Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 73

Poem 73

The Tao is always at ease.

It overcomes without competing,

answers without speaking a word,

arrives without being summoned,

accomplishes without a plan.

Its net covers the whole universe.

And though its meshes are wide,

it doesn't let a thing slip through.

Commentary

What we have here is a short lyric praising the Tao.  Once again, commentary is perhaps more than usally superfluous, given its sheer succinctness.  Also, as is the case with most devotional and spiritual treatises, their authors praise the object of that act to the highest degree.  Once more, as in praises of the beloved in all love poetry, exaggeration is used again and again, e.g., "It overcomes without competing" - it is at once paradox as well as sheer exaggeration. "It answers without speaking" and accomplishes all it needs to "without a plan."  Quite obviously, we humans cannot get our head around any of these exaggerations and paradoxes as they contradict our lived experiences of the world.

However, once again, we are confronted with the nature of reality - what is the real world? What is reality in itself? As everything eventually breaks down according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics perhaps contemplating the wisdom that everything on this side of the grave will fade and pass - almost into oblivion when the last people who could possibly remember little us have passed, too - might help us to appreciate the wisdom our Taoist poet is presenting for our contemplation in the above poetic lines.  

It would seem also that our author wants his readers to learn to go with the flow; to realise that, in this world of experience everything does fit in, that there is an underlying pattern to things that is beyond our ken; that nothing is ever lost, that everything forms part of a greater whole; that there is an order despite the seeming disorder.

Namaste. 

Journal of a Soul 43

The Mess of Things

Winter scene of Dublin Bay from Clontarf

We learn lessons almost as soon as we are thrust forth from our mother's womb.  In the terms coined by the father of psychoanalysis the child learns early that there is a clash between the "pleasure principle" and the "reality principle," and it is somewhere in the clash of those two that the reality of life lies.* 

I can recall as a young boy when I first became aware that things broke, that plants decayed and that animals died, and finally that human beings also broke and died.  The lessons of mortality are soon learnt indeed by the growing child.  I vividly recall following a wind-up toy around the floor as a young boy and then my dismay when it ceased functioning consequent on my having wound it up too tightly.  Or when my father got sick when I was just three years of age - he lost the use of his right arm to polio and spent the rest of his life depending on his left arm only.  Or my grandmother Mary Phoebe Brophy laid out on her deathbed in the front room of the Crumlin home.  Life is messy and we learn to acknowledge its mess early. Admittedly, for some, life can be a whole lot more messy than for others.

Types of Mess

In the past few weeks I have dealt with various types of mess, mostly in the life of others, and I suppose any mess I might have experienced would be my ability or rather inability to be of help or my inability to deal with theirs at a personal level.  However, thankfully, I manage to forget about their mess as soon as work ends and I go home.  Otherwise, I would be no good to any of them. (When I was a very young teacher, I was not quite so good at doing that).  In those past few weeks I have dealt with one young lad who suffers from anger issues and shouts and roars at his dad mostly.  They have exchanged blows at times.  I have listened to another who told me that his mother (a recovering drug addict on metadone treatment) and her partner attacked him one morning and that he had rung the police. (We duly reported this to the social services, of course) I listened to another boy who is suffering from depression, and another who exhibited schizoid or schizophrenic traits and told me that the group he was founding was going to take over the world starting with Africa. Somewhere in the midst of all his outpourings he talked about exterminating those in the human race that were useless, and when he found me to be listening only and not reacting that perhaps he was playing mind games and how he didn't like anyone trying to get into his mind. (Some few Asperger boys exhibit symptoms of schizophrenia and that is a clinical fact)** I mention these instances here not to impress the reader with my psycho-therapeutic prowess or my empathy with others.  I do so to illustrate the various messes we humans find ourselves in.

