CHAPTER 4
The Horror of Human Suffering
All three stages
of human evolution have their own perspective. The exoteric first stage is primordial
and all about existential survival, the stage where soul begins the
individuation of its reflective self-consciousness, and it grows and evolves in
self-conscious awareness from one lifetime to the next until it has evolved
enough to gravitate to the mesoteric second stage of evolution where it begins to
sense its divine nature, and the more it grows in its divine nature the more it
is driven by its encoded imperative to satisfy its longing for wholeness and
completeness; but the natural process of evolution cannot satisfy soul’s
longing for wholeness and completeness, and soul gets stuck in the second stage
of evolution.
“As each plant grows from a seed and becomes in the
end an oak tree, so man must become what he is meant to be. He ought to get
there, but most get stuck,” said Carl Jung; and soul gets stuck because it cannot
resolve the paradoxical nature of its inner and outer self, just as Jung
himself got stuck in his own remarkable journey through life: “At that time, in
the fortieth year of my life, I had achieved everything that I had wished for
myself. I had achieved honor, power, wealth, knowledge, and every human
happiness. Then my desire for the increase in these trappings ceased, the
desire ebbed from me and horror came over me…My soul, where are you? Do you
hear me? I speak, I call you—are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I
have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you. I
am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you again…” (The Red Book, A Reader’s Edition, by C.
G. Jung, p. 127).
Jung was called to
his destiny, as every soul will be called when life has made them ready for the
third and final stage of evolution (regardless of the path one is on), and with
resolve and fortitude he went in search of his lost soul, which I also had to
do when I was called; but I’ve told this story in The Pearl of Great Price and need not repeat myself here. Carl Jung
also told his own remarkable story of his “confrontation with the unconscious” in
six black notebooks, which he later worked out with brilliant illustrations of
his journey into the depths of his psyche in what he came to call The Red Book.
And it was here, banging
on the door of the esoteric third circle of life that I came upon the good professor
Jordan Peterson online; and I don’t believe it was an accident. His silent cry
was so loud and desperate that it pierced my heart center; that’s why I felt
compelled to send him a copy of The Lion
that Swallowed Hemingway and The
Pearl of Great Price, a terrible presumption if not a damn impertinence which
must have left him wondering; and I’m sure he was no less baffled by My Writing Life and The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity that I sent him three
years later; but my oracle spoke to me, and I listened…
It’s a lonely
journey to one’s true self, the loneliest journey in the world; which is why so
many souls fell by the wayside in the Sufi poet Farid Attar’s allegory The Conference of the Birds. Out of the
thousands of souls (symbolized as birds in the allegory), only thirty souls completed
their quest for God in whose face they saw their own image, thus fulfilling
soul’s longing for wholeness and completeness; so, it takes as much wisdom as
it does courage to step out of the mainstream of life and into the final stage
of personal evolution.
“And do you now
believe in God?” the canny interviewer John Freeman asked the eighty-four-year-old
Carl Gustav Jung in the now famous 1959 Face
to Face BBC interview at Jung’s home on the shore of Lake Zurich in Kusnacht,
Switzerland.
Surprised by the
question, the venerable octogenarian replied, with a glint in his eye and the
sweetest smile on his face: “Now?
Difficult to answer. I know. I don’t need to believe, I know.” By this time
in his life, and the distance he had travelled in his lonely journey to
wholeness and completeness, Jung did not have to apologize for what he had
discovered, and he told John Freeman that God was a matter of experience with
him and not belief, which only convinced his detractors that he had been a
Gnostic all along—as if that was a fault!
But that only
spoke to the blind malevolence that Jung had to endure from his resentful detractors
who felt threatened by his enlightened perspective, just as Jordan Peterson (who
was strongly advised by his professors while pursuing his doctorate in clinical
psychology to steer clear of that heretic Jung) began to experience when he was
catapulted onto the world stage with his own enlightened viewpoint. To the
Indian novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra, who not only skewered Peterson’s book
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
but took a pathetic cheap shot at the author as well in his essay in The New York Review of Books (“Jordan
Peterson & Fascist Mysticism”), Peterson tweeted back: “And you call me a fascist? You sanctimonious prick.
