Journal of a Soul 71

The Journey Continues

Howth, Christmas Eve, 2014

A New Year has begun.  Another year has been clocked up on that strange weak vehicle of self or soul we call the body.  The calendar cycle has begun once again.  There is a wisdom in the seasons that seems to suggest that everything is cyclical, that progress is an illusion.  The way of wisdom is by the gradual erosion of our superficial beliefs bit by slow bit - like that proverbial drip that wears the stone.  Nothing is constant - all, as the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus says, is "in a state of flux," and yet there is a paradoxical cyclical repetition to change. 

Heraclitus in Raphael's School of Athens

The New Year is ushered in by a review of the events - little and great, insignificant and significant, heroic and tragic - of the past twelve months.  It is as if the fires of the last year have all burned themselves down into the ashes of our memory as we look ahead in anticipation and hope to the brighter fires of the year to come. Sometimes one gets the distinct impression that the drudgery of the whole thing begins again.  It's as if our body is growing tired of the whole thing and that the spirit itself is flagging.  When one looks out into the grey skies of winter in this northern hemisphere it feels as if one might be a character in a Kafka novel or a Beckett play - just there on an indifferent stage not understanding what has happened to you in life and that the blessed thing has a habit of just going on and on.  Yes, the cycle begins over and over again. And where lies the meaning?

There are sentences that haunt the mind of this writer - ones indeed of Biblical portent and intensity. These are sentences that come whistling like boys walking past graveyards on a dark shadowy night. "There is nothing new under the sun," says Qoheleth, the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes and he proceeds in Kafkaesque and Beckettian tones, in absurdist or existentialist terms with these rather anachronistically modern lines that are paradoxically over 2000 years old:

A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.

The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.

The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.

All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.

What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already
in the ages before us.

There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be among those who come after. (Eccles. 1: 2-9)

And so here we go with another year. Where does that leave the writer of this blog? What about the progress on the spiritual way for this pilgrim soul?  I often wonder how far I have come and if any progress has been made at all.   Am I just beginning all over again? It often seems as if the spiritual journey is one of a cyclical nature too.  It feels as if the whole journey is beginning all over again from the start and that any progress that had apparently been achieved has now turned out to be a mere illusion.  With this in mind I can empathize with the young boy who informed me today that he had to get a repeat of his operation of four years ago to replace his VNS device (Vagus Nerve Stimulator) under the skin in his upper chest. This procedure is a modern treatment for trickier cases of epilepsy.  Or still again I can appreciate the predicament of anyone who has had a relapse of one or other disease that plunges them back to the beginning once again.

TS Eliot

And yet,  the words of Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) lift me, as they always do, with their dearly-bought but deep wisdom:

We shall not cease from exploration 
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started 
And know the place for the first time. ("Four Quartets")

As any teacher or indeed any maker of poems will tell you a question like "what does this poem or these lines mean?" is a rather inappropriate one to ask of any such work.  Poems are an intricate interweaving of words, feelings, inspiration and sound, and their meaning lies somewhere in the interaction of the reader with that complex phenomenon.  So meaning is a very dynamic experience that cannot be reduced to a mere paraphrase.  

Let's try, though, to tease out some of the connotations and implications for our lives from Eliot's intriguing lines: 

Most of us are searchers and explorers who want to make some sense of our lives.  And moreover, we may never cease from doing so as Eliot suggests.  Oftentimes, and indeed our poet suggests always, we arrive back where we started out and see the place anew.  On one level the place is obviously the same, but now we are seeing it with "new" eyes, with a new optic, from a new or deeper or even different perspective.  Now there are new dimensions to our experience - new depths and/or new heights to it!

Making Sense of Life and the Turn to Meditation

If we don't seek to make some sense of our lives we are somehow consigned to a rather humdrum, boring and meaninglessly repetitious existence.  In short, we are meaning-making creatures and were meant to be.  In so doing, we are in a growing mode, ready to embrace happiness or that state called "flourishing" or "eudaimonia" by Aristotle.

However, searching and exploring can tire the spirit and the body.  I remember many years ago attending a spiritual retreat where each group was asked to come up with a name for their group.  The names suggested were along these lines: Searchers, Explorers, Sunflowers, Wayfarers, Pilgrims, Brothers and Sisters and so on.  The name that showed the least sense of struggle, obviously, was that of Sunflowers.  That particular group explained that they were so aware that they were respondents to sheer gifts and graces that were lavished upon them by God, the Universe or Life itself that they could come up with no other appellation.  This, at first sight, is a rather strange way of responding to life, is it not?  And yet it a legitimate experience of thanksgiving for life's bounty or bounteousness  that quite a number of people experience.  Sunflowers turn towards the sun and are led to blossom under its rays.  There are people who experience living as such a response to what they experience as the sheer giftedness of their being.

