Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 31

Poem 31

Weapons are the tools of violence;

all decent men detest them.

Weapons are the tools of fear;

a decent man will avoid them

except in the direst necessity

and, if compelled, will use them

only with the utmost restraint.

Peace is his highest value.

If the peace has been shattered,

how can he be content?

His enemies are not demons,

but human beings like himself.

He doesn't wish them personal harm.

Nor does he rejoice in victory.

How could he rejoice in victory

and delight in the slaughter of men?

He enters a battle gravely,

with sorrow and with great compassion,

as if he were attending a funeral.

Commentary

I have mentioned this before, but it bears repeating, that the Tao Te Ching is some 2,500 years old dating back roughly to the sixth century B.C.  It represents a programme for living. In fact, the word "Tao" means "way" and the whole phrase "Tao Te Ching" means "The Classic of the Way of Virtues."   Jesus, the founder of Christianity, also proclaimed that he was "the Way, the Truth and the light!"  Therefore, it's nothing new to state that all religious founders suggest a programme or a way for living.  Too often, though, their followers who mostly construct the "Church" or "organization" that their founder perhaps did not visualise, often lose sight of the original basic way. 

Taormina, 2006 - Peace reigns

It is very interesting to see that Taoism is from the very beginning against the use of weapons.  The same can not be said for the histories and indeed the holy books of many of the world religions, but that is an idea for a post for another blog entirely.  Our motivation in this blog is neither didactic nor point scoring.  One would feel instinctively that the first two lines in the above poem would make a good poster for Barack Obama in his campaign to have stricter gun control laws in the USA.

As a teacher of some 36 years service, I have long been convinced that fear is a poor motivation in learning, period!  One would want to be particularly obtuse not to realise this immediately.  To say that weapons are "tools of fear" is, perhaps also, to state the obvious. 

Warring nations are adept at demonising the enemy and canonising their own heroes.  They do it to engender hate and all possible negative emotions towards the enemy.  To realise that the enemy soldiers, or indeed enemy civilians, are only all too human like ourselves is something these warring nations seek to suppress.  After all, it's particularly hard to kill, or even be mean to, people who are all too much like ourselves.  Hitler and Stalin were adept at canonising and demonising as they knew well how to get the emotions of a people going - how to whip up hatred for others especially when it was needed.  Dehumanising others is the way to excite the baser emotions against them.  Therefore, the opposite is most especially true - humanise others and we promote peace.

Bridge Building is better than War - Dusseldorf, December, 2006

Therefore, as the year 2016 is approaching in a few days time, let us decide to humanise all people we meet as best we can; to humanise even those we have not met for a long time - perhaps even people we have fallen out with; to humanise all the African refugees who are fleeing their very extinction in their own countries; to humanise as best we can even the lowliest of our brothers and sisters.  Then, now that the thought strikes me - can we even humanise those who have a very right wing gun-toting belief?  If we can so do, can we talk civilly with them?  Or are we in a weakened position de facto from the very beginning of our conversation.

They say that peace is the work of justice.  Therefore, maybe we can seek to be more just in our living in 2016.  The above poem needs to be reflected upon.  I'm not totally convinced that the policy of pacifism ever really works - if it did Neville Chamberlain would have convinced Hitler and there would have been no WW II.  Likewise, had there been no Churchill the Third Reich would most certainly still be in power.  So naive pacifism simply gets nowhere.  I believe the Taoist poet intuitively knew this, and, therefore, he recommends that the true warrior enter battle "gravely, with sorrow and with great compassion, as if he were attending a funeral."

Journal of a Soul 64

Of Torment

Sand on Donabate Beach

Humans beings are complex creatures.  All our sciences - both natural and human - have attempted to plumb both our depths and our heights.  From depth psychology, person-centered counselling, cognitive behaviour therapy and existential psychotherapy on the one hand to biochemistry, neuroscience and psycho-pharmacology on the other we seek to map both the landscape and the mindscape of what it means to be human.  Whether we have achieved much or not in that task, I suppose is for the scholars in those various areas of specialty to delineate and their clients or patients to give either oral or written testimony as to the efficacy of the various approaches.  Be that as it may, some of our number do remain tormented souls.