If you were in my room at the moment, I’d slap you happily.”
Bravo, Jordan! That’s why in Australia
later in the year when he was asked if he believed in God he wisely deflected
his answer by talking about archetypes and various belief systems, having
learned how a straight answer would only have ensnared him; but he had also
learned from the “Shaman of Zurich,” as Carl Jung was called by the locals, to
hide himself in plain sight as Jung did in his gnostic psychology of
individuation; and the good professor now deals with ironic brilliance the malevolent
forces of life that want to take him down, and the world loves him for his
courage, learning, and iconoclastic common sense…
The viewpoint from
the third and final stage of evolution is so radically different from the
viewpoint of the first and second stages of evolution that one would be wise to
not share it, because the world will only turn on them for fear of being seen
for its shallowness and hypocrisy; like it did with Socrates, who was tried and
condemned for corrupting the youth of Athens with his seditious
philosophy.
This is the wisdom behind Lao Tzu’s saying,
“Those who speak, do not know; and those who know, do not speak.”
But last month I
was called to write a spiritual musing that offers such a radical perspective
on human suffering that it may just help to ease the pain of man’s anger at God
for all the senseless suffering in the world; and the only reason I’m quoting it
here is because professor Jordan Peterson’s emotional sincerity while delivering
his lecture, “Existentialism: Nazi
Germany and the USSR,” devastated me and made my heart bleed.
I was so moved by his
nightmarish terror of man’s deception and self-deception and willful malevolence
that’s directly responsible for most of the world’s suffering, like the unspeakable
horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and Stalin’s gulags that wiped out millions
of innocent people, which haunted the good professor for years, that I have to
share my spiritual musing on human suffering to ease the unbearable anguish of unknowing:
The Paradox of Human Suffering
Stephen Fry annoyed me. He always did. Many people do,
usually people that we’re exposed to all the time in the media, movie actors,
comedians, public figures whose life is revealed through their thoughts,
beliefs, opinions, betrayals and self-betrayals, whatever constitutes their ego/shadow
personality; and Stephen Fry, an openly gay comedic actor, writer, and public
persona annoyed me.
It
wasn’t because he was gay, that didn’t matter a wit to me; it was because of
his whole demeanor, his ego/shadow personality that was so thick with Stephen
Fry that there was no room for anyone else, including and especially God;
that’s what annoyed me.
“Quantity
kills quality,” goes the old saying; and there was so much Stephen Fry in
Steven Fry that he killed Stephen Fry; that’s the tragic irony of Stephen Fry.
Of
course, this is just my perception; but it’s not a perception born of bias,
malice, a warped sense of righteous belief, or metaphysical speculation for
that matter. This is just the way I see Stephen Fry from outside the
existential paradigm of conventional thinking, from that place of personal
resolution where one can see both sides of the human predicament; like the side
of God that Stephen Fry was annoyingly blind to in “Stephen Fry Annihilates
God,” the YouTube video interview that I chanced upon the other evening.
The
interviewer says to Stephen Fry: “Suppose that what Oscar (the celebrated
social wit Oscar Wilde who wrote The
Importance of Being Ernest whom Fry admired from the age of fifteen and
tried to emulate his whole life) believed in as he died, in spite of your
protestations; suppose it’s all true, and you walk up to the pearly gates and
you are confronted by God. What will Stephen Fry say to Him, Her, or It?”
And
Stephen Fry, who played the infamous gay writer in the movie Wilde, replies: “I will basically, this
is theodicy I think; I’ll say, bone cancer in children? What’s that about? How
dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not
our fault? It’s not right. It’s utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a
capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of
injustice and pain? That’s what I would say.”
“And
you think you’re going to get in?” asks the interviewer, with a wry smile.
“No.
