that her spiritual guide had told her to tell me to get a quartz crystal and carry it on my person before my surgery, which was cancelled twice for different reasons, which I now believe was to prolong the healing benefits of the crystal because my heart was damaged from two heart attacks and the surgeon was dubious about performing surgery; but after the operation, the surgeon said to Penny, with a puzzled look on his face, that he only had to do a double bypass and not a triple, because one of the blocked arteries was almost normal, and a few years before this surprising phone call, our friend had a vision of the novel I had just written on my past lives and gave me the title that she saw on the cover, Cathedral of My Past Lives, and she also told me a few more things about my life that only a gifted psychic could possibly know, so I had history with her gift, and when she told me that Penny’s miraculous healing started when I was called to the final surrender, I believed her. Penny was my whole life, and letting go of her was the most difficult thing I ever had to do; but it gives me comfort to know that Pastor Joel was there to witness it, or no one would believe me. “I have to let her go, Joel,” I said to him, convulsing with tears. “I’ve just been called to the final surrender...”
   Why else would our gifted friend call out of the blue? Why, if not to confirm the essential mystery of the way that Jesus symbolized with his crucifixion and revealed to Carl Jung’s spiritual guide Philemon in the final words of The Red Book when he said, “I bring you the beauty of suffering. That is what is needed by whoever hosts the worm,” the sacred mystery of self-sacrifice that proud little Friedrich Nietzsche so tragically misperceived and resisted his whole miserable life, the mystery of letting go of our final attachment to our existential self to realize the purity of the immortal I Am consciousness of our divine nature; but, in all honesty and with trembling humility, I did not need this confirmation. My friend’s call was for my readers’ edification.  
Again, I never cease to marvel at how the merciful law of divine synchronicity works in my life when I’m writing a new book, nudging my friend from Orillia to call and give me unexpected confirmation of my final surrender and Penny’s miraculous healing for the closing chapter of this incredible true story of only one rule to live by; and now I have to bring my story home with one final spiritual musing that answers the question of why we should be good and bring happy resolution to the divine imperative of professor Jordan Peterson’s hierophantic message…

“Muse,” wrote the poet Jane Hirshfield, “derives from the Latin mussare, meaning first, ‘to carry in silence,’ then ‘to brood over in silence and uncertainty,’ and then only finally ‘to murmur or mutter, to speak in an undertone.’ Musing, it seems, is a thing that happens best in the circumstances of quiet. Undogmatic and tactful before the object of attention, musing does not impose but bears witness. It quietly considers, and then, when it finally speaks, does so with the voice, respectful of other presences, that we use in a library, church, or museum—the voice used, that is, when we feel we are in the company of something more important than ourselves (Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, by Jane Hirshfield, pp. 26-7, bold italics mine).
I carry ideas for my spiritual musings in silence, sometimes for weeks and months at a time—even years, it seems! —before they are given expression, and always tactfully and respectful of others; and now that I reflect upon how they are written, also in a voice that makes me feel like I’m in the company of something more important than myself, a voice that bears witness to the Logos, like my spiritual musing “Why be Good?” that I was called to write Friday, April 17, 2015, three years before I was called to write One Rule to Live By: Be Good which brings the imperative of professor Peterson’s hierophantic message in 12 Rules for Life to satisfactory resolution, I know now why I was called to write my spiritual musing “Why be Good?” Because, in its omniscience my oracle knew that this is what I was going to need to bring literary closure to One Rule for Life: Be Good that was not even conceived yet and would not be written until professor Peterson was called by life three years later to answer the angry question of my poem, What the Hell is Going on Out There?

Why be Good?
           
