One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 36: The Brilliance of Friedrich Nietzsche and the Tragedy of his Teaching

CHAPTER 36

The Brilliance of Friedrich Nietzsche,

and the Tragedy of his Teaching

         

“I am Zarathustra, the godless; where do I find my equal? All those are my equals who determine their will out of themselves, and who push all submission away from themselves,” declared Nietzsche’s hero with no less hubris than Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost who cut off his nose to spite his face rather than bow to God’s will.

“Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven,” said Satan, and Nietzsche followed suite by declaring God dead rather than submit to God’s imperative; but—and this is the but that opened the gates of hell and set loose all those nasty heathen demons upon the world—did Nietzsche know what God’s imperative was, or did he misperceive Christianity for God’s will? That’s the brilliance of Friedrich Nietzsche and the tragedy of his teaching; by honoring man’s free will in his tendentious teaching of the Superman, he dishonored God’s imperative, because brilliant little Nietzsche had to have his cake and eat it too…

“I was fascinated…yet repelled at the same time. I found it difficult to discover the right attitude toward Nietzsche,” wrote Rudolf Steiner in his book Friedrich Nietzsche: Fighter for Freedom. And after much study, Steiner concluded: “This was the picture of Nietzsche that appeared in my thought. He revealed to me the personality who did not see the spirit, but in whom unconsciously the spirit fought against the unspiritual views of his age,” making of Friedrich Nietzsche a paradoxical man who drove himself insane rather than submit to the imperative of his divine nature and reconcile the dual consciousness of his  essential and existrential self, the being and non-being of his false and true self.

I never understood my fascination with Nietzsche either when studying philosophy at university, and it wasn’t until I found the answer many years later to the question that had called me to university (who am I?) that I learned that the Logos, the omniscient guiding principle of life, was responsible for the authors that changed my life, like P. D. Ouspensky, whose book In Search of the Miraculous introduced me to Gurdjieff’s teaching that awakened me to the secret way, C. G. Jung, whose Memories, Dreams, Reflections opened me up to a psychological understanding of the individuation process that helped resolve my deep-seated issues with Christianity, Dr. Victor Frankl, whose Man’s Search for Meaning confirmed my understanding of the gnostic way, and many more authors whose books were just what I needed at that time in my life; but never Friedrich Nietzsche, for whom I always had an instinctive antipathy and could never bring myself to read.

One can, and many have made a lifelong study of Nietzsche but never understanding why he turned on God and embraced the idea of eternal recurrence which justified his Satanic pride and trapped his soul in the recurring cycle of the same life forever; but having broken the cycle of eternal recurrence, which I explored in the memoir of my parallel life in The Summoning of Noman, I know that Nietzsche was wrong in the basic premise of his teaching that there is no God and we either embrace our fate or be crushed by it.

Nietzsche was trapped by his fate in the meaninglessness of life until he was granted an insight of eternal recurrence while out on a walk one day in the Swiss village of Sils Maria, and he took up the intellectual challenge of the idea of eternal recurrence and grew to love his fate so he could overcome the oppressive spirit of nihilism, which gave birth to his Satanic hero Zarathustra who proudly justified why he had turned on God; but was it God the Logos that he had turned on, or the God of Christianity for whom he had a pathological antipathy? Wasn’t his amor fati just an ironic rationalization of his unhappy, miserable life?

I understand why he would believe that God was dead and that we had killed him (I also walked away from the God of Christianity), which drove Nietzsche insane trying to resolve the enantiodromiac nature of his dual self, but the teaching that his Satanic hero Zarathustra gave to the world has led the world down the garden path and left the world dangerously wanting; which brings to mind a spiritual musing that I wrote on how I resolved the issue of my own dual nature by adopting a special attitude to life that satisfied the longing in my soul for wholeness and completeness, and made me happy:  

My Secret to a Happy Life

Yesterday Penny and I made our first batch of Italian sausages in Georgian Bay, just like my parents used to make; well, not quite the same, because in this batch we did not add fennel seeds to our spices of salt, black pepper, chili pepper flakes, granular garlic, and paprika. We made the first batch without the fennel seeds, because I’m going to give some to my neighbor Tony who does not like fennel seeds in his homemade sausages; and today we’re going to make the second batch with fennel seeds, and with less paprika.