A Brief History of Torment 

By torment I mean the proclivity within a certain number of us to mentally torture ourselves.  The history of self-inflicted torment is as old as humanity itself.  I remember when I was studying Scripture many years ago one of our more erudite lecturers introduced us to the ancient Egyptian poem known in English as The Man Who Was Tired of Life or The Dialogue of a Man and His Ba (or Soul). This composition is universally regarded as one of the masterpieces of ancient Egyptian literature. It is also one of the most difficult and continually debated, as well as being the subject of more than one hundred books and articles.  It is the author's mental anguish or torment that intrigues this writer here - one could say, to use a definite anachronism, that this early poem is pure existentialism. This poem dates back to the Twelfth Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, a period that spanned from 1991-1803 BCE.  In the text the man accuses his soul of wanting to desert him, of dragging him towards death before his time. He says that life is too heavy for him to bear, that his heart would come to rest in the West (i.e. the afterlife), that his name would survive and his body would be protected. He urges his soul to be patient and wait for a son to be born to make the offerings the deceased needed in the afterlife. His ba describes the sadness death brings and retorts to the man's complaints about his lack of worth, his being cut off from humanity and the attractiveness of death by exhorting him to embrace life and promises to stay with him. Scholars have disputed as to whether the author is intending to take his own life or not.  One way or another the author of the piece is a highly tormented being and one full of angst to use yet another anachronistic term associated with existentialism. Here is a brief snatch from this rather pessimistic and angst-ridden poem:

To whom can I speak today?
Hearts are rapacious
And everyone takes his neighbour's goods.   [To whom can I speak today?]
Gentleness has perished
And the violent man has come down on everyone.
To whom can I speak today?
Men are contented with evil
And goodness is neglected everywhere.
To whom can I speak today? (see HERE)

Moonlight over Donabate strand this evening

There are other ancient documents, too.  For example, the earliest is the Sumerian text  A Man and His God, dating from 2000 - 1700 BCE describes the unjust and innocent sufferings of a righteous man. An Akkadian text called Ludlul Bel Nemeqi (I will praise the Lord of Wisdom), dating from 1000 BC, describes a nobleman praising the Babylonian god Marduk. This god had healed the stricken nobleman on account of his religious and cultic piety. Yet another ancient text is the Babylonian Theodicy which was composed between 1400 and 800 BCE. It consists of a dialogue between a sufferer and a comforter that seeks to explain why an innocent and good-living man should suffer. All these ancient compositions thematically resonate with the book of Job and demonstrate that the themes of theodicy were important pieces of the theological discourse in the ancient Near East. 

Of the Book of Job the WIKI records that it is:

one of the Writings (Ketuvim) of the Hebrew Bible, and the first poetical book in the Christian Old Testament.^[1] Addressing the theme of God's justice in the face of human suffering - or more simply, "Why do the righteous suffer?"^[2] - it is a rich theological work, setting out a variety of perspectives.^[3] It has been widely and often extravagantly praised for its literary qualities - "The greatest poem of ancient and modern times," according to Tennyson,^[4] and the only book of the Bible on one list of "The 100 Best Books of All Time". (HERE)

Job simply cannot understand why he is seemingly being punished by God as quite obviously he has been a righteous and good-living man all his life.  The ancient theology is quite rightly debunked by Job, that is, the traditional theology that argued that retribution always followed an evil man's deeds and that the good and righteous always prospered. That's why he gets so upset with his so-called comforters who argue that he must have done something wrong to merit God's retribution.  However, Job will have none of their arguments.  For him, the questions of God's justice and of human suffering are far more complex than traditional  theological thought was able to comprehend.  I shan't rehearse any of Job's arguments and protestations here save to illustrate how tormented a soul Job was. Very early in Chapter 3 he laments the fact that he was even born at all:

“Why is light given to him who is in misery,
    and life to the bitter in soul,
21 who long for death, but it comes not,
    and dig for it more than for hidden treasures,
22 who rejoice exceedingly
    and are glad when they find the grave?
23 Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden,
    whom God has hedged in?
24 For my sighing comes instead of[a] my bread,
    and my groanings are poured out like water.
25 For the thing that I fear comes upon me,
    and what I dread befalls me.
26 I am not at ease, nor am I quiet;    I have no rest, but trouble comes.” (Job 3: 20-26) ESV

There are many other quotations from the Book of Job that illustrate all too vividly his tormented state of mind, but quoting more of them would be redundant to my argumentation here.  I merely wish to comment on the angst or torment dimension of his mind. Let me place a quotation here from the father of Existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard, a quotation I'm sure I have used here on too many occasions:

I stick my finger into existence – it smells of nothing. Where am I? What is this thing called the world? Who is it that has lured me into the thing, and now leaves me here? Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?” 