            When I read David Brooks’ column from the New York Times (“Rather than building our careers, we should build inner character”) in my Friday, April 17, 2015 Life section of the Toronto Star, I heard my call to write a spiritual musing, why be good?
But for one reason or another, I put it off; and then I picked up my Sunday, May 3, 2015 Star, which also features The New York Times International Weekly and Book Review inserts, and as the playful spirit of synchronicity would have it, Brooks’ column in the New York Times was titled “Goodness and Power,” and the Book Review insert just “happened” to feature a review of David Brooks’ new book The Road to Character; and, just to play with my mind a little more, after reading my papers yesterday afternoon the playful spirit of synchronicity nudged me to listen to the CBC Tapestry podcast instead of Writer’s & Company as I had intended, and (oh happy coincidence!) Mary Hynes, the host of Tapestry, was interviewing David Brooks on his book The Road to Character; so here I am this morning contritely complying with the divine imperative of the omniscient guiding principle of my life to write the spiritual musing that I was called to write several weeks ago, why be good?
In his review of The Road to Character, Pico Iyer writes: “Brooks begins with a sweeping overview of the non-intersecting worlds of moral logic and economic logic, as he has it, dividing us into an ‘Adam 1,’ who seeks success in the world, and an ‘Adam 2,’ more deeply committed to character and an inner life,” and he goes on, summarizing the theme of Brooks’ book: “To nurture your Adam 1 career, it makes sense to cultivate your strengths. To nurture your Adam 2 moral core, it is necessary to confront your weaknesses.”
Brooks felt impelled to write The Road to Character, “to save my own soul,” he said to Mary Hynes; and it was obvious from listening to him on Tapestry that he had invested way too much energy in his Adam 1 and not nearly enough energy in his Adam 2, and in his fifty-first year of his life he was making an honest effort to cultivate a better relationship with his Adam 2—his better self, if you will; and this brings me to the theme of today’s spiritual musing, why be good?
This is a big theme, and it would certainly seem presumptuous to offer an answer to a question that has vexed some of the best minds in the world; but, in all humility, I bring a lifetime of gnostic wisdom to the table, which gives me the confidence to say that when all is said and done our essential purpose in life is to simply be a good person.
This presupposes a lifetime of questing for the meaning and purpose of life—a personal library of thousands of books and years of commitment to various teachings; so, my spiritual musings are nothing if not serious reflections upon the human predicament.
But to answer the question why be good? I have to call upon my creative unconscious to give me the proper image, because images are much more convincing than words will ever be; and in my mind’s eye I see life as an elaborate maze, and man scrambling from one lifetime to the next to find his way out. And the man that I see in the maze today is New York Times columnist/author David Brooks.
“There is a doctrine uttered in secret that man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away,” said Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo, which speaks to the perplexing nature of the human condition (the maze of life); and whether we are aware or not that we live more than one lifetime does not really matter, because we will just keep coming back to live life over again until we are ready to look for the key that opens the door to our prison.
And herein lies the mystery that David Brooks yields to with his book The Road to Character, because Adam 1 brought him success in life but Adam 2 will open the door of his prison and set him free from the maze of the human condition. “Many are called, but few are chosen,” said Jesus; and David Brooks heard the call to save his soul by working upon his character and moral center.
Everyone will hear the call when life has made them ready, and David Brooks heard the call when he began to notice the distinction between Adam 1 and Adam 2 in some special people that he met serendipitously in his daily travels through life, as he tells us in his New York Times column:

“About once a month, I run across a person who radiates an inner light. These people can be in any walk of life. They seem deeply good. They listen well. They make you feel funny and valued. You often catch them looking after other people and as they do so, their laugh is musical and their manner is infused with gratitude. They are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing. They are not thinking about themselves at all.
“When I meet such a person it brightens my whole day. But I confess I often have a sadder thought: It occurs to me that I’ve achieved a decent level of career success, but I have not achieved that. I have not achieved that generosity of spirit, or that depth of character.
“A few years ago, I realized that I wanted to be a bit more like those people. I realized that if I wanted to do that, I was going to have to work harder to save my own soul. I was going to have the sort of moral adventure that produces that kind of goodness. I was going to have to be better at balancing my life.”

I highlighted the last paragraph, because when life calls the voice is different; it comes from the depths of one’s own tired soul, and it speaks a truth that makes one shiver. David Brooks shivered when he heard the call, and he wrote The Road to Character to find the way out of his prison and bring balance to his Adam 1 and Adam 2, which speaks to the Master Key of our prison door—the liberating power of goodness.
            Socrates, who believed the virtue of goodness to be the most noble virtue, said that the unexamined life was not worth living; and although that may be a bit harsh because every life serves its destined purpose to wholeness and completeness, David Brooks examined his life and came to the realization that to have the generosity of spirit and depth of character that he needed to save his soul, he had to have “moral adventures that produce that kind of goodness,” and his moral adventures lay in shifting his priorities from those that were self-serving (Adam 1), to those that were more life-serving (Adam 2).
In short, David Brooks had to be less selfish and more giving, because the dynamic of the Master Key of Goodness declares that the more you give of yourself, the more of yourself you will have to give; and, conversely, the less you give of yourself, the less of yourself you will have to give. That’s what Jesus meant by his paradoxical saying: “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” A deep mystery that cannot be resolved without the Master Key.
Why be good, then? Because there will come a time in one’s life, whether it be in this lifetime or the next, when one will be called upon to open the door of their prison; and, like David Brooks, one will come to see that the only way to open their prison door is to simply be a good person.
And that’s why we should be good!

———





No comments:

Post a Comment