Journal of a Soul 66

The Futility of Obsessional Searching

Galicia, Spain, not far from Allariz

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

Stream of Consciousness:

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

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

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

Going with the Flow

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

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

Allariz, Galicia, Spain

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

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

Journal of a Soul 63

From the Ashes of Despair

It's hard to know where to start.  Like drawing a circle, I suppose one can put the compass point anywhere on a sheet of paper, set the radius randomly and start at any point to describe it.  Writing about the Soul or Self or Meaning, or lack of any one or all of them, is somewhat similar, I guess.  The alcoholic writer, Charles Bukowski, whom 1986 Time called a "laureate of American lowlife," described despair as only an alcoholic could as: “my beer-drunk soul is sadder than all the dead Christmas trees of the world.”  What, I hear you chorus in response to these words brings you to write about despair?  Well, I suppose when we are inundated on all sides by pain, suffering, dying, death, war and destruction we can be forgiven for at least being a little sad.  What motivates these thoughts forming themselves in words upon this virtual screen is the well publicized death of the brilliant, inimitable actor and stand-up comic Robin Williams, whom the director Steven Spielberg has described as "a lightning storm of comic genius" and the on-going murder of innocents in Gaza, not to mention other places in the world that we forget so easily where such wanton killings of innocents continue to scar and mar the human face of the world.  We forget these poor souls because other more recent horrific news gains sway in the headlines. As I type these poor inadequate words, I am listening to a live radio show here in Dublin, Ireland where parents, sons and daughters and siblings are describing their pain at the suicide of one of their relatives.  If anything, the late great, wonderful human being Robin Williams is still touching our lives all over the world by helping raise our consciousness of this issue. Robin Williams R.I.P.

No Substitute for Experience

The subtitle here says it all, I think.  There is, indeed, no substitute for first hand experience.  Also to sound a very old tune in these pages the cerebral or intellectual only captures such a small, albeit a significant part, of the human phenomenon.  There are so many other dimensions of that phenomenon that can only be described after one has experienced them. These are all those non-cerebral, non-intellectual sides to our character like relationships, experiences of beauty, truth, love, compassion, companionship, care, love, hope, spirit, genius, laughter, genius and even that spark of madness all of which Robin Williams so much embodied in his sheer humanity.  And to that list, dare I say it, I must, of course, add despair.

I have said that there is no substitute for experience.  I have also written about my own experience of clinical depression when I was 40 years of age, now some 16 years ago.  That place or space was one where there was no soul, no meaning, no self.  That was a place or space of despair that only seven weeks hospitalization in a psychiatric hospital could mend. Thankfully, due to medical intervention, I have never had the experience of revisiting either the hospital or that space or place of pain since.  Important here has been a comprehensive understanding of the nature of depression which can be (i) of the clinical or endogenous variety (in other words, a biochemical disorder that can be corrected as far as possible by pharmacological intervention or medication) and (ii) the reactive variety where our life situation brings us down.  In this second variety, counselling and therapeutic intervention are very effective, though sometimes prescribed drugs can help to kick start the process, medicines that can later be withdrawn.  Also, I find that in the case of clinical depression, care of the soul through the creative arts and reading and attending self-help courses also helps.  The worst thing for anyone who knows anyone who is depressed  is to offer them cheap black and white advice.  There is no simple answer as depression varies from person to person in its symptoms, and a "both/and" and not an "either/or" response is the correct approach with regards to medical and therapeutic interventions and helps.

In matters of the mind, cheap advice can be useless at best and destructive at worst.  In all cases I have found that to be with and to accompany others in their crisis is the right approach.  What's said, in the end, does not matter much.  Being there is what matters. It's about presence or being present with others who suffer.  Of course, that is more easily said than done.  The accompanying person or companion will often feel helpless and so useless and more often than not seemingly ignored as the poor wretch suffering their despair simply cannot respond or reach out because they are not able to.

