Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 33

Poem 33

Knowing others is intelligence;

knowing yourself is true wisdom.

Mastering others is strength;

mastering yourself is true power.

If you realize that you have enough,

you are truly rich.

If you stay in the center

and embrace death with your whole heart,

you will endure forever.

Commentary

The lifelong task of human beings is surely that of getting to know themselves.  However, that is easier said than done and being "true to oneself" or being "honest to oneself" or being "authentic" or "whole" or "integrated" or "individuated," no matter how one terms full self-knowledge, it is truly a long and painful journey.  That is the essential goal of all conscious life. 

Recent photograph of me

It appears that it is somewhat easier to get to know others, but that is only a superficial perception anyhow.  After all, we really only get to know their social, rather than their "real" selves anyway.  Do we ever master others?  No, indeed.  We possibly might master how to manage our "underlings" or staff or whoever at our places of work, but that is the extent of that.

Our task in life, as we have stated it above, is that of getting to know our true or real selves. This takes courage as we have to stand up to the power and opposition of our egos which are, on the whole, fed with much driving power by society.  Facing down the ego, then, requires much courage!

Greed is one of the basest of desires as we never can get enough of success and possessions and of apparent control of others.  It takes wisdom and the practice of much meditation to arrive at a sense of detachment from others and from the things of this world.  One day we realise that actually we have too much things and that things really don't satisfy our true and real desires.  Even at times the love of others, the we-ness of love itself cannot really satisfy our inner desires for fulfilment.  True detachment and the love that springs from it can be greater than human love.

This is the love that we read about in the Old Testament that is greater than fire and that many waters cannot quench it.  It is a love that stretches beyond death, and we have a hint of eternal life in its expression in that passage.  Likewise, the thoughts of our Taoist poet in the last lines of the above poem are stretching for a similar suggested, if imaginative solution, namely that if we stay in the centre (that is, rooted in the Tao) "and embrace death with (our) whole heart, (we) will endure forever."  In both texts, we have to agree that these are the thoughts of ancient scribes imaginatively reaching towards another world of being - imaginatively reaching to the myth of eternal life.  We remember here that myths are not literal but rather suggest a deeper truth which defies expression.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 7

Poem 7

The Tao is infinite, eternal.

Why is it eternal?

It was never born:

thus it can never die.

Why is it infinite?

It has no desires for itself;

thus it is present for all beings.

The Master stays behind;

that is why she is ahead.

She is detached from all things;

that is why she is one with them.

Because she has let go of herself,

she is perfectly fulfilled.

Commentary

The great enigmatic pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (c. 535 - 475 B.C.) springs to mind immediately when I ponder this seventh poem from the Tao Te Ching. He is famous for his insistence that all life is in motion and that everything is change or flux as expressed in his famous line, known to anyone who ever studied philosophy, viz., "you cannot step into the same river twice."  Another famous phrase attributed to him comprises two words only, viz., "panta rhei" = "everything flows."  This latter Heraclitean quotation is mentioned in Plato's Cratylus.

Heraclitus, unknown artist, Sheffield Museum

Heraclitus is also renowned for his enigmatic style and paradoxical expression leading him to be called "Heraclitus the obscure."  Also, his style has been described as "wondrous," that is, in the sense in which Plato has defined the beginnings of philosophy as being in wonder. In this sense much ancient philosophy is spiritual in effect and thrust.  Hence this style of philosophizing has much in common with the spirituality and philosophy set before us in the Tao Te Ching. 

Once again, it is no surprise to learn that Heraclitus was much concerned with what I have termed in these several posts on Taoism the tension of opposites or binaries or polarities. Commentators on Heraclitus call this his predilection for the "unity of opposites," and his most famous statement in this regard is that "the path up and down is one and the same." This idea as we have seen is common to a lot of religious and spiritual traditions.

