Poems I Journey With 28

T.S. Eliot said in “Burnt Norton,” the first poem in the sequence of poems called “Four Quartets,” that “human kind cannot bear very much reality.” Reality here, I contend, can be interpreted as all that wears us down as human beings as we try to negotiate our way through life, as we try to cope with its many highs and lows and make some meaning of our own journey through it. Again, I repeat this great poet’s words merely to highlight our need for some form of escapism from time to time: a good holiday, an inspiring read, celebrations of all kinds, concerts, drama, plays, music recitals, and all the cultural conventions and traditions that attempt to help human kind cope with the “jagged edges of existence” or “reality” as T.S. Eliot puts it in the above quoted poem.

Here, I’d like to return to two poems from the pen of our great national Nobel Laureate for Literature, W.B. Yeats and reproduce here for the readers of these musings two lovely refreshing poems that quite soothe my drooping spirits in these stressful days after a traffic accident.

Poem 1: The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1888):

Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Poem 2: The Song of Wandering Aengus

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

Source: The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)

Briefest of Commentaries

Yeats was born in 1865 and so he was only 23 when he wrote “Lake Isle of Innisfree” while he was 34 when he wrote the second poem. Eleven years is a long time in anyone’s life, and the second poem is obviously a far more mature and far deeper poem than the first. However, they are both written against the background of the nourishing and sustaining power of nature for us humans. In short, a good walk out in nature can heal many a broken heart and lift many a depressed spirit. These poems help me cope with life then at this first level, that is, at the level of the balm, the comfort and the healing that nature can offer us if we are open to her charms.

As Yeats grew older he became much more interested in what we in Ireland call the “Celtic Twilight” period, namely that Romantic turning back not alone to nature, but also to mythology and the strong links that mythology had with nature as it developed.  Also Yeats as a poet became far more enchanted with anything to do with mystery, mystique and, indeed the mystical. To commune with nature was to commune with the sustaining power behind that universe – the pagan Celtic gods as represented in that wonderful body of Gaelic Celtic mythology that he himself did much to preserve and to promulgate.

The “fire” that was in his head is a very potent line because it shows the passion for nature that is in Aengus’s mind and indeed in that of the poet himself. Again, Aengus cuts and peels a “hazel wand” and we are immediately enchanted with a magical act that brings us into a more mystical world to which we can escape from the harsh reality around us.  Everything around Aengus is magical and mystical and shot through with the powers of the gods of nature. There are moths on the wing there while the very heavens contain the mystical “moth-like stars” and the repetition of words serves to enchant us further as this is indeed the song of a wanderer through nature with all its healing attributes – indeed it yields up a “silver trout” to feed us on our journey.

Then we are invited into Aengus’s company as he lights a fire on the forest or wood floor, and then some mysterious person calls Aengus, or indeed us the reader, by our name. For sure, we are now in the mythical and mystical woods of the Celtic imagination, of the Celtic Twilight.  Indeed, we are so enchanted that we want to stay there with Aengus.  Like a fairy presence, this female voice changes into a beautiful girl who enchants Aengus and us the readers:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Reading the final verse, this commentator writing these few reflections feels old like Aengus in the poem: “old with wandering” or old and worn out from looking for meaning in an often sad and painful world.  But this final verse is full of promise and hope; full of beauty and truth; full of wisdom and inspiration, for we truly can live in an enchanted world when we read those wonderful final lines of this second poem:

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

Poems I Journey With 1

Introduction

Having written on and pondered the meaning of life from a spiritual point of view for nearly forty years now, I return again and again to poetry for spiritual sustenance.  Over the next several months I should like to record here the poems - with a short commentary on each - that have inspired me throughout those years. They are the poems to which I return again and again for comfort.

Pearse as a Barrister

Given the significance of 2016 for us Irish, namely the centenary of the 1916 Rebellion or Rising as we more commonly call it, I should like to start with a poem by one of our major national heroes, namely Patrick Pearse (1879 - 1916) who, along with many others, gave his life for the future freedom of the Irish nation.  I will start with one wonderfully deep poem from his pen in English.  It is called "The Wayfarer"

The Wayfarer

The beauty of the world hath made me sad,
This beauty that will pass;
Sometimes my heart hath shaken with great joy
To see a leaping squirrel in a tree,
Or a red lady-bird upon a stalk,
Or little rabbits in a field at evening,
Lit by a slanting sun,
Or some green hill where shadows drifted by
Some quiet hill where mountainy man hath sown
And soon would reap; near to the gate of Heaven;
Or children with bare feet upon the sands
Of some ebbed sea, or playing on the streets
Of little towns in Connacht,
Things young and happy.
And then my heart hath told me:
These will pass,
Will pass and change, will die and be no more,
Things bright and green, things young and happy;
And I have gone upon my way
Sorrowful.

