Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 50

Poem 50

The Master gives himself up

to whatever the moment brings.

He knows that he is going to die,

and he has nothing left to hold on to:

no illusions in his mind,

no resistances in his body.

He doesn't think about his actions;

they flow from the core of his being.

He holds nothing back from life;

therefore he is ready for death,

as a man is ready for sleep

after a good day's work.

Commentary

One of the disputed quotes attributed to one of the mid-twentieth century Prime Ministers of Great Britain, Mr Harold Macmillan, who when asked what was most likely to throw any administration into crisis, is the famous one which goes, "events, dear boy, events!" Whatever about the accuracy or inaccuracy of its attribution, its wisdom is simple and so true.  Things happen either purposely or by chance, crises occur, accidents  take place and so on and so forth, and the wisdom we must learn to our definite cost is that we must weather these incidents with equanimity if we are to survive in this world in any sane sense.  This is the type of wisdom that our Taoist poet is alluding to in this poem above.  Once again, I hasten to point out that what he is recommending is no mere passivity in the face of random or caused occurrences, but rather an attitude of mind, a seemingly imperturbable spirit that will allow us peace of mind and sanity to deal with the human fall-out of those events no matter what the level or depth of their tragedy.

A weak flame tries to pierce the falling dusk: January 2016

Once again, at the heart of all spirituality is the contemplation of death and dying.  It has most rightly been pointed out by our inherited wisdom as a human race - in almost all spiritualities to a greater or lesser extent - that death is not the end of life - in fact, they maintain that it is part of the experience of living and central to life itself.  After all, individuality is but a little part of what life is.  We individuals are but mere specks of life who mostly subscribe to our own mythology of being so much more than we actually are: life is always greater than we small specks of it. However, when those close to us die, we are reminded in no small way what fragile vessels of life we are in actual fact.

In this regard, the Master lives by holding nothing back from life, by retaining nothing within his being that should not be spent on living and thereby adding to the sum total of life in the outer world.  He most naturally goes with the flow of life or the river of being.  As I type these fragile words on this virtual page in computer space, I realise how much more powerfully moving and existentially-loaded is the phrase "river of being" than the reductive, though solidly biological, "river of genes" of Richard Dawkins.  As humans, we are spiritual realities inhering so mysteriously and intricately in our temporary biological bodies. And so, as death and dying are inextricably part of all growth and of all life, the Master lives also by holding nothing back from the inevitability of life, not even his own death.  And so, dear friends, chance readers of these cyphers in virtual space, we could do worse than re-reading and pondering the above poem, which I repeat here for emphasis.  Namaste!

The Master gives himself up

to whatever the moment brings.

He knows that he is going to die,

and he has nothing left to hold on to:

no illusions in his mind,

no resistances in his body.

He doesn't think about his actions;

they flow from the core of his being.

He holds nothing back from life;

therefore he is ready for death,

as a man is ready for sleep

after a good day's work.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 47

Poem 47

Without opening your door,
you can open your heart to the world.
Without looking out your window,
you can see the essence of the Tao.

The more you know,
the less you understand.

The Master arrives without leaving,

sees the light without looking,

achieves without doing a thing.

Commentary

Windvane on the lungomare in Catanzaro Lido, January 2016

It is becoming increasingly hard  to come up with new insights with respect to the Tao Te Ching and consequently avoid boring the reader unduly by too much repetition.  I have referred to the balance of opposites many times here already.  However, a central pair of polar opposities that springs to mind is that between Inner and Outer. Indeed, this polarity is quite common in early philosophy and theology in general.  The great early Christian scholar St Augustine of Hippo (354 - 430) was one of the scholars within the early Church to highlight its importance.  Augustine was a restless seeker who sought the meaning of life both in the outside material world and also in the inside spiritual world.  According to his own account of his quest for meaning which he delineated in his wonderful classical biography The Confessions he found the former, while sensually stimulating, to be spiritually stultifying:

Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you.  And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged in to those lovely created things which you made.  You were with me, but I was not with you.  The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness.  You were radiant and resplendent - you put to flight my blindness.  You were fragrant, and I dew in my breath and now pant after you.  I trusted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you.  You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.

