Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 64

Poem 64

What is rooted is easy to nourish.

What is recent is easy to correct.

What is brittle is easy to break.

What is small is easy to scatter.

Prevent trouble before it arises.

Put things in order before they exist.

The giant pine tree

grows from a tiny sprout.

The journey of a thousand miles

starts from beneath your feet.

Rushing into action, you fail.

Trying to grasp things, you lose them.

Forcing a project to completion,

you ruin what was almost ripe.

Therefore the Master takes action

by letting things take their course.

He remains as calm

at the end as at the beginning.

He has nothing,

thus has nothing to lose.

What he desires is non-desire;

what he learns is to unlearn.

He simply reminds people

of who they have always been.

He cares about nothing but the Tao.

Thus he can care for all things.

Commentary

Modern building, Milan, Easter, 2016

At the risk of boring the reader let me repeat what I have said here in this sequence of posts many times.  One concept I have underlined before is that of the psychological concept of flow as proposed by the Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csikszentmihályi.  Flow is a central concept in positive psychology, and it is also known as the zone.  Children can far more readily enter this zone than we adults because they are closer to their hearts and to their intuition that we adults are.  We adults are far more likely to be locked in the world of logic and intellect.  Flow or the zone is the mental state or that state of being where the person doing some action or activity is fully immersed in his/her experience of the moment, and is fully energized and well focused on the task at hand.  Flow is characterized by complete absorption in what is being experienced.  

In a sense, what the above amounts to is an appreciation for the quality of living and being in the now of experience, of going with the natural flow of life, by doing everything that is not using and abusing energy by pushing against its natural flow.  It is in this sense that we read our first stanza above:

What is rooted is easy to nourish.

What is recent is easy to correct.

What is brittle is easy to break.

What is small is easy to scatter.

Milan Cathedral, Easter 2016

The second stanza is about very much being prepared and proactive, of planning out things in a natural way, consistent with the flow of life, of living and of being.  In this stanza we read the  often quoted line that "the journey of a thousand miles" begins with our taking the first step now. 

Stanza three makes for good sound wisdom.  Forcing an item into a space it will not naturally fit into will distort or break the item.  Pushing one another in a queue for a bus or train will certainly not improve matters - indeed, it will most likely slow the loading of the bus down and actually delay the departure time, and perhaps even result in injury to some one.  Rushing into things never helps, while doing things mindfully certainly will. 

When we meet spiritually advanced people, no matter what their overt religious or even non-religious affiliation, the striking characteristic we notice is that of equanimity, calmness, peace of mind and a sense of deep attention to living in the now.  We are singularly blessed when we meet these beacons of hope and peace in our lives.

Let us read the above poem reflectively and mindfully once again and let any line or phrase offer itself to us by way of a short meditation to begin our day with the goal of being present to all whom we meet and most essentially to our own self.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 40

Poem 40

Return is the movement of the Tao.

Yielding is the way of the Tao.

All things are born of being.

Being is born of non-being.

Commentary

Water lily on the Garavogue River, Summer 2006

In the fourth of T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" called "Little Gidding" we read the following piece of wisdom: "We shall not cease from exploration//And the end of all our exploring //Will be to arrive where we started //And know the place for the first time." Eliot had studied Eastern philosophy at Harvard and was certainly au fait with the philosophy of both Buddhism and Hinduism and so these quoted lines capture much of such a spirituality or philosophy.  Spiritual or personal movement is often not linear and can be circular or cyclic in nature and hence, while there may be a "return" to a beginning, there is a new knowledge or a deeper wisdom gained by the traveller who now "knows the place for the first time."  In like manner, this fortieth poem of the Tao Te Ching informs us that return is the movement of the Tao.

Quite often our native resistance or our initial reaction to push against situations or circumstances in life can rebound upon us and thereby frustrate us or increase further the intensity of our problems.  Often going with the flow of life can be a better course of action. That is the meaning of the line "Yielding is the way of the Tao."