Falling Apart

Often in these times I find turning to poetry one of my resources.  Again, at the risk of repetition ad nauseam in these pages, let me come to William B. Yeats.  He wrote a wonderful poem in 1919, shortly after the ending of The Great War called "The Second Coming", some appropriate lines of which I will quote here:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

While Yeats spoke about the disintegration of the outer world in the wake of the Great War, the lines touch and move me on a personal existential level of inner disintegration and inner falling apart.  To that extent those words of Yeats are really very apt indeed. In this experience of inner disintegration, I am so much reminded of other lines from the wonderful father of Existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard that run:

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.” 

                            (― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death)

Pulling the Parts Together: Standing Together in Hope

Early Christian thinker, Origen, 185 - 254 A.D.

This is so hard to do and so much easier said, so the naivete of the subtitle here has to be forgiven, at least momentarily.  If anything, we humans have to learn over and over again the lesson of our brittleness as human beings. Too often, we believe the myths we have created about our power over all things and even, God help us, our power over ourselves. The old writers and artists often got it right: An early Christian theologian, Origen, presented a response to the problem of evil which cast the world as a schoolroom or hospital for the soul. It is interesting to note that the great Romantic poet John Keats saw the world as the "vale of soul-making" and his thoughts were very much in line with those of Origen.  In other words, to be truly human is to be a carer, a nurse, a doctor or a paramedic for each other.  To be truly human we must be soul-makers, not soul-breakers.  Too much of modern life is into soul-breaking rather than soul-making. To be a soul-maker is to be a compassionate healer.  The answer is seen in all the ways we can become caring communities rather than anonymous urban sprawls that dislocate and break souls down. Indeed, pulling the parts together is no easy task.  We live in a world that almost prefers disintegration to integration.  We care little about others, especially strangers.  We care little even about our neighbours, and often even less about ourselves.  Anonymity is seemingly preferred to being accepted as belonging. Indeed, it is so hard to put down roots in the masonry and concrete of our modern cities.  And yet there are so many reasons to hope as is shown in these two wonderful videos I am placing here below. The first is the moving video of the meeting of two wonderful young human beings one a Palestinian American and the other a Jewish American, both of whom were beaten up by Israeli police at various times in the last several years. Its viewing brought tears of hope and peace and brotherhood to my eyes.  The second is even more moving recent video as the human hands of love speak so powerfully by scratching at the earth and lifting stones and rubble to bring a wonderful little child back to the fresh invigorating air of life. My heart breaks in hope for our stained humanity.  Maybe the youngsters of today will teach their children better than we have done ours: (i)Two Modern Heroes and Healers  and (ii) The Healing Hands of Love.

Journal of a Soul 60

Dealing with Pain

There are no easy answers to any of the big questions.  Indeed, as I have pointed out many times in these posts we engage in good philosophy when we set about questioning shallow solutions, indeed when we suspect easy answers as not alone being the easy way out but to be a simplistic twisting of and an undermining of the truth.  Life teaches us more than "is dreamt of in our philosophy," as Hamlet perspicaciously pointed out to his university friend Horatio.  In searching for meaning, life more often than not forces us away from neat cerebral and cognitive answers to our problems and throws us in at the deep end to either sink or swim in the murky waters of its mystery.

A Mystery to be Lived not a Problem to be Solved

Clontarf, Dublin, Sat 6 July, 2014

When I studied philosophy and theology back in the late 1970s the topic I chose for my 4th Year thesis was "The Mystery of Evil," and the title of this section of my post is one gem of insight I came up with from my reading.  Another gem of a quotation I vividly recall reading was one which goes, "a mystery is not a wall against which we bang our heads, but rather an ocean into which we plunge."  Life teaches us most assuredly, and bit by inevitable bit it knocks the corners off our initial egotistical take on life, chastens our hubris, challenges our certainties and sends us deep into our spiritual and cultural reserves as human beings simply to keep going.  If we are reasonably astute and wise human beings we will learn from our mistakes and from the problems and pains life throws our way so that when we reach twenty years at our job we will have twenty years experience, not one year multiplied 20 times.  Likewise with life - hopefully I have 56 years of cumulative wisdom and not just a few years multiplied by a fairly big factor.  Hopefully, we all will have grown and learnt and deepened and heightened our experience of life and reflected on its significance and meaning with the help of others by the time we age substantially.