Admittedly, Augustine went on to condemn the material things of this world, most especially those related to the body as vitiated with evil and to elevate the spiritual realm to a rather esoteric stratosphere.  In other words, I believe he did not manage to hold the two poles in a healthy balance.  However, whatever about our criticisms of Augustinian philosophy and theology, we cannot overlook his insight that a spiritual dimension inheres within us.  In fact, Augustine spoke of his community of fellow friars as being on a shared journey to God and that this same God could be met in their code of practice (moral behaviour), the priciples they subscribed to (the Christian creed) and in their cultic practices (what I mean here by the word "cult" is any particular system of religious practice or worship: religious ceremones like Mass and so forth). He aslo recommended a life of prayer and meditation that followed a process which he called "interiority," namely that it was by a process of "going within" in prayer that one communed with God.

Now back to poem 47.  Our Taoist author is in essence doing exactly as St Augustine recommended above, namely that he suggests that we can be open to the Tao without physically opening our door and going outside.  Even without doing that, we can open our hearts out to the whole world.

Again, the idea of humankind's ignorance is an old epistemological tenet dating back many years.  Socrates encouraged his hearers to continually declare their ignorance as they sought out deeper and wider knowledge.  That knowledge could best be discovered by a process of asking tough questions to elicit ever clearer answers.  Augustine built on Socrates through Plato by recommending what he described as a "docta ignorantia" or "learned ignorance." This is the sense of the second stanza which declares that "the more we know, the less we understand." If one imagines a sphere as being the amount of accumulated knowledge learned by humankind then as knowledge grows the sphere obviously grows and while we have amassed more knowledge and wisdom there is a gowing surface of knowledge over against an ever-expanding universe of unknown knowledge and wisdom.  In that very same sense, it is often said that the more we know, the more we know what we don't know. This is, in effect, the epistemological thrust behind the lines of the second stanza.

Sometimes we need to rest and to cease from all activity to be open to life.  To be busy is a great pastime but it can often lead to mindlessness and drift on the one hand or an obsession with work or with pleasure on the other.  It is in this sense that we must read the lines of our final stanza:

The Master arrives without leaving,

sees the light without looking,

achieves without doing a thing.

Journal of a Soul 56

Body and Soul

A walk in Marley Park, Dublin, April 2014

"Body" and "Soul" are categories with which we are all too familiar.  Certainly, within the Roman Catholic dispensation. Building on Greek philosophy (most especially the work of Plato and Aristotle), the early Christians and the somewhat later Church Fathers promulgated a strong philosophy and theology, or if you like a philosophical theology*, that differentiated very strongly between the two categories. The soul, which is by nature good, inhabits the body, which according to St Paul, whom some scholars see as being as much the founder of the church as Jesus himself, is "the Temple of the Holy Spirit."  Building on the theology of St Paul, St. Augustine would adjudge the body as being simply the root of all evil.  And so over centuries there emerged a philosophy and theology that demonized the body and sanctified the soul.  

This rather radical disjunction of body and soul was accepted right down through the ages and is still central to both orthodox and unorthodox Christian belief, indeed to mainline theist belief.  The body dies and the soul lives on in another spiritual world, another realm. Now, needless to say, I am not arguing strongly on one side or another here.  I am merely stating the facts as they are, facts which hopefully I will build my reflections on somewhat later in this post, and perhaps in further posts.  My preferred method of reflection in things spiritual is always phenomenological, never reductionist or positivist, as anyone who has been a reader of my posts will know.  It's just that I like to get the basic facts straight first before proceeding. 

When René Descartes came along in the early seventeenth century, his "cogito ergo sum," a philosophical position worked out painstakingly through the crucible of intellectual doubt, argued that the mind (the mental) was radically different to the material (the body) and that they somehow interacted through the strange workings of the Pineal gland.**  Now, needless to say, this is a philosophical position compatible with most theologies that claim that immortal souls occupy an independent "realm" of existence distinct from that of the physical world.

That is a very brief outline of the historical background.  Whatever we human beings are in our full humanity we are certainly both mental (spiritual) and material (body).  Modern thinking would argue for a holistic approach where both mental and bodily aspects of who we are are inextricably linked.  While they can be differentiated to enable reflection on the mystery that is the human being in his/her totality, they simply cannot be radically separated as in either mainline Christian theology or in radical Cartesian dualism.