Garavogue River, Summer 2006

Being and its contrary non-being are often widely discussed categories in both traditional Eastern and Western philosophies.  The Pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides maintained that being implies immutability, actual existence in itself or in its essence.  Non-being, he declares, refers to non-existence.  However, the contrast between being and non-being has been interpreted in different ways over the course of the centuries.  For example, Plato believed that being refers to the immutable world of ideas (= forms), while non-being is unformed matter; and these two are paradoxically united to compose or constitute the transient world of becoming.  If we turn to Hindu belief/philosophy, we find that it equates being with the enduring reality of Brahman, and non-being with the illusory unreality of the manifested universe or so-called real world of experiences. Turning to Mahayana Buddhism we find written in the Nirvana Sutra: "The Buddha nature neither exists nor does not exist/both exists and does not exist/...being and nothing combined/This is what is called the middle path." For Hegel, being and non-being are two opposing, completely indeterminate logical and also ontological categories which, however, are integrated into a third category of becoming at a higher and determinate level.  For Heidegger, being and non-being are no longer indeterminate categories, and non-being is, in fact, instrumental and necessary for our grasp of the meaning of being.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger

All of the above is, I admit, a highly complex philosophical reflection on humankind's experience of spirituality in its lived expression. Analytical philosophers would rule all these musings out of court as sheer mystical rubbish that means nothing.  For them, these categories used above are far too fuzzy terms for equally fuzzy and wholly unprovable realities.  In short, we are simply wasting our time on undefinable nonsense.  This writer can understand such scepticism because all of the above is nonsense to those who simply have never had a religious or spiritual experience.  I find myself in agreement with the wise words that Shakespeare puts in Hamlet's mouth by way of his response to his friend Horatio's opinions and ideas: "There are more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio!"  Analytical philosophers, to my mind, need to declare a little humility and abandon an arrogance that encompasses so much dismissal of what may be beyond their ken.  

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 36

Poem 36

If you want to shrink something,

you must first allow it to expand.

If you want to get rid of something,

you must first allow it to flourish.

If you want to take something,

you must first allow it to be given.

This is called the subtle perception

of the way things are.

The soft overcomes the hard.

The slow overcomes the fast.

Let your workings remain a mystery.

Just show people the results.

Commentary

Forest Walk, Dalgan Park, 2006

Once again the Taoist poet indulges his predilection for the balance of opposites.  How can one know what white is unless one knows what black is and vice versa? I won't bore the reader by repeating what I said on balance in my last post here.  However, the last two lines of the first stanza contain the essence of the poem.  What is perception? The Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley (1685 - 1753) explored the nature of perception in depth.  He was obsessed with the contrasting ideas of immaterialism versus materialism as a result of his reading the empiricist philosopher John Locke and the skeptical writings of Pierre Bayle. Originally, he had based his line of argument for immaterialism on the fact that colour, taste and other sensible qualities were purely subjective in nature.  However, he later replaced this early thinking by a profound  analysis of the meaning of that quintessential experience of all human beings, namely that of being or, as he, in the footsteps of Shakespeare, called the "to be" question.  What, he asked, did it mean "to be"?  His answer can be simply stated as follows: "To be," when it refers to an object, means "to be perceived." When "to be" refers to a subject it means "to perceive."  Traditionally when discussing Berkeley's philosophy, lecturers used start with his famous statement in Latin, that phrase or formula: "Esse est percipi aut percipere" = "To be is to be perceived or to perceive."

Bishop George Berkeley (1685 - 1753)

Whatever about the views of Bishop Berkeley, who is classed as an idealist in philosophical terms, that is, a follower of any philosophy that maintains that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental or immaterial, or old time or modern day materialists who look on all reality as fundamentality reducible to actual material objects, our Taoist poet, like all writers from any spiritual tradition, speaks about a spiritual realm either beyond the physical one or a more subtle spiritual essence that pervades the physical one.  The person who is open to the Tao is one who has a "subtle perception" that can achieve a sense of the way things are in themselves or as they interconnect.  Again, such a "subtle perception" of reality could be equated with what people of a religious persuasion commonly call a "religious experience," or what certain psychologists and sociologists have called "depth experiences," or "height experiences" or "peak experiences" (Abraham Maslow).  I imagine also that James Joyce's concept or notion of "epiphany" is akin to the meaning all the foregoing expressions.

In conclusion, the old proverb that the "proof of the pudding is in the eating" captures a good deal of what I am attempting to convey in this short post.  Is it not true that everything in the end boils down to our lived experience, rather than to our most exquisite and fine thinking?  This proverb I have just quoted means that the real value of something can be judged only from practical experience, and not from appearance or theory.  It would seem to this commentator that the last two lines of our second stanza above is getting at the same truth, and maybe at times we should do just as those lines counsel us.  Therefore, I'll repeat them by way of conclusion here:

Let your workings remain a mystery.

Just show people the results.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 11

Poem 11

We join spokes together in a wheel, 

but it is the centre hole

that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,

but it is the emptiness inside

that holds whatever we want,

We hammer wood for a house,

but it is the inner space

that makes it livable.