After we ground the meat and mixed in the spices, Penny fried up a couple of small patties to taste the result, and we found it a little dry; so, I added a cup or so of red wine that I had made last fall with Tony and mixed it into the meat, and Penny fried up two more patties and it tasted fine; and then we spent an hour or so stuffing the meat into the casings that we slid onto the funnel attachment of our electric meat grinder.

I like fennel seeds in my Italian sausages, but there was a time when I denied myself the pleasure of eating sausages altogether because I had taken up a special way of life that was inspired by the Sufi path that Gurdjieff’s teaching had introduced me to. Serendipity had introduced Gurdjieff into my life by way of Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous in my second year of philosophy studies at university, and as I “worked” on myself with Gurdjieff’s teaching I created what Gurdjieff called a “magnetic center” which attracted me to teachings of a similar nature, like Sufism and the sayings and parables of Jesus. Actually, Gurdjieff called his Fourth Way teaching “esoteric Christianity,” which was inspired by the secret teachings of the Essenes that Jesus was initiated into when he was a young man.

The premise of the Sufi Path is that one must “die before dying” to become their true self, which is a very difficult teaching to understand, let alone practice; but this is what Jesus meant with his paradoxical saying: “He that findeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” And since I was on a quest to find my true self, I took Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” to heart, which over time pulled the secret way of the Sufi Path and Christ’s sayings and parables into my life; and by secret way, I mean cultivating a special attitude with life that nourishes one’s inner self.

This, then, is the subject of today’s spiritual musing that came to me this morning while  “talking” with St. Padre Pio for my book A Sign of Things to Come, a creative exercise in what Jung called “active imagination,” not unlike Neale Donald Walsch’s “conversations” with God; and as I shared yesterday’s sausage making experience with my fellow countryman (Padre Pio was born in the village of Pietrelcina, not too far north from where I was born in the village of Panettieri, Calabria) I got the strongest feeling to write a spiritual musing on this special attitude that is essential for the growth of one’s inner self, an attitude of conscious living which is reflected in a poem that I wrote a number of years ago—

Sufi Sausages

The best sausages that I ever tasted

are made from a secret recipe that I found one day

while looking for the secret way.

I was so hungry for God that I would have eaten anything

to preserve my spiritual strength;

and I did, a cult concoction of sun and nonsense

that gave me spiritual cramps for many years.

Then I chanced upon a Sufi sausage maker who gave me

a secret recipe that changed my life forever.

“You take the casing that you have,” he instructed me,

“and stuff it with the meat of the last supper.”

I had no idea what he meant, until I re-read the Christian Bible; 

and from the moment I caught the light that Jesus shone,

I discerned the Sufi sausage maker’s wisdom,

and I began to practice the sacred art of Sufi sausage-making.

The first few batches that I made were much too spicy,

because I stuffed my casing with every esoteric meat

that I could find;

but with time, patience, and an ardent desire for God,

I learned to stuff my casing with the freshest meat of all,

the tender flesh of my own simple, daily life;

and the more I died to my mortal flesh,

the sweeter my sausages tasted, and the more strength

I gathered for my long journey back home to God.

            The most difficult aspect of my quest for my true self was decoding the language of the secret way, which is so well hidden that only the most devout seeker will ever decode the meaning of life’s purpose; but once I did, the secret way of the Sufi Path and Christ’s sayings and parables gave up their secret, and life finally began to make sense to me.

But I still had a lot more living and many years of writing before I could explain the secret way, until one day I realized that it all came down to a special attitude with life that reflected the essential truth of every spiritual teaching, and by special attitude I mean the secret of conscious living that Gurdjieff’s teaching made me wise to.

Of course, we are all conscious despite what Gurdjieff said about man being asleep to life, but consciousness is relative to every person, and waking up to life is a matter of degree for everyone; but it was Gurdjieff’s purpose as well as the Sufi Path and the sayings and parables of Jesus to speed up the process of self-realization and waking up to life, which in the language of the secret way means taking evolution into our own hands to complete what Nature cannot finish.

