66
The
Eleventh Person
Imagine yourself going into Chapters. You don’t
have a specific book in mind to purchase, but you go to Chapters once or twice
a month to browse and see what grabs your attention, which I like to do when
I’m in a city with a Chapters book store; and, as so often happens, you come
upon a book that excites your interest and buy it. I always come home with
several magazines as well, usually The
New Yorker and The Atlantic; but
what was it about the book you bought that caught your interest?
I explored this question in my spiritual musing “The
Mystical Relationship between the Story and the Reader,” and I concluded that
we read the books we do to satisfy our conscious or unconscious need to know.
If our
need to know is conscious, as for example my need to satisfy my literary
longing with Alice Munro’s new book of stories Too Much Happiness, I’ll go to Chapters with the purpose of purchasing
her new book; or if my need to know more about Saul Bellow’s life is strong
enough, I may go to Chapters to buy Greg Bellow’s memoir Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir, and/or a collection of Saul
Bellow’s letters because I love reading a famous writer’s private letters
because they often give me insights into their creative genius, as Hemingway’s
letters have done; but by what magic am I attracted to books that satisfy my
unconscious need to know when I have no awareness of what my need is? I ask because
this has happened to me enough times to suggest some kind of mystical guidance.
In fact,
not unlike dream shaman Robert Moss, author of The Secret History of Dreaming and other books which went a long
way to satisfying my need to know more about the dreaming process that plays a much
bigger role in our life than we realize, who in his new book Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs,
Symbols, and Synchronicities in Everyday Life makes a game of teasing out
the invisible guiding principle of life, I also play this game by going blind
into book stores and letting my instincts guide me to books that will satisfy
my unconscious need to know. I do this just for the fun of it, but also to
gauge my inner longings; and although I’m not as successful as I would like to
be when I try to tease out the book oracle (Arthur Koestler calls this oracle “Library
Angel”), it’s happened enough times to convince me that this guiding principle
has a mind of its own, and sometimes we can tease it out and sometimes we can’t;
and this is the subject of today’s spiritual musing…
At the
risk of sounding like some kind of weird mystic walking back into the modern
world after six months of lonely meditation in a cave somewhere in the remote
regions of the Hindu Kush, the best example that I can give of teasing out this
guiding principle happened before Penny and I moved to Georgian Bay, an
incredible coincidence that went so far beyond the laws of probability that I
had to call it divine intervention.
“Please
find us a nice lot for our new home,” Penny said to me the Saturday morning
that I left our home in Nipigon twelve years ago to look for a building lot in
the Wasaga Beach area of Georgian Bay where we planned to build our new home
and relocate, but this put so much pressure on me that I pleaded with God for
guidance.
“Please give me a sign which lot to buy,” I said
to God; but I wasn’t just pleading, I was making a special demand because of
the special circumstances of our life that compelled us to relocate to Georgian
Bay. “But I don’t want just any sign,” I
said to God. “I want an unequivocal sign
which lot to buy, otherwise don’t bother!”
Without
going into detail (which I do in my novel-in-progress), I got a sign where to
buy our building lot in Tiny Beaches Township on a street called STOCCO CIRCLE,
just a few minutes’ walk from the longest fresh water beach in the world; and
that’s where we built our new home, on a street coincidentally named after
me—Orest Stocco; and if that’s not an unequivocal sign from the divine then
nothing is!
And if I
may, just to illustrate the playful side of the guiding principle of life, my
nickname is “O”, which is the symbol for circle. So STOCCO CIRCLE spoke to me
so intimately that I got heart palpitations when I saw that street sign in
Bluewater, Tiny Beaches where Penny’s friend from Wasaga Beach and I had gone
to look for the perfect building lot for our new home in Georgian Bay, which I
found on the street called STOCCO CIRCLE.
That’s
how I teased out the guiding principle of life and why I came to call this
guiding principle the merciful law of
divine synchronicity, because it satisfied my desperate need to find the right building lot for our new home in Georgian Bay; but it doesn’t happen this way all the time, as most
of us know because of all the times we asked for signs to guide us and got a
big fat zero—that we were aware of, anyway. In all probability the signs were
there and we just didn’t see them. As Carl Jung said, “Synchronicity is an ever
present reality for those who have eyes to see.” But if one’s need is strong
enough one can invoke this merciful law of divine guidance, as I did when I
asked God for an unequivocal sign for a building lot for our new home.
As I
wrote in my new book Gurdjieff Was Wrong But
His Teaching Works, when one is desperate in one’s needs, as I was to find
the right path to my true self, the
merciful law of divine synchronicity will kick in automatically; this is
how Gurdjieff’s teaching came into my life by way of a serendipitous gift of
Ouspensky’s book In Search of the
Miraculous which introduced me to Gurdjieff’s teaching that I desperately
needed to find myself.
So, what
is my point of all this; and what does it have to do with walking into Chapters
to browse for books which may satisfy our need to know?
If I may,
let me answer this by way of analogy, which I sprang upon my brother years ago
when he strongly advised me to write for the public and not for myself if I
expected to sell what I wrote because he felt that what I wrote was much too
esoteric.
I didn’t
disagree with him, except for the esoteric part because I don’t know if one can
call novels of spiritual quests like Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist or Eat, Pray,
Love, Elizabeth Gilbert’s story of self-discovery, esoteric, self-discovery also
being the central motif of most of my books; nonetheless, I took his point
because he spoke to the reader’s most obvious mental and emotional needs whereas
my books spoke to the reader’s desperate spiritual need to know who and why they are, and I responded to my brother with my
analogy of the eleventh person.
“Ten
people walk into Chapters,” I said to my brother, and they walk around the
store and browse. One of my books is on the same display table in the center
aisle as many other books on sale at reduced prices, but none of the ten
browsers pick it up. They check out other books on the table, but not mine; why?
They don’t even glance at it. It’s as though my book is invisible to them. But another
customer walks into the store. He’s the eleventh person, and he walks down the
center aisle to the table where my book is displayed and it catches his eye
instantly, almost as though he zeroed in on it unconsciously. He reads the back
cover and the first page and buys it. Why did my book catch his eye and not the
other ten people?”
My brother
couldn’t answer, but it strongly suggests the guiding principle of life that guides
us to the books that satisfy our need to know, and depending upon how desperate
one is in their unconscious/conscious need to know, that’s what determines the
books they will be attracted to; and I said to my brother, “I write for the eleventh
person.”
“You
won’t get rich that way,” he replied, with a wry smile.
“I know.
But I’m a servant of my Muse, and not until I’m called to write for the ten
other people will I stop writing for the eleventh person.”
───