Commentary

This poem captures for me one of the central issues in life, namely its transience, transitoriness or impermanence, call it what you will.  I suppose most of us encounter this impermanence most essentially through experiencing loss, especially that loss we encounter in the death of our loved ones.  Another way of expressing this is to say we encounter in those losses our mortality and the brevity and brittleness of the enterprise we call life.  

There are many history commentators with divergent views on Patrick Pearse, but not one can deny his ability as poet, author and perspicacious educationist.  In this poem, "The Wayfarer,"  Pearse expresses his encounter with his own mortality.  Undoubtedly, for those who understand the broader historical motivations of the author, the above poem will have resonances for the reader about dying for one's country.  Pearse knew, indeed believed, that the freedom of the Irish Nation could not be achieved in any other way but through the sacrifice of his life for his country.  However controversial his political beliefs were, and however much we can see their influence in the above poem, nevertheless, anyone knowing nothing of the author will meet the poem in itself, within its own internal coherence without historical interference. It is in this sense of the poem's own internal integrity that I love it. 

The great contemporary psychiatrist and psychotherapist Professor Irvin Yalom has outlined four main ultimate concerns that lie at the heart of every patient or client who comes to his consulting rooms namely (i) existential aloneness, (ii) freedom, (iii) meaninglessness and (iv) mortality.  These four ultimate concerns, he argues, make up the very ground of our being in the world and portray themselves in a vast array of mental complaints in the clients or patients who frequent his therapy sessions.  They also form the four main planks of what he describes as Existential Psychotherapy. 

Pearse as a young boy

Using Professor Yalom's insights into Existential Psychotherapy, and indeed his basic insights into the nature of the human condition we may say that Patrick Pearse engages the two main ultimate concerns of (i) existential aloness and (ii) mortality in his wonderful little poem "The Wayfarer."

The title of the poem is, for me, a very spiritual one, namely that we are all pilgrims or wayfarers on our journey through life.  Without a doubt, the image of pilgrim, wayfarer or journeyer is essentially a religious or spiritual one.  Central to all religions and spiritual traditions is the notion that life is a journey on the way to some destination.  Most religions call such a destination by the name of Heaven or Nirvana or whatever.  Yet within many religious traditions, there are also spiritual sub-strands that emphasise that the journey or pilgrimage itself is what matters and that the NOW of life is what is important, not the goal! If there is a goal, well so much the better, but that often distracts us from the task at hand, namely making the most or the best of the life we live in the now of existing.

Transience (mortality, mutability, transitoriness, impermanence) is noticed in these lines: "This beauty that will pass," "shadows drifted by," and "These will pass//Will pass and change, // Will die and be no more."  Also the beauty of the world will sadly pass, too.

Pearse, when he wrote this poem was obviously overcome with sadness, the sadness of leaving the beauty of the world behind him at his death.  And yet for me, I am never saddened by this poem as I understand his predicament at the time, namely what his sacrifice of his life would cost him.  Moreover, with an understanding of existential psychotherapy as proposed by Irvin Yalom and Emmy Van Deurzen and others of that approach to therapy and to life, it is by encountering our mortality head on that we come to prize life and living all the more highly.  

In the Buddhist tradition, meditation upon dying and death is highly recommended, not from the point of view of wallowing in depression or sadness, but rather in the consequent appreciation of the power of living in the now and valuing all the painful beauty we may meet in that now: of valuing the beauty of the brittleness of the world and the fragility of life, "the leaping squirrel," the beauty of "a red lady-bird upon a stalk," or "some green hill," or even barefooted children running on the sands of the coastal strands, little beautiful towns, "things young and happy," and "things bright and green."

There is no need, like the wayfarer, to go on your way sorrowful that things will pass, but rather to begin the journey to learn to appreciate the presence of life in the now, even if it is fleeting and transitory.  In the end, we are, after all, just a little part of a more eternal cycle. Let us appreciate our little part in that great cycle of things that makes life in the first place. 

For an alternative commentary and a recording of an actor reading the poem see the following LINK.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 50

Poem 50

The Master gives himself up

to whatever the moment brings.

He knows that he is going to die,

and he has nothing left to hold on to:

no illusions in his mind,

no resistances in his body.

He doesn't think about his actions;

they flow from the core of his being.

He holds nothing back from life;

therefore he is ready for death,

as a man is ready for sleep

after a good day's work.

