Age New Spirituality - Inspirational Stories ( Part 55 )
The Spiritual Journey of Chuck Palahniuk
Follow his transformation in a personal story that will be familiar to many.
Chuck Palahniuk is known for writing, publishing and marketing his novel on the zombie apocalypse in Survivor and for writing "Fight Club." He is an award-winning novelist, short story writer and journalist. As a result of this success, he became provocative with his quotes about spirituality but never seems to have had much time for organized religion or spiritual practice. In this personal story we discuss how he transitioned from thinking about the afterlife to reaching out into life.
It's been a few months since I wrote last. Maybe a year. Whenever it was, I've been trying to transition from the old paradigm to the new. It's not easy. In fact, it can be downright baffling if you're not looking for it, if you don't know what to look for and how to interpret it. I'm just now at the point where that process is in full swing and life is moving quickly around me again—but I'm also still trying to figure out where I fit in this new reality.
What follows is a personal story that may be helpful to some readers as they transition through their own transformation (even if they never read my writing). It may be hard to tell where Chuck begins and where his fictional alter ego begins, as he uses the story to discuss some of the major issues that contributed to his transition.
There are a lot of changes happening in my life right now. I'm going through some of the same things that Tyler Durden went through—a revolution, a revelation, an internal shift from conventional thinking to something more enlightened. I'm trying yet again to move beyond my prison and my shackles and find freedom. By doing so, I've moved from one empty yearning for an afterlife to a new spirituality. This new world is full of irony in that I'm learning from a man who is actually dead. And while I'm doing this, we're going through the same things that anyone who's reached this point in life must go through: self-discovery and death and grief, but also life and love.
Though many of us are aware of the process by which life takes place and can apply the lessons we learn to our reality—how to cook or clean or build or fix–it's difficult to acknowledge our own identity in this process. We can become so accustomed to being a "person" that we forget about being a "spiritual being." It's hard to know what you are when your religion tells you that you're nothing but a "soul" and an "immortal spirit;" the same sort of things our Western culture has told us for centuries.
I believe this is where Chuck Palahniuk has been all along, with the exception of his first novel, Fight Club. The book seems to answer the question of how someone can find immortality in death, which is exactly what you need if you want to live forever—you need to be able to understand cultural and spiritual paradigms. This is what Fight Club and the characters that appear throughout his novels do. They attack the soul-less culture we live in and make us question what a "spirit" is and how it exists, who or what it can be and why it lives—why we should live.
The book explores these questions through three characters: Tyler Durden, who is actually Chuck Palahniuk himself; Chuck, the fictional character he wrote about in his novel Fight Club; and Marla Singer, a woman who is made up of all of the body parts that have been cut away from Chuck because he felt there was too much of himself to allow him to lose consciousness in case something happened to him.
When Chuck gets to the point where he is old enough to realize that he has engaged in the same system of self-editing and self-destruction that his father exhibited, his concerns are validated—but this revelation is not the most important issue on his mind. He's ready (or thinks he's ready) for a new paradigm and questions what he has been taught about life after death.
Chuck was ripe for some sort of spiritual awakening, even if that awakening had to happen as a result of someone else laying the foundations for him to understand himself and his place in this universe. That person turned out to be Tyler Durden, who was both a fictional character in one dimension and a real person in another.
He needed to see that everything he had been taught was wrong and to realize that the afterlife is life—that you have to live in order for death to have meaning. As he figures this out, he begins searching for the first time for what it means to be a spiritual being instead of a "soul."
It's my personal belief (and belief is all we have) that when Chuck started writing his second book in 1996, his next step was to move beyond Fight Club so that he could start living up to his potential. I think it's why he wrote Survivor as well as Invisible Monsters. Invisible Monsters, as you may recall, is a story about the human body and the parasite that we can become. As it turns out, this topic is central to Chuck's transformation.
I'm not going to get into a lot of details about my own transition; however, I will say there have been many people who have helped me over the years. The first of these was my brother. He showed me a book called Seth Speaks by Jane Roberts and I changed from being a non-believer to being a believer overnight—but it was a belief in something that science couldn't touch, so for years I thought I was crazy or bad or both.
For many years after, there was no one else.
Conclusion
Not that long ago, a friend told me that I should be careful about what I write. He knew what he was talking about and suggested I think about the consequences before I open my mouth or sit down to type.
In the end, it doesn't matter what anyone believes as long as they're not hurting anyone else (that's one of the many things Fight Club taught me). When it comes down to it, we're all human beings, trying to figure out how to live in this world and understand who we are and why we're here.
For me, Fight Club is an incredibly relevant piece of fiction that accurately describes how most people feel at some point in their lives.