New Spiritual Musing: "Bee After Bee and the Secret Way"

SPIRITUAL MUSING

Bee After Bee and the Secret Way

“Watch for the coincidences, synchronicities;

they will bring you goodness.”

—Padre Pio

I just love coincidences. I never know when they will happen, nor does anyone else for that matter (they have a mind of their own); but when they happen, they do so for a reason, and one happened the other morning to give me confirmation for something that I already knew cognitively but not quite as gnostically as I would have liked—hence, the coincidence that came to me that confirmed through personal experience what I already knew intellectually, and as confusing as this may seem, this is the inspiration for today’s spiritual musing on what C. G. Jung called “the way of what is to come,” which he also called the secret way...

In all honesty, when I’m called to write a spiritual musing I never know where my oracle and muse want to take me; and no sooner did I write the first paragraph of this musing, and I caught a glimpse of what I had been called to explore—the inexorable mystery of the omniscient guiding principle of life that poets have been exploring for centuries— “Adventure most unto itself /The Soul condemned to be; /Attended by a Single Hound— /It’s own Identity,” wrote Emily Dickinson.

That’s what we’re all looking for, our own identity, our divine true self that the omniscient guiding principle of life points us to through signs, symbols, dreams, and especially meaningful coincidences; which I came to see after years of living the secret way can only be found by growing into the person we are meant to be; that’s what made my little coincidence the other morning so timely that it crossed over into the domain of what C. G. Jung called “synchronicity,” the word he adopted to describe the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear meaningfully related but have no discernable causal connection—hence, “meaningful coincidence.”

If I may, then. While reading David Brooks’ new book the other morning, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, I came upon a passage which he believed could very well be the “pivotal point” of his whole book. Brooks quotes Annie Dillard, taken from her book Teaching a Stone to Talk—

“In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our science cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other” (The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, by David Brooks, p. 64)

This was my experience, which, by happy coincidence, I had just written about in my new book One Rule to Live By: Be Good, followed up by the sequel The Fourth Corner of the Abyss that I was just bringing to closure; but because I had never heard of Annie Dillard, whose comment Brooks felt was pivotal to his new book on the quest for a moral life that he embarked upon five years after he wrote The Road to Character, I had to Google the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, which I did immediately; and what I found impressed me enough to put two of Annie Dillard’s books on my Amazon wish list: Teaching a Stone to Talk, and The Writing Life—which I had to read, because I love reading about what writers have to say about writing; so I went into Amazon’s Look Inside feature and started reading Chapter One (which she began by quoting Goethe, “Do not hurry; do not rest,”), and that’s when the remarkable little coincidence happened.

Again, if I may. I was feeling antsy the day before, and it carried over into the morning; and I was antsy because I had been watching too much Netflix, YouTube, and TV to avoid my second reading of Brooks’ book The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, which I had to read again to refresh my memory so I could bring my own book The Fourth Corner of the Abyss to closure with the final chapter “The Five Stages of Life” that a dream I had and Brooks’ new book had inspired.

This antsy feeling has happened before, many times in fact, which I have explored and come to define as a mild form of spiritual restlessness that makes me apprehensive, like an annoying itch that can’t be scratched; which was how I was feeling when reading the first chapter of Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life.

I had to get myself out of my doldrums, but I didn’t really know how—or, I did know how, but I didn’t want to slug my way through Brooks’ book again, because the second half of the book was mostly padding; and that’s when Annie Dillard’s name lit up on me when I read the passage that Brooks quoted.

So, I Googled her to find out what I could about her, and reading something that she wrote in Chapter One of The Writing Life (thanks to Amazon’s Look Inside feature) inspired the remarkable little coincidence that gave me the inspiration I needed to get myself out of my doldrums; and here’s the passage that did it—

“To find a honey tree, first catch a bee. Catch a bee when its legs are heavy with pollen; then it is ready for home. It is simple enough to catch a bee on a flower: hold a cup or glass above the bee, and when it flies up, cap the cup with a piece of cardboard. Carry the bee to a nearby open spot—best an elevated one—release it, and watch where it goes. Keep your eyes on it as long as you can see it, and hie you to that last known place. Wait there until you see another bee; catch it, release it, and watch. Bee after bee will lead toward the honey tree, until you see the final bee enter the tree. Thoreau describes this process in his journals. So a book leads its writer.”

 This wasn’t new information for me, because I’ve been a student of the Sufi teaching for years and they have used this metaphor of bees and honey to pass on the secret teachings of the way (the omniscient guiding principle of life, which flows out of the Sufi mystic Rumi in streams of boundless wisdom), so Annie Dillard’s passage did not take me by surprise in that sense; it took me by surprise another way, because the timing was absolutely perfect—or, meaningfully coincidental, if you will; and I knew instantly what I had to do to get myself out of my annoying little doldrums: I had to be like the bee and go from flower to flower to collect the honey I needed to nourish my soul and grow out of my self-inflicted oppressive  little mood of apprehension (which I knew would morph into despair if I didn’t do something about it) that took the joy out of my day; so, I opened up a book by one of favorite poets—Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, by the American Zen poet Jane Hirshfield, the first blossom in my “honey” quest.

Jane Hirshfield is the poet that made me aware that poetry does our thinking for us, and it does so because when the poet writes a poem, he or she engage what C. G. Jung called our “transcendent function,” which he recognized as our superior insight; and when we engage our superior, or higher function, we tap into the creative energy of life, the Logos, which IS the omniscient guiding principle of life that C. G. Jung identified as the “way of what is to come” and the secret way.

So, I went to Chapter Four of Hirshfield’s book, which coincidentally enough was titled “Thoreau’s Hound: Poetry and the Hidden,” and this chapter inspired me to write a poem, “Una Bella Giornatta,” which led to more reading and writing.

That’s how I “worked” my way out of my self-inflicted annoying little doldrums, by tapping into the well of my creative higher self, which we all have access to if we make the effort (the trick is to do something, because DOING has the strange and mystical power to send those pesky little monsters back to hell where they come from; especially if it is doing for another, as I did in my poem “Una Bella Giornatta”); and that’s the deep mystery of “the way of what is to come” that C. G. Jung identified as the secret way, the omniscient guiding principle of life that fosters  personal resolution and spiritual growth through signs, symbols, dreams, and meaningful coincidences, not to mention the transformative power of poetry that is the “honey” of the secret way that nourishes our soul’s longing to be whole with the poet’s gnostic wisdom—which, ironically, was the basic theme of David Brooks’ new book, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life that I finally finished reading for the second time.

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