Life is Unfair

I have always found that the simple statement "life is unfair" as the most basic of philosophical foundations on which to base one's life.  I remember reading it in a biography of Steven Hawking, a book co-authored by two of his postgraduate students about twenty years ago.  They had asked him whether he was angry with life for being confined to a wheelchair, indeed to be rendered speechless and motionless almost by Motor Neuron disease.  He replied in words akin to the following: "Why should I?  As a physicist I know that life is all about chance and luck -Evolution has nothing to do with fairness or justice." Obviously these are my words and are a mere paraphrase of what this world-renowned physicist said all those years ago and are rendered here through the mists of memory. However, they capture the substance of what Hawking said.

Acceptance and the Onward Thrust of Life

Sometimes the desire to understand things can frustrate us, especially our desire to understand and make sense of life.  I see this almost all the time with the Asperger boys with whom I work.  I teach them Mathematics, Life Skills, Communication Skills and Social Interaction.  One obstacle to tackling mathematical problems (in the less mathematical student) is their utter obsession with understanding everything and not being able to accept this or that method on trust to such an extent that they down tools in despair and say simply "I can't understand that!" I tell them that we are all simply finite beings.  We are not all superhuman, nor could we ever be.  There are many things which we should take on trust.  I tell them that I love technology, computers, iPads and cars and airplanes and so on.  I don't understand everything about my computer or the engine of my car but that I can drive both. The rest I can take on trust.

And so acceptance of our finitude means also accepting all the things we cannot understand and trusting others who understand some of those things.  Acceptance means going with the flow, swimming with and not against the current.  Now, I hasten to point out here that swimming with the current means just that - swimming, that is doing something, not just abandoning oneself to fate.  I stress again - acceptance is never blind fatalism.  Acceptance is an attitude that accepts things in a way somewhat similar to the following manner: "Okay, there is no use denying the obvious, I have high blood pressure, suffer from endogenous depression, am borderline obese and borderline type 2 diabetic.  Now I have the first two regulated by medication and meditation and by looking after my mental health.  I admit I must take more exercise and eat much more healthy foods so that I can control the type 2 diabetes that threatens by my diet.   I know this is possible with determination. Yes, this is something, I, Tim Quinlan must get on top of as a fifty six year old man."  Okay, all of the last several lines are true as they are an account of my medical condition.  I will do my very best to get down my weight over the next few months.  I need to drop 1 stone and I'll be fine apparently - well, as fine as any 56 year old can be.  I am a member of the local gym and do my best to take exercise and keep my weight under control.  All of that is the onward thrust of life, built on the acceptance of the reality of me and my state of health now in February 2014.

Shit Happens but Shit also Grows the Roses

The Autumn leaves in Fairview Park, Dublin, 3

We all need to accept the mess that life is or can be, and develop coping skills to guide us safely through that mess.  Life will throw many messes at us, and our task is to deal as best we can with the shit it throws at us.  That's why the Self-Help sections of bookshops and online book sellers are so well frequented.  That is also why complementary medicines and therapies are becoming so commonplace in these modern times.  Please notice I have said complementary, not alternative.  Listening to Professor Richard Kearney recently on the radio, I noticed that he spoke about dealing with his depression by the use of both medication (antidepressants) and psychotherapy and meditation, and that the treatment of mental illness needed a both/and approach, not an either/or.  As a sufferer from endogenous depression for the last twenty years I have believed this right from the start of my getting to grips with my illness, and more or less overcoming its severe debilitation. 

After coming to grips with my depression at forty years of age I have travelled more, written more - I wrote some four books, one of which I got published, done more courses, studied more, been involved in more voluntary organisations than I had ever done prior to forty.  In other words while shit happened to me, that same shit also helped grow roses which I never knew could have bloomed in my life.