More Questions than Answers: Mind, Soul and Self

I like to describe myself as a spiritual person with a deep interest in Christ and the Buddha, who believes that there is a spiritual aspect to the life of the planet and to all sentient life, and most especially to human life. Indeed, phenomenologically I experience life as miraculous in the sense in which the transcendentalist/realist poet Walt Whitman put it in his eponymous long poem:

To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same;
Every spear of grass–the frames, limbs, organs, of men and women, and all that concerns them,
All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles.

Marley Park, April, 2014

In other words, what I am arguing for here is the sheer mystery or wonder or magic with which the experience of living presents the conscious mind.  To offer simplistic, and especially reductive, answers to the meaning of life is to my mind the height or depth of arrogance and hubris. While no easy answers exist to the following questions in a clear rational sense, nonetheless these questions are valid for every thinking and feeling human being.  Let me pose the questions here - questions that are existential in tenor, questions which invite the listener to listen, reflect, ponder, wonder, expand his/her thought, stretch or flex their cognitive powers or simply invite the questioner to listen in silence and meditate on the experience.

• Is the Mind the same as the Soul?
• Is the Mind the same as the Self?
• Is the Self the Soul?
• What is the Mind?
• What is the Self?
• What is the Soul?
• Where does Personality fit into all of this?
• Is the Self the same as our Identity?
• Who or what defines Who we are?
• Is Identity a psychological phenomenon solely?
• Is Identity a sociological phenomenon solely?
• Is Identity a psychosocial phenomenon more correctly, then?
• Has Identity got a Spiritual dimension?
• Has Identity got a Religious dimension?
• What is the difference between Religion and Spirituality?
• Have the Natural Sciences anything to say about our Identity or about any of the above questions?
• What is the difference between the Natural Sciences and the Human Sciences?
• Where does the Truth lie? In the Natural Sciences or in the Human Sciences?
• Or more correctly, does it not lie in dialogue between both areas of exploration?
• Is Truth singular, i.e., "The One Truth" (Ultimate and Objective)?
• Is the Truth plural, i.e., "The many truths of knowledge" (Relative and often Subjective)?
• Can/does the Soul live on after Death?
• Can/does the Mind live on after Death?
• Can/does the Self live on after Death?
• Why are these questions so important for humankind?
• There are billions of people who believe that these questions are important.  Why?
• Does an animal have a Mind?
• If the Mind = the Soul, then could not an animal be said to have a Soul?
• Why couldn't an animal live on after death so?
• Do animals have a Personality or a Self or an Identity?
• Is a self-conscious Self a Soul?
• Is a non-self-conscious Self, i.e., an animal a Soul?

Obviously, if we wish to explore the above questions systematically we will have to do some pains-taking work of research into the origins of each term, their historical usages from culture to culture and then go on to offer a descriptive definition of each.  Once that's done we should then have to discuss and debate each question in a systematic way. Obviously, one could never tackle all such questions in one post, one chapter or even one book.  However, what I am about in this post is to give the reader a flavour of the breadth, depth and height of the questions posed by any worthwhile philosophical anthropology.

Analytical or positivist philosophers like A.J. Ayer would say that these questions are practically all invalid as they ask questions about things that are mere hypotheses and absolutely strange ones at that.  They are in no way verifiable or falsifiable and hence completely meaningless and therefore redundant questions. Those questions, he argues, simply make no sense at all as they refer to the mere idle speculation of of less rigorous philosophers.  Bertrand Russell says somewhere that to ask such metaphysical questions as I have done above is as ludicrous as asking is there a tea-pot orbiting the sun or any sun out there in space?***

Flowers, Marley Park, April, 2014

Of course, we are perfectly well within our rights to counter Russell, and indeed Ayer who was one of his early students and followers, by stating that in an existential and in a phenomenological sense human beings find that they actually do ask these questions. Indeed, I would argue that there is something within us driving us to ask these questions. In a sense, I believe that our two analytical philosophers are in fact being somewhat disingenuous because they are treating human beings as mere cognitive entities, or as entities that can only ask certain linguistically logical questions, that somehow human beings are not allowed to engage in a meta-linguistics or in a meta-meta-linguistics and further even in a metaphysics. Why not?  In this regard, I have always been inspired by that great metaphysical question asked by Heidegger, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" ****