We work with being,

but non-being is what we use.

Reflections:

Once again when it comes to the big questions of life, like the" why" of it, we are singularly at a loss, and are indeed left existentially in a chasm of doubt or in an abyss of mystery that can invite different responses according to our culture and our physical/mental make-up.  Some will respond by faith in a religious deity, others by an atheism that denies all possible design by a higher power and still others will declare their inability to be sure about what life is about at all - that position is known as agnosticism.  In between these three major options a myriad of other nuanced positions can be held.  None of us, as we grow older, will be satisfied with asking merely the "how" questions of science and digesting their rather dry bland answers alone.  We somehow desire and demand  a more appetizing and tastier meal of knowledge.  In this regard, we are in the company of the great Nobel Prize winner for Theoretical Physics, Richard Feynman who declared: "I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned!"  This statement appeals to me because it shows the thrust towards knowledge and truth which, I would argue, is at the centre of all good religious inquiry as well as that of the sciences.  I would also believe firmly in the contention of the great nineteenth century theologian and scholar, John Henry Newman, that no truth in any area of human exploration into knowledge can contradict another truth found in another area of such exploration: he declared that no truth can contradict another truth as such was axiomatic by very definition of truth in the first place.

And so we return to the paradoxes and the unity of opposites or of binaries or of polarities. I have spoken of this concept many times in the preceding posts. A partial list of such polarities would be:

• Light vs Dark
• Night vs day
• Clear vs Opaque
• Heavy vs Light
• Good vs Bad/Evil
• Rigid vs Flexible
• Emptiness vs Fullness

The poem above returns us once again to the image of the wheel which is a wonderful symbol for life which continues to persist and perdure in a cyclical sense.  The paradox at the heart of the first stanza of the above poem is worth repeating: "it is the centre hole that makes the wagon move."  This is obviously paradoxical.  I remember once, when attempting to write on the mystery of suffering as an undergraduate in philosophy and theology, coming across the image of a word carved in stone which sought to contend that the word itself exists for us in the emptiness carved from the stone.  I also remember finding an image of the word "evil" carved in stone in some book or other.  What these artists and authors were getting at is the Augustinian theory/theodicy that evil is simply a lack of the good that should be there in the first place: "MALUM EST PRIVATIO BONI."

In the second stanza above, we are presented with the image of the emptiness in the pot having the potential to hold the substance of its contents.  The potential of emptiness for fullness is also paradoxical and essentially mysterious, belonging to the sense of wonder which is the beginning of all philosophy and indeed of all knowledge.

And then we are faced with the final paradox that Being and non-Being are the major balance of opposites that we encounter in human existence.  That tension of polarities suffuses everything we do in life.  Life occurs somewhere somehow as the very energy that shoots between both those poles of Being (Life) and Death (Non-Being).  In a sense, to live is to die and mortality is central to what life essentially means.  I wrote more fully on this particular tension by way of reference to the Second Law of Thermodynamics HERE in this blog so I shan't run the risk of repeating myself ad nauseam. 

Meditating on non-being as well as being is important, and that's the reason why Buddhists place a lot of significance upon the student in search of enlightenment learning to meditate upon his/her dying and death.  Such a meditation is never in any way morose or depressing as it essentially liberates the meditator to more fully live in the "now" and to embrace the presence of his/her existence.

Conclusion: One again I invite the reader of these few words to re-read the above Taoist poem and to let a remembered word or phrase or line act as a mantra for a meditation session of say five or ten minutes.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 3

Tao Te Ching

Poem 3

If you over esteem great men,

people become powerless.

If you overvalue possessions,

people begin to steal.

The Master leads

by emptying people's minds

and filling their cores,

by weakening their ambition

and toughening their resolve.

He helps people lose everything

they know, everything they desire,

and creates confusion

in those who think that they know.

Practise not-doing

and everything will fall into place.

Commentary

In the above poem not-doing equates to being.  Traditionally, in most philosophical and spiritual traditions, there has been a polarity set up between being and doing.  In the Christian Scriptures there is the lovely story of Martha and Mary that refers to an episode in the life of Jesus which appears only in the Gospel of Luke, and can be read immediately after the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:38-42). 

