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 34

Poem 34

The great Tao flows everywhere.

All things are born from it,

yet it doesn't create them.

It pours itself into its work,

yet it makes no claim.

It nourishes infinite worlds,

yet it doesn't hold on to them.

Since it is merged with all things

and hidden in their hearts,

it can be called humble.

Since all things vanish into it

and it alone endures,

it can be called great.

It isn't aware of its greatness;

thus it is truly great.

Commentary

Pond, Parc de Montsouris, Paris, June, 2006

From the beginning of civilisation, human beings have been preoccupied with getting to know and understand the things of the world and indeed themselves.  It is perhaps beyond argument that self-consciousness was and is the key to all civilisation.  One of our early musings as to what life was about concerned the nature of the environment that surrounded us.  The earliest philosophers proposed the make-up of that environment to be the four essential elements, namely earth, air, fire and water.  One can readily understand why a lot of cultures proposed their surroundings to be constituted by these basic elements, for they were self-evidently in front of them, and they needed all of them to survive.

Turtle on the same pond of Parc de Montsouris

What may not be so evident is that ancient cultures also proposed that there was a fifth element that made up reality, viz., an element called "quintessence" from the word "quint" which means "fifth." Hinduism and Buddhism proposed this fifth element as did the Greeks, with the Hindu calling it "akasha" and the Greek philosophers naming it the "aether," a term indeed that persisted in the history of science right up to the late nineteenth century. Indeed, it is also worth noting here that what we now call the natural sciences were once called natural philosophy and that the knowledge of the sciences grew out of the thrust to and thirst for knowledge which began in wonder, that is, in philosophy itself.  Moreover, it is worth noting here also that one of the big questions in philosophy is that of the nature of reality? Is reality all that is noted/noticed/documented by the five senses, that is empirically or is there more to reality?  The idea of the fifth element brings with it all these bigger questions of philosophy as the nature of reality is inextricably linked with other big questions like the origin and destiny of life and all its possible meanings.  The WIKI article on the classical elements is worth perusing for those who require a little extra background on the subject than is demanded in this brief post. See Classical Elements.

My footprints in the sand, Donabate, summer 2006

Living in our modern world where global warning is without doubt drenching, swamping and even drowning our places of habitation and work in water, we cannot but be ever more cognisant of this major element of the four.  Water, both fortunately and unfortunately, will manage to get anywhere at all as those poor souls who have been flooded out in their very homes will attest to.  The human body is mostly water, and we are anywhere between 50 and 75 per cent constituted of it depending on our age, sex and physical condition.

Is it any wonder, then, that the essence or quintessence (that fifth element!) of life, the very Tao is imaginatively described as having the attributes of water, that it "flows," that it "pours itself into its (creative) work," "it nourishes infinite worlds." and yet it does not hold on to them; rather it lets them go to flourish on their own.  Like water, the Tao does not cling onto things, it flows through and by them and lets all things go.

Indeed, all things, our Taoist poet tells us, vanishes into the Tao, and s/he reliably tells us that it alone will endure forever.  Interestingly, and paradoxically, our author believes that the Tao is not conscious of his/her/its own greatness.

Once again, by way of conclusion please read over the above poem and let a line, a phrase or a word suggest itself as a mantra for five minutes meditation.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 12

Poem 12

Colours blind the eye.

Sounds deafen the ear.

Flavours numb the taste.

Thoughts weaken the mind.

Desires wither the heart.

The Master observes the world

but trusts his inner vision.

He allows things to come and go.

His heart is open as the sky.

Reflections:

My father used often say that too much of anything is never good for us.  It is a truism worth repeating that moderation is possibly the best key to life in order to open up all its possibilities.  There is something in us that drives us to want more and more and more. That drive is more than likely part of our primordial instinct to survive. We all want success in life and some of us equate that with status, position in society or wealth.  One just has to take a few steps back and observe how obsessive people become about all of these things. Human beings, in building up an identity, accumulate all of the aforementioned and further a lot of our number become driven to acquire more and more.  And yet none of these things in themselves, either singly, or together necessarily brings us happiness.  Something else is needed.  Onto this scene, then, enter the various religions and spiritualities that seek to offer paths to happiness.   

