66: The Eleventh Person

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.”         

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