Commentary

One of the disputed quotes attributed to one of the mid-twentieth century Prime Ministers of Great Britain, Mr Harold Macmillan, who when asked what was most likely to throw any administration into crisis, is the famous one which goes, "events, dear boy, events!" Whatever about the accuracy or inaccuracy of its attribution, its wisdom is simple and so true.  Things happen either purposely or by chance, crises occur, accidents  take place and so on and so forth, and the wisdom we must learn to our definite cost is that we must weather these incidents with equanimity if we are to survive in this world in any sane sense.  This is the type of wisdom that our Taoist poet is alluding to in this poem above.  Once again, I hasten to point out that what he is recommending is no mere passivity in the face of random or caused occurrences, but rather an attitude of mind, a seemingly imperturbable spirit that will allow us peace of mind and sanity to deal with the human fall-out of those events no matter what the level or depth of their tragedy.

A weak flame tries to pierce the falling dusk: January 2016

Once again, at the heart of all spirituality is the contemplation of death and dying.  It has most rightly been pointed out by our inherited wisdom as a human race - in almost all spiritualities to a greater or lesser extent - that death is not the end of life - in fact, they maintain that it is part of the experience of living and central to life itself.  After all, individuality is but a little part of what life is.  We individuals are but mere specks of life who mostly subscribe to our own mythology of being so much more than we actually are: life is always greater than we small specks of it. However, when those close to us die, we are reminded in no small way what fragile vessels of life we are in actual fact.

In this regard, the Master lives by holding nothing back from life, by retaining nothing within his being that should not be spent on living and thereby adding to the sum total of life in the outer world.  He most naturally goes with the flow of life or the river of being.  As I type these fragile words on this virtual page in computer space, I realise how much more powerfully moving and existentially-loaded is the phrase "river of being" than the reductive, though solidly biological, "river of genes" of Richard Dawkins.  As humans, we are spiritual realities inhering so mysteriously and intricately in our temporary biological bodies. And so, as death and dying are inextricably part of all growth and of all life, the Master lives also by holding nothing back from the inevitability of life, not even his own death.  And so, dear friends, chance readers of these cyphers in virtual space, we could do worse than re-reading and pondering the above poem, which I repeat here for emphasis.  Namaste!

The Master gives himself up

to whatever the moment brings.

He knows that he is going to die,

and he has nothing left to hold on to:

no illusions in his mind,

no resistances in his body.

He doesn't think about his actions;

they flow from the core of his being.

He holds nothing back from life;

therefore he is ready for death,

as a man is ready for sleep

after a good day's work.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 45

Poem 45

True perfection seems imperfect,

yet it is perfectly itself.

True fullness seems empty,

yet it is fully present.

True straightness seems crooked.

True wisdom seems foolish.

True art seems artless.

The Master allows things to happen.

She shapes events as they come.

She steps out of the way

and lets the Tao speak for itself.

Commentary

Howth Harbour, 2003

Once again, we are in the misty realms of the mystical where nothing appears clear - at least clear in the conceptual or cortical or logical sense Once again, to continue by way of a refrain, we are in the country of poetry which nicely parallels the world of the mystical. Another related, and indeed cognate word to mystical is undoubtedly that of "mystery." Both derive from the Greek root "musterion" and the Latin word "misterium" through "mistere" of Old French to mean something akin to hidden meaning or truth, or a deeper religious feeling or some sort of esoteric experience of union with that meaning or truth behind whatever reality is. Maybe, indeed, it is that reality in se? Moreover, it suggests a strong, though hidden, presence of the source of all truth, namely God or some other such esoteric principle, with the person doing the experiencing. 

Further, let me point out here, at the risk of repeating myself somewhat ad nauseam, that there is more to human intelligence than the logical, the cortical or the narrowly mathematical.  There are many other aspects to the human intelligence as the great contemporary psychologist Howard Gardner so powerfully pointed out to us in his book Frames of Mind (1983) namely Musical, Visual, Verbal, Logical, Bodily, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal,  Naturalistic and Existential.  There are other scholars who would add some others to this list. Be that as it may, these nine intelligences are essentially highly useful and intuitively obvious models of Intelligence, and obviously they do overlap and mutually co-operate in the workings of our human brains/minds.  In the main, as a schema or suggested structure for the complexity that is the human intelligence, they are useful in many fields of endeavour, especially in education and mental health areas to name but two.  What I am about here, to state my argument as vividly and as clearly as possible, is to emphasise that argumental clarity is a trait of logical and mathematical intelligence pre-eminently, and that it is not necessarily a strong trait in other aspects of intelligence as in Art or Music or Bodily or indeed Existential Intelligence.  In short, it is only at our peril that we look for a logical clarity in spiritual or mystical or indeed in existential writing.