Attachment and Detachment

Once again, let us return to the Second Noble Truth of Buddhism which reflects the message intended by the above Taoist poem.  This truth insists that there is a definite cause to human suffering and, that is, that all our desires and cravings are based on our ignorance of reality. This ignorance causes us to cling to the things of the world like wealth and success and all their appurtenances  as that which is truly valuable and real.  This Second Truth, also known as Samudaya, tells us that we will be hurt proportionately to the intensity of our attachment or clinging to all these things. Craving can be for sensual experiences like love, money, comfort, success, fame, power and all sorts of pleasant feelings.  Or there can be a craving for being/becoming that leads to a craving that life will continue forever, that there will be an eternal life.

The standard rendering of the Second Noble Truth is that dukkha (suffering or stress) is caused by greed or desire.  Apparently, the actual word for this desire is "tanha," but it is more accurately translated as "thirst" or "craving."  This truth is not telling us that we must give up everything we love and then go live an ascetic life in order to find happiness.  The real issue for us here is far more subtle - it is the issue of our attachment to what we desire and it is this attachment that we must learn to control because if we don't it gets us into trouble (stress or suffering). 

Trees: Newbridge House

In commenting on the above Taoist poem in a rhetorical way, we may say that more and more colours won't necessarily make our lives more colourful; more and more sounds won't necessarily add to the harmony; more and more flavours won't necessarily make the food tastier; more and more thoughts won't necessarily make the mind more intellectually profound nor will more and more desires necessarily make the heart grow fonder. 

Inner versus Outer

St Augustine tells us that he searched for God (we may use this term as a metaphor for meaning if you like) everywhere in the world, through the satisfaction of all the senses and his intellect, but finally found him within, in his own inner self or soul.  He described his way of meditating as that of "interiority." Like the Taoist poet he trusted his "inner vision." All of meditation is about going on that inner or interior journey, that journey down to the real or inner self or still point of being below or above (depending on your preferred spatial metaphor) all our agitated and agitating thoughts.

Candles: Vienna Cathedral

Openness

It is so hard to be open about things: to be open to the self, to others, to the world, to life, to the universe or to whatever is its underlying power.  And yet, that openness is the fruit of much meditation and the promise of all great traditions of spiritual practices.  The intention of this poem is that our hearts too will be "as open as the sky."

Conclusion

In these final lines, I will once again invite the reader to peruse the above poem and let any word, phrase or line strike your attention and then to use that as a mantra for a short ten minute meditation.

Namaste, Friends. 

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 9

Poem 9

Fill your bowl to the brim

and it will spill.

Keep sharpening your knife

and it will blunt.

Chase after money and security

and your heart will never unclench.

Care about people's approval

and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.

The only path to serenity.

Commentary/Reflections

As we grow in age and wisdom, we realise that there is such an attitude as trying too hard. Search too hard for something and we will never find it.  Over-train for a race or a match or whatever and we fall short of winning.  Trying too hard reveals a certain compulsion and indeed a definite fear of failure.  While much hard work is necessary for any achievement that is worthwhile in life, overwork will spoil it in some way - perhaps even by ruining our health in the process.  Look at a skilled football player, a professional runner or swimmer and we notice a certain ease  as well as the hard work necessary for success.