Nature will only evolve us so far, said Gurdjieff; and to complete what Nature cannot finish we have to take evolution into our own hands by cultivating a special attitude with life that speeds up the process of becoming our true self, which is the essential meaning and purpose of our existence.

It took years for me to realize why Nature cannot evolve us to our full potential, but the more I “worked” on myself (which I encoded in my poem as the sacred art of Sufi sausage-making), the more I grew in truth and understanding, and it finally dawned on me one day that the secret way was all about resolving the consciousness of our dual nature; or, as Jesus expressed it in the secret language of his teaching, making our two selves into one.

In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus was asked by someone when his kingdom would come, and he replied, “When the two will be one, and the outer like the inner, and the male with the female neither male nor female.” And the two are one when we speak truth to each other and there is one soul in two bodies with no hypocrisy, as the saying is explained in The Unknown Sayings of Jesus, by Marvin Meyer.

This special attitude with life then is nothing more than learning how to live one’s life with conscious intention, which means karmic responsibility; because as long as we refuse to wake up to the governing principle of life, which in A Sign of Things to Come St. Padre Pio called “the law of corrective measures,” we remain trapped in the endless cycle of karma and reincarnation, which is why we have to take evolution into our own hands to complete what Nature cannot finish and become our true self. And if I were asked to define what I mean by this special attitude of the secret way, I’d be forced to say: simply be a good person, and let your conscience be your guide. That’s my secret to a happy life.

———

            For whatever reason Nietzsche lost his faith in God, he cut himself off from the spark of divine consciousness that he was born with and was never able to reconcile his existential self with the imperative of his divine nature; and in his effort to overcome the oppressive spirit of nihilism born of the emerging scientific age and his willful denial of God’s imperative to resolve the consciousness of his lower nature, he forged a teaching of “the eternal recurrence of all things” and embraced his existential self—over and over in a never-ending cycle of time eternal, a fate that he was forced to love by the imperative of his logic.

“And if you should die now, O Zarathustra: behold, we know too what you would say to yourself… ‘Now I die and decay…and in an instant I shall be nothingness…But the complex of causes in which I am entangled will recur—it will create me again! ...I shall return…not to a new life or a better life or a similar life; I shall return eternally to this identical and self-same life…to teach once more the eternal recurrence of all things, to speak once more the teaching of the great noontide of earth and man, to tell man of the Superman once more…” wrote Nietzsche, staking his salvation on an idea of eternal egocentrism (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Penguin Classics; translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Introduction, p. 24).

“Alright,” I imagine proud little Nietzsche saying to himself, after he walked away from his Christian faith—for whatever reason, we will never know; but it was enough for him to deny the existence of the God altogether (probably crystallized by the love of his life, Lou Salome, who drove him into deep despair when she refused to marry him)— “if this is the way it’s going to be, then I’ll embrace my fate and be done with it!”

And like Satan in Paradise Lost, who turned on God and embraced hell forever, Nietzsche’s unconscious gave birth to the compensatory idea of the eternal recurrence of life, and he made a sterile heaven out of his own miserable existence by embracing his fate like Milton’s proud Satan; and he created his own stagnant heaven by giving birth to the Superman, whose sole purpose for being was to “overcome” his miserable existence over and over again for time eternal. “Where I found a living creature, there I found will to power…And life told me this secret: ‘Behold,’ it said, ‘I am that which must overcome itself again and again,” wrote Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, echoing Milton’s Satan’s “The mind is its own place, and in itself /Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

“The Superman, the will to the Superman, the will to power and self-overcoming. Live dangerously! Amor fati, eternal recurrence, total affirmation of life. The great noontide. These are the slogans, the ‘signs’, by which Nietzsche surmounted his nihilism and resolved his crisis,” wrote R. J. Hollingdale; but it was a false resolution, because Nietzsche drove himself insane trying to satisfy the divine imperative of his inner self for wholeness and completeness by sacrificing his divine self to his existential self (eternally recurring or not), the obverse of Christ`s salvific teaching of making our two selves into one self whole and complete.