When I was doing that thesis which straddled the border ground between philosophy and theology, a not-so-close friend of mine called Paulene O'Rourke was undertaking her thesis on a more personal take on the mystery of evil, namely the problem of suffering and pain. None of her classmates ever got to read Paulene's opus, which unfortunately never really saw the light of day as sadly she ended her own life at the age of 21, having gassed herself in her grandmother's home where she had lived.  This young student was one of the most intelligent girls I had ever met in life and was quite sophisticated and always appeared to me as being quite brave.  Unusual for women at the time, she even rode a small motorbike.  I was not close enough to Paulene to know that she suffered from clinical depression, compounded by the fact that her Doctor father had been killed tragically in Africa and that her mother had become an alcoholic as she had never gotten over the death of her partner.  Too many painful events in life apparently conspired to bring a very sensitive human being to the tragic conclusion of her life in a lonely kitchen, suffocating from gas poisoning.

I often wonder what exactly Paulene had written in her thesis.  I wonder did anyone dare look. That's probably a useless wonderment because presumably it was heavy with pain.  I remember one day Paulene stopped and got me to ride pillion on her motorbike into college.  I remember her being full of life that day.  And yet, and yet and yet? As the Irish songwriter and singer Paul Brady puts it in one of his songs, "Nobody Knows" the chorus of which runs:

Nobody knows why Elvis threw it all away
Nobody knows what Ruby had to hide
Nobody knows why some of us get broken hearts
And some of us find a world that’s clear and bright
You could be packed up and ready
Knowing exactly where to go
How come you miss the connection?
No use in asking…the answer is nobody knows
No use in asking…the answer is nobody knows

(Listen to the song: HERE )

Creativity

The real thing: Edvard Munch's The Scream

Creativity is just one possible doorway towards the assuage of pain and suffering. Once again, needless to say, it is no instant fix or panacea for pain or suffering.  Rather, it is one very valid coping mechanism that we can employ.  How many poems, paintings, pieces of music and sculptures have been created over the years of our civilization whose provenance have been the cruel crucible of pain and suffering?  We instinctively know that the answer must lie in the thousands if not multiples of that figure.  In the field  of music we might mention the suffering endured by Ludwig van Beethoven and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and in the field of art and painting Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch and in the field of writing and letters Sylvia Plath and Ernest Hemingway.    Anyway, these are just names that occur to me of persons who have suffered from severe mental suffering and pain. The reader can add his/her own.  An interesting article on creativity and mental illness can be found HERE.  

Beyond Creativity

Howth Village by night - from the Harbour.  June 2014

I find all types of writing therapeutic, just like an artist finds all types of drawing so.  However, such escape through creativity is just one doorway out of pain.  As a sufferer from clinical depression, I know writing or creativity is simply not enough.  Here is where we need the help from the professional medical people - be they nurses, doctors or psychiatrists.  For some people their depression may be of the reactive variety, that is a consequence of their failure to cope with life's stresses.  For most of these sufferers, talk therapy of various varieties and/or CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy) will treat the mental suffering.  For those of us who suffer from clinical depression medical intervention in the form of psychopharmacology (antidepressants, and other psychiatric drugs in other words) will be the only answer.  And yet, I have found that I have needed both in my personal medical history.  I have a deep suspicion of many who, no matter what their professional qualifications push for a single answer to complex mental issues.  Either/Or has never worked for me personally.  Both/And I have found to be a more balanced position to take.  It's a fact that no depressive can write or draw their way out of depression or even illness.  Once other supports have been put in place, creative pursuits of all kinds will certainly help in one's recuperation, or in at least providing supports along the way.