There is an old Zen story that tells of a learned Professor who travels to see a famous Guru in order to find an insight into life.  The Guru welcomes the professor with great generosity and starts by asking him if he would like some tea.  The professor readily agrees and accepts a china cup and saucer while the old Guru boils the water.  The professor holds forth his cup for it to be filled when the water is boiled and the tea made, but when pouring the tea for the professor the Guru keeps pouring until the tea flows over the side of the china cup.  The professor leaps back in disgust declaring: "Why are you over-filling the cup?"  The Guru's reply is most perceptive and goes something like this: "My dear Professor, you are like the filled cup.  You are so full of your own opinions that there is no room for those of others!" This little Zen story captures a similar thought as the opening lines in the above Taoist poem.

Once again, the poem is also very much about the Second Noble Truth of Buddhism, namely that our clinging to and over-dependence on things are the main causes of suffering in life. Again, hopefully as we age and grow in wisdom we will realise that having more and more does not necessarily lead to happiness.  When we are young we want that big house or apartment, that lovely shiny car, that beautiful wife and family, success and promotion as the ego-driven world would have us desire.  If we are wise we will realise that all these things do not necessarily bring us happiness.  The above stanzas invite us to stop endlessly chasing and craving either things or success as the world would demand, and recommend that we sit back and let go, let life and let love, as it were.

Moreover, there is nothing as enslaving as doing things to achieve the approval of others. Nobody's approval is necessary to our self-esteem unless of course we are talking about a child in the family or a student at school which is a far different thing anyway.  Indeed, I have often heard  wise people say: "Nobody can ever have any power or control over you unless you give them permission to exercise it in the first place."  I suppose we only learn this wisdom as we age.

No matter what our work, it is important to have pride in it; to do it to the very best of our ability.  And yet, this Taoist poem recommends that even then we need to put some distance between ourselves and our achievements.  We have to step back from them and let them go, too.  After all, they too will pass, as will we as time will inevitably prove.

To conclude, once again I invite you to read the above poem reflectively yet again.  Any line, phrase or word that strikes you, let it act as a mantra as you meditate for five or ten minutes.

Namaste, friends.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 2

Tao Te Ching

Poem 2

When people see some things as beautiful,

other things become ugly.

When people see some things as good,

other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.

Difficult and easy support each other.

Long and short define each other.

High and low depend on each other.

Before and after follow each other.

Therefore the Master

acts without doing anything

and teaches without saying anything.

Things arise and she lets them come;

things disappear and she lets them go.

She has but she does not possess,

acts but does not expect.

When her work is done she forgets it.

That is why it lasts forever.

Reflections

Paradoxes have long been a means of expressing an abstract thought or feeling or some experience that goes beyond the ordinary. A paradox is a statement that apparently contradicts itself and yet might be true (or, indeed false at the same time). Poetry is, by its very nature, replete with paradoxes. The most memorable paradox that we learnt at school way back in the early 1970s was one from the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth: "The child is father of the man," a line from a short lyric entitled "My Heart Leaps up When I Behold," a poem from 1802 that we all had to learn off by heart.  The line makes no literal sense obviously, but metaphorically it means much, as the child will eventually grow into a man who will in turn father a child.  So, therefore, humankind stretches language as far as it will go to get at a deeper understanding and meaning.  To remain at a literal level is to be two-dimensional and superficial.

Polarities

Our poem above is replete with polarities.  In philosophy polarities are called dualisms, dichotomies or binaries.  In poetry/literature polarities are often referred to as opposites (Coleridge spoke a lot about this dynamism) and even antinomies (a word much favoured by our own national poet William Butler Yeats).  Anyway, it really does not matter what name you call polarities by, because they all amount to the same thing, viz., pairs of opposing concepts.  Our stanza above maintains that each side of a polarity requires the other.  These polarities shoot through much literature of either a religious or spiritual nature and even of none.  A partial list of such polarities would be:

• Light vs Dark
• Night vs Day
• Clear vs Opaque
• Heavy vs Light
• Tall vs Short
• Good vs Bad
• Soft vs Hard
• Rigid vs Loose

and so on and so forth - you can add your own examples to this list.  It would seem that like the positive and negative poles of a magnet or of a spherical body like the earth itself, it would seem that one pole cannot exist without the other.  In like manner, the great psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung spoke about there being a Shadow aspect to every Self.  He argued that it was by incorporating the shadow aspect of the Self that we become whole.