One can note the same existential angst and torment in all these quotations, both ancient and more modern.  One might also mention here another tortured literary soul, viz., Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) As I noted some years ago in a previous blog (Dostoyevsky):  The first book I read by Dostoyevsky was Notes From Underground.  This book was written in 1864 and  is a short novel that is quite easily read.   It is considered by many to be the world's first existentialist novel. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as "The Underground Man") who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg.  I was transfixed by this nameless character's alienation as a young nineteen year old student.  The "Underground Man's" life is quite dry and meaningless and without purpose and he seems to delight in pain and suffering which alone seem to keep him conscious of actually being alive.  He describes war early on in this small novel as being people's rebellion against the assumption that everything needs to happen for a purpose, because humans do things without purpose, and this is what determines human history.  Hence, life is wearisome, tedious, frustrating and tormenting.  Here, our anonymous antihero tells us that “I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.” Consciousness itself is the problem.  The fact that suffering exists is a given but the fact that I am aware or conscious of it just adds to my human burden.  Our man is a highly educated and sophisticated human being who is deeply disillusioned and he savages both the lofty romanticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the contemporary socialist principles that correspond to his middle age.  This is a very dark novel, written in equally dark times. However, we also must bear in mind that its author is also a deeply suffering, tormented and alienated individual.

Fairview Park, Autumn 2013

Torment Today

That torment exists in our world today is wholly and patently beyond doubt.  In the past few days here in Ireland a young lad of eighteen years of age took the lives of his eight year old twin brothers and then drove some distance and ended his own life in a lonely spot on the bank of a river.  What desperation of soul or torment of mind drove him to that awful crime and sad denouement in the taking of his own life?  perhaps we'll never know.  One could list many more examples of such lonely despair, of such inner desperation and painful torment, but such a rehearsal would only serve to sicken both this writer and his intended readers. This contribution to the journal of a soul was not meant to be a sad one.  Rather, it was meant to be a sobering one calling us back to a realism that means we have to have our feet firmly planted in the ground of meaning in our own lives.  All these instances of torment must call us to a new and strong realism that is able to accept the pain and suffering that is obviously there in the lives of all human beings and to have the strength to work to help assuage it. Denial of mental torment and suffering is an avoidance of the important issue of mental health both in our families and in our communities.  This reflection is a call to be active and pro-active, to be on the alert for signs and symptoms of distress, depression and torment in the lives of significant others.

Choosing Life

The tormented want escape from their troubles.  Our task is to help them realize that an action like suicide is too extreme a reaction to what may be a mere temporary though significant problem.  There is always a possible solution to every problem if people are taught only to reach out to all the aid that is available all around them today.  Sigmund Freud spoke about two drives in life: Eros - the drive to procreate and indeed to live and Thanatos - the drive towards death and extinction.  When these two options present themselves to us we must train our hearts and minds to choose Life always and to avoid the drive towards death as an extreme answer to what are often temporary problems.  We choose life everyday when we get up and face the world, when we go out there to work and to be with others, to help them and care for them and to simply do our best in everything that we do.  We choose death every time we are in denial, ever time we are negative to self and others, every time we chastise and complain, refuse to get up or go to work, every time we intentionally malinger or put obstacles in the way of others.  Let us have courage always to face life head on, to choose it over death as a way of living happily and cheerily on Mother Earth.  Let us always be kind and compassionate to self and others and to plant those seeds of kindness and compassion in the hearts of our fellows.

Journal of a Soul 50

Introduction: Towards the More in Humanity

Our winning all-Ireland Science debaters! Towards the More!