But I wouldn’t want to. I wouldn’t want to get in on His terms. They’re wrong,”
Fry replies, and herein lies the crux of today’s spiritual musing…
Ironically,
the creative impulse that impelled me to offer my perspective on human
suffering that puzzles celebrated atheists like Stephen Fry and countless
believers alike who are no less bewildered by the human predicament that they
also fall prey to spiritual paralysis, did not come to me from the Fry
interview; it was set free while reading something about Mitch Albom’s healing
journey in my new novel memoir Sundays
with Sharon that was inspired by the book Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom, the former student of
sociology professor Morrie Schwartz who was dying of ALS, also known as Lou
Gehrig’s disease.
In a
sudden flash of insight, I caught the bittersweet irony of Morrie’s suffering,
and I knew that I had to write a
spiritual musing on his dying experience that Mitch Albom recorded in his
heart-wrenching little book Tuesdays with
Morrie. This is the sentence in Sundays
with Sharon (Chapter 7, “Thank You for Being My Friend”) that set my idea
free: “Through Morrie’s friendship, Mitch got linked to his
inner self and began his own healing journey to wholeness and completeness like
his old coach Morrie Schwartz.” In one flash of insight, I saw the paradoxical nature
of human suffering.
For whatever reason, which I can only attribute to the
creative principle of my life that I call my oracle and my muse, this sentence
lifted me up above the physical, mental, and emotional agony of Morrie
Schwartz’s suffering as his body wasted away with ALS, and I was allowed to see
the spiritual healing that came with his suffering; and the moment I saw the
miraculous power of human suffering, I was given the title of today’s spiritual
musing: “The Paradox of Human Suffering,” which automatically triggered my
memory of the Stephen Fry interview that annoyed me so much when I saw it the
other evening.
Fry continues his annoying answer to the loaded
question: “Now, if I died and it was Pluto, Hades, and if it was the twelve
Greek gods, then I would have more truck with it; because the Greeks were, they
didn’t pretend not to be human in their appetites, and in their capriciousness,
and in their unreasonableness. They didn’t present themselves as being
all-seeing, all-wise, all-kind or beneficent, because the God who created this
universe, if it was created by God, is quite clearly a maniac. Utter maniac. We
have to spend our life on bended knees thanking Him? What kind of God would do
that? Yes, the world is very splendid; but it also has in it insects whose
whole life cycle is to burrow into the eyes of children and make them blind.
They eat outwards from the eyes. Why? Why did you do that to us? You could
easily have made a creation in which that did not exist. It is simply not
acceptable. So, you know, atheism is not just about not believing there is a
God; but on the assumption that there is one, what kind of God is He? It’s
perfectly apparent that He is monstrous, utterly monstrous, and deserves no
respect whatsoever. The moment you banish Him, life becomes simpler, purer,
clearer, and more worth living, in my opinion—”
To which the
bemused interviewer Gay Byrne responded, “That sure is the longest answer to
that question that I ever got to this entire series,” which caused Fry to burst
into laughter, thus bringing to a close the short clip of Stephen Fry’s
annihilation of God; but did Fry annihilate God, or simply display a
tendentious and supercilious ignorance of the creative principle of life?
Must give me pause…
Writers bring to light what we already know, so they
say; but sometimes the creative unconscious surprises us with new insights, as
mine did with what was revealed in that sentence that set free the idea for
today’s spiritual musing: “Through Morrie’s friendship, Mitch
got linked to his inner self and began his own healing journey to wholeness and
completeness like his old coach Morrie Schwartz.”
When I wrote this sentence, I did not see it; neither
did I see it when I read and edited the chapter for the fourth or fifth time.
But for some reason known only to my muse, I saw what my creative unconscious was telling me in the phrase healing journey. In a flash, it came back
to me that all of Morrie’s suffering was healing his soul, which I did not see
this way before; and that’s when the title of today’s spiritual musing popped
into my mind, “The Paradox of Human Suffering,” because no one—and especially
the incorrigible Stephen Fry—can see the miracle beyond the pain and agony of
human suffering; but I did in Morrie Schwartz’s journey to the final frontier
of his life as he was dying of ALS. And that’s what reminded me of the Fry
interview that I was compelled to watch again.