"Of the writing of books there is no end!" Own library

Once again, to sustain my old refrain, poetry lends itself well to the expression of mystical theology, mystical experience, religious or siritual writing in a most important way. Poetry places all its powers at the disposal of the spiritual or mystical writer: simile, metaphor, paradox, imagery of all types, symbolism and so on, along with much subtlety of connotation.  Yet again, setting up pairs of polar oposites is to the fore in the above poem: perfection vs imperfection, fullness vs emptiness, presence vs absence, straightness vs crookedness, wisdom vs foolishness, expression vs concealment, openness vs closedness or closure, masculine vs feminine and so on.    

Perfection is essentially a hard word really, a relentlessly condemnatory and judgemental one at that, I believe. Somehow, unrealistic and obsessional teachers and professors have used it over the years as a cruel weapon in education to beat their pupils and students relentlessly with and in so doing massage their own egos. To my mind, they were simply that, that is to say, simply unrealistic, obsessional, cruel and egotistical.  A friend of mine, whose father was a professor and scholar of note at one of our foremost colleges described him as a "grammar fascist" in his ruthless pursuit of perfection in his chsosen language of study.  It is educationally sound to strive for a certain perfection as a goal but never to be obsessional in its pursuit as it can be so dismissive of seemingly lesser achievements, achievements which may require greater effort on the part of strugglers than the effort expended by the experts in the discipline in question. After all, does not life teach us that imperfection is often the order of the day?  Things fail and structures crumble as indeed do the creators and makers of those things.  As a young boy, I was often quite upset when this or that toy broke.  And then, I learned to live with the inevitable breaking down of things.  A deeper and more bitter lesson yet had to be learnt by me as a young boy, and that was that people as well as things broke, faded and died.  This is life, I learned to my then consternation. Perfection is always ahead of us, often never, if ever, here in the now. Living in the now often requires that we be satisfied at times with accepting what we cannot improve or change despite our greatest efforts, and that some individual things and some situations in which we find ourselves in life may just well be such as the old saying has it, that is, that they represent life's being simply "as good as it gets!" 

And yet perfection may include within it an element of the imperfect.  After all, how can one describe light without shade, black without white, good without bad, kindness without cruelty and so on?  Those polar opposites may just well be in that healthy tension suggested by many philosophers and creative writers?

As one of our great Irish writers, Oscar Wilde, once so pithily put it "the truth is never pure and rarely simple."  Indeed, Wilde did not write his words flippantly (as we often infer from his more humorous works) as he had suffered much in his quite short life and much of his thoughts and indeed his great humour were tempered with the most bitter of experiences of a life that had as many lows and well as it had highs. 

In a sense, existentially we are called upon, in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre to shape our own destinies by modelling the best self (or our best identity project) we can from the talents at our disposal within the orbit of our own little lives.  In that same sense, we are condemned to be free within the limits and constraints of our own private and public worlds.  However, we are but mere dots on a bigger blob of earth that is in turn a mere dot within a bigger blob that is a mere dot within another bigger blob and so on ad infinitum.  In that sense, the Tao or the Wisdom behind the universe or God or the Great Spirit or even what some call the Indifferent Energy behind the universe, or whatever is at the base of reality, shapes much that is beyond our puny control.  We are definitely mere "flies to wanton boys," as Shakespeare once so timelessly put it, in this particular context outlined. And yet, our task is at least to make the best stab we can at making even a little splash in our tiny pond of life.  To this end, all cultures call us, and all religions, too, which are, of course, mere aspects of those same cultures.  Maybe, indeed, the cultural must, of necessity, always and ever be greater than mere individuality, that most wonderful and elusive myth of all.

Journal of a Soul 76

Summer Retreat

La Basilica di San Pietro, Roma, giugno, 2015

It is hard to say something new. That is surely the greatest problem facing anyone who wishes to write something. With regard to spiritual/meaning matters I feel this is especially true. Travelling on one's own I feel is a form of pilgrimage as one is journeying inwards as well as outwards as it were; the spiritual journey mirrors the outer physical one.  One thing I like about such travelling is that one ends up talking to people out of necessity simply because of the desire to hear one's own voice again as well as the natural desire to reach out and communicate with others.  Sitting on some steps in Piazza San Pietro, Rome, just three days ago, a young Australian lad struck up conversation with me, opining that it was "very peaceful here." Our conversation spanned from Irish to Australian cultural similarities and differences, and why so many young Irish people wished to take a year out and backpack "down-under."  He shook my hand as I departed: the desire to acknowledge another human being who had the courtesy to listen. 