I've been arguing that the phenomenon of our consciousness in itself is a greater entity than the mere sum of the signals or perceptions we register on our brains.  Indeed, I have also been arguing that the mind in the sense of consciousness is also greater than that organ known as the brain in which it is said to mainly reside.  What our personhood or selfhood may be is also somehow linked to our consciousness of what or who that person or self may be.  These are major areas that can be learnedly discussed in philosophy, philosophy of mind, psychology, philosophical psychology, anthropology, philosophical anthropology, neurology and indeed in psychiatry and cognitive science. (I'm sure there are many other learned areas of study in cognate areas that I have not listed here!)  Indeed, the arts in general explore that complex area of self-identity through all the various creative media: painting, sculpture, architecture, music and writing in all its incarnations.  Come to think of it, we should not leave the sciences out either. After all, they too, share in the creative impulses that make up our human consciousness.  Maths, Engineering and Technology also capture on the one hand the beauty, magic and brilliance of the human mind as well as its sheer practical application to human affairs on the other.

In my last post, I spoke about human passions that mark us out as different from the other animals in the Animal Kingdom.  I referred to (a) our desire for knowledge, (b) our desire to love and (c) our desire to be loved as demarcating qualities.  There are others, too.  I briefly referred to our desire for peace and justice.  As Pope Paul VI put it rather pithily, peace is the work of justice.  Let me turn to this last desire or passion here as a demarcating trait of the human person.

The Desire for Justice

One thing that has always inspired me about human beings is their idealism that is shown in many ways, and most especially in their desire to see justice done.  That we are instinctively drawn to causes which promote justice is certainly undeniable.  The Civil Rights Movement, headed up by the late great Martin Luther King Jnr., great prophetic figure, is an excellent example of this human trait I am describing here.  Then, closer to home, we had the Civil Rights Movement in the North of Ireland which sought to do the same for the Roman Catholic population of North of Ireland as its sister movement had achieved for the black population in the USA.  People gave their lives, and still do give their lives in great numbers in all parts of the globe for causes that promote justice for all.  And why do it?  Why put your life on the line for the cause of justice among others, especially when you yourself have those rights that are denied to those for whom you fight?  Why?  Because you believe that there are some values that are universal, and that those values point to what is great and good in the human being; that those values transcend the person and are interpersonal and even trans-personal;  that they somehow point to an author of values beyond us, to an horizon of meaning beyond us*, and perhaps point to some Giver of values beyond us... perhaps.  I will leave these thoughts open to a possible greater meaning or horizon of values above and beyond us.  I will stay with that tentativeness because I just cannot prove this last observation one way or another.

In the wake of the Nazi atrocities committed against innocent people before and during World War II, it was hard for the Allies to convict the accused before their courts of justice at Nuremberg without appealing to a higher court than those of mere mortals.  It has always appeared to this writer here that without the atrocities committed by both Hitler and Stalin; that without, as it were, falling into the pit of sheer atrocity and knowing the sheer depths of depravity to which we humans can descend; that without plumbing the depths of human evil we should never have been inspired to conceive of, write and agree to the International Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.  Article 1 states:

• All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

We are all endowed with reason and conscience.  As to the nature of conscience the Declaration, needless to say, has nothing to say.  After all it is a international document listing and declaring solemnly the rights of all men and women everywhere in the world.  As to where that conscience comes from, this document does not state, nor should it, indeed, as it is neither philosophy, theology or ethical theory.  Perhaps like Newman, and Kant before him, that conscience could be the voice of a higher power, an author of such universal human rights, before whom in conscience we stand accountable.  Perhaps.  I'm not saying, obviously, that this is definitely so.  I am merely stating it and leaving it out there as one of some few main propositions on the matter.

The Power of Vision

The power of vision: St Vincent's celebrate victory in our School

Another characteristic that describes humanity, both in its essence and in its actions, is that of having a vision of how things could be if we dream big dreams of progress, not alone in technology per se, but in technology which has an ethical and humane dimension to it, namely to improve the lot of other human beings.  Undoubtedly, this is linked with the desire for justice, but here in this paragraph I wish to emphasize the visionary aspect of the desire, rather than the work of justice itself.  In other words, I am talking essentially about the same thing, but from a different perspective.