The Scottish empiricist David Hume was an early atheist who not alone denied the existence of the soul but also of the very notion of a self, an entity that he defined as a mere "bundle of perceptions."  This is alright in theory or in logically worked out clinical thought, but humanity is more than logic or rationality.  Humanity also entails feelings, affectivity, moral and ethical impulses, and indeed much that is non-rational, even irrational.  One might counter Hume and his followers phenomenologically with a statement such as the following: "No client attends a psychotherapist, analyst or counsellor and says 'I am suffering from a bundle of perceptions crisis.'  S/he implicitly, if not  at times explicitly, believes that someone called the Self actually exists."  In other words both client and counsellor know that the self as a phenomenon exists because of their experience.  In all of this, I sometimes take heart that the great Victorian theologian and philosopher John Henry Cardinal Newman***** wrote somewhere that the human being "knows more than he is aware of," and that while he never used the term "the unconscious," he certainly would have been most aware of intuition, feelings and so on, much of which was not accessible to clinical reasoning, though it could always be reflected upon and thought about "after the fact."  Newman saw spirituality and the world of religious experience as being very much part of our overall human experience, though once again only amenable to reason "a posteriori." 

Indeed, if we were to take the Analytical and Positivist philosophers literally we would simply have no literature at all, and indeed I believe there would be no place in such a literal world for Arts of any kind.

Marlay House, once owned by David La Touche, M.P. and first governor of Bank of Ireland

The human being is way more complex than some scholars might allow.  That's why we need a philosophy like that of Socrates, a philosophy that always asks the hard and searching questions, that always asks "why" of everything and keeps asking even at seemingly inappropriate times.

I have spoken before that what is important for our study of the nature of humanity is a philosophical anthropology that looks at that nature from as wide a perspective as possible, that seeks the truth from every possible area of knowledge and does not arrogantly arrogate all truth to its own narrow province like the logical positivists and analytical philosophers do.  Phenomenologically and sociologically, Religion even has something to say about human nature. Perennial philosophy as well as all the other approaches in philosophy, and all the various theologies have much to contribute, too.  The Natural Sciences must always be tempered and balanced by the Human Sciences so as to do justice to "the phenomenon of man," in all  his/her complexity, that is the complete and essential nature of the human person.

In this sense, dear reader, what our anthropology must explore is the "more" that is in humanity rather than the "less."  The easy way out of deep thinking and reflection is often the lazy way of seeking to reduce humankind to the least it can be.  

Endnotes 

*Now the very early Christians would have had very little learned theology.  After all, theology emerged as a reflection on their lived faith experience over the ensuing centuries after Jesus' death and resurrection.  The great Greek and Roman Fathers of the Church and the early Church Councils like Nicea and Chalcedon all co-operated to promulgate various learned theologies (note the plural here, in later centuries a rather solidified central core of orthodoxy emerged, and some even subscribed to one theology or way of looking at things spiritual and religious) built upon the foundations of Greek philosophy mainly.  I have mentioned "philosophical theology" in my text above as it is an area where the two overlap rather foundationally, and obviously I am using this twentieth century term rather anachronistically here.

** "Substance dualism is a type of dualism most famously defended by René Descartes, which states that there are two fundamental kinds of substance: mental and material. According to his philosophy, which is specifically called Cartesian dualism, the mental does not have extension in space, and the material cannot think.  Substance dualism is important historically for having given rise to much thought regarding the famous mind–body problem. Substance dualism is a philosophical position compatible with most theologies which claim that immortal souls occupy an independent "realm" of existence distinct from that of the physical world." See article on Dualism in the WIKI here.

 ***The WIKI describes Bertrand Russell's argumentation on this matter thus: "Russell's teapot, sometimes called the celestial teapot, is an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making scientifically unfalsifiable claims rather than shifting the burden of proof to others, specifically in the case of religion. Russell wrote that if he claims that a teapot orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, it is nonsensical for him to expect others to believe him on the grounds that they cannot prove him wrong. Russell's teapot is still referred to in discussions concerning the existence of God" See here.

**** I have discussed Heidegger's famous question in many posts in various blogs I have written over the years.  Here is a review I wrote of a book with this very title by Leslek Kołakowski: here.

