Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 46

Poem 46

When a country is in harmony with the Tao,
the factories make trucks and tractors.
When a country goes counter to the Tao,
warheads are stockpiled outside the cities.

There is no greater illusion than fear,
no greater wrong than preparing to defend yourself,
no greater misfortune than having an enemy.
Whoever can see through all fear will always be safe.

Commentary

Stained glass window, St Vitus Cathedral, Prague, 2016

Our translator Stephen Mitchell is using his translator's licence in his above rendition of poem 46. To illustrate how one translator's version differs from another's, I give here immediately that of Derek Lin which is available at the link given after it.  It runs thus:

When the world has the Tao

Fast horses are retired to till the soil

When the world lacks the Tao

Warhorses give birth on the battlefield.

There is no crime greater than greed

No disaster greater than discontentment

No fault greater than avarice

Thus the satisfaction of contentment

is the lasting satisfaction

(Tao Te Ching Version 2)

Mitchell speaks of the stockpiling of nuclear weapons and Lin that of horses being prepared for battle.  He also chooses to use contemporary or modern images of prosperity and war, that is, tractors and nuclear warheads while his fellow translator chooses the more historic images of agricultural workhorses and warhorses to put across the same message, namely that harmony with the Tao leads both to individual, social, national and international peace and harmony.

Ancient means of war: Prague Castle, February 2016

Evil stalks our world when we as individuals are not "at home " or are not comfortable with ourselves as persons; when we are always envious of others, and when our hearts are shackled, if not shattered, by negative feelings.  If, as individuals, we find it hard to live with ourselves, how can we ever find it easy to live in some peaceful acceptance with others?Whatever happens in our hearts at this micro or personal and social level must surely be magnified if a whole people or nation are not "at home" or comfortable with their identity as a people.  It is no wonder, then, that when crises arise, these opposing nations can see no peaceful solution to their conflicted sense of their own identity and that of the hated other and take recourse to war.  

Therefore, if more and more people are in harmony with themselves they will live in consequent harmony with others.  This micro, personal and social situation will then be replicated further at national and international level.  Hence, the more people practise mindfulness, meditation and prayer as individuals and as small groups there will be a knock-on effect on the world.  When people are "in harmony with the Tao" prosperity comes about.  One could say that peace and prosperity "break out," instead of its direct opposite, namely the inevitability of fighting and war.  Material prosperity follows inevitably on the heels of spiritual prosperity, if one may express the idea thus.

Hitler, and indeed all other dictators whether of the right or left, knew all too well how to manipulate people by playing to their baser instincts like fears, anxieties, memories of old rivalries; by re-opening old wounds; by inspiring the negative feelings of greed and avarice, discontentment, jealousy and envy and thereby fomenting racism, hatred, murder, mayhem and war.

However, to see through all fear is a very difficult thing to do.  The Tao Te Ching is suggesting a path for us to follow, a way of practising reflection and mindfulness, a way of meditating on life, a way of positive action in the world that springs naturally from such practice.  Once, when the great Irish poet, W.B. Yeats was asked how a person becomes a good writer, he replied that he or she must practise continually their craft.  If we are to become mindful people we must also follow the advice given by Yeats, namely to practise the craft of meditating as often and as regularly as possible.  Nothing less is required.

Namaste, friends.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 13

Poem 13

Success is as dangerous as failure.

Hope is as hollow as fear.

What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure?

Whether you go up the ladder or down it,

your position is shaky.

When you stand with your two feet on the ground,

you will always keep your balance.

What does it mean that hope is as hollow as fear?

Hope and fear are both phantoms

that arise from thinking of the self.

When we don't see the self as self,

what do we have to fear?

See the world as your self.

Have faith in the way things are.

Love the world as your self;

then you can care for all things.

Reflections

These poems from the Tao Te Ching are designed to make the reader or indeed listener (as in those ancient times when these lines were written oral cultures abounded, as only the very rich or people of status were able to read) think; to snap the person into a state of wakefulness or awareness.  Koans, which can be in the form of a story, a question, a statement or even a dialogue, were traditionally used in Zen Buddhism to provoke the disciple into a deeper awareness or a keener sense of wakefulness than heretofore.  In this way, the student's progress in Zen practice was tested. To my mind, the poems in the Tao Te Ching share in that purpose, namely to test and to deepen the student's progress in wisdom. The above poem is quite koanic (if this word exists) or koan-like  in this regard. 