Now, our poem above is about time vs timelessness as our author mentions both infinity and eternity.  Time may be defined as the measure of change and this is where both the Tao and Heraclitus come in for my commentary here.  What does infinite mean?  All religions speak of their God as being both eternal - always having existed - and infinite - without beginning or end.  The author tells us, then, that the Tao was never born, that it existed always. He/she also describes the notion of infinity in an interesting and unusual way, viz., in that it is present for all beings consequent on its having no desires for itself.  One needs much meditation and consideration on these sentiments to tease out the possible meaning of that line. However, we are in the realm of mysticism where paradox and enigma abound.  Much of that area of study is ineffable and can only be expressed in a poetry that stretches language almost to breaking point.

Again the second stanza of the above poem is replete with paradoxes expressed by way of the "unity of opposites," e.g., "Behind" and "Ahead" and "At One" and "Detached"  at one and the same time.

Invitation to Meditate

Once again as what we are engaged with here is more a spiritual practice than an intellectual exercise it would be profitable to read the above poem again and to let a line or a word therefrom jump from the page as it were into your mind.  Then, with eyes closed, you could do worse than meditating for five or so minutes using that word or phrase as a mantra.

Namaste, friends.

Journal of a Soul 45

Wooden sculpture, Botanic Gardens, Belfast

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

The above rather long quotation with which I begin this post this evening is the third stanza of W. B. Yeats's masterful poem Sailing to Byzantium.  This poem recounts the Nobel Laureate's frustration with the body as he grows old.  The first stanza talks about Byzantium's being "no country for old men," stanza two that "(a)n aged man is but a paltry thing", and then in the above quoted stanza we read that the poet's heart or soul is "sick with desire//And fastened to a dying animal//It knows not what it is."  In other words, Yeats is cursing the body in a way, or at least writing it off as a very frail vessel for the soul/heart. Now, these poetic sentiments are all very much in the tradition of Western Philosophy and Western Theology, firmly reinforced by the Cartesian dualism inaugurated in the seventeenth century and almost fully swallowed whole by more unquestioning scholars in the centuries thereafter.  What I am speaking about here is what the modern English philosopher Gilbert Ryle decried as the "ghost in the machine," a severe criticism of Descartes' mind-body dualism or mainline Christianity's  soul-body dualism.

Immortality, a work I reviewed here.  The exact sentence that elicited this post were: “But it is precisely in this contradiction that I find the crux of the human condition: our heads are full of dreams but our behinds drag us down like an anchor.” (Immortality  by Milan Kunders, Faber and Faber, London, 1992, translated by Peter Kussi, pp. 269-270). 

Body and Mind/Soul/Self

Art on concrete path, Baldoyle, Dublin

Some of the more vexed questions that bother me from time to time, and perhaps sometimes the readers of this rambling journal, are (i) whether the mind equates to the self, (ii) whether the self equates with the soul, (iii) whether the three concepts are really the same and (iv) whether any one of the three survives after death or more specifically whether in my more spiritual moments I really believe that the soul itself continues in another dimension of existence after we have "shuffled off this mortal coil" (Shakespeare) and have left the "dying animal" (Yeats) behind.  These questions bring me into the land of mystery and wonder, rather than into the land of strong belief on the one hand or the land of strong unbelief on the other.  After much reading, study, reflection and discernment I still remain with an open mind, not too sure at all, at all, but that is fine - after all, what is wrong with open-ended-ness?

Where does all the foregoing speculation lead?

Speculation is just that, speculation.  In the end, we humans are left with our experience.  No concepts, no matter how intellectually convincing they may  be, will, in the end, "cut the mustard" or "come up to the mark" when it comes to matters of deep human or existential concern like when we are faced with life or death crises, deep emotional pain or some such human trauma. And so, where does the speculation lead?  In a sense, all speculations only matter as supports for what's deeply held in our experience.  It's hard most times, I believe, to move from speculation or thoughts or theories into deep conviction, though if we are to believe many authors, both theists and atheists, that thoughts and thinking can and do lead to deep confidence in this or that principle.  However, I have always been captivated by John Keats's remark that "axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses." In other words, we will deeply hold philosophical (or theological) axioms only when we have validated them first in our experience.  Hence, the only place we can really turn, then, when we have ceased all our intellectual explorations is to return to the, perhaps not very solid, but nonetheless somewhat firm ground of our own experience.  It is to this ground of personal experience to which I wish to devote the immediately following series of posts.