And yet the existential trials of life walk with us as we make our pilgrimage.  Indeed, we mostly repress those existential trials in order to survive.  But there is a further "and yet" that needs to be acknowledged.  That "and yet" is that the existential trials of life, and most especially death and dying are the greatest repression of modernity, as the great contemporary existential psychotherapist and psychiatrist Irvin Yalom has so perspicaciously and wisely pointed out.  Let me illustrate for the briefest moment.  If you are Irish or Irish-American you will be well aware of the tragic deaths of those young 21 year old J1 students from Ireland who died when a balcony collapsed recently in Berkeley California and the number of others seriously injured, especially those who suffered life-changing injuries.  The trials of these last mentioned are only beginning.  Or to put it in more poetic words: their pilgrimage truly begins now.

As I write, I have just read that another mad gunman - appropriately dressed in black - has gunned down countless tourists on a beach in Tunisia, among whom one Irish mother was murdered.  The mind boggles. Moral evil raises its ugly head all too often.  Indeed, let us add another "and yet" here: if none of us risked anything in life humanity would amount to very little.  Life is about risk.  Without risk it is hard to envisage any life worth living at all.  How true that old proverb is: "Nothing ventured, nothing gained!"  If you don't go a J1 visa to USA you miss out on a lot.  I had not got that opportunity due to family circumstances and financial constraints at the time.  It is a super opportunity for personal growth.

Life is fickle and chance-bound.  I remember when I first started in my present school some 27 years ago that as I descended the bus at a stop near the school that a motor cyclist nearly mowed me down; that as a young four year old boy I was nearly killed by a lorry from the local bacon factory - I can still hear the screech of brakes and so on.  Recall here your own near misses.  We have all had near misses - some nearer than others.  And yet, if we had not had the courage to venture forth, we simply would not be the people we are today, in this moment of time.  That is what life is about - the courage to take risk or as the existentialists put it the COURAGE TO DARE.

There are other thoughts and feelings that throng my conscious mind, and yet like a meditator of some thirty years or more, I know that I must learn to still those thoughts and feelings, to just let them come and go as the waves of the sea, and then attempt to let them slide from consciousness and dwell in pure awareness.  No easy task, that, I assure you.  And yet, I believe that is the goal of life.  Recently I was at a conference and a Ph.D, candidate, dedicated teacher, committed family man with wife and family and a former student of mine (who had lost both his parents when he was all too young) asked that old chestnut of a question: "What's it all about, anyway, Tim?  I was brought back thirty years to Ger Smith, a teacher colleague who had asked me the same question.  It was only a couple of years later that I had learnt that Ger had died of a congenital heart disease to which there was no cure. I was not then to know that man's inner tormenting question in its fullness.  Today I understand it better having been through my own personal wringer of which I have written about widely in these pages, so there is no need to repeat the obvious.

And so as we journey we carry all the above questions in our backpack, and that is no harm at all.  Indeed, it is a gift.  Meditating on death and dying, chance and mischance, accidents and life-altering occurrences are all part of the deal.  Risk is simply part of the deal with life and let us not forget that.  In short, what are these pages, these writings, these reflections teaching me?  Well, they are teaching me to DARE TO BE, to keep right on, or as one of my favourite singer-songwriters puts it, "to keep on keeping on."  Those words as no doubt you will know are sung by the infamous Bob Dylan. That's what it's all about: to keep right on till the end of the road.  Once, when my mother had fallen in her early eighties and had crawled to the wall for support. she marvelled out loud to me when I had picked her up: "I wonder is it coming near the end, Tim?"  I asked her how she was and she said: "I'm fine. I slipped after dressing myself and couldn't get up, but as I knew you'd drop by at lunch time I'd only have to wait four or five hours here!" She died at 96 in a nursing home.  Her whole motto was simple: "Keep going!" Or as the great poet Robert Frost once remarked rather succinctly, when asked what life was all about: "It goes on!" The same wisdom as that of most of humanity. All spiritualities teach us to live in the "now," to have no regrets about the past or fears for the future, but simply to appreciate the now.  Dear reader, let us learn to Dare To Be, To Dare to Risk or to Dare to Live!!  Aude Vivere!!

Journal of a Soul 75

Of Living and Dying

"Live in the Now" - that's the lesson of Meditating on Death

“None of us gets out of life alive” is a quotation that remains in my mind.  I even remember the occasion of my first hearing it way back in the early 1990s.  I was listening to a radio programme by the Irish journalist Colm Keane on the subject of “Death Row” in some penitentiary in one of the southern states of the USA.  Our intrepid journalist interviewed a convicted murderer, who was placed behind a protective glass screen.  I remember that this man showed absolutely no remorse for the murders he had committed and saw life as being just a sort of game which one played; a game where it did not matter if one broke the rules as long as one got away with it.  In fact, the prison guards called him, “the animal.”  I remember the hair standing upright on my neck as I listened to this cold, unfeeling, rational, and obviously very intelligent man, express his thoughts and feelings on the crimes he had committed and on life in general. However, he expressed in eight short words the very heart of the human predicament – our temporality or our transitoriness on this minuscule planet that is a mere dot in the infinity of space. This state of affairs, when it hits home in the thinking and feeling and self-conscious human being, is exactly what we mean by the adjectives “existential” or “existentialist.” In short, our mortality lies at the heart of what essentially existentialism boils down to.