As the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus tells us,
life is always in a state of flux, forever changing from one state into
another, one continuous flow of being and becoming forever in the process of
uniting the opposites and becoming one with the Logos; a mystifying philosophy
that has intrigued the world ever since Heraclitus propounded it, a philosophy
that implies an inherent guiding principle to the human condition that
Heraclitus called the Logos—which is what I caught a glimpse of in all the pain
and agony of Morrie Schwartz’s suffering
in that remarkably revealing sentence, “Mitch
got linked to his inner self and began his own healing journey to wholeness and
completeness like his old coach Morrie Schwartz.” By the miracle of
creative writing, I saw that all of
Morrie’s suffering was healing his weary soul and making him whole. That’s what
called fifteen million people in forty-five countries to read Tuesdays with Morrie—because it spoke to
their own weary soul crying to become whole…
Stephen Fry can moan and groan and whine and complain
and shout in vitriolic anger at a creative principle of life that he cannot
fathom, but he too will grow and resolve through the natural process of
individuation through karma and reincarnation into one self whole and complete
and see that all of this suffering in the world serves a higher purpose than we
can see, as it did with Mitch Albom’s old sociology professor dying of ALS,
because the closer Morrie Schwartz came to the end of his journey the more his
suffering healed his soul and helped make him whole.
As the former agnostic professor revealed to his
former student, who began recording their Tuesday talks with his big Sony tape
recorder, the closer he came to dying the more he came to see that his body was
a mere shell, a container for the soul and that death was not cold and final as
he once believed. But this isn’t a mystery that one can explain; one can only
experience it, as Mitch Albom began to do when his old professor’s journey to
the final frontier of his life reconnected him with his inner self and destined
purpose to wholeness and completeness, and Mitch began serving life instead of
always taking from life like he used to, unlike the incorrigible Stephen Fry
whose whole self-serving demeanor affronted me deeply.
Mitch Albom learned from his old professor that it was
better to give than to receive, and with the financial success of Tuesdays with Morrie and the books that
followed he funded a number of charitable organizations, his orphanage with
over forty children in poverty-stricken Haiti being his favorite; that’s how
the former student honored his old professor, by giving back to life like he
taught him in the final class of his life on life’s greatest lesson that only through goodness can we
realize our true self.
After watching the Stephen Fry interview for the
second time, I watched two more videos on Stephen Fry: “Who Do You Think You
Are?” in which he traces his English and Jewish family roots, and “Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of a Manic
Depressive,” in which he reveals his troubled youth (expelled from two schools
when he was 15 and at 17 absconded with a friend’s credit card and charged with
theft that got him three months in prison) and his life-long battle with
bipolar disorder, formerly known as manic depression, a mental condition that
causes periods of deep dark depression and periods of elevated moods known as
mania. And after watching these videos, I deeply empathized with Stephen Fry’s
conflicted journey through life; but as much as I tried to get over my annoyance,
he’s still too much Stephen Fry for me.
———
“Life is a hierarchy of devouring,” said the deceased former evangelist
Charles Templeton, who lost his Christian faith and became a believer in
Darwinian determinism; and he was right, because the existential life is all
about survival of the fittest.
But he went to the extreme in his unbelief. “I believe
that there is no supreme being with human attributes—no God in the biblical
sense—but that all life is the result of timeless evolutionary forces, over
millions of years. I believe that, in common with all living creatures, we die
and cease to exist as an entity,” he declared in his book Farewell to God.
But like my hero Carl Gustav Jung, I know that God is; and I know that we
are more than our physical body, and that’s the mystery that professor Jordan Peterson
explored in his deeply and obsessively researched Maps of Meaning that I cannot wait to read.
In the meantime, I’m watching his online lectures on Maps of Meaning, and I love following
his logic as he explores the narrative of soul’s evolution though life in the ancient
stories and myths of the world that help him reason his way through his wall of
unknowing, an exceptionally brilliant student of life who dares to go where his
oracle calls him…