“He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal,” said Jesus, which proud little Nietzsche so wrongly misperceived that he violently denounces Christianity for its redemptive nay-saying to life (self-sacrifice is the secret way of Christ’s teaching, which Jesus symbolized with the death of his lower self on the cross); and that’s the brilliance of Friedrich Nietzsche and the tragedy of his teaching—the same dilemma that haunts the pages of professor Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, and my call to write One Rule to Live By: Be Good…

One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 35: The Great Choreographer of Life

CHAPTER 35

The Great Choreographer of Life

We’re well into September and the leaves are beginning to turn color, but we’re back from our little getaway where we visited family and old friends, and my muse beckons; so, I’m going to jump right back into my story with a divinely choreographed experience that I had in Thunder Bay, because it bears direct relevance to One Rule to Live By: Be Good that will help bring the imperative of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, which can only take one so far on their journey to wholeness and completeness, to resolution.

I did an enormous amount of reading this summer. Not as much as I had hoped, but I managed to read professor Peterson’s ponderous Maps of Meaning, and enough Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn to get into their psyche; and this gave me a much greater appreciation for Jordan Peterson’s obsession with these authors.

I had to read the Preface to Maps of Meaning twice before I caught the gist of Peterson’s evolving theses (“Personal interest—subjective meaning—reveals itself at the juncture of explored and unexplored territory, and is indicative of participation in the process that ensures continued healthy individual and societal adaptation,” he wrote in his Preface, a thematic overview of his “maps of meaning” that he rendered into 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos), and it wasn’t until I plodded through the first and was well into the second chapter that I finally caught the logic of his thinking, a creative dialectic that espouses the wisdom of evolutionary biology, neuroscience, mythology, psychology, religion, philosophy, literature, and his own life experience; and from then on it was like reading a mystery thriller, because with every chapter professor Peterson “mapped” out the polyphonic meaning of the human condition with the brilliance of a Sherlock Holmes, connecting disparate clues to create a picture large enough and clear enough to justify the presumptuous title of his book, and when he brought Maps of Meaning to resolution (as far as he could take it, that is) with a quotation from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, which contains some of the most secret sayings of Jesus, I knew precisely why I had been called to write One Rule to Live By: Be Good, because the secret sayings of Jesus were the “key” to solving the final mystery of the human condition. “Whoever finds the interpretations of these sayings will not taste death,” said Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, which is what the good professor leaves us with—the sacred mystery of realizing our essential, divine nature!  

Not only did Maps of Meaning explain the wisdom of his second book 12 Rules for Life, it answered my nagging question: why was I compelled to send him four of my books to read—The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway and The Pearl of Great Price before he came into public prominence, and just as he was coming into public prominence three years later, My Writing Life and The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity? And as presumptuous as it may seem, I really had no choice, because I was no less beholding to the same divine imperative that compelled the mystic poet Rumi to do his own oracle’s bidding—“Tell it unveiled, the naked truth! The declaration’s better than the secret.”

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is professor Peterson’s naked truth, forged in the smithy of his own purpose-driven life (working three hours a day for fifteen years to write Maps of Meaning, plus years of lecturing on his research material and practical wisdom garnered from his clinical practice), and as incredible as some of his “connections” were (like his lobster thesis) that helped him resolve the puzzle of the human condition, his wisdom rang so true to me that it wrenched my heart to see that he had gone as far as his brilliant mind could take him to wholeness and completeness, but not through the eye of the needle, which was why my oracle compelled me to send him The Pearl of Great Price to read.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls. Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it,” said Jesus (Matthew 13: 45-46); but not until one has broken the code of Christ’s sayings will one apprehend the wisdom that will see them through the eye of the needle; this is why I wrote my novel Jesus Wears Dockers to share my understanding of Christ’s sayings.

But that’s neither here nor there, because there is only self-initiation into the mysteries of life, and life is fundamentally an individual journey of self-discovery; so, it doesn’t really matter what Jordan Peterson says, or what I say, or what C. G. Jung or anyone says, we all have to negotiate our own way to wholeness and completeness, and if what we say resonates with the world, so be it. Which brings me back to the Jordan Peterson phenomenon and the intellectual storm that he has stirred up with his 12 Rules of Life: An Antidote to Chaos.