In those dry periods when its seems that I am going around in meaningless circles, as so brutally expressed in my opening paragraphs, that I am seemingly in the same old place or predicament, I often find myself turning to meditation.  Meditation for me can be done at three levels, and often I can do it at each of the three levels according to how I feel in any given situation.  At level one we can meditate at a physical level, that is, we can engage in it  solely as an exercise to relax our body.  At level two we can go deeper still and relax our mind - that is, where the mindfulness exercise is one of mental or psychological relaxation.  As a believer in the spiritual realm, I accept and indeed experience meditation as allowing me to experience a sense of being in touch with a deeper ground of my being, namely a divine or spiritual level to my life and to the world.  

It is at this third level that I experience graced moments of contact with a deeper or higher level reaching into my own little world.  This is very hard to describe because quite simply one has to experience it, to be touched by it and moved by it so as to appreciate it in any way at all.  It is at this level, I believe, that the human meditator can become like a sunflower responding to the Sun or Ground of life that some dare call God.  It is at this deeper (or higher depending on one's spatial metaphor) level that in T.S. Eliot's words we recognize or "know the place for the first time."  It is also at this level that one realizes that despite the seeming stagnation, the apparent atrophy and the stupefying stasis, there indeed has been a significant shift at the level of meaning, at the level of being, at the level of the spiritual journey.

And so the spiritual journey goes on.  As any pilgrim will tell you, the road is often twisting and troublesome, sometimes dangerous and impassable and yet one knows one can never turn back.  It is the persevering on that journey that counts.  Paul Tillich, the great German-American theologian and philosopher, called on us to "dare to be!"  He reckoned that this was the call issued to every human being in the task of making life meaningful in a very secular age.  For the wayfarer on the journey to self-knowledge and wisdom, this call can be re-written as "dare to journey onward" or "dare to risk" digging deeper or climbing higher or journeying further in the task of knowing your real self!  That way we will encounter our true and authentic self in all its dimensions.

Journal of a Soul 11

The Makers of Meaning

A book I am currently reading.

We are makers of meaning.  Without meaning, life is shallow and hollow. Without it, we become heartless and soulless automata.  Eventually, we literally dry up, wilt and die like an uncared for plant.  Immediately here, we have the makings of a good metaphor – living a good life is, in a certain sense, gardening for the soul.  This is a metaphor suggested by Carl Ransom Rogers in his Person-Centred Therapy (PCT).

In a major sense, too, our opening metaphor here, namely gardening for the soul, suggests a firm connection with nature.   And, further, this is one of modern and post-modern humanity’s greatest faults.  Not alone do we lack a real connection or relationship with the earth and its goods, but we destroy them with impunity.  Even worse, the acquisitive and capitalist cultures we are born into allow us to be virtually indifferent to the earth and its bounty.  Sadly, we meet many people who are unaware of the destruction we are doing to the bountiful planet on which we live. 

Maybe at this juncture in the history of humankind, when we are in the midst of the worst economic crisis we have ever witnessed, we are ready for a wake-up call.  Perhaps, greed and rapacity have shown us their worst results – corruption, bankruptcy, selfishness, and a sheer lack of appreciation for things of the spirit or the soul, for values other than those linked to financial profit at all costs.

But, any of us who are idealists, who believe that something else is needed over and above rapacious capitalism for the redemption of humankind, are often left totally disillusioned.  In this side of the developed world – Europe – it would seem to this economically ignorant commentator that the powers that be, namely Germany and France don’t really want to help the rest of Europe in solidarity.  Rather, they prefer to self-righteously preach about unfettered over-spending by smaller countries and lack of regulation, and not a word about their own unfettered over-lending.  There is not much solidarity in squeezing the last penny from some of the poorest nations who in turn are squeezing their own poorest citizens.

This is no political qua political post, dear reader.  It is, perhaps, political qua spiritual, as all spiritual stances have political and financial consequences.  Humankind has lost its way as all spiritual values are being lessened and eroded in the name of the mighty euro or indeed the mighty dollar or whatever the ascendant currency might be. What, then, are these values, the decrease of which, I lament here?  Let me try to list them in no specific order:

