Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 57

Poem 57

If you want to be a great leader,

you must learn to follow the Tao.

Stop trying to control.

Let go of fixed plans and concepts,

and the world will govern itself.

The more prohibitions you have,

the less virtuous people will be.

The more weapons you have,

the less secure people will be.

The more subsidies you have,

the less self-reliant people will be.

Therefore the Master says:

I let go of the law,

and people become honest.

I let go of economics,

and people become prosperous.

I let go of religion,

and people become serene.

I let go of all desire for the common good,

and the good becomes common as grass.

Commentary

The wonderful worker bee: Summer 2012

Control is an interesting desire. In one sense we all desire control of our own lives, and that is essentially a good desire. However, there are many who seek also to control others as if these others are actually part of their own reality. (A good philosophical sense helps in no little way here.  After all, I can ask the seminal questions: what is my reality? What is his/her reality? What is our shared reality as partners in a relationship or as workers in a company? In short, these are very important questions.  The root question, of course, that underlies them all is simply put: what is the nature of reality anyway? Putting these seminal questions will, to sustain the metaphor in our adjective, promote the growth of harmony and good leadership anyway.  So, a good sharp sense of philosophy is a good tool for any leader). I remember attending a talk years ago on teaching and management where the psychologist Dr Tony Humphreys emphasised over and over again that "all control is self-control."  How right the good Doctor is!  If I can control my own "self," then everything else falls into place, and I actually don't have to control others then at all.  In fact, the base desire to control others vanishes.  One might, of course, still legitimately desire to lead others and that is a very good thing.  However, all good Human Resource Personnel know that good leadership is not about controlling others at all.  A desire to control others results in what's termed "micro-management" which has a negative affect on all the staff including the so-called controller or "control freak."

Mallard, Phoenix Park, 2012

Flexibility, or the ability to bend with the circumstances, is an approach with works. The opposite, namely rigidity, or the inability to bend with the situation, is a method that leads to fracture of all harmony in the workplace.  Something has got to give and people do actually crack. It's the same with ideas, concepts and preconceptions.  That's what our ancient writer (some 2,500 years ago) means when he says that we must "let go of fixed plans and concepts," because that is the path of wisdom.  A leader who comes into any organisation or business with his or her ideas, plans and concepts set in stone will meet with much opposition and will eventually break or at least cause much upset amongst the staff.  Most leaders know that when all the staff have a "buy in" to whatever the plans are for the particular company or organisation that much more progress is made.  More progress is made in a harmonious atmosphere than in a disharmonious one.  Having recently completed the Ken Blanchard et al  Leader Behaviour Analysis II, the whole guiding principle is that of flexibility and awareness of the four leadership styles and the positive and negative aspects of each, and through growing awareness to be able to avoid the negative aspects and highlight the positive ones, and moreover, to be able to flexibly change one's style of leadership through awareness and practice.  Like the Myers Briggs or MBTI inventory of personality types (16 in total) once one knows one's natural type one can change this by awareness.  Of course, one will have a style or a type more natural to you, but with awareness and practice one can alter one's style or type from time to time as appropriate and then obviously return to that which is a more natural tendency for you.  In short, awareness or consciousness is all.  In fact, awareness in any mental, and indeed physical illness, is most important.  Much relief and release, if not a certain amount of healing, comes with this knowledge.

Another few lines that jump out at this commentator here are "The more subsidies you have, //the less self-reliant people will be."  As a Resource Teacher, I have found that those parents who put too much help and assistance in place for their children foster a attitude of over-dependence in their offspring, while those that allow their children more responsibility and have less fears about their future foster an attitude of independence and self-reliance in their offspring.  

Sundown, Phoenix Park, Winter 2015

However, realistically, too, there is a growing minority in all societies who need to be watched over and controlled because of the nature of their great disabilities or by virtue of their inability to conform to societies' rules, that is, through criminality and so on. However, our Taoist poet is not talking about these exceptions, but rather about the most of us who are law-abiding and responsible members of society.  It is in this context alone that the final stanza makes any sense at all.  Also, we must remember that we are dealing with poetry which is replete with simile and metaphor that abhors a literalistic or a fundamentalist interpretation.  Needless to say, the same can be said of all the religious and spiritual texts from any religious tradition.  It is only in this sense that we can read any meaning in these words of the final stanza:

Therefore the Master says:

I let go of the law,

and people become honest.