Vision belongs equally to the engineer the technologist as it does to the poet and novelist.  It belongs to all peoples, to all cultures, to all faiths and to all colours.  In short, it belongs to the man and woman in the street, no matter what their profession, or indeed, their lot in life.  Here, I am reminded by those wonderfully apt words composed by the great Irish writer, socialist and dramatist,  George Bernard Shaw (1856 -1950) in Back to Methuselah (1921): ' "You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?' '  For me as an Irishman, the first time I heard these words was in the famous speech of John F. Kennedy before the Irish Parliament or Dáil in June 1963.  In the context of his speech, he was highlighting the very heart of justice, which is essentially the work of democracy.  Both he and his extended family have not alone been associated with the Democratic Party in the USA, but with the work of justice on an international level in an effort to bring about world peace.  That the Kennedys passionately believed in the work of justice as central to the democratic process is without doubt.  That John F.Kennedy openly embraced the vision of The Civil Rights Movement and of its prophetic leader Martin Luther King Jnr is also beyond question.  That JFK's brother Bobby was the bearer of his brother's beacon of justice for all after the latter was assassinated is a question of historical fact.  However, that Bobby Kennedy was perhaps the more courageous and more passionately driven of the two is not without evidence.  That the two were assassinated for their beliefs in peace as the work of justice can never be denied.  Their assassination as the asssassination of Mohandas Gandhi, Ruth First and Martin Luther King Jnr., just to mention a few, happened because their outspokenness for justice and equality for all stepped on the toes of those powerful interests within all societies that look to exploitation of the weak and poor for their selfish aggrandisement.  This is all incontrovertible.  The human drive to a vision of how things could be, the innate drive for a Utopia almost lies at the very heart of human dreaming, it seems...

And yet, history teaches us the very sad lesson that while we have such visions of how things might be, in reality wars and injustices abound.  However, without such visionary drives in humankind as witnessed in the lives and sacrifices of great prophets for peace as the work of justice, we should be in even a worse state of moral disintegration.  There are so many prophets of peace who have paid the ultimate price for their vision besides those few whom I have named above, and, indeed, many of them are unacknowledged and many more unknown.  Their sacrifice has not been in vain, as many countless others have benefitted by their sacrifice by either achieving their freedom or in escaping from injustice with their lives.

A Final Word

And lastly, dear reader, how do we account for the courage of heroes putting their lives at risk for those of others?  Where does that fit into an atheistic or indifferentist scheme of things or in an agnostic Darwinian structuralist view of what we humans really are?  Or push the idea of heroism further, and one comes up with the actuality of someone sacrificing their lives for those of others, many of whom are unknown to the hero or sacrificial victim to put it in more religious terms, as it were? How do we explain this in the overall scheme of things? These are all big cultural questions, all big philosophical and anthropological questions. Perhaps they are even spiritual and religious questions.  One thing is sure, they are not cold scientific ones at any rate.  Whoever we are essentially is a work in progress, and sadly we find out more and more about that essence by experiencing how low at times some of us can stoop.

Journal of a Soul 27

Facing Death

Ireland's Eye from Baldoyle

Those who live close to nature learn its mysteries with a certain ease that is always foreign to us city dwellers.  That is why I love travelling back to the county where my father was born and lived for more than half his life.  He truly shared in that country wisdom.   Likewise, do the simple country people of Calabria where I have been holidaying for some recent summers.  Tribes and more primitive peoples also share in such simple wisdom.  Modern sophisticated humankind, which works so much from the neo-cortex, has almost forgotten what it is like to live close to nature and its cycles. Often, alas, we moderns only meet nature when it interrupts our plans through the natural evils of tornadoes, snow blizzards, floods and so on.  Indeed, we have learned of late that much of the natural disasters are caused by man-made pollution to our atmosphere.  Alas, we moderns have done so much learned thinking about the world that we have quite forgotten that we are part of it, too.  We are creatures, albeit self-conscious, but creatures nonetheless of the world, in which we live, move and have our being.