Icon of this Lucan story: See HERE

In this story Mary sits at the Lord's feet listening (that is, a metaphor for contemplating or meditating or praying or simply being in a state of reverence for the holy) while her sister was anxiously doing preparations so that the welcomed guest (the Lord Jesus) would have all the generosity the household could offer (that is, action or doing). All traditions of spirituality recommend a balance between both, while in this Biblical story Jesus tells Martha that Mary has chosen the right course of action in this case, that is, not-doing, meditation, contemplation or prayer.  Once again, and it bears repeating, that all traditions emphasize the balance between both and how both are necessary to good spiritual practice.  However, there are, of course, stories that emphasize either one according to the intentions of the author at that particular time to get his message across.  All Scriptures, whether Christian or Taoist or Buddhist or Hindu have to be taken on balance.  There is nothing as bad as Scriptures used to prove a polemical or didactic point without an appreciation of context, good scholarship and that elsewhere in the same Scriptures that there are other balancing texts giving a different perspective on the question but never necessarily being self-contradictory.  That's why a knowledge and understanding of polarities or binaries or opposites is so crucial to our spiritual journey. Doing and Being are both important aspects of the Doing-Being polarity.  (For readers with an interest in graffiti here is an interesting article on the origins of the graffito joke: To Do is To Be - Socrates, To Be is To Do - Aristotle and Do Be Do Be D0....  - Sinatra: Quote Investigator ).

What is appropriate in life is obviously BALANCE.  All good mainline spiritual traditions recommend such balance.

Avoidance of Extremes

In keeping with the notion of balance the above poem opens with a call to the reader/meditator to avoid extremes.  Over-esteeming some people, our author poet argues, disempowers others.  Over-valuing possessions leads people to steal.  The question of over-valuing is an interesting concept in itself.  We all too often hear of the polar problem of undervaluing.  Indeed, it is interesting to follow this line of argument philosophically and spiritually.  Moot questions would be: Is it possible to over-value human life?  Is it possible to over-value humankind's place in the world? Is over-valuing anything, including ourselves, a mark of our ego-driven ambitions and sheer hubris? These are all questions, not statements, of course.  In this regard, I firmly believe that what the Physics Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman said is totally correct, that we should "..... rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned."  However, a good pilgrim on the path to self-knowledge or spiritual-awareness will know that it is the balance between the extremes that counts; that it is the healthy tension set up between the poles that is important, not either pole in itself.  Over long years of spiritual questioning and questing, I have become enamoured of how close theoretical physics can be to spirituality.  As the great nineteenth century theologian John Henry cardinal Newman used say: no truth from any area of knowledge can contradict another truth from another area if it is to be the truth at all - this, in short, is axiomatic or foundational to all knowledge or truth. 

Emptying and Becoming Empty

These notions are central to most mainline religions also.  The believer has to empty himself or herself of his/her EGO, pride, hubris and all other lesser attributes so that they can become receptacles or vehicles or conduits of the divine.  In meditation and prayer in all traditions, the seeker has to empty his/her mind of distracting thoughts and baser desires. Even if we are not religious qua religious or spiritual qua spiritual in the specific sense, we are all spiritual in a general or generic or psychic sense.  There is always much in us that has to be healed, or made whole in the process of Integration of the self (Anthony Storr et al) or in the process of Individuation (Jungian Analysis), or in the process of Self-Actualization (Carl ransom Rogers and Abraham Maslow) or in that Self-realization (general). In spiritual terms, if we belong to a specific religious or spiritual tradition we might call it an emptying in order so we can be filled by the divine.  In a sense, of course, these are all human words that stretch language to breaking point in an attempt to describe a religious or spiritual experience.  For Christian believers, St Paul advanced the notion of the kenosis undergone by Jesus Christ in order to save the world.  As a discourse on this Christian concept is beyond our needs here, please refer to the following links if you wish to read about it: WIKI  and  Theopedia. 

There is throughout the Tao Te Ching,  then a call to humility, a call to declaring first our ignorance before going on our spiritual way.  Please note how close this is to Socrates' call to all who would wish to be philosophers or followers of what is true to first declare their ignorance and that knowledge will follow from there by a process of radical questioning of all our thinking.  St Augustine, the fifth century A.D. philosopher and theologian maintained that even with the aid of Christian revelation that divine knowledge was so far beyond our ken in this world that the most we could achieve, after all our intellectual and spiritual travail, is merely what he termed a "docta ignorantia" or learned ignorance.

Meditation:

Read the above poem again and let whatever line or  phrase or word jump out of the text for you and repeat it in your mind slowly like a mantra.  Then close your eyes, centre yourself and meditate on those words for five minutes.

Namaste, friends!