Objectivity

All meditative practices allow us to withdraw a considerable distance from our own ego or from our obsession with self, from our egocentricity.  If we can arrive at this stage of personal or spiritual development, we have become more objective about ourselves and are less likely on the one hand to swell up with pride when we are praised by another or on the other hand retreat in failure into gloomy despair when criticized.   In that sense we can meet success and failure in our stride and not be too overcome in either an overly positive or overly negative sense.  Another way of stating these objective sentiments would be by making the paradoxical or koanic statement that "success is a dangerous as failure."  Once again, it's a question of not clinging onto or obsessively desiring those allurements or charms of the ego.  In that sense, success can be dangerous to our discovering real happiness, which lies in discovering the real or true self that is hidden behind all the empty promises of our ego-ridden society.  Failure can be crippling to the ego and reduce it to a state of not being able to do this or that.  We want to keep the ego in a healthy place in our psyche, and we certainly don't want to cripple it.  In fact, when we learn to give it its proper place in the psyche, balanced well astride the super-ego and id, then we can function confidently in life.  We have to learn to be ruthlessly objective and never allow our failures to have any negative effect on our real and true selves.  This takes some work in both personal development and on-going meditative practice to achieve. 

Our Taoist poet tells us also that "hope can be as hollow as fear."  In other words, the poet is telling us that unfounded fear or anxiety can reduce a person to an ineffective and passive on-looker rather than an active participant in society.  Unfounded hope can be mere wishful thinking and lead us into despair.   

Stanza three is pure koan and will only yield up a little of its wisdom after meditating upon it many times.  Therefore, I am offering no explanation here, or attempted explanation even, as I have to humbly, like Socrates, admit my ignorance.  What I will do is meditate and pray on it and leave it to the great Unconscious (or God, or Meaningfulness, or the spirit of life or whatever you wish to call it) to offer up some suggestive answer.

It is also my opinion that the Taoist poet uses the "self" in two differing ways in this poem. Stanza three seems to suggest that when we go beyond the self, or beyond being preoccupied or even concerned with self that it is only then that we have nothing to fear.  Stanza four recommends, in a rather contradictory sense, that we must see all things in the world from the perspective of the self that it is only then that we can really love everything and everyone. This last stanza, then, is in the tradition of Jesus' famous command to his disciples to love their neighbour as themselves.

John Keats: 1795 - 1821

However, as we all know by now, it is in the tradition of Taoist wisdom, as it is in that of Zen Buddhism, to hold the two opposites in a polar tension or union.  Therefore, as readers of this beautiful Taoist poem, we are happy to remain in a state of what the famous ill-fated wonderful Romantic poet John Keats called "negative capability," a term he coined himself for the learnt ability in the human mind to balance opposites and hold them thus "without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." (see Negative Capability)

Conclusion:

One again, by way of conclusion, I invite the reader to read reflectively through the above Taoist lines and let a word or phrase spark a mantra for a five or ten minute meditation.

Journal of a Soul 66

The Futility of Obsessional Searching

Galicia, Spain, not far from Allariz

Having observed at close quarters an ASD pupil who suffered from severe OCD was a great lesson for me in my life's journey.  Having encountered others since who have relatives with this mental ailment further convinces me of how disabling any form of obsession can be to us as individuals. Prior to this I was well used to encountering people and students with hosts of other problems from depression to schizophrenia, from anxiety to panic attacks and so on, and I knew how these were very crippling - indeed I have written many times in these pages and others about my own diagnosis of clinical or endogenous depression at the age of forty.  But the obsessional lesson, if I may be so bold as to call it that, was particularly enlightening.  At this juncture in my life as a 56 year old Special Needs Teacher, with a background in philosophy, theology and counselling as well as in the usual more academic subjects - Mathematics and Languages - I have been searching for the truth of who I am for longer than I care to remember. Every time I look back over my progress over this earthly pilgrimage I constantly observe that it was often during those periods when my search was most intense that the "answers" or at least the consolations were always surprisingly few, and that it was the times when I was not pushing myself so hard and so obsessively for answers that the so-called "answers" and consolations were surprisingly more.  As a writer I often find that this is also the case with inspiration - the muses come to us when they wish, in their own time as it were, and often don't come when we are obsessively searching for them.

