Journal of a Soul 41

Thoughts on the Eve of 2014

A very wet Lungomare, Soverato, Jan 2nd 2014

I remember once reading in the works of the great Victorian theologian, scholar and writer, John Henry Newman, that essentially how (not why) we believe was as much a mystery as how we remember.  And indeed, memory is one of those great mysteries in life.

As I write this post here in Isca Marina (Sullo Ionio) on the last day of the year of 2013, bereft of Internet connections as the rain pours down – almost as inexorably as it does in Ireland – I am indeed awash with memories, most of them random, though somewhere my inner Self (whatever or whoever that is) is giving them some structure and form. Being without any instant Internet connection for the week to come means that this post will not see “light of day” on-line until sometime later than this last day of 2013 - more than likely very early in The New Year.

Is memory (which here I am equating with what many of us have come to define as the Self) really all about nothing more than the random connections and interconnections made by all those millions upon millions of neurons through those even more numerous dendrites that randomly spark off one another through this or that neurotransmitter?  Or is the Self more than a biochemical or even a psychochemical mass?  Whatever, the Self may be it always has a sense of being so much more.  Indeed, every human being wants his or her Self to mean more, to be more, than just a “bundle of perceptions” as the great Scottish empiricist and atheist philosopher David Hume had it.  After all, what client or patient comes to a psychotherapist, counsellor, clinical psychologist or psychiatrist with the complaint that they don’t really feel that they are being true to their “real bundle of perceptions,” or that they have not yet found their “real bundle of perceptions”?  We believe deeply that we are more.  Intuitively we grasp that the whole (Self) is always greater than the sum of its parts, greater than a mere “bundle of perceptions.”

And so for this present post I am defining myself as my memories.  At the end of any year we so love to trace what has happened not alone in the world or the country at large, but what the dying year has made of us.  Even, what all our years to date have made of us as we stand on the threshold of yet another year.

An old picture from 1945 or there abouts.  My mother is at the back on left

Memories crowd my neural memory pathways somewhat randomly, but with some little dictation from some centre of control – some area of “self-awareness.”  There I am, a three year old boy sitting on the dirt lane at the back of our house in Roscrea playing with a toy lorry and filling its trailer with lollypop bags of sand.  The old half-blind cat sits on the line pole, a great comforting presence.  The backyard is full of geranium plants.  The sting of the nettles on my legs as I run through the neighbouring fields. The fading sound of the train leaving Roscrea station with my daddy aboard, click, clack, click, clack, ...  Sad feelings.  Missing him again.  The move to Dublin. No electric light. Just candles till the power is restored.

My grandmother laid out in death in a bedroom in the old Crumlin house. I was ten. So still. Beyond us. Then and now. Only old faded photos remain. Uncle Pat’s funeral in 1970 when I am twelve.  The sound of leather shoes crushing the gravel as we followed the coffin up to its final resting place. The sound of clay falling on the wooden lid. Prayers intoned.  Men in gray coats condoling with my father. My mother comforting him in Granny Saunders’ garden when he cried. I buy ice cream for the same old woman – the oldest woman I have ever known as a young boy.  How I think she might expire at any second.  That horrible big yellow blister on her leg when she spilled boiling water on it. The time she told us that once as she dozed at the fire a mouse had run up here leg.  How we laughed.

The old Christian Brother who takes us for catechism and who tells us stories both to frighten and uplift us, though more of the former.  The smell of chalk dust mixed with stale urine, the steam that rises from wet coats as they lie draped over radiators on a rainy day.  The ice that covers the school yard making it a skating rink.  How we skate free on it before the bell tolls for class and lessons.  The young boy whose name I forget who is knocked clean from his bike to dusty death at only ten years of age.  The black hands of the old wind-up clock with Roman numerals that counts out our education in loud tick tocks.  The old brother winds it up every other day.

And there are so many other memories vying for attention with that self-aware centre of control that they could overpower, swamp and almost smother it at once, if all the controls were off.  Maybe this is the place to stop this wet last day of the dying year that is 2013.  Maybe too many memories have been summoned up.  Some centre of my inner Self has summoned them up, given them life, and shape and pattern.