The above poem pushes these polarities even further and stretches language to the very  breaking point of incomprehensibility.  The poet tells us that the Master "acts without doing anything" and that he the Master is actually a "she" when we would be expecting a "he." Obviously Male vs Female would be another example of a polarity.  Bisexuality and androgyny obviously both share in this polarity. Indeed, the Master/Mistress can teach without saying anything.  It's often in silence that we learn much.  I love the healthy tension set up in the following polarity in stanza 3 above: "She has but she does not possess."  This is a wonderful spiritual insight and is really, once again, the second noble truth that dukkha or suffering is caused by our craving of or clinging to our baser and even higher desires.  How often do our possessions possess us?  It is surely possible to own something without being "possessed" by it? We could even be possessed by our relationships as in over-dependence on another.  Again the Master/Mistress is not possessed by her work as "When her work is done, she forgets it."

Again, there is much about "living in the now," that classic statement, that is a plank underpinning every spiritual tradition worth its salt hinted at and implied in the above poem. There is also in these lines a sense of the cyclic nature of things - that the cycle of life endures and perdures and goes on forever.  Maybe that is the sense of eternity hinted at here.  

Conclusion: One again, I invite you to read the above poem and meditate on it for 5 or 10 minutes.

Namaste, friends.

Journal of a Soul 75

Of Living and Dying

"Live in the Now" - that's the lesson of Meditating on Death

“None of us gets out of life alive” is a quotation that remains in my mind.  I even remember the occasion of my first hearing it way back in the early 1990s.  I was listening to a radio programme by the Irish journalist Colm Keane on the subject of “Death Row” in some penitentiary in one of the southern states of the USA.  Our intrepid journalist interviewed a convicted murderer, who was placed behind a protective glass screen.  I remember that this man showed absolutely no remorse for the murders he had committed and saw life as being just a sort of game which one played; a game where it did not matter if one broke the rules as long as one got away with it.  In fact, the prison guards called him, “the animal.”  I remember the hair standing upright on my neck as I listened to this cold, unfeeling, rational, and obviously very intelligent man, express his thoughts and feelings on the crimes he had committed and on life in general. However, he expressed in eight short words the very heart of the human predicament – our temporality or our transitoriness on this minuscule planet that is a mere dot in the infinity of space. This state of affairs, when it hits home in the thinking and feeling and self-conscious human being, is exactly what we mean by the adjectives “existential” or “existentialist.” In short, our mortality lies at the heart of what essentially existentialism boils down to.

Freud used to say that the real repression in humankind was that of the base sexual desires that were deeply rooted in the dark pit of the unconscious.  However, Jung and others since have pointed out most wisely that the ultimate or real repression is that of death.  In one sense, this repression is a survival mechanism.  After all, the denial of death allows for egocentric humankind to push forward against all opposition – coming from either others or nature – to amass property, wealth and acquisitions of all kinds.  One might say, in quite a convincing sense, that all culture is created in the face of death – a sort of myth of significance and permanency in the teeth of the very impermanence and transitoriness of life itself.

Daffodil, Easter 2014

Here is where a philosophy of life comes in on the one hand and where the spiritual and religious traditions on the other have had some insightful things to say.  Admittedly religions in their more structural, authoritarian, hierarchical and indeed forbidding senses have been all too doctrinaire in their tenets and often murdered many who opposed them throughout the course of history.  However, here I am referring to a more devotional and spiritual model or aspect of such religions.  It is arguable that when religions lose vital contact with what the philosopher Eric Voegelin, called their “engendering experience” (or spiritual source or originating vision) they become monolithic, heartless and forbidding structures capable of dehumanising others.