Journal of a Soul 39

The Human Condition

Autumn scene, Fairview Park

This title covers a multitude.  It is a phrase I have heard bandied about since I was in my mid-teens.  When I was young I was very certain of what things I really believed in; I trusted instinctively what society in its wisdom through the education system and the broadcast and print media wanted us to accept almost unquestioned; I welcomed almost wholly the accepted truths promulgated by either Church or State.  However, as soon as I got to college I was encouraged to question accepted opinions and beliefs on a cerebral level. However, it was when things began to crumble on a personal level much later in life that I really began to question the old certainties.  Questioning old certainties has always been part of the life of the thinking person.

Daily Reality

As a firm believer in the positive outcomes of such practices as those of various Meditation techniques, Yoga, Zen, TM, Tai Chi, Falun Gong, Focusing (Eugene Gendlin) and so on, and even ordinary everyday physical exercise, I have instinctively in the last twenty or so years almost always listened to the wisdom of my body.  The body, when listened to in any attentive fashion, is a great yardstick of and guide to what is truly real.  Our bodies in a physical way (through pain and the development of the various psychosomatic diseases) "know" much more about us -  stuff we either refuse to accept about ourselves or the world - or are simply unconscious of in the first place.  That's why another name for Meditation is Awareness (Anthony de Mello has written a wonderful book with this very title which is really worth reading) and Mindfulness, still another more modern synonym.  Such practices train us in precisely becoming more aware firstly of our own bodies through concentrating on or being aware of something so essentially and simply human as our very breathing, and then becoming aware of our "real" or "essential" self, or simply by learning to delight in simply being.  Doing versus Being is an interesting polarity, or contrast, or healthy tension, or dichotomy - call it what you will. They are really the two polar opposites of the see-saw of existence as it were.  I will refer to them more fully below.

What is Your Daily Reality?

My daily reality is that of a 55 year-old Special Education Teacher in a Boys' Secondary School where I teach in the Asperger's Unit as well as doing learning support for pupils who have problems in Mathematics.  In between the teaching, or perhaps more correctly, during that teaching I listen to the vicissitudes of the lives of my charges.  One boy who comes in tells me about his suicide attempts and about his friends who have cut themselves.  Young people (that is, teenagers) today have many concerns, not all as grave or as serious as the one I have briefly described in the foregoing sentence.  Others have addiction problems or are perhaps the sons of absent fathers, or of former or current drug addicts, or of abusive parents and so on and on and on. Others are just going through the usual hard and difficult identity crisis associated with their adolescent years.  However, the nub of the problem, that is of the human condition, is very simple really - all they want is a compassionate and non-judgmental adult ear.   In a sense my workaday world is never dull or dry or sterile. It is always gripping and mostly rewarding if at times somewhat tiring. All you have to do, dear reader, is to ponder what your daily reality is.  Perhaps it would be better for you to write it down for yourself, or if you are artistic you might sketch or paint it, or if musical sing it or play it. 

Lessons to Learn

Autumn Scene, Fairview Park, late November, 2011

There are many lessons we can learn from tuning in to life, from becoming aware or mindful, and I shall attempt to list some of them here.  Pardon me if you have read some of them here before because it is really very hard for me to be fresh and insightful a lot of the time.  When I write here, I often feel like I am repeating myself ad nauseam. However, I take much solace from the answer T.S. Eliot gave to an interviewer who commented that the famous and erudite poet had repeated himself much in his poems and writings that while he may have done so he certainly never said anything ever again in precisely the same way. Anyway, here are some short lessons I have learned from life:

(i) We don't get out of life alive.  This world is not a "dress rehearsal."  We only get one shot at living and we had best make the most of it.  In other words, here we have the context for Horace's famous injunction to us "to seize the day" and forget totally about tomorrow and what it may have in store for us.  Those of you who laboured in the vineyards of the Latin language will recall the actual words of Quintus Horatius Flaccus: "carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero."

(ii) Are we happy in our own skin?  Are we really happy with what we do in life, with our job, in our friends, in our partner and family? 

(iii) Have we really got time for others?  Do we really listen to them?  Or even more importantly do we really have time for ourselves? Do we really listen to our inner "self"?

(iv) Think about, or rather meditate upon that wonderful dichotomy between Being and Doing.  In reality one is not more important than the other.  It is rather the harmonious balance of both that is of utmost importance.  Doing must be challenged by Being, and Being can be  supported and enhanced and  by Doing. There is a further polarity worth mentioning here, too, that of Being and Having.  This existential dichotomy was emphasized and explicated by the psychoanalyst, psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm.  While the Western capitalist system feeds the greed for Having, the Eastern religions emphasize the overriding importance of Being.  While we need to have the basics to survive, and some social economists and psychologists suggest that after an annual income of some 44,000 $ the happiness index goes no higher.   