1. Connection with the earth.  Call her Mother Earth or Gaia – see James Lovelock’s notion of Earth as one great organism.  Notice the connection of all simple religions and spiritualities with the Earth as Mother or provider.  In this regard reading the spirituality of the American Native Indians is very enriching.  (Note to self: I must read more here.)
2. Fostering creativity in all its incarnations: drawing, painting, writing, sculpting, composing music, singing, dancing, acting and so on and so forth.  What do they tell us about humanity?
3. The moral call – the call to fight for justice on our own doorstep as well as further afield.
4. Asking questions like: Where does this moral call come from?  Why behave in a just way? Where or who is the source of this moral call?  Is there a source of Good, i.e., God?  The present writer believes this is a very important question to discuss, though he is agnostic about the answer.  He certainly has very few answers.  But in the tradition of Socrates all questions, especially the hard ones must be put.
5. What is friendship? What is love?  Or again, in reference to the current financial crisis: What is SOLIDARITY? What is the common goal of humanity?  In how far am I my brother’s keeper?
6. What lessons have we learnt from the current worldwide DEPRESSION?
7. What, essentially, have the traditions of the great world religions to teach us about our values as humans?

If we as humans are the makers of meaning, and the makers of values, then we had best be up and at it, and not leave the way clear for the empty philosophies of bureaucrats and capitalists, who, in the words of the great Irish litterateur Oscar Wilde, “know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Journal of a Soul 2

Intense was the word that a good friend used to describe me when I was in my early twenties.  He added that he meant absolutely no criticism by that description.  Nor indeed did I take it as such.  And other synonyms for intense are passionate, powerful, profound, forceful, heartfelt and concentrated.  I'd still accept any of those adjectives as descriptive of my way of being in the world.

Having recently read much philosophy from the early Greeks right through to the contemporary Charles Taylor I am still enthused with a passion for wonder, with a desire to embrace life in its fullest measure.  From my readings in philosophy and literature I find a singular lack of intensity and passion in the world in general. That's why we need our religions (in the spiritual manifestation, not in the power manifestation, of those entities, I hasten to add is what I have in mind here), our theatres, our cinemas, our traditions and our literatures, and especially our music.

In the psalms we read that  "Deep calls to deep at the sound of Your waterfalls; All Your breakers and Your waves have rolled over me." (Psalm 42:7; New American Standard Bible, 1995)  I remember these words clearly since the time I was a young novice in the Augustinian Order many years ago.  Deep calling onto deep always moved me to the very foundations of my being.  A I sat there in the early mornings in the cool and incense-laden oratory, season in and season out, I remember touching depths within me that I certainly had never plumbed before.  Some past pupils who, with their dad, are expert potholers come to mind.  What is it in the human heart that wishes to push its being deeper and ever deeper.  These past pupils are now doing just that, and doing it physically, literally crawling on their bellies down and further down and further down still into the bowels of the very earth.  As I sat there all those years ago I felt that I was spiritually doing what these lads do physically, except that I was crawling down, down, down into the caverns of the heart, or of the soul, or of the spirit, or indeed of the Self.  And yes, I am using all these words here synonymously even though I am aware that there are differences between their connotations in various areas of study.  But for my personal purposes here they refer to my deep sense of my own being. 

And so, in short I am moved to new depths always.  I rejoice that as I age I am able to go deeper and am able to bear more pressure.  It's rather like diving deeper, as the deeper you get the more the water presses down on you.  And so, again, as I sit here listening to the haunting voice of the great Canadian singer Neil Young singing Old Man and my eyes are filled with tears as he brings me deeper with his words:

Old man look at my life,

I'm a lot like you were.

Old man look at my life,

I'm a lot like you were.

Old man look at my life,

Twenty four

and there's so much more

Live alone in a paradise

That makes me think of two.

Or again listening to the late great and wonderful Irish Folk singer Liam Clancy weaves the same wondrous effect on my soul. Try listening to his rendition of Those Were The Days on YouTube here:

Or again listen to the late great Jacques Brel singing his powerful rendition of Amsterdam which you can view hereunder:

Or again, I dove much deeper still when viewing Des Bishop's tribute to his late father Mike, RIP, in tonight's documentary on RTE 2.  You can view this in three parts on YouTube here:

And so all of these things serve to carry me deeper and deeper into self.  Whatever Self may be it is to be found only by pushing oneself to the limit.  Des Bishop, Jacques Brel and Liam Clancy all push themselves to the limit because the self is a reality of the limits and of the horizons.  Again many other metaphors can come to mind here.  The Self is a reality of the extremes, that's why the human soul is wont to go on pilgrimage.  Look at all those great mountaineers who seek to climb the highest mountains.  Bring to mind all those explorers of yesteryear who sought out the very limits of the world.  Think of those astronauts who seek to explore the wonder of space.  Call to mind the English Captain Robert Falcon Scott and the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, explorers of polar regions both.  Nothing but the pursuit of self, the pursuit of identity could carry them up to and beyond the threshold or portal of death.