The novelist, literary critic and professor of philosophy Umberto Eco opined that we read literature to learn how to die.  That notion is perhaps a bit one-sided.  I prefer to say that we read literature in order to learn how to live and die.  Living and dying are, in fact, the two sides of the one coin and are somehow paradoxically inextricably linked.  To be a living being is to be a dying being.  Essentially, death and dying are consequences of The Second Law of Thermodynamics or of the results of what’s called entropy.  A thorough understanding of this concept is beyond me as I have little background in Physics, but I can grasp some of its intentions and implications.  To my mind, Walter E. Requadt explains entropy very well for the ordinary person in the street in his wonderfully thought-provoking and stimulating blog called “The Happy Iconoclast” by invoking “Murphy’s Law”:

Unless we constantly insert new energy into a house by maintaining it, painting it, repairing it, the structure will eventually but inevitably be levelled to the ground. Its molecules will move from a lower level of randomization, from structure, to a higher level of randomization, towards unstructured debris.

Entropy is the reason why paint peels, why hot coffee turns cold. Furthermore, entropy is the reason why investments have a pre-ordained inclination to go sour -- unless we enhance success by inserting into the investment system additional energy in the form of strategy, work, calculated risk or other forms of energy. Entropy ensures that sugar, which becomes more randomized when it is dissolved in water, will not reconstitute itself in the crystalline form -- unless we apply heat energy from outside the system and evaporate the water.

Wherever we look, whatever we do, we must be acutely aware of the immutable laws of thermodynamics, especially the easily overlooked Second Law: Entropy. This fundamental law of physics ranks with other fundamental manifestations of the universe such as gravity, time and electromagnetism.

Anything that can go wrong not only will go wrong, it must go wrong, as decreed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (See here: The Happy Iconoclast)

To say that we humans die is to say that we like the entire flora and fauna of the earth are subject to the inevitability of the various laws of the universe, and most essentially to the law of entropy.

Along similar lines, Stephen Hawking told his biographers (Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science by John Gribbin and Michael White, 1992), who had once been Ph.D. students under his direction, that he had never succumbed to anger at life when he was stricken down with motor-neurone disease because essentially life was just chance anyway, and that it all boiled down to the randomness of nature – that is, to the chances involved or the probability of one’s parents meeting and then in the combinations of genes allocated by nature to your particular embryo.  These were, to say the least, random.

Professor Stephen Hawking

While Hawking likes to style himself an atheist, this stance is quite akin to that of a Buddhist spirituality (which some say is not religious anyway) that states that all suffering is caused by our attachment to things animate and inanimate.  All meditation practices and wisdom learnt therefrom and from study, and indeed from life in general, all help us to break free from such suffering by learning detachment. In other words, this is the implication of what is known as the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism that can be stated in simple terms as:

1.  Suffering exists: dukkha. (Life is unfair essentially, with much chance involved – Hawking’s position)

2.  Suffering arises from attachment to desires. (Wishing that things were different – that I shouldn’t get Motor Neurone disease and so on). It is called either samudaya or tanha in the various traditions and is the vain desire to have and control things. 

3.  Suffering ceases when attachment to desire ceases. (When I cease to be attached to unfulfillable desires or even fulfilled ones). The end to suffering is called nirodha. It is achieving Nirvana, which is the final liberation from suffering. The mind experiences complete freedom, liberation and non-attachment. It lets go of any desire or craving. It is an attaining of dispassion.

4.  Freedom from suffering is possible by practicing the Eightfold Path

It is important to note that in the Eastern religions, to meditate on dying and death is no mere negative action.  Nor is it a particularly morose one.  Only at first sight does it appear to be such.  Once one has meditated on either dying or death one comes from one’s sitting with a renewed commitment to living life more fully, and more especially living it more fully in the now.  To realise that truly life is fleeting and that we all end up either “six feet under” or being cremated is to deeply realise that the only answer is to live life more fully, more intensely by being aware of the sheer importance of living fully in the now.  After all, now is all we have.  In a sense, neither the past nor the future exists because the first has ceased to be and the second has not yet come.  In a deeper sense, all that exists is the present moment or the now.  In fact, conscious life is just that – an awareness of the abiding present or the passing now. (Or, as I look at these previous words anew, why not write "the abiding presence of the passing now"?