Indeed how true is the opening statement I quoted from the venerable Cardinal John Henry Newman.  How we believe is as much as mystery as how we remember.  Perhaps a greater mystery is what we remember and how we choose to construct those memories, what shape and pattern, what form we may wish to give them.  That is the mystery of the Self, the centre of our identity which is an on-going construction, ever a work in progress.

Journal of a Soul 21

The Elusive or Illusive Self.

There have always been sceptics in philosophy and, indeed, in all branches of knowledge.  We may trace scepticism back as far as the dawn of consciousness, I would suggest.  The most famous ancient sceptic was Sextus Empiricus (roughly 100 to 200 A.D.), the very English translation of whose surname would lead us to believe that he needed to be presented with the evidence of his senses to justify his believing anything.  Since the knowledge of reality, (whatever that is, though our common sense would have us assuredly accept the world and all its contents as such!) is always mediated by fallible bodily senses there is no way of proving things are one way or another.  This is in keeping with the Pyrrhonian School of Scepticism whose catch cry may be proclaimed simply thus: "No more this than that!" Such early scepticism worked as a sort of therapeutic apostasy which resulted in practice in a kind of docile acceptance of life in all its vicissitudes.  

Many other philosophers through the ages, of course, were very sceptical, and among these we may certainly number the classical Rationalists like Descartes, Arnauld, Spinoza and Leibniz and, indeed, the classical Empiricists like Locke, Hume and Voltaire to name several. 

However, setting the philosophical excursus of the opening paragraphs aside, we normally equate scepticism with general doubt, and more specifically with, say, the questioning of the existence of God.  Then, added to that, there has even been a scepticism as to whether the Self exists, never mind the questionable existence of a metaphysical Being called God.  Indeed, as we search for some self-identity or for some notion of selfhood in this journey we call human existence, we must face these thorny questions.    The more we journey onwards on this earthly pilgrimage (a glaringly religious but apt metaphor), the more we become dissatisfied with too simple, too pat or too trite an answer or answers.  Further, the more we travel onwards (or downwards or upwards, indeed - choose your own metaphor!) the more we come to realise that it must be left to the individual wayfarer to come up with his or her own authentic answer to the problems life throws at us to either comprehend or perhaps simply accept.

My title above uses two similarly sounding but different adjectives to describe the mystery of the Self, which I capitalise in a Jungian fashion here.  The Self is never a finished product.  Rather it is a project ever in the making; a project I take on to make or design or form like a potter with the clay (a Biblical image).  In that sense, it is elusive.  We simply cannot sum it up in precise words or say that it is a totally finished product. However, we know that as creators of a work of art (the Self in this case) we are very much totally involved in the project.  The second adjective "illusive," which I have used above in my title, I reject as being a descriptor of the noun "self" at all because this word means "not real, though seeming to be."  

The Self is very much a real phenomenon as any psychotherapist or psychiatrist will confirm for you if you need to go to such phenomenological or psychological lengths.  I mention the word "illusive" above and here solely because many great philosophers (most notably David Hume) and many scientists over the years have rejected the notion of Self completely and have adjudged it an illusion.  In this regard, the current writer was both drawn to and a little unnerved at the naive and somewhat arrogant certainty of the title of a recent book, written by a scholar and scientist, which runs: The Self Illusion: Why there is no “you” inside your head. [Hood, B (2012)] This book lies firmly in the tradition of scientism.  By scientism I mean the belief in the universal applicability of the scientific method and approach to all phenomena, including the human person, without exception.  It was the rise of scientism, as distinct from science per se that brought about what I term the eclipse of the phenomenon of the Self.

Who am I? Where did I come from?  Where am I going? are age-old questions and are as old as consciousness  is itself.  They are the first self-reflective questions which are the very hallmark of consciousness and belong to the term almost by definition.  As we go through our normal daytime routine we often ask ourselves as regards our fickle emotions, "Which is the real me?  Is the real me or true self the angry me, the selfish me, the happy me, the compassionate me, the helpful me, the moody me, the joyful me, the suffering me, the moaning me, the selfless me, the generous me, the mean me etc?"

The next few posts will be on that topic.  Where is the true Self at all.