He’s not yet completed his 100 city global tour; but he’s caused such a stir with his refreshing, albeit shocking point of view that he’s initiated a whole new conversation on moral responsibility and God and religion and the soul and the meaning and purpose of our existence, and the world is actually listening. A phenomenon, indeed!

So, it’s obvious that he’s resonating with the world; or, to be fair, with a very large sector of society that is fumbling in the dark. Like his hero Carl Gustav Jung, who wrote, “the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being,” so too is professor Peterson kindling a light in the darkness of mere being by providing an answer to the angry question of my poem, “What the Hell is Going on Out There?”

Which brings me to the spiritual musing that I was called to write when we got back from our little getaway this summer, a spiritual musing that will help to open the secret door that 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos prepares one for:

When the Student is Ready…

There’s an old joke. If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. This implies that we never know how our life is going to turn out, despite everything we do to make it go our way; but that’s because we have free will as well as a destined purpose, and if we stray too far from our destined purpose, Providence will always intercede to bring us back to our destined purpose.

Despite science’s contention that free will is an illusion, we all know that choices have consequences, and eventually (unless we are unreasonably stubborn) we will become more discerning in the choices we make to prevent unpleasant consequences. This is free will and not animal instinct. Which brings me to today’s spiritual musing: how can we know that the choices we make will not bear unpleasant consequences?

We cannot, of course; but as we grow in our discernment, we take calculated risks and hope that the choices we make will not bear unpleasant consequences. Like the gifted young poet Micah Pawluk, whom the great choreographer of life introduced me to when Penny and I went on our little getaway this summer, said in the opening poem “Advice” in his second book of poetry Above the Old Birch Trees: “Take a chance, /dig deeper, /take more risks.”

This is sage advice from a young poet who’s just beginning to play the game of life (and life is a game really, with all of its rules and consequences; literally, and otherwise); but as we get older, fear has a way of dampening our spirit for risk-taking, and many of us settle into what Thoreau called a life of “quiet desperation,” waiting for the day when we are called to our reckoning like Everyman was in the eponymous medieval morality play that was the inspiration for my poem “Noman” that I wrote in high school and which became the central theme of my memoir The Summoning of Noman that I wrote fifty years later.

Thank God for youth then when the seeds of our life are planted, giving us the potential to realize wholeness and completeness; but, life being what it is, not all seeds take root (“Ten thousand acorns fell from the oak, /five took root, /and one became a tree,” from my book Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys), and not everyone is fortunate enough to realize their destined purpose. This is why I was so excited when the great choreographer of life introduced the young poet into my life with Penny’s gift of Above the Old Birch Trees; and it was this delightful coincidence that inspired today’s spiritual musing…

The great choreographer of life is not a figment of my imagination; it is the Logos, the Word, the Voice of God, Providence, which in my own journey of self-discovery I came to recognize as the omniscient guiding principle of life that keeps us connected with our destined purpose, whether we are aware of it or not, and which has also been referred to throughout history simply as the way.

The way is everywhere to be found (Jesus called the way by many names, essentially all meaning a transformative process as well as a destination), but not everyone finds the way until they are ready to find it; this is the mystery of the human condition that the young poet is struggling to resolve. That’s why he was meant to come into my life, and I into his; he, to find inspiration in my writing that will help him find the way and connect with his destined purpose, and me to offer encouragement in his journey of self-discovery, because he is the acorn that has just taken root and I am the acorn that has become a tree.

And how do I know this?

Aside from his book of poetry Above the Old Birch Trees, which to me bared an anguished soul crying out to the Universe for direction and purpose, but because of what he also revealed about himself in our short online conversation that we had the day I sent him a friend request when I saw his post on Facebook with a photo of him and Penny’s sister proudly holding his new calendar at market of the CLE grounds in Thunder Bay where he was promoting his books and 2019 calendar adorned with photos he had taken of the area, the young poet confirmed why the great choreographer of life wanted us to connect:

O: Penny’s sister gifted me your new calendar, and Penny gifted me your book of poetry. Love the calendar, but your poetry book engaged me from the first three lines (“Take a chance, /dig deeper, /take more risks.”), and I read the whole book over the weekend. You have a gift. Will be ordering your other books from Amazon. Good luck on your lifelong journey.