Freud used to say that the real repression in humankind was that of the base sexual desires that were deeply rooted in the dark pit of the unconscious.  However, Jung and others since have pointed out most wisely that the ultimate or real repression is that of death.  In one sense, this repression is a survival mechanism.  After all, the denial of death allows for egocentric humankind to push forward against all opposition – coming from either others or nature – to amass property, wealth and acquisitions of all kinds.  One might say, in quite a convincing sense, that all culture is created in the face of death – a sort of myth of significance and permanency in the teeth of the very impermanence and transitoriness of life itself.

Daffodil, Easter 2014

Here is where a philosophy of life comes in on the one hand and where the spiritual and religious traditions on the other have had some insightful things to say.  Admittedly religions in their more structural, authoritarian, hierarchical and indeed forbidding senses have been all too doctrinaire in their tenets and often murdered many who opposed them throughout the course of history.  However, here I am referring to a more devotional and spiritual model or aspect of such religions.  It is arguable that when religions lose vital contact with what the philosopher Eric Voegelin, called their “engendering experience” (or spiritual source or originating vision) they become monolithic, heartless and forbidding structures capable of dehumanising others.

The novelist, literary critic and professor of philosophy Umberto Eco opined that we read literature to learn how to die.  That notion is perhaps a bit one-sided.  I prefer to say that we read literature in order to learn how to live and die.  Living and dying are, in fact, the two sides of the one coin and are somehow paradoxically inextricably linked.  To be a living being is to be a dying being.  Essentially, death and dying are consequences of The Second Law of Thermodynamics or of the results of what’s called entropy.  A thorough understanding of this concept is beyond me as I have little background in Physics, but I can grasp some of its intentions and implications.  To my mind, Walter E. Requadt explains entropy very well for the ordinary person in the street in his wonderfully thought-provoking and stimulating blog called “The Happy Iconoclast” by invoking “Murphy’s Law”:

Unless we constantly insert new energy into a house by maintaining it, painting it, repairing it, the structure will eventually but inevitably be levelled to the ground. Its molecules will move from a lower level of randomization, from structure, to a higher level of randomization, towards unstructured debris.

Entropy is the reason why paint peels, why hot coffee turns cold. Furthermore, entropy is the reason why investments have a pre-ordained inclination to go sour -- unless we enhance success by inserting into the investment system additional energy in the form of strategy, work, calculated risk or other forms of energy. Entropy ensures that sugar, which becomes more randomized when it is dissolved in water, will not reconstitute itself in the crystalline form -- unless we apply heat energy from outside the system and evaporate the water.

Wherever we look, whatever we do, we must be acutely aware of the immutable laws of thermodynamics, especially the easily overlooked Second Law: Entropy. This fundamental law of physics ranks with other fundamental manifestations of the universe such as gravity, time and electromagnetism.

Anything that can go wrong not only will go wrong, it must go wrong, as decreed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (See here: The Happy Iconoclast)

To say that we humans die is to say that we like the entire flora and fauna of the earth are subject to the inevitability of the various laws of the universe, and most essentially to the law of entropy.

Along similar lines, Stephen Hawking told his biographers (Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science by John Gribbin and Michael White, 1992), who had once been Ph.D. students under his direction, that he had never succumbed to anger at life when he was stricken down with motor-neurone disease because essentially life was just chance anyway, and that it all boiled down to the randomness of nature – that is, to the chances involved or the probability of one’s parents meeting and then in the combinations of genes allocated by nature to your particular embryo.  These were, to say the least, random.

Professor Stephen Hawking

While Hawking likes to style himself an atheist, this stance is quite akin to that of a Buddhist spirituality (which some say is not religious anyway) that states that all suffering is caused by our attachment to things animate and inanimate.  All meditation practices and wisdom learnt therefrom and from study, and indeed from life in general, all help us to break free from such suffering by learning detachment. In other words, this is the implication of what is known as the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism that can be stated in simple terms as:

1.  Suffering exists: dukkha. (Life is unfair essentially, with much chance involved – Hawking’s position)

2.  Suffering arises from attachment to desires. (Wishing that things were different – that I shouldn’t get Motor Neurone disease and so on). It is called either samudaya or tanha in the various traditions and is the vain desire to have and control things. 