The Mess of Things Revisited

As I look around me as I write I am aware of the small but significant mess of things about me.  I have a few thousand books I guess and I have spent about an hour trying to put some order on a few hundred of them.  When their authors wrote them, it is my contention that they were trying to put order on some messy ideas they had about life.  I was trying to separate my books into sections so that I'd more easily be able to access them. I also have a lot of washed clothing awaiting the pressing of my iron, some breakfast things that need to be washed and put away, documents that need to be sorted, bills that need to be paid, forms that need to be filled in and returned to this or that government department and finally, my own lack of inclination to engage with some if not all of this stuff is also part of the mess.  As I look around me I see this little mess that my life is now.  However, as I write these words I take great delight in the order that I am putting on the mess that is my existential being here and now in and through the task of making words and thoughts behave upon a page.  It is in the struggle for order, pattern and control versus the mess of disorder, lack of pattern and chaos that essentially the human (if not divine) dwells.

Endnotes

*Freud argued that the young baby realises early the importance of the pleasure principle. If the little child cries and is fed quite often when it does so it begins to realise that its needs can be met, its hunger and thirst satisfied and that such leads to real pleasure and gratification. Simply put, this is the “pleasure principle.” Now, it would be great if we lived in an "ideal world" where all our needs, wants and desires were satisfied. But such is not the real world. Instant gratification is not the way of life. Everything comes at a price. The child also learns very early on that sometimes when he/she cries their needs are not met immediately. In other words that child is beginning to learn that harsh reality is just that - harsh! It is almost superfluous to state that Freud called this meeting with harsh reality the "reality principle." The child now embarks upon a more balanced take on life – fine, it is well and good that one’s desires, needs and wants are met, but such does not happen all of the time. The young child quickly learns to balance the "pleasure principle" with the "reality principle."

** see this link for information about a possible link between Autism and Schizophrenia:  Here

Journal of a Soul 26

Order versus Disorder

Clouds over Baldoyle recently

Somewhere, sometime, long ago at the dawn of consciousness, which, I should imagine, roughly corresponded to the emergence of civilisation around the great rivers of the world from Mesopotamia to Egypt to China and so forth, there was a first great push for order among humans.  Humankind had begun to order itself, to create systems to help itself better survive in a hostile world.  Together, human beings could create and invent ever easier and better ways of surviving.  And so, progress was now possible with these first steps of co-operation. And so, indeed, prehistory gave way to history as civilisation after civilisation sought to record all their efforts at self-betterment, both successful and unsuccessful.

And today, we are the rich inheritors of multifarious cultures and we possess a sheer abundance of ever-expanding knowledge which has its foundations in those early cultures we described above.  Having been born in a relatively poor and young nation, namely Ireland, in 1958, I was, like my contemporaries exposed to very little new knowledge as it were – most of it was then contained in the written media and in the school books from which we learned our traditional school subjects. I recall well the arrival of the first television set into our little town of Roscrea, Co Tipperary in 1962 when I was only four years old. The National Television Service, RTE, was founded on January 1 that year.

And so as I grew up, the world became simultaneously and paradoxically both larger and smaller.  Larger, insofar as we would gradually come of age by learning through the medium of the TV how bigger and richer nations lived.  We would also desire the goods they had and to do the activities they engaged in.  We would want to travel more and experience and learn at firsthand what it was like to live elsewhere.  It became a smaller world, too, insofar as we are now beneficiaries of what Alvin Toffler long ago so aptly described as “the acceleration of change” in the early 1970s – so much so, indeed, that we can now call up any amount of relevant (and irrelevant) information at our fingertips through modern technologies such as smart phones and i-pads etc.

Obsessed with Information and with organising it

The Public Library, Baldoyle

In short, we are still obsessed with information – indeed, we might truly describe it as information overload – and we are equally obsessed with ordering that information into all its relevant categories and classes, subcategories and subclasses.  The web of knowledge gets evermore intricate as the world seemingly progresses.  Note the adverb here, as human progress is surely a matter of philosophical importance, and questions can indeed be raised as to what exactly progress consists in – thoughts for another post there, I should think. The internationally famous contemporary British professor of philosophy, A.C. Grayling puts it thus, and many are wont to agree with the learned professor:

“The development of science and technology shows us that, as a species, we have grown clever; their misuse for war and oppression shows us that we have not yet grown wise.  Moral heroism is required for us to teach ourselves wisdom” (The Choice of Hercules, Phoenix, Orion: London, 2007, p.68)

Disorder breaks in

If you own a property you will realise how much maintenance is required and much if not all of it on-going.  Things naturally break down – The Second Law of Thermodynamics and all that.  As soon as a house is unlived in, nature begins to have its way all too quickly with grasses and weeds growing from every available crack and crevice.  In other words, we have to constantly labour to bring about order, and also to keep order in place lest it suddenly descend into disorder and chaos.