(v) Carl Jung, following his great friend, mentor and collaborator but later opponent, critic and rival Sigmund Freud, held that “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”  This task takes many long years of work to accomplish.

(vi) Can we live with ourselves, or accept ourselves precisely as we are?  When we make decisions can we sleep easily knowing that we have done our best and have acted from authentic motives?  If we can we are approaching what it means to be true to our core self.

To be continued

Journal of a Soul 20

Searchers for, or Makers of  Meaning?

It is wonderful to write one's thoughts, give them shape and pattern on a page, and even see them take a virtual form that can be summoned up at the touch of a button or as a random connection to some remotely connected search on Google, initiated by an unknown soul.  Then that those thoughts might be read, that they might even elicit a response only adds to the wonderment.  There are times when I wonder do my thoughts precede my words or do my words precede me thoughts - the hen-egg conundrum in another guise.  And yet, I believe instinctively that it is the interplay of both, that dynamism, or symbiosis even, where one supports the other that is more important.  

As I write these thoughts, I also fully realise that these thoughts write me, that they are, in fact, giving shape to "me", forming my selfhood.  We find our selves (and I deliberately disjoin this word) in doing, in action and in all things that we pursue to give our little lives meaning.  As I have said in these posts so many times before, we are meaning-making creatures, and the greatest meaning we can make is our very own SELF.  Again, we shape our selves in another important way to - by simply learning to be and become the person we were innately meant to be.  In that sense we make ourselves by metaphorically travelling in two directions as it were, by going without (going out and interacting with others and the world) and by going within (through meditation and contemplation, through entering the stillness of not alone one's own being, but discovering in that stillness the unity of all being of which the self is put a drop in the ocean.).

And yet, I don't want to make too much of "making meaning" here.  I wish, rather to comment on the human condition insofar as it relentlessly searches for meaning.  In a sense, this is almost a counter spiritual movement if it is a fraught and lonely search that reveals very little meaning, maybe even frustration and despair.  In this sense, I am writing here about the very heart of existentialism - that lonely search for meaning in a seemingly meaningless world.  Searching for meaning can be both a spiritual and a disillusioned aspiritual (I'm not sure if this word exists, but unspiritual is certainly not what I mean, what I mean is a-spiritual in the way amoral relates to moral!) quest at one and the same time.  Let us not dwell too much on the sheer meaninglessness of life as Camus would have it in his version of the great myth of Sisyphus. 

Ah, dear reader, you are probably wondering where these thoughts are going to at all, at all.  In these posts, I often believe I am feeling my way in the dark, but hopefully with a little more direction than Mulla Nasruddin searching for his lost key under the light of the street lamp simply because there was more light there than in the dark house where he had lost it.  And so let me come to some point in this meandering post.  Last Thursday evening I had the pleasure to view the wonderful film The Great Gatsby.  Indeed, it was to my mind wonderfully loyal to the book, or at least to my memory of it from years ago - having read it for my Leaving Certificate many years ago when I was a young lad of 17 years. What comes across in the film is the sheer feeling of lostness, of being cut adrift on an ocean of multiple, though colourful and alluring experiences; of searching for something of value, almost irretrievably lost in that multiplicity; of tasting excess after excess and finding it all so hollow.  What is it, at all, that can make us humans really happy?  Why do things, which we once desired so much, eventually leave such a rotten taste in the mouth?  

In a sense, this book or film is quintessentially about F. Scott Fitzgerald himself.  After all, all writing is inevitably autobiographical  when pondered and reflected upon and cut back to the bone.  One quotation I placed on the flyleaf of a recent piece of work was a quotation from this wonderful Irish American writer.  That quotation runs:  “Five years have rolled away from me and I can’t decide exactly who I am, if anyone.  (Letter, 1932).  He had written The Great Gatsby in 1925 at the young age of 29, when he was obviously a searcher for meaning in a fraught and intense way.  One can see this search for meaning (let's call it meaning as revealed in love, in human love - yet very much in this case in the form of the classical love for the unobtainable beloved) in the following quotation about Gatsby which we find in the first chapter:

―He stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward – and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far way, that might have been the end of a dock.