Balance

Life is so much about balance, about not "going over the top" on any one simplistic solution. For me my mental health includes the following: a reasonably balanced and healthy diet (at which I work as hard as I can, but often fall so far short), good healthy physical exercise, liberal doses of meditation and visualization practices, good solid reading, working at my relationships and getting out and about doing various things to keep my mind busy.  I know how easy it is to fall into   "the slough of despond" as John Bunyan puts it so graphically in Pilgrim's Progress (1678), so I employ as many helps as possible: medical, therapeutic, mental and physical exercise as well as more creative pursuits to "keep my head above water," to use yet another cliché. I switch off immediately when I meet someone who has the perfect answer to everyone's problems.  Such people are indeed a "vexation of the spirit." Like the proverbial drunk at a party they are to be avoided "like the plague."  Apologies for the surfeit of hackneyed phrases and colloquialisms in this paragraph.

Perspective

Arguing about Justice - Dept of Law UCD

I have mentioned this quality many times before.  The other day I went into our National Gallery and viewed some of our wonderful paintings on display.  To view them properly one needs to stand back, and, of course, that's why galleries have to be places with great space, or at least have a great feeling of space about them. Perspective can only be achieved at a distance.  Is it not the same with all the problems of pain and suffering that life throws at us all too randomly?  The perspective of time often heals them.  I love visualization techniques as they are so powerful in helping us through or coping with problems.  One such visualization that I like is to do, and which I find very effective in lifting my spirits, is to sit in what I call my semi-demi-lotus position (as I am so dreadfully poor at crossing my legs!).  I then unwind by using the usual meditation techniques like relaxing the body through a body-scan or concentration on breathing etc. When I am suitably relaxed I envisage myself sitting in my little spot on the ground with my back propped against the wall, then in my library, then my house, my street, my locality, my city, my country and so on up through a bird's eye view of my ever diminishing self, and up further till I have an astronaut's view of the world. This I call my visualization of perspective. When we are depressed we are self-obsessed.  Our little world becomes the only world. Perspective is a way of zooming out of self-preoccupation and self-obsession. We are one little creature on a very small planet in a very big expanding universe, one of some 7 billion plus inhabitants.  It is often good to realize in a very counter-cultural way, at least for a while, that we may not be that important at all in the great scheme of things.*

The Great Spiritual Teachers

Reading and listening to what many of the great  teachers and indeed founders of the various Religions and spiritual traditions have had to say is also important.  I strongly believe that going back to what many of them said cannot be squared with what the so called Institutions or Churches that followed them promulgated.  On this, I recommend a good thoughtful reading of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, especially the wonderfully powerful and imaginative scene where Jesus visits the Grand Inquisitor to tell him how far the Roman Church has strayed from what he was about when he was on earth.  So going back to what Confucius, Jesus, the Buddha or Rumi said can be very inspiring.**  One can find a lot of similar profound thoughts in each of these named above, and one can only be amused that it is so hard to find proof of such teachings in the works of the churches or organizations that were built on their foundations.***

Returning to the Music of Life

Let me in conclusion return to music by way of some further clarification or elucidation of a mystery which is truly almost beyond our understanding.  Firstly, let me recall for you some of the lyrics of one of the songs, Anthem, by one of my favourite singers, Leonard Cohen:

The birds they sang 
at the break of day 
Start again 
I heard them say 
Don't dwell on what 
has passed away 
or what is yet to be. 
Ah the wars they will 
be fought again 
The holy dove 
She will be caught again 
bought and sold 
and bought again 
the dove is never free. 

Ring the bells that still can ring 
Forget your perfect offering 
There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets in. 

(my italicization: You can here Leonard sing this song HERE )

Perhaps a trace or an intimation of an answer lies somewhere in these lyrics.  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps!

End Notes

* The great thing about philosophy is that it trains the mind to ask all the most difficult and awkward of questions.  Not alone is this no harm, but it serves to deepen or to heighten our understanding and appreciation of everything.  On the one hand, we can undervalue human life as is exemplified in all the most horrific of wars we poor humans have been engaged in since time immemorial.  On the other we can over-value human life at the expense of our fellow animals and at the expense of the very environment which, unfortunately, we have almost destroyed. What a legacy we moderns have left for our off-spring!  In other words philosophically we can ask the twin questions: How do we undervalue human life? and How do we overvalue that same life?  Both questions are equally valid.