3.  Suffering ceases when attachment to desire ceases. (When I cease to be attached to unfulfillable desires or even fulfilled ones). The end to suffering is called nirodha. It is achieving Nirvana, which is the final liberation from suffering. The mind experiences complete freedom, liberation and non-attachment. It lets go of any desire or craving. It is an attaining of dispassion.

4.  Freedom from suffering is possible by practicing the Eightfold Path

It is important to note that in the Eastern religions, to meditate on dying and death is no mere negative action.  Nor is it a particularly morose one.  Only at first sight does it appear to be such.  Once one has meditated on either dying or death one comes from one’s sitting with a renewed commitment to living life more fully, and more especially living it more fully in the now.  To realise that truly life is fleeting and that we all end up either “six feet under” or being cremated is to deeply realise that the only answer is to live life more fully, more intensely by being aware of the sheer importance of living fully in the now.  After all, now is all we have.  In a sense, neither the past nor the future exists because the first has ceased to be and the second has not yet come.  In a deeper sense, all that exists is the present moment or the now.  In fact, conscious life is just that – an awareness of the abiding present or the passing now. (Or, as I look at these previous words anew, why not write "the abiding presence of the passing now"?

Picture of a Poppy I took April 2014

 Meditating on dying and death should never bring us down into the pits of despair because its real message is to deeply value and live in the enduring present.  Obviously, I don’t mean by this combination of words that everything stays the same or that nothing changes.  What I mean is that we only can really live in the now of time as it moves – that’s what I mean by the enduring present.

We read in the Tao Te Ching:

If you realise that all things change,

There is nothing you will try to hold on to.

If you aren’t afraid of dying,

There is nothing you can’t achieve.

Trying to control the future

Is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place.

When you handle the master carpenter’s tools,

Chances are that you’ll cut your hand.

(Tao Te Ching, verse 74, Lao Tzu, translated by Stephen Mitchell)

In summary, then, we have two choices and the choice recommended by all spiritualities worth their salt is to choose life not death everyday of our lives by practicing living in the now.

Journal of a Soul 74

Nothing New Under the Sun

The Kerry Cliffs, February 2015

In Ecclesiastes 1:9, the writer tells us in succinct words: "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." (NIV).  I often ponder these words whenever I might possibly think that I may have come up with a startlingly new insight into anything.  Indeed, I suppose, one of the few people for whom the thought is new is indeed I, the thinker of the thought. Often, I struggle to come up with something new for this particular blog because it is the most personal of any of the blogs I author or contribute to.  "How far have I progressed in self-knowledge?" has always been a constant question in my life since I was a young man.  Many years ago as a young novice I was a student in religious life for three years and for the duration of that time I would have attended a spiritual director/counsellor on a regular basis.  Hence, that question was to become and to remain an important one by which I measure my existence on this planet.  

At an an in-service programme I attended as a new Resource/Special Education teacher I remember the instructor telling us that many autistic children make progress in millimeters. I loved her analogy, and I suppose, in answer to my above question of myself, I could respond in like manner.  Along with the spiritual classics and the scriptures, I have always found reading every and any poem I can get my hands on thoroughly rewarding.  Poems in general contain a distilled wisdom in shape and sound that resonate in my heart.  Readers of this blog will know that I have a particular liking for the poems of T.S. Eliot and that I am wont to quote him often.  Once when accused of repeating himself a tad too often in his poetry, he replied in some such words as: "Ah, but I always said it in a new way each time." In other words, by implication, we can look at a problem or indeed the mystery of life itself from many different angles, from many different perspectives.

Nothingness and Emptiness

Portrane, February 2015

In The Myth of Sisyphus, that basic seminal text of absurdism, Albert Camus tells us that the thought about the sheer absurdity of life can strike us at any time and may occur as simply as when we might enter or exit a building through a revolving door.  Heidegger and the other philosophers of that amorphous and rather untidy group of writers/thinkers called existentialists stress that philosophy begins in this very experience of the nothingness and emptiness of life.  Now and again I hear friends and acquaintances ask the rather  common but exasperatingly desperate question of life, viz., "What's it all about, anyway?"  Richard Kearney reminds us that "through the experience of nothing, something emerges as important." (Life Lessons, ed. Rita de Brún, Dublin: New Island, 2014, p. 252)

Again, I was always taken by the question that Heidegger argued was the most important one that anyone could ever ask in philosophy since I first heard it, viz., "Why is there something rather than nothing?"  I first heard that question when it was addressed to us by Fr Patrick Carmody, our wonderful philosophy lecturer, way back in the 1970s.  Indeed, it is a question well worth pondering and indeed meditating on as a mantra in prayer.  Further, if you do so, as I have done from time to time, you will then understand what Wittgenstein meant when he declared "(T)hat this world is; that is the mystical."