           (Scribner's paperback edition, p. 21)

That green light in the darkness marked where his beloved Daisy Buchanan lived with her millionaire husband Tom.  And, indeed, we instinctively know that this love is pretty much unobtainable, and the fog that is not quite as thick as that in Eugene O'Neill's wonderful play Long's Day's Journey into Night, is all too indicative of lostness: "―If it wasn‘t for the mist we could see your home across the bay…You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock." (Ibid., p.92)

And then, there is that very sad expression, which is the very antithesis of all spirituality, that suggests that the only way of steering our barque of self through the choppy waters of life is by living in the past or by the vain attempt to recapture that past in the now..  The quotation I have in mind is given almost verbatim in the movie:

"Can‘t repeat the past?‘ he cried incredulously. Why of course you can!" He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand...  I‘m going to fix everything just the way it was before," he said, nodding determinedly. "She‘ll see."

―He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.  (Ibid., p.110)

In this sense, then, as I have already stated, this could be said to be an aspiritual quest, an illusive and elusive quest.  Those of us who deeply accept the spiritual life believe fervently in living in the now.  Indeed, we could say that Gatsby was living in a spiritual or existential hell, well before Albert Camus gave it philosophical form.

One theme of this novel  or film could be stated as follows: Dwelling in the past can only result in obsession and misfortune. We cannot transplant ourselves into the past again as it is passed and gone forever. The future misfortune can only be prevented by learning from the past.  Gatsby simply had not learned this lesson.  Another theme would be: Some of us drink in and swallow whole the illusion that the rich person's life is perfect.  In other words, we confuse illusion with reality.  After all, is this not one of the main symptoms of mental illness - that the border lines between illusion and reality are very blurred indeed? Another theme, still, would be that when dreams become an obsession they fall out of our reach.  Finally, another theme would be that wealth is not all it's cracked up to be; that the American dream may be linked to wealth, but that it is much, much more, too.

In writing this novel of quest for meaning, F. Scott Fitzgerald penned a classic which has made his name immortal in human culture as he pointed out the sham which life can be.  Deep down as humans we know we want more.  The tragedy may be that this wonderfully gifted writer F. Scott Fitzgerald may not have truly realised how great a writer he was and that his finely crafted words would live on after he had passed into the mist or fog of the past as a person.

Reading the book and viewing the film can only affect us deeply if we are at all human.  Both will push us to want to live in the now with an eye to our future. We can never, for an instant really believe the words of the narrator as we finish the novel or film, because we know, that like Gatsby we, too, will be lost forever in the fog of our own illusion if we do:

―I thought of Gatsby‘s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy‘s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could barely fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night....

―Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that‘s no matter – to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther….And one fine morning...

―So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.(180, 182)

Journal of a Soul 18

The Nub of it is the Now of it

Metaphors intrigue us just as life does.  We forge them in the smithy of our soul in an effort to explain the seemingly incomprehensible, i.e., life in all its vagaries and vicissitudes.  "Nub" or "Knub" ( a less frequent spelling) refers to the core or essence of something.  My alliterative title refers to the nub or essence of life or of existence.  The major lesson from every spiritual tradition under the sun is to live in the NOW!  Hence my pithy and alliterative title: The Nub of it is the Now of it.

Oak sapling growing in our resource room at school

As I said many times in these posts and in other blogs elsewhere, the goal of life can be expressed many ways, viz., self-actualization (Abraham Maslow, Carl Ransom Rogers and the Humanist School of Psychotherapy in general), integration (Anthony Storr, Ronnie Laing, Rollo May, Irvin Yalom), individuation (Jung),  and self-realization (Hinduism).  While we could spend days on end reading the writings of all these scholars and exploring their different emphases on what they consider to be the essence of life, we may, I believe, boil it all down to what my title succinctly states:  THE NUB OF IT IS THE NOW OF IT.

Not for the Faint-Hearted

However, the NOW OF IT is not for the faint-hearted.  It is very much for the courageous.  To live in the now requires courage and, indeed, great courage.  It requires a togther-ness and holism which can only be acquired through what today we call MINDFULNESS. If I were to recommend any single book to read with respect to courage it would be Paul Tillich's wonderfully enlightening little book The Courage To Be, wherein our author sees the courage to be, or what I call the "aude essere," as the only antidote to all the myriad theses of meaninglessness handed out to us today as easily as those advertisement leaflets in the high street.