*****The great Victorian scholar, theologian and philosopher John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1090) was perhaps one of the greatest prose stylist of his era.  Much of his prose writings appeared on various curricula in English literature around the world for decades because of its sheer precision and essential beauty.  He was an original thinker, steeped in ancient history, the classical languages of Greek and Latin, the writings of the Fathers of the Church, Church history and contemporary issues in science and philosophy and much else besides.  Indeed, he had one of the subtlest of minds of his time, well able to dialogue with, as well as argue with the Darwinians of his day.  He was also a founder of a University, named the Catholic University of Ireland, which preceded UCD and wrote a classic on the philosophy of education called The Idea of a University.  His most erudite book and the subtlest of his philosophical/theological works is undoubtedly his Grammar of Assent which shows a most amazing insight into not alone why it is reasonable for humans to believe in God, but also shows a profound understanding as to how a human believes at all.  In short, after Rev Professor Jan Walgrave, O.P., I have argued in a paper I wrote some twenty years ago that Newman's approach to belief was one of "phenomenological investigation."  In other words, Newman was very much ahead of his time in describing the complexity of the phenomenon of humanity.  However, Newman's majestic Oxford University Sermons, written in his late thirties to early forties before his conversion to Catholicism, remains my favourite book from the great Victorian scholar for its beauty and simplicity of language and most essentially for its sheer authenticity.

Journal of a Soul 45

Wooden sculpture, Botanic Gardens, Belfast

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

The above rather long quotation with which I begin this post this evening is the third stanza of W. B. Yeats's masterful poem Sailing to Byzantium.  This poem recounts the Nobel Laureate's frustration with the body as he grows old.  The first stanza talks about Byzantium's being "no country for old men," stanza two that "(a)n aged man is but a paltry thing", and then in the above quoted stanza we read that the poet's heart or soul is "sick with desire//And fastened to a dying animal//It knows not what it is."  In other words, Yeats is cursing the body in a way, or at least writing it off as a very frail vessel for the soul/heart. Now, these poetic sentiments are all very much in the tradition of Western Philosophy and Western Theology, firmly reinforced by the Cartesian dualism inaugurated in the seventeenth century and almost fully swallowed whole by more unquestioning scholars in the centuries thereafter.  What I am speaking about here is what the modern English philosopher Gilbert Ryle decried as the "ghost in the machine," a severe criticism of Descartes' mind-body dualism or mainline Christianity's  soul-body dualism.

Immortality, a work I reviewed here.  The exact sentence that elicited this post were: “But it is precisely in this contradiction that I find the crux of the human condition: our heads are full of dreams but our behinds drag us down like an anchor.” (Immortality  by Milan Kunders, Faber and Faber, London, 1992, translated by Peter Kussi, pp. 269-270). 

Body and Mind/Soul/Self

Art on concrete path, Baldoyle, Dublin

Some of the more vexed questions that bother me from time to time, and perhaps sometimes the readers of this rambling journal, are (i) whether the mind equates to the self, (ii) whether the self equates with the soul, (iii) whether the three concepts are really the same and (iv) whether any one of the three survives after death or more specifically whether in my more spiritual moments I really believe that the soul itself continues in another dimension of existence after we have "shuffled off this mortal coil" (Shakespeare) and have left the "dying animal" (Yeats) behind.  These questions bring me into the land of mystery and wonder, rather than into the land of strong belief on the one hand or the land of strong unbelief on the other.  After much reading, study, reflection and discernment I still remain with an open mind, not too sure at all, at all, but that is fine - after all, what is wrong with open-ended-ness?

Where does all the foregoing speculation lead?

Speculation is just that, speculation.  In the end, we humans are left with our experience.  No concepts, no matter how intellectually convincing they may  be, will, in the end, "cut the mustard" or "come up to the mark" when it comes to matters of deep human or existential concern like when we are faced with life or death crises, deep emotional pain or some such human trauma. And so, where does the speculation lead?  In a sense, all speculations only matter as supports for what's deeply held in our experience.  It's hard most times, I believe, to move from speculation or thoughts or theories into deep conviction, though if we are to believe many authors, both theists and atheists, that thoughts and thinking can and do lead to deep confidence in this or that principle.  However, I have always been captivated by John Keats's remark that "axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses." In other words, we will deeply hold philosophical (or theological) axioms only when we have validated them first in our experience.  Hence, the only place we can really turn, then, when we have ceased all our intellectual explorations is to return to the, perhaps not very solid, but nonetheless somewhat firm ground of our own experience.  It is to this ground of personal experience to which I wish to devote the immediately following series of posts.

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!