Picture of a Poppy I took April 2014

 Meditating on dying and death should never bring us down into the pits of despair because its real message is to deeply value and live in the enduring present.  Obviously, I don’t mean by this combination of words that everything stays the same or that nothing changes.  What I mean is that we only can really live in the now of time as it moves – that’s what I mean by the enduring present.

We read in the Tao Te Ching:

If you realise that all things change,

There is nothing you will try to hold on to.

If you aren’t afraid of dying,

There is nothing you can’t achieve.

Trying to control the future

Is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place.

When you handle the master carpenter’s tools,

Chances are that you’ll cut your hand.

(Tao Te Ching, verse 74, Lao Tzu, translated by Stephen Mitchell)

In summary, then, we have two choices and the choice recommended by all spiritualities worth their salt is to choose life not death everyday of our lives by practicing living in the now.

Journal of a Soul 70

The Human Web

Our school debating team meets the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Mr Christy Burke.

Identity is never something one constructs alone.  We are so much social creatures that our identity is moulded, shaped and formed within the context of community.  We reach out from our shell of individuality and, too often from a carapace of loneliness, for the supports of relatives, friends, team mates or other groupings to save us the frightening experience of being alone in the universe.  We were simply never made to be alone.  The wise words of the great philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) come readily to mind: "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me."  It is a quotation that has been etched on my heart or soul since I first heard it.  When one looks out into the infinity of space in the outer cosmos or into the equally mysterious space in the inner cosmos of the atomic world or even contemplates the seeming eternity of time versus the short duration of our little lives one can surely feel that frightening loneliness and brittleness of spirit that Pascal wrote so memorably about in those quoted words above.

Everywhere one goes one can see this thrust in humankind to reach out its fractal fingers over and over again and network its communications into a community - into a veritable human web.  We experience ourselves being moulded, shaped and formed in relationship with so many others whom we touch and who in turn touch us.  Most especially do we experience this sense of being a human community at Christmastide.  The tunes that emanate from the various shops, the songs that are played on the radio, the seasonal music associated with the Festive Season, the colourful lights sparkling in the frosty air, the buzz of busy shoppers buying gifts for loved ones all conspire to convince us even more that we truly were made to embrace and be embraced, that the first person plural is always so much more important than its singular number.  But then, most of us probably do not need too much reminding of this incontrovertible fact.

The Brittleness of Life

Ardgillan Park, Skerries, June, 2014

And yet we are all equally convinced of the sheer loneliness of certain brittle souls.  Only some few months ago I wrote about the final moments of a former student of mine who decided to end his life at twenty short years of age.  He left no note.  There was no indication, as far as I know that he had been suffering pain of such proportions that the only solution that presented itself to him was shutting off the pain by hanging himself from the branch of a lonely tree not far from our school. Further, the experts tell us that once a suicide has definitively decided on the exit plan that a sense of peace descends upon their lonely soul.  Indeed all this young man's closest friends and family attest to his being in fine form on the evening of his demise.  

As I write my mind is enlivened by other interweaving thoughts and feelings.  A colleague of many years passed away barely 24 hours ago.  He was a larger than life character who was a happy soul who had time for all the young men he had taught over his thirty-five year career. He was also generous and kind to a fault.  Sadly, a son of his had predeceased him in an  act of suicide. Then there are other feelings and thoughts which vie for their attention in my mind: another close friend whose mother is dying from cancer, yet another who is herself recovering from an operation occasioned by the excision of a cancerous tumour. These thoughts and feelings trigger other, if older, sad memories of our fragility.  And yet that fragility is a hallmark of our humanity, a quality that somehow mysteriously magnifies the meaning of every little work of our creative if mortal being.  Shakespeare's genius - indeed his very soul -lives on in his wonderful writings.  Mozart's spirit endures in his wonderful music. And so on.  Humankind reaches out its cultural embrace down the timeless generations and on out into future possibilities beyond the finite and limited individual lifespan.