The Power of Wonder

Cemetery, Portrane, Summer 2013

In other words, a sense of the mystical is experienced in our being driven to wondering what life is all about in the first place.  No wonder Socrates opined that "philosophy begins in wonder." [Plato puts those words in the mouth of Socrates in the Theaetetus 155 d (tr. Benjamin Jowett)] Or again, I am often reminded of an old Peanuts cartoon by Charles Schultz from my college years which featured Snoopy the dog and had the following caption underneath it: "Sometimes I sits and I thinks. Sometimes I just sits." (The dog in the said cartoon happened to be sitting on either a potty or a toilet bowl, I cannot remember which at this distance in time.)  These moments of wonder or even bewilderment - often expressed through tears, laughter, screams of joy, mania or even pain - represent the beginning of the philosophical quest.  We are figuratively thrown outside ourselves, or made to sit or stand "beside" ourselves and in doing so we put ourselves, others and everything in our world into question.  This is what the theologian Karl Rahner means when he says that "man is himself the question."  It is further most interesting to note that this brilliant theologian was long a philosophical disciple of the equally brilliant philosopher Heidegger who said that the human being is the only creature whose being is an issue for it.  

The Elusive Now

As far back as the early 1700s the Jesuit priest (and mystic in my opinion) Jean Pierre de Caussade S.J. (1675 – 1751) was encouraging those in his spiritual care to live in the present moment or in the "now" of experience. He was telling them that the present moment is a sacrament from God and that self-abandonment to it and its needs is a holy state.  And we think that Eckhart Tolle's teaching is new!   Indeed, many spiritual scholars have found Caussade's writings very similar to those of both Mahayana and Zen Buddhism. Again, our minds are rarely in the now because many of us may neurotically live in the past - regretting this, that or the other action or occurrence - or in the future - desiring or indeed fearing this, that or the other state or this, that or the other material thing.  Bringing the mind into the immediacy of the now of present experience is no easy task.  At a recent mindfulness retreat, the director reminded us that our bodies were always in the "now" and that this is why when we meditate we first return to mindfulness of our bodies, most especially to our breath, as a way of stilling the mind.  Meditation brings us back from that "standing beside ourselves" or outside ourselves that we have said is the beginning of philosophy.  Richard Kearney opines that "(i)n many respects, prayer, yoga, being one with nature, alcohol and food can be different ways of responding to the gap, of bringing us back to a certain kind of presence." (Op. cit., pp. 254 - 255)

Now, quite obviously the animal does not exist (from the Latin "ex-istere" which means "to stand out or apart from") in the same way as we humans do.  They can never stand out or apart from themselves a s we do.  Indeed, inanimate objects can certainly never exist in such a fashion at all.  Kearney again reminds us that for these reasons we are most likely ".... to relax with animals: they calm us and bring us back to earth, to basics and peace and quiet. Think of a purring cat or a sleeping dog." (Op.cit., p. 255)

From Esoteric Dreams to Concrete and Dirt

It is good to get stopped in our tracks, held up, brought to our knees, even onto all fours from time to time.  Some six weeks back I was walking all too quickly and blithely across our school yard lost in reverie, and indeed lost to the world.  As my late mother would have put it, I was "away with the fairies."  Then suddenly, crash, bang and wallop.  I had run into a huge garden planter that has been in the school yard for many years.  I cut both knees and both shins in my collision.  As I was doctoring myself with some medications from the  First Aid Kit some moments later I began to laugh at how ridiculous this whole existence is; how stupidly serious we actually take ourselves in our nothingness and emptiness and how desperately and sillily we want to fill that emptiness with our pipe dreams. Meditating some hour or two later, I realized that my collision with the garden planter was serendipitous as it was calling me back to an awareness of my body, or re-calling me to the now-ness and immediacy of the present, to be really and truly present to myself in the here and now.  This is essentially what all meditation, what all mysticism is about.  Further, some clay spilled out of the planter and it reminded me that as the Bible said we were made of such and to such we would return.  It also reacquainted me with the fundamental meaning of being "human" which is etymologically linked with the Latin word "humus" which simply means clay or earth.  

Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does the planter exist in the first place? Why do I exist?  These are questions we will never get a final answer to, but that is not what life is about at all, is it, dear reader?  It's the wonder and mystery of all those questions that keeps us going; that pushes us on to ever new horizons; that inspires us to strike out for the next hill or valley, to set off to foreign lands, to explore the mysteries of space and to wonder at our own littleness and brittleness against such vastness.  We were made to wonder.  We were created to be philosophical and spiritual beings.  May we never stop wondering and may we never stop asking those big questions of ourselves.