Stream of Consciousness:

All too infrequently I do a written exercise in stream of consciousness composition where I just let the words roll onto the page without either censoring them or using any form of punctuation.  Punctuation would obviously be a way of hindering the flow as it would  be an obvious shaping or ordering of the words.  Those of my readers who are into literature will know that our great and wonderful Irish author James Joyce was a master of this technique. I was taught it several times over the years at various creative writing classes I attended. However, to cut to the chase here, let me add a brief extract from my most recent stream of consciousness exercise:

some flowers will appear like lotuses from the muck and gunk and bilge and all that slime and all that slime and somewhere deep within it there will be something fine formed like a poem coming to birth coming to a shape forming forming from all those Freudian depths from that cesspit from which rises the Self like some exotic phoenix (see Stream )

It would seem that everything is grist to the mill for a writer or shaper of words, indeed for any artist at all.  Furthermore, everyone is an artist in the sense that they are the shapers of their own lives, of their own Self. We have to learn to be unobsessive shapers of our lives, that is, we definitely have to learn to mould and shape our lives but we have to learn to do so in an unobsessive manner, that is, not in an obsessive manner that could certainly cripple us in our pursuit of real happiness.  That's the sense behind the quotation above from my recent stream of consciousness, that the Self does rise like an exotic phoenix if only we would learn "to go with the flow" of life and learn to tap into its overall energy.  Shaping our lives means going with the flow, pushing with the energy of life, not pushing against it. We certainly have to work and shape, mould and form our lives, often with the sweat of our brow, but always by going with the flow of the energy around us.  Obviously, this is never ever a sense of aimless drift - the exact opposite to what I am talking about here. Going with the flow is never the easy way out. It requires a level of honest effort, too.

Going with the Flow

Here I wish to say a little about the contemporary psychologist and psychotherapist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.  He discovered that we find genuine satisfaction during a state of consciousness that he called simply "Flow". In this state we are completely absorbed in an activity, especially an activity that involves our creative abilities. During this “optimal experience” we feel “strong, alert, in effortless control, unselfconscious, and at the peak of their abilities.”  Here, in the footsteps of Abraham Maslow, Csikszentmihalyi insists that happiness does not simply happen. It must be prepared for and cultivated by each person, by setting challenges that are neither too demanding nor too simple for ones abilities. The Pursuit of Happiness (see Here) website gives as an example of flow an advanced skier's conquering of a difficult slope.  We might add any other skill we have learnt, even typing these few words on my laptop.  We have to put in the effort obviously, and then allow ourselves to tap into the energy that's out there to enliven us.  Of course, going with the flow can involve all the simpler exercises like good conversation, listening, encouraging, helping, being compassionate, joining in the fun, playing a game and so on.  However, the major point here is that it is never a lazy drift that will lead nowhere.

Cziksentmihalyi defines flow as “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” (Cskikszentmihalyi, 1990, p.4)

Allariz, Galicia, Spain

Again, I have experienced this state at work, most especially when I am involved in helping others cope with life; especially more recently where I have been called on to listen to the upset of a seventeen year old at his brother's hospitalization or of another's experience of depression. A more powerful experience of flow that I participated in (and I use these words deliberately as I felt that there was another power literally flowing through me) was that of visiting with a family who had been recently bereaved by a suicide of a young man of twenty - the essential topic of my last post here. My experience of being part of a flow of energy, of a higher power even, that I was somehow directing rather like a conductor of an orchestra was and is surely inspiring.  As I sat with that young man's friends and his family I knew I had to be there, felt drawn there, knew what I was about, could use all my organizing skills to their best to celebrate that young man's short life, to help support family and friends in their almost unspeakable grief.  Going with the flow is very empowering.  It does take courage but once you start the flow itself energizes you.

It would seem to me at this stage in my life's journey that (i) learning to search for meaning without obsession is a healthy thing to do.  Such a searching is something akin to, though not the same as, John Keat's famous concept of "negative capability" that he defined in his Letters as: that state of mind "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" (See Here) (ii) that being open to lessons from our own unconscious through dreams, visualizations, meditation exercises, yoga, singing, writing or art of all kinds  and (iii) going with flow are all valuable skills to learn so that we can begin to navigate the Ship of Self through the choppy seas of life if I may be permitted to use a somewhat extravagant though useful metaphor here.  One, of course, can use other descriptors for these suggested skills like soul, spirituality, Higher Power, Inspiration, God, Holy Spirit, Mysticism, Living in the "Now," and so on.  In the end, the language is a surface matter.  What really is important is the real-life experience of the energy of Flow.