The web is always ever greater than its individual strands and in a Gestalt or holistic way far greater than the sum of its strands. And so I return inevitably to our starting point above that we are very much part of a human network greater than us, in a real sense a human web.  There is a famous seanfhocal or proverb in our native language - Gaeilge - which runs: Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine and which translates "We live in each other's shadow" and to which the following English proverb approximates: "No man is an island." Further, the words of the sermon of the famous Dean of Saint Paul's Cathedral in London, the wonderful poet and divine, John Donne (1572-1631) come to mind here: 

No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.  If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.  As well as if a promontory were.  As well as if a manor of thy friend or of thine own were.  Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind.  And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. [Meditation XVII from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, and Several Steps in my Sickness, published in 1624.]

The Temptations of the Ego

Moon reflected in water, Donabate Beach

In a sense here is where Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha got things so right. In the second noble truth he tells us that suffering is caused by our clinging to things and craving them.  In fact we can also cling to and crave other people by becoming too dependent on them.  This essentially is the weakness of the human Ego.  The Ego in modern English has many meanings. It could mean one’s self-esteem; an inflated sense of self-worth; the conscious-thinking self or in philosophical terms, one’s self. Here, I am using it in a general way as that sense of one's control over one's own life, a sense that could view the self as the centre-point of control of all things that fall within that person's ambit.  Such a person might be arrogant, egocentric and narcissistic. Such indeed are the temptations of the Ego.  In extreme cases egocentrism and narcissism can and do lead to egomania or megalomania that were the hallmarks of dictators like Hitler and Stalin and so on. However, with sound soul-work or good therapy or indeed with mature self-development the Ego can find a balanced place where it can function in harmony with both Superego and Id in the Freudian structural model of the psyche. The Buddhists and Hindus do also use the word Ego as meaning a grandiose sense of one's own importance, a self-importance that must be tamed or even destroyed.  Indeed, the Buddhists have a teaching called Anatta which is a strict one that teaches the doctrine of neither accepting nor denying  the existence of the Ego or Self.  

In all of this we in the West have succumbed to the myth of the grandiose self (Ego) who can control all within its path.  It is also a vain self (Ego) that thinks it can know everything and achieve everything.  It is a power-hungry self (Ego) too that thinks it can control, dominate and subjugate others.  It is a greedy self (Ego) that thinks it can amass wealth after wealth even if this means exploiting others.  It is a lustful self (Ego) that desires the satisfactions of the flesh in all its incarnations.  It is also often a foolish self (Ego) that thinks it can avoid ageing, dying and death.  It is, moreover, a stupid self (Ego) that avoids facing up to painful truths about life.  The reader can add his or her own descriptions of the self (Ego) to this list.

In all of the above the temptations of the Ego-Self are to separation, that the "I" can control, that the "I" can possess, that the "I" can triumph, that the "I" will suffice.  The teachings of all religions and mysticism in general are that the "I" will not suffice, that the "we" of union and unity and oneness only will endure. The path of the Real Self, then,  is to integration not separation.  And so the way out of this separation is through engaging in practices that promote integration, unity, community and communion with one another, even with all of creation, with Mother Earth or Gaia herself. The way out of all the deceptions that the Ego-Self offers us is by engaging in meditation or in any other soul-making activities that recognize the shallowness of the above listed myths of the modern self. In short, no matter who we are, we simply do not get out of life alive. We were made to die and that is the truth of it.  To live is to die.  To live well is to learn to die. To live is to realize that we are a little part of a greater whole.