I let go of economics,

and people become prosperous.

I let go of religion,

and people become serene.

I let go of all desire for the common good,

and the good becomes common as grass.

Journal of a Soul 49

The Validity of Experience 4

Introduction:

Our winning Debating Science Issues team: The Desire to Know More!!

There is much in our experience that cannot simply be reduced to information garnered from our senses.  The preceding posts have all attempted to come at what human experience is from as many directions as possible.  Reducing our experiences to merely those perceptions that are registered on our human brains by empirical data accessed through the senses is very delimiting of what human experience is or may be in its totality. (And it is  the "totality" of experience at which I am aiming to describe in these posts).

In mystical theology there was a way of approaching the divine through what was termed "the via negativa" ("the negative way") which contended that the divine was so far beyond our human knowing that the only way of approach for us human beings to make any sense of that great mystery was to advance towards it by saying what it was not - hence its appellation as being a "negative way."  Another term for this type of mystical theology was Apophatic theology. *  The WIKI sums up this approach thus:

In negative theology, it is accepted that experience of the Divine is ineffable, an experience of the holy that can only be recognized or remembered abstractly. That is, human beings cannot describe in words the essence of the perfect good that is unique to the individual, nor can they define the Divine, in its immense complexity, related to the entire field of reality. As a result, all descriptions if attempted will be ultimately false and conceptualization should be avoided. In effect, divine experience eludes definition by definition. (see HERE)

I shall discuss mystical theology later in these posts, but the point I want to emphasize here is that even on a human level we can learn from this humble approach.  Indeed, even if we are somewhat agnostic, or even atheistic, we can still learn something from the "via negativa" or "via negationis."  In other words, I am arguing here that if we are to proceed in the task of finding out what we humans really are in and through our experiences, it is surely better for us to proceed by being open-minded.  That is, it is better for us to allow  human experience to be all that it can be by keeping as many doors open to the mystery of truth, rather than by shutting certain doors of our perception because they cannot be contained within a narrow understanding of epistemology that reduces knowledge to those facts seen only through the doors of the five senses. 

And so, at this stage in this Journal of a Soul, I want to attempt a sort of summary position, or a sort of personal statement of what I believe, or what the great Victorian theologian John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) called an "Apologia Pro Vita Sua."

(1) I am a creature of Desire

Autumn Scene, Fairview Park, 2013

As what I am attempting to do here is very personal, I must use the first personal pronoun a lot, though in academic writing one tries to avoid such a use in order to be as objective as possible.  However, it is also acceptable, especially in the social sciences to use qualitative as well as quantitative research.  These types of research methods involve describing in detail specific situations using research tools like interviews, surveys, and observations.  Self-research would fall under this heading, and it is a legitimate form of research if done methodically and with as much objectivity one can marshal. 

And so my experience of "myself" or of my "self" is that I am a sentient creature with desires and as I experience them these desires are (a) my animal desires, (b) my desire to know and (c) my desire to love and (d) my desire to be loved.  Let me briefly look at each of these subheadings: 

(a) My Animal Desires

This undoubtedly is, perhaps, the easiest to describe.  One needs to be no biologist to list our animal desires.  The obvious one is the desire for food and drink that is obvious from our very first moments of existence.  As a little child we have all cried to be fed and to have our thirst slaked.  After that the sexual nature of our bodies eventually kicks in, especially at adolescence where basically we experience our desire to mate with another of our species and so procreate or reproduce our species.

(b) My Desire to Know

Frank with the Debating Team before their victory!

This is, perhaps, the one desire, that distinguishes us most from our fellow sentient creatures.  I find as I age that this is the one of the  greatest desires that inspires me from day to day.  I am constantly desiring to know more and more. In The Metaphysics, Aristotle states: “All men by nature desire understanding.” ** This statement has also been translated as "All men by nature desire to know." Now, that statement appeals to me, but one could obviously argue that all men do not so desire and point to this or that person whose life showed that they did not desire to know because their actions showed otherwise or that they were cognitively deficient in some way.  However, Aristotle's phrase "by nature" is a qualification that retrieves his generalization somewhat as it refers to the potentiality of each individual person, irrespective of whether they achieve knowledge or not. 