** Going back to the thoughts and/or writings of these early founders can be both enlightening and often surprising, so much so that one begins to question how far removed institutional and organized Religions have come from the vision or charism of their founders.  Confucius said much that is also found in Jesus Christ, viz., “Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire” which corresponds very nicely to what Jesus said: " Do to others as you would have them do to you." (Lk. 6:31)  There is wisdom in many of their sayings which often should not be taken out of context and which should be balance by other quotations from the same spiritual leader.  Context and balance is very important if we are given to quotations.

*** As regards the foundation of Religions and Churches it is often a moot question as to whether a so-called founder actually founded a particular religion or Church because in certain cases these were established by their followers.  It is arguable that St Paul was the great founder of the Christian Religion while its Roman version could be seen as the child of the Emperor Constantine.  I have no great interest in many of these moot points, save that in questions of truth and spirituality we must progress by taking into account all the sides of a story, all the perspectives as it were.  For me no one Religion, Church or organization can have a manopoly on the Truth.

Journal of a Soul 51

To Travel or Not to Travel

To travel or not to travel, sometimes that is the question.  We are a restless species at base. The great St Augustine described himself as "a restless seeker."  In a sense, that fifth century saint summed up the human predicament nicely.  An acquaintance of mine who died over a year ago was not alone a "restless seeker," but he was also a restless traveller.  The way he dealt with his imminent demise was to take to travelling with an increased compulsion, if his previous obsession with it had not been intense enough.  Even to meet this man, you instinctively and intuitively picked up his restlessness.  He was always on the move, always going places, always living in the future, always making plans and more plans and more plans.  He was a deeply discontent person, and evidently unhappy in the moment. 

This road in Marley Park will eventually lead into the mountains

As I write these lines on the screen before me, I am at home in my attic study, having just finished one of Deepak Chopra & Oprah Winfrey's online meditation sessions.  Usually, I would be down in Isca Marina in Calabria for Easter, but this time I chose to stay at home while both my brothers travelled southward to the Mediterranean.  I have also just completed an eight week guided course on mindfulness in my local university -DCU.  Maybe that was one of the contributing reasons to why I did not wish to travel this Easter. However, there were also issues of getting my house into a more homely state to dwell in.  I have managed to get some long-standing jobs done about the house, and so not travelling did help.

However, for me as I live alone, I enjoy the peace and solitude of my Easter holidays.  I find that when I stay put alone I do a lot mental travelling - sometimes maybe too much. However, such internal journeying can be either stimulating or even disturbing.  Let me spell out what I am about here.  Restlessness can result in our desire to physically travel, but it can also see us staying put and travelling the equally hazardous roads of our own inner landscape.

And so as I sit here typing these words on the screen of my laptop I am travelling the roads of my own inner landscape.  Thankfully these are mostly interesting pathways leading me to a great extent along scenic routes to the discovery of a newer and deeper sense of Self. Moreover, I am also painfully aware that inner exploration for anyone of a depressive nature can be most disturbing, deeply unsettling and not a little scary.  I have written much over the years in various blogs about my suffering from clinical depression of the uni-polar variety.  Hence, I have known only too well the back-roads and side-roads of sadness and depression for a good number of years in my past life.  Thankfully, I have had no reason to travel those dreadful by-ways of the lonely depressed mind in the last sixteen years. Knowing them only too well, and my consequent awareness of what can pull me away from the more secure roadways and pathways to the real self and  into those dreadful by-ways of depression has led me to leading my life with a good map, both medical and therapeutic.

So journeying to the centre, or journeying to the Real Self, can and often is a painful one. However, as I have just stated, like any journey we set out on, we must make preparations, arm ourselves with the best maps, bring passports, visas, money and so on.  For the journey inward, we need the help of friends, spiritual guides, reading, discernment, patience, humility, openness and above all compassion for the Self.  All self-exploration, then, must be done with sound preparation and guidance, because as all spiritual teachers, guides, counsellors, therapists and any good, solid and well-trained facilitators of it will know, any form of deep meditation or mindfulness must be accompanied by solid sustenance for the journey. 