Journal of a Soul 64

Of Torment

Sand on Donabate Beach

Humans beings are complex creatures.  All our sciences - both natural and human - have attempted to plumb both our depths and our heights.  From depth psychology, person-centered counselling, cognitive behaviour therapy and existential psychotherapy on the one hand to biochemistry, neuroscience and psycho-pharmacology on the other we seek to map both the landscape and the mindscape of what it means to be human.  Whether we have achieved much or not in that task, I suppose is for the scholars in those various areas of specialty to delineate and their clients or patients to give either oral or written testimony as to the efficacy of the various approaches.  Be that as it may, some of our number do remain tormented souls.

A Brief History of Torment 

By torment I mean the proclivity within a certain number of us to mentally torture ourselves.  The history of self-inflicted torment is as old as humanity itself.  I remember when I was studying Scripture many years ago one of our more erudite lecturers introduced us to the ancient Egyptian poem known in English as The Man Who Was Tired of Life or The Dialogue of a Man and His Ba (or Soul). This composition is universally regarded as one of the masterpieces of ancient Egyptian literature. It is also one of the most difficult and continually debated, as well as being the subject of more than one hundred books and articles.  It is the author's mental anguish or torment that intrigues this writer here - one could say, to use a definite anachronism, that this early poem is pure existentialism. This poem dates back to the Twelfth Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, a period that spanned from 1991-1803 BCE.  In the text the man accuses his soul of wanting to desert him, of dragging him towards death before his time. He says that life is too heavy for him to bear, that his heart would come to rest in the West (i.e. the afterlife), that his name would survive and his body would be protected. He urges his soul to be patient and wait for a son to be born to make the offerings the deceased needed in the afterlife. His ba describes the sadness death brings and retorts to the man's complaints about his lack of worth, his being cut off from humanity and the attractiveness of death by exhorting him to embrace life and promises to stay with him. Scholars have disputed as to whether the author is intending to take his own life or not.  One way or another the author of the piece is a highly tormented being and one full of angst to use yet another anachronistic term associated with existentialism. Here is a brief snatch from this rather pessimistic and angst-ridden poem:

To whom can I speak today?
Hearts are rapacious
And everyone takes his neighbour's goods.   [To whom can I speak today?]
Gentleness has perished
And the violent man has come down on everyone.
To whom can I speak today?
Men are contented with evil
And goodness is neglected everywhere.
To whom can I speak today? (see HERE)

Moonlight over Donabate strand this evening

There are other ancient documents, too.  For example, the earliest is the Sumerian text  A Man and His God, dating from 2000 - 1700 BCE describes the unjust and innocent sufferings of a righteous man. An Akkadian text called Ludlul Bel Nemeqi (I will praise the Lord of Wisdom), dating from 1000 BC, describes a nobleman praising the Babylonian god Marduk. This god had healed the stricken nobleman on account of his religious and cultic piety. Yet another ancient text is the Babylonian Theodicy which was composed between 1400 and 800 BCE. It consists of a dialogue between a sufferer and a comforter that seeks to explain why an innocent and good-living man should suffer. All these ancient compositions thematically resonate with the book of Job and demonstrate that the themes of theodicy were important pieces of the theological discourse in the ancient Near East. 

Of the Book of Job the WIKI records that it is:

one of the Writings (Ketuvim) of the Hebrew Bible, and the first poetical book in the Christian Old Testament.^[1] Addressing the theme of God's justice in the face of human suffering - or more simply, "Why do the righteous suffer?"^[2] - it is a rich theological work, setting out a variety of perspectives.^[3] It has been widely and often extravagantly praised for its literary qualities - "The greatest poem of ancient and modern times," according to Tennyson,^[4] and the only book of the Bible on one list of "The 100 Best Books of All Time". (HERE)

Job simply cannot understand why he is seemingly being punished by God as quite obviously he has been a righteous and good-living man all his life.  The ancient theology is quite rightly debunked by Job, that is, the traditional theology that argued that retribution always followed an evil man's deeds and that the good and righteous always prospered. That's why he gets so upset with his so-called comforters who argue that he must have done something wrong to merit God's retribution.  However, Job will have none of their arguments.  For him, the questions of God's justice and of human suffering are far more complex than traditional  theological thought was able to comprehend.  I shan't rehearse any of Job's arguments and protestations here save to illustrate how tormented a soul Job was. Very early in Chapter 3 he laments the fact that he was even born at all:

“Why is light given to him who is in misery,
    and life to the bitter in soul,
21 who long for death, but it comes not,
    and dig for it more than for hidden treasures,
22 who rejoice exceedingly
    and are glad when they find the grave?
23 Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden,
    whom God has hedged in?
24 For my sighing comes instead of[a] my bread,
    and my groanings are poured out like water.
25 For the thing that I fear comes upon me,
    and what I dread befalls me.
26 I am not at ease, nor am I quiet;    I have no rest, but trouble comes.” (Job 3: 20-26) ESV

There are many other quotations from the Book of Job that illustrate all too vividly his tormented state of mind, but quoting more of them would be redundant to my argumentation here.  I merely wish to comment on the angst or torment dimension of his mind. Let me place a quotation here from the father of Existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard, a quotation I'm sure I have used here on too many occasions:

I stick my finger into existence – it smells of nothing. Where am I? What is this thing called the world? Who is it that has lured me into the thing, and now leaves me here? Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?” 

One can note the same existential angst and torment in all these quotations, both ancient and more modern.  One might also mention here another tortured literary soul, viz., Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) As I noted some years ago in a previous blog (Dostoyevsky):  The first book I read by Dostoyevsky was Notes From Underground.  This book was written in 1864 and  is a short novel that is quite easily read.   It is considered by many to be the world's first existentialist novel. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as "The Underground Man") who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg.  I was transfixed by this nameless character's alienation as a young nineteen year old student.  The "Underground Man's" life is quite dry and meaningless and without purpose and he seems to delight in pain and suffering which alone seem to keep him conscious of actually being alive.  He describes war early on in this small novel as being people's rebellion against the assumption that everything needs to happen for a purpose, because humans do things without purpose, and this is what determines human history.  Hence, life is wearisome, tedious, frustrating and tormenting.  Here, our anonymous antihero tells us that “I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.” Consciousness itself is the problem.  The fact that suffering exists is a given but the fact that I am aware or conscious of it just adds to my human burden.  Our man is a highly educated and sophisticated human being who is deeply disillusioned and he savages both the lofty romanticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the contemporary socialist principles that correspond to his middle age.  This is a very dark novel, written in equally dark times. However, we also must bear in mind that its author is also a deeply suffering, tormented and alienated individual.

Fairview Park, Autumn 2013

Torment Today

That torment exists in our world today is wholly and patently beyond doubt.  In the past few days here in Ireland a young lad of eighteen years of age took the lives of his eight year old twin brothers and then drove some distance and ended his own life in a lonely spot on the bank of a river.  What desperation of soul or torment of mind drove him to that awful crime and sad denouement in the taking of his own life?  perhaps we'll never know.  One could list many more examples of such lonely despair, of such inner desperation and painful torment, but such a rehearsal would only serve to sicken both this writer and his intended readers. This contribution to the journal of a soul was not meant to be a sad one.  Rather, it was meant to be a sobering one calling us back to a realism that means we have to have our feet firmly planted in the ground of meaning in our own lives.  All these instances of torment must call us to a new and strong realism that is able to accept the pain and suffering that is obviously there in the lives of all human beings and to have the strength to work to help assuage it. Denial of mental torment and suffering is an avoidance of the important issue of mental health both in our families and in our communities.  This reflection is a call to be active and pro-active, to be on the alert for signs and symptoms of distress, depression and torment in the lives of significant others.

Choosing Life

The tormented want escape from their troubles.  Our task is to help them realize that an action like suicide is too extreme a reaction to what may be a mere temporary though significant problem.  There is always a possible solution to every problem if people are taught only to reach out to all the aid that is available all around them today.  Sigmund Freud spoke about two drives in life: Eros - the drive to procreate and indeed to live and Thanatos - the drive towards death and extinction.  When these two options present themselves to us we must train our hearts and minds to choose Life always and to avoid the drive towards death as an extreme answer to what are often temporary problems.  We choose life everyday when we get up and face the world, when we go out there to work and to be with others, to help them and care for them and to simply do our best in everything that we do.  We choose death every time we are in denial, ever time we are negative to self and others, every time we chastise and complain, refuse to get up or go to work, every time we intentionally malinger or put obstacles in the way of others.  Let us have courage always to face life head on, to choose it over death as a way of living happily and cheerily on Mother Earth.  Let us always be kind and compassionate to self and others and to plant those seeds of kindness and compassion in the hearts of our fellows.