Therefore, even if Aristotle's formulation is a broad generalization, we have here an insightful statement about the nature of human beings. Everyone of us desires to know or to understand something on a daily basis, no matter how small or insignificant.  "Where is room 202A?" for instance or "Could you tell me where the Post Office is, please?" and so on and so forth would be good examples of our daily desire to know small things.  We might also wonder what it would be like to travel to Athens or Corfu or Cagliari or New York and decide to go there to find out.  At a deeper level we might wonder what a "Black Hole" or "Dark Matter" is or whether the universe is really expanding. In other words we can surely say that in all the senses listed above and in many more instances, all humankind is involved in the world of ideas and reflection: Everyone is searching for some rational explanation of something, no matter how trivial on the one hand, or how important on the other. Everyone, then, contemplates the issues that are foremost in their minds.  In a deeper existential sense, each person, in his/her own right, asks the ultimate questions concerning his/her own existence. As I sit here, I experience the desire to know who I am?  Who is this creature that types these words, forms these sentences upon this virtual page out there in cyberspace. You may be wondering what it means to be you in your particular circumstances, what it means when you have to suffer X or Y or Z, or perhaps you are asking a question like, "Why did God allow my wife/husband/partner to die so painfully?" And so on.  These questions are truly unlimited, perhaps even infinite.

As I walked from the Dart Station at Sydney Parade with a group of some twenty sixteen and seventeen year old pupils over to UCD some days ago we talked about, among other trivia, different theories of the formation of the universe.  At some stage I asked a group around me how many times bigger would they think the universe was in size proportionally to the size of one little thinking human being like ourselves.  The answer of one very intelligent boy took me by surprise and got me thinking.  He replied that it would be a figure something like the reciprocal of Planck's constant that might fit the bill.  In other words, the number one over what is perhaps the smallest number known in atomic physics.  Lovely answer.  Wish I could have come up with it.  My question was not looking for a mathematical answer at all, though I appreciated the wonderful response.  It was merely asked to provoke wonderment at mystery, quite like the Biblical question of God asking Abraham how many grains of sand were on the seashore.  In other words, even as we walk here or there many questions cross our little minds by way of desiring to know.  Then, there is that wonderful philosophical question that hits me almost existentially as well as cognitively from time to time, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" ***

(c) My Desire to Love

This is also a complex desire.  There is much written on the topic of love from poems to songs to novels to learned prose essays, not to mention all the philosophical and psychological works this subject has inspired.  Our desire to procreate or our animal desires can to a little extent participate in what love is.  A materialist would perhaps have to say that his desire to love is just that, his desire to physically copulate with another.  Yet, we humans are more than a little outraged by such a reduction in what we consider ourselves to be.  Culturally, we have conceived ourselves to be so much more than our animalness or animality.  We are outraged, and rightly so, when the actions of some humans against others of our species reduce us to the actions of unthinking animals, e.g., rape, incest and legions of other horrific actions.  Indeed, oftentimes the crimes committed by humans are worse even than animalistic as even animals never drop so low.  The nature of such evil is beyond our purposes here, but it can be horrifying and troubling to a great and deep extent.

I desire to love my mother, father, brothers, sisters, cousins etc.  Indeed, we culturally desire to love even our enemies.  Those of us who might be sincere and peaceful Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics and indeed atheists and so on desire to love even our enemies as we sincerely believe in loving all of humankind.  On a human level, I desire to love my friends and even my work colleagues insofar as is humanly possible. However, we certainly cannot like everyone we meet, but we can certainly desire to love them in the sense of treating them justly.  Further, on a daily level I try to show my love for my pupils by the way I teach, how I treat them as individuals deserving of respect as other unique human beings and especially by  how I teach them to love and care for themselves as show real compassion for themselves as well as for others. In this context I should like to refer to an entry in my other blog on Book Reviews.  See Passion for Justice. 

(d) My desire To Be loved

With some friends, enjoying myself:  Quest for identity there, too!