Meditation as a Coping Strategy

I remember one of my acquaintances remarking many years ago that no one gets out of life alive.  In spite of all our individual efforts to keep order in our individual lives we grow old and die.  The existentialists were keenly aware of this patently obvious absurdity at the very heart of the human predicament: - the self-project which each individual sets out to accomplish will come to nothing in the dust of our death.  Admittedly, collectively as a culture we amass mounds of information, much art, buildings of great architectural value, languages, the intricacies of mathematics and sciences of all types as well as the more creative stuff of poetry, novels, drama and so forth.  And yet, as individuals we come to nought.  This was at the heart of Irish National Broadcaster, Marion Finucane’s interview with the dying writer Nuala O’Faoláin some two years back.  Nuala was heartbroken, she said, on learning that her death was imminent because all the order and shape she had built up in her individual life would now simply become nothing – all the facts she had learned, all the experiences she had gained, all the insights, the teeming brain, the languages, the literature, the writings, the music she so loved, the art, her three or so apartments, her wonderful friendships, her next writing task – all gone, forever, dissolved into nothing as her individual life, her little selfhood of her own creation, was snuffed inexorably out.  That, indeed, is the human dilemma, the existential condition under which we all live. 

And yet, meditation is only too aware of this. After all, it was Siddhartha Gautama’s (the Buddha) own lived dilemma, too, how to deal with suffering in all its manifestations – mental, spiritual and physical.  For him, the key was to learn to become detached from the concerns of life, to learn to get over clinging to either things or persons – in short, to learn acceptance and detachment.  This is the Buddhist philosophy of life, a way to live serenely and sanely in an all too frenetic and insane world.   

And so, what does living wisely mean? I argue that it means something along the following lines:

To learn that there are no easy answers to life’s big questions and that  those who propose such easy answers are singularly unwise, misled and misleading.

Sometimes we have to learn to accept events in life that we can never ever understand.  Acceptance, of course, here is never blind acceptance which is sheer fatalism.  By acceptance here, I mean that graced place of equanimity where one arrives spiritually, having worked hard at either solving the problem at hand, looking for help from as many quarters as possible, seeking advice, doing one’s best to come up with some partial solution and so on.  There is little or nothing more one can do against the inevitable at that stage.  Hence, acceptance is a wise position because one has expended all the necessary energy and a further expending is nothing short of wasteful and useless.

Knowing one’s strengths and limitations, and playing life’s game in that knowledge.

Forming good relationships and working at them like a gardener cultivates his patch of ground.

Learning the limits of human knowledge.

Being humble in a Socratic way – the admission of ignorance can be the beginning of knowledge and wisdom.

Learning things by doing – the practical knowledge or wisdom (phronesis) advocated by Aristotle.

Learning through meditation to accept whatever order there is in chaos.

Doing things slowly, mindfully and consequently well.

Perfection does not exist – it is an unobtainable ideal.  Everything has slight imperfections somewhere.  Excellence is a different matter.  To excel at something need not mean being perfect at it.  The nearest description I found for “perfection” was in the Bible where one translation described it as being “whole” or complete.

Finally, one must learn the harsh truth of all existence, namely that life is not fair, and by all the logic of statistics could never be.  Mostly, life is a matter of sheer randomness and luck.  How, when, where, to whom and in what medical and monetary circumstances we are born are all matters of varying circumstances.  We are dealt a specific hand of cards and we had better play them as best we can to our advantage if we are to engage positively at all with life!