M: Thank you for your kind words, I hope you enjoy the other books as well.

O: Your inner journey fascinates me. Have been friends with your aunt Fiona and uncle Clifford for years. Looking forward to how your life unfolds, which I’m sure you’ll be working into your poetry. Don’t mind telling you, that one of your lines in your book Above the Old Birch Tree has to be one of the most powerful lines I’ve ever read: “Life fears art.” But do you know why?

M: I think one reason could be that it shows us the truth of ourselves we wish didn’t exist, or at least that it shows us difficult truths that most people would rather not face.

O: That’s the poet’s gift, to see what other people don’t want, or refuse to see; but then, as the gifted New Zealand short story writer Katherine Mansfield said, “Literature is not enough,” implying that the wisdom of literature is not enough to satisfy the longing in one’s soul for wholeness and completeness, and so one may well ask: where does one go from here? That was my quest, which I have resolved to my satisfaction and have been writing about for years. Check out My Writing Life, if you have time. Keep writing, Micah. Your poetry is a birthing of your inner self.

M: I will, thank you!

O: You’re welcome. Have to get back to my work in progress. Don’t hesitate to initiate a dialogue whenever you’re in the mood for a good discourse. Ciao for now.

This young man is not only a gifted poet, but a gifted pianist who played at Carnegie Hall and who also won a competition in Italy and is currently studying for a degree in music, not to mention his passion for photography and mountain climbing; and it was obvious to me from the first poem I read in Above the Old Birch Trees that he is suffering from what professor Harold Bloom called an “immortal wound” that will never heal until he finds his own way and realizes his destined purpose (it’s not a coincidence that he called his youthful memoir Without a Trail), and I simply knew that we were meant to connect; because, as the old saying goes, when the student is ready…

———

            That’s why so many young people, especially wayward young men that have been  immortally wounded by the wonder of professor Jordan Peterson’s message—reading his shadow-dismantling book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, which has now hit two million in global sales, and viewing his online lectures that have over a hundred million views and counting—are flocking to his book tour talks that have been averaging 2500 people in every city, because there’s a hole in the soul of the world that neither religion, science, nor politics can fill, and Jordan Peterson’s divine imperative to help the world find its way again that it lost when science eroded religion’s credibility, which brilliant little Nietzsche pathologized in Thus Spoke Zarathustra with his “God is dead” philosophy, reminds me of the heart-warming starfish story and the good professor’s newfound purpose.

          The starfish story, which has been adapted from “The Star Thrower” by Loren Eiseley, has been used by motivational speakers throughout the world to inspire dreams and noble intentions, however foolish, like the good professor imperative to right the world with his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, podcasts, book tour talks, and interviews:

On day, goes one version of the story, an old man was walking along a beach littered with thousands of starfish that had washed upon the shore by the high tide; and as he walked, lost in thought, he came upon a young boy throwing starfish back into the ocean, one starfish at a time. Puzzled, the old man frowned and asked the boy what he was doing.

 Looking up from his task, the boy replied, “I’m saving these starfish, Sir.”

The old man snorted a chuckle. “Young man, there are thousands of starfish and only one of you. What difference can you possibly make?”

The boy picked up another starfish and tossed it into the ocean; and turning to the old man, he replied, “I made a difference to that one, Sir.”

No one knows how many souls the tides of life have washed upon the shoals of the world only to wither and die broken because they could not make their way back to the ocean, but along came an impassioned U of T professor of psychology and clinical therapist who hailed from a small prairie town in northern Alberta, emboldened by the myth-shattering writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and pioneering depth psychologist Carl Gustav Jung and other great souls like Victor Frankl and Jean Piaget, who risked his career and clinical practice when he was called to help all those broken souls make their way back to the ocean so they could continue on their destined journey to wholeness and completeness, a tireless endeavor that has given the good professor a renewed sense of purpose and meaning; and all the broken and weary souls that have taken his message to heart thank and praise Jordan Peterson for giving them the hope they so desperately needed to reclaim their lives—“His example gave me permission to begin thinking about what I might become in a world that has lost its bearings, even as I had lost mine,” said one of his followers in Esquire magazine; and she is only one of the thousands of starfish that the young boy threw back into the ocean…