I suppose, to use a fitting metaphor, to love and be loved are two sides of the one coin.  I remember my English lecturer at college, the great late John Devitt of Mater Dei Institute arguing that as a senior examiner in Leaving Certificate English he had insisted on one of his subordinate examiners increasing the essay marks of one candidate who had written with great insight on the dual nature of loving, i.e., to love and be loved.  Without a doubt, I am nothing if I am not loved.  My personhood and selfhood is reduced to a mere suffering entity which feels lost, rejected and scorned.  If Lady Macbeth could speak of being "unsexed" by her crimes, we could surely speak of being "unselfed" by not being loved.  To be loved is to be invited in from the cold, to be accepted as part of the group.  In short, to be loved means to belong somewhere.  When we don't belong, we are in fact outsiders, out in the cold, left one side, marginalized, forgotten, overlooked, discriminated against and so on.  You, dear reader, can add your own description of being unloved to my attempts here.

My desires, in my opinion, which I have outlined and explicated to the best of my ability above, push me to an identity which is, as it were, a being or a self who is so much more.  I have attempted to come to grips with what this more may be.  I see myself or my "self" as being a project, which while firmly rooted in the now, is like some strange plant that has been mysteriously sown in this body but which is striving daily to grow more and more.  Our personhood or our selfhood is a project that is always on-going.  We are reaching out to embrace that more all the time both individually and culturally.  Perhaps it is somehow in this quest for selfhood that the Divine enters in.  While I experience myself as very much finite in this all-too-human and animal body, I also simultaneously experience my desires to be of an infinite quality, that is desire belongs to the infinite, to the divine spark in me. Perhaps, I would not be so desiring, unless there is a more... unless there is a more somewhere ever ahead of me.  Or am I merely delusional?  I think not, I know not. I desire not.  All, I can proclaim, like Socrates is my ignorance seeking knowledge.  But why such seeking?  I'll leave the answer, or perhaps more accurately, the quest to you, dear read. Buon viaggio!

*Apophatic Theology: In the apophatic strand of Christian mysticism God is understood as “the One” who is way beyond words and images, the one who transcends every category in a radical simplicity beyond all human thought and idea.  God’s uniqueness and grandeur so ovewhelm our senses and minds that God is described as solitary, radically simple; even as hidden, invisible, or “dark”.  Thus, Henry Vaughan’s famous poem The Night: There is in God (some say)//A deep, but dazzling darkness; As men here//Say it is late and dusky, because they//See not all clear//O for that night! where I in him//Might live invisible and dim.//

Hence, all apophatic theology can do, in one sense, is declare what God is not in terms of human words.  However, it can declare God's utter transcendence in terms that are actually ironically quite clear like that of dark mystery, of hiddenness and otherness, uniqueness and grandeur.  One might wonder here at the marvelling of our astrophysicists at the Black Holes and the Dark Matter of the Universe.  Maybe, just maybe, there could be some parallels here with The Dark Night of the Soul of St John of the Cross.  After all, there are some great parallels between mysticism and astrophysics, not to mention quantum physics. See the Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra.

** Aristotle's most famous book is perhaps his Metaphysics.  The parts of it still in existence span fourteen books. The early books give background information and survey the field before Aristotle's time. Therein, he describes the nature of wisdom as well as criticizing the theories of Plato which he deemed as too ideal and far too poetic: it begins with sense perceptions, which must be translated into scientific expertise. Such knowledge requires the understanding of both facts and causes, and wisdom comes only with an understanding of the universal principles and primary causes built on this science. Aristotle's work in metaphysics is therefore motivated by this desire for wisdom, which requires the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. What is known to us as metaphysics is what Aristotle called "first philosophy." Metaphysics involves a study of the universal principles of being, the abstract qualities of existence itself. The starting point of Aristotle's metaphysics is his rejection of Plato's Theory of Forms. In Plato's theory, material objects are changeable and not real in themselves; rather, they correspond to an ideal, eternal, and immutable Form by a common name, and this Form can be perceived only by the intellect. Thus a thing perceived to be beautiful in this world is in fact an imperfect manifestation of the Form of Beauty. Aristotle's arguments against this theory were numerous. Ultimately he rejected Plato's ideas as poetic but empty language; as a scientist and empiricist he preferred to focus on the reality of the material world.

***This question appears in Martin Heidegger's An Introduction to Metaphysics, Yale University Press, New Haven and London (1959), pp. 7-8  See here for the philosopher Arthur Witherall's short essay on this topic. 

Journal of a Soul 12

Self on Caulonia Beach, this Easter season!!