Let's give some practical examples:

(i) I recall having to sit for hours on end in the casualty department of Beaumont Hospital in January 1993 when my father was left lying on a trolley.  He had just had a major stroke and his mind was completely confused.  There was no use being anywhere except in that situation.  Even as I type these words I feel the "nowness" of that situation etched onto my memory.  From the meditation or mindfulness practice I had being doing, I remember saying to myself:  "Be here in the NOW; go with it; stay here; don't run away!"

(ii)  At the dentist:  I have found the same advice applicable to the dentist's chair which many people fear.  There is such a thing as the aesthetics of pain.  Pain can be horrific and sometimes but very rarely sublime.  Now I speak here in a practical and pragmatic sense of real pain and fear experienced by everyone in the street.  I had a tooth next to a wisdom tooth extracted very recently.  The dentist said:  "I won't lie to you, there is a possibility that the wisdom tooth will come out with the bad one.  I'll have some hard work to do here!"  I remember saying to myself practically the same words as in point (1) above: "Be here in the NOW; go with it; stay with the experience; notice all the movements of the instruments!"  Indeed, I felt absolutely no pain though I could feel all the movements of the dentist's instruments:  the expanded openness of my jaw bones, almost locked in place, the movements of the various instruments and the tearing sound as the tooth broke loose from the jaw bone leaving two shards behind which he then told me he needed to extract.  I felt an instrument lever those two shards from the jaw bone.  Staying with it in the Now of It lessened the crisis.  

Schooll boys doing their house exams

(iii) Taking a rough class.  I am a Resource Teacher these recent years which requires me to listen to, help, counsel and teach autistic adolescents - all boys.  However, I also teach one or two mainstream classes in the school to which our Autism Unit is attached. Generally, I take the more troublesome classes there.  This year, I was asked to take a sixth form class of 26 for the Leaving Certificate in Irish.  There are five pupils in that group who have ADHD, two of whom have SNAs (special needs assistants).  Needless to say, they can be very disruptive.  However, it's the being able to remain in the NOW of the situation, without desiring any immediate, rash or instant solution to the problem that helps me relax into the situation, to go with it.  In learning to go with it, my blood pressure does not hit the roof, I'm less likely to shout - actually, shouting only increases the disruption with the guys I'm teaching.  In fact, by being relaxed, living in the now, learning to with the flow, not seeking instant solutions helps me very much to survive and to be able to deliver some form of a coherent lesson.

(iv) Going to the Gym:  Now, I need to go to the gym more often.  In fact, I was there this morning  for the first time in two weeks and I enjoyed it immensely.  Now, I should go at least three times weekly as I need to shed a half stone.  The last time I shed that amount my blood pressure and blood sugar levels both dramatically decreased.  Unfortunately, I put that weight back on in the past three or four months with the resultant raising of blood pressure and blood sugar levels.  Anyway, my point about going to the gym is that bodily exercise really helps to root us in the NOW: the now of my breathing, my muscular movements etc.  I find going to the gym a marvellous way of being MINDFUL.  Indeed, any physical activity roots us in the NOW.  The body, indeed, is an essential physical representation of the self.  To be clued into the body is to be clued into the self and essentially to live in the now!  This is one of the most powerful reasons I know to counter the old lie of the Cartesian split between Body and Soul/Self.  That's why I like the compound expression BODY-SOUL rather than the opposition Body and Soul.  There is a unity not a duality!

Photo I took in Mayo, May 2011

(v)  I have also mentioned many times here and elsewhere in my writings the fact that I suffer from clinical depression which was diagnosed by one of the best psychiatrists it has been my privilege to come across in my lifetime, one Dr Anthony O'Flaherty, now happily retired.  Looking back on the episodes of depression I then suffered, I can only say that I would not wish them on my worst enemy.  However, I remember, yet again that it was my determination to stay in the NOW OF DESPERATION that was often my salvation.  Let me explain.  When one is lost in a bout of depression, there seems to be absolutely no way out.  One cannot sleep for nights on end.  The more one desires to sleep and escape the nowness of the desperation, the less one is likely to sleep.  After many a sleepless night, I changed my attitude and said to myself:  "I'm not going to try to go to sleep at all, I'm going to hang on for dear life onto the coat tails of those never-ending and spiralling thoughts that chase each other round my brain interminably!"  Ironically, it was only when I abandoned myself to the inevitability of not going to sleep that I, in fact, eventually fell asleep.  Another way of putting this, is to say simply that THE NUB OF IT IS THE NOW OF IT!

I'm sure that there are many examples that you, dear reader, can add to the ones I have described above.  In finishing here, may I wish you a surfeit of living in the NOW!