Flowers in Ardgillan Castle & Demesne, Skerries

In a nutshell, the difference between mindfulness and meditation is that the former is the secular face or incarnation of the latter.  Mindfulness is meditation divested of its religious garments, to use a metaphor.  However, in practice, to my mind at least, they are very much the same thing.  In short, I believe that mindfulness can be done at several levels.  The basic or foundational level is that of being mindful of the body and breathe.  The next is the level of being mindful of the thoughts, feelings and emotions.  A further and deeper level would be mindfulness of the Inner Self or the Real Self.  Again, more religious incarnations of mindfulness, would speak of a spiritual, if not a divine, experience associated with either meditation or prayer.  However, I do believe my nutshell explanation in the first sentence in this paragraph gets at the essence of the thing for the beginner. 

Yesterday and the day before I went out walking with my camera in hand, after I had done my period of meditation.  I found on both occasions that I had a new and more aware sense of the beauty of things than I usually would have if I had not done any mindfulness practice at all. Having said that, I was also somewhat overcome, too, by the fragility and beauty of life.  I had a sense of the destructiveness of the power of the more worldly pursuits of humankind, namely the despoiling and destruction of nature that is occurring at an alarming rate.  One would have to be living in a cocoon not to be aware of the environmental destruction we are subjecting our planet to literally on a minute by minute basis.  

Now, as an experienced meditator, I know myself only too well and realize that I cannot let myself dwell too much or too deeply on the flip-side or negative side of the "realization of the fragility and beauty of life" as such would bring morbid thoughts on.  Enough to go out into my garden, mow the lawn, and do my own little bit to nurture nature, and in so doing nurture my own soul.   Likewise, I recommend getting involved in one or other green campaign because so doing lessens the negativity that can be overwhelming when we contemplate how humankind threatens the very survival planet Earth.

More flowers, Ardgillan Park, Skerries

Recently, I was counselling a young boy who is suffering with depression.  He is also attending a psychologist. He was sent onto me by the school counsellor as she felt that my teaching him some meditation and visualization practices might help him.   Usually, I make a brief sketch of the client's state of mind on the whiteboard, with his help.  Needless to say, I work with all the good advice given by his psychologist and school counsellor, ensuring at all times that I do not contradict what they say, as working with others and on the same path is always crucial.  I sketched out what he was doing with his psychologist.  She was working with what made him Happy and what made him Sad.  We listed both these on the whiteboard.  What made him sad was that life was ultimately about loss, that everything and everyone grew old and died.  What made him happy was everything to do with living.  These were polar opposites as we sketched them out.  The birth of his little sister in more recent times has been a moment of singular happiness and joy for him. "Seek life", "go on living", "live in the now" were all messages we felt were good for living.  I recommended that he buy a present for his little sister and one for himself to celebrate the option for life.  When he returned the following week he had bought both presents and was a far happier boy.  As we were talking we spoke of the cycles of life and that often the life-death cycle can be a unity which we must respect as we are integral parts of it.  To get lost in either end of the cycle might not be the whole truth somehow.  Certainly getting lost in a cycle of depression, where we choose the dark and the negative and the deathly and death-ridden will lead us to despair.  Choosing sheer hedonism, a life of sensual pleasures may be choosing life as nothing but empty satisfaction after empty satisfaction.  Such a choice may, in fact, be very superficial.  Choosing to hold the hand of a sick or dying person, may paradoxically be choosing life, because those last moments of that person's life are so worthwhile.

Now, this is what I mean by travelling within.  Another metaphor could be "internal weather."  What's the weather like in your mind now? Stormy? Sunny? Cloudy? Grey? Dark? Dismal? Rainy? Windy? Night? Day? Sunset? Sunrise? and so on.  We do mindfulness and meditation and we travel ever deeper or ever higher (depending on your directional metaphor) into the Real Self, but that journey has many twists and turns, many obstacles, many hills and valleys, many rivers to be crossed, even seas and mountains at times - all of which means that we need to be well prepared and always look for help.  Going it alone is always dicey, to say the least.

To all the readers of this journal of a soul, I say "Buon viaggio!"

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!