Many years ago when I was a first year student at college I remember reading several of Saul Bellow’s novels.  The one that sticks out in my memory is Henderson The Rain King.  The protagonist, Henderson, is middle aged and somewhat confused as to his identity.  Not alone is he confused about his selfhood, but he simply does not know what he wants from life at all.  Then, throughout the novel we meet with his often repeated chorus: “I want.  I want!”  I think many of us modern and postmodern humans could sing the same chorus as we, too, simply don’t know what we want.  At base, what we want is some direction in our lives, some meaning.  Then the inevitable questions arise:”Who will give us this direction?  Where does that elusive meaning lie?”  These questions are not surprising at all – for, as the famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustave Jung puts it, the second half of any person’s life is always about the search for meaning.  After all, the first half is necessarily about getting qualifications, marrying, rearing a family and then, and then and then etc.  And then, what?

As I type these reflections I am sitting in Calabria, South Italy, awaiting my return home to Ireland tomorrow.  Life is also about that, too, waiting. The American poet and critic, Randal Jarrell wrote a famous poem about waiting in line while he was a soldier in Korea, if I remember correctly.  He saw waiting as one of the key conditions of modern humankind, not alone that of the lonely GI.  If you have ever lived in Italy you will know that things work very, very, very slowly indeed here.  Everything is literally drowned or drowning in paperwork at all times.  So much so that any non-native is liable to wonder how anything gets done at all in this wonderfully eccentric and endearing country. However, things do gradually and eventually get done. And then, one will say, albeit much time later - It was all worth the wait!!

And Waiting, then, can be good for the soul.  Let's contemplate that so...

We Westerners don’t like to wait.  We live in a fast world.   It is decades since Alvin Toffler spoke so learnedly about the acceleration of change, never mind the speed of it.  His classic book, in which he proposed this thesis, was called Future Shock.   We want fast food, instant results, instant contact with others, instant service and so on.  As a teacher I find that the concentration of young people today is getting ever and ever poorer.  It is a very hard task to keep the attention of modern teenagers as they are used to instant gratification and stimulation from the virtual world of computer games.  A class dealing with a poem or a period in history can never really be that interesting or gripping no matter how hard the teacher tries to use modern technology to enliven his/her presentation. All knowledge, like wisdom, has to be earned through the blood, sweat and tears of study.  Sure, we can use technology to enhance our presentation of data and even our learning of it, but much spade work still needs to be done by the learner. 

As this is a journal about the soul, I wish to highlight the importance of patience, the learning to sit with the situation we find ourselves in.  Okay, so I cannot get X, Y or Z object now, or resolve A, B or C situation immediately, or earn D, E or F amounts of money!  So what?  Does it make an appreciable difference to me now at this moment? Obviously, I’m mostly talking about people in Henderson’s or Jarrell’s existential situation, not someone dying of starvation or otherwise in extremis.

If I meditate on my situation in a spiritual or soul-building sense I might ponder the following:

What is happiness for me and my loved ones?

Is the price – in terms of health, mental and physical - worth paying for what I/we earn?

Are our children really happy?

Is my job worth it in terms of the human price I’m paying?

Am I really flourishing?  Incidentally “flourishing” or “eudaimonia” was the word Aristotle used for happiness.  In other words, he did not equate happiness with any fleeting feeling.  It was, rather, a sense of flourishing, or of living life to the full in a more wholesome and holistic sense.

As I sit and wait with the realisation of all the things I cannot have now, immediately, this minute, what is at the base of my desire for them?  Is it simply my own delusions?  Do I need to tackle my own self-deceptions?  One step is surely to attempt to become aware of them in the first palce!

Am I really happy in my own skin?  Can I really live with myself?  Do I sleep easily?

As I sit here and meditate on the rhythm of my breath, can I not simply learn to be, to exist, to let the “real” me surface gently?

As I sit here, can I not gently learn to accept myself as I am, to be more patient with my “self” and with significant others in my life?

As I sit here, can I not let my breathing work in unison with the very planet on which I am a miniscule creature?

As I sit here, can I not stop repeating Henderson’s mantra, “I want, I want!”and replace it simply with “I am, I am”  Say it over and over.  Surely Being is more important than Having as Erich Fromm used to emphasise so perspicaciously?  Surely Being beats Wanting any day?