Be that as it may, what I want to write about here is the last few hours of my mother’s life.  That frail life is slowly but surely leaking away now at the grand old age of 96. My brother Pat and I have been called home from holiday to await her passing from this world.  And yet, with all the knowledge we have gained about what it means to be human, we have never really bettered the ways of coping and dealing with dying and death than the many religious traditions of the world have put at our disposal.  The community comes around and ritualises the passing of this person from our presence.  As a philosopher, I would like to believe that I am open enough to allow all creeds the dignity of their individual beliefs.  Dying and death, and indeed how we deal with them, are not matters of pure science that can rule as to what is the true and right way to celebrate the meaning of a life that has passed or indeed rule upon the belief of a life to come.  Comforting ourselves in our lonely grief is quite fittingly the province of faith, religion and indeed of the imagination, and it is my considered conviction that both faith and religion belong firmly within the ambit of the intricate mystery of the imagination.  It is not, therefore, a question of whether the next life exists or not or of whether it can be proved one way or another. It is simply not a question that falls within the province of science at all.  It is one that falls within the ambit of the psychology and sociology of religion and within humanity’s many learnt ways of coping with its crises.  These are the factors that such trenchant atheists like Hitchens, Dawkins and Denneth leave out of the picture.  Their arguments are good and valid, but only good and valid within the narrow parameters of a delimiting and dehumanising science, in effect within the confines of a sheer scientism.

My mother and I about five years ago

The imagination is a wonderful faculty which leads us individually and collectively into mysteries which the rational or cognitive faculties of the mind cannot fathom – great works of music, wonderful pieces of art, marvellous buildings and bridges and so on.  Over 100 years ago the great John Henry Cardinal Newman pointed out that even scientists had to use their imagination as well as their cognitive or rational faculties in bringing their discoveries and inventions into the world. The imagination of a culture is a rich world that cannot be reduced to the parameters of any science.  We meaning-making creatures need our beliefs, no matter what their standing in a purely cognitive or logical sense. The brain, and the mind which resides principally though perhaps not entirely there, and even the soul which some believe lives mysteriously there, too, are all more than just firings on and off of various neurons.  Yes, they may be that, but not just that.  We humans are more.  And it is in the quest to find out what the “more” in us is that all true inquiry lies.

And so, as my mother’s life leaks out, I am in many ways diminished.  The womb that begot me is no more.  That was the human animal womb.  Was there or is there, as the great psalmist David put it, a womb before the dawn that begot us all?  Our questions are legion, our feelings confused, perhaps numbed.  The existentialists are right.  Death makes dust of both our individual achievements and dreams.  However, it cannot reduce to ashes the memory of the collectivity, the shared emotions and feelings of the race, the drive to meaning within any culture. In times like this, all I can do is take refuge in the wisdom of the culture which begot me.  Rest in peace, Mary Quinlan.  I hope I will live the remainder of my life with the courage and determination to see no task left undone as you did! Your task is finished – a job well done!    Consummatus est! I will miss you sorely!

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 10

Una Chiesa a Garace, una bellissima citta' in Calabria

We do like to fool ourselves into thinking that our words once written have some permanence.  Or at least we like to believe that they are somewhat more permanent when written down that when merely uttered.  The orator’s words may move us momentarily and then they just fade into the ether to be shortly forgotten.  A written encomium may be somewhat more permanent than its oral counterpart.  Or a snatch of a song that we hear or even sing is just that, a snatch of music that fades, even though somewhere in some musty drawer – or perhaps even in the corner of some virtual world - the sheet music exists.  Thoughts come and go like their close relatives called feelings.  Once again, they all fade into nothingness. 

These thoughts written here could have been penned by Qoheleth, that great wisdom teacher of the Old Testament, who kept repeating “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”  He was an existentialist before the word was invented.  For him, life was just a fleeting moment in the infinity of time, a mere nanosecond in terms of the duration of the universe.   When he saw humankind’s efforts to battle the inevitable constraints of life he just kept repeating the above sobering chorus: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” 

And so, I resume this journal of a soul after some eight or so months. In the interim I have been involved in writing other words elsewhere.  Some few readers of this blog have asked me the reasons for the hiatus – well I just did not feel the need, given that I was writing elsewhere.  However, these present thoughts were provoked by the sheer contingency of life.  There is nothing as sobering as attending the funerals of friends and relatives.  Nothing. Even philosophers and theologians baulk before the maw of death.  The litany of recent bereavements runs: one friend’s son ended his life in his late twenties, two aunt’s “shuffled off this mortal coil,” one in her mid eighties and another in her late sixties, and then a colleague died from cancer after four excruciatingly painful years of suffering – and he some three years younger than the thinker or writer of these thoughts.  And that leaves us with the big questions – What is life at all? What could possibly be its meaning? And mortality, what can it teach us?

Mortality teaches us the value of life, literally the value of everything.  When you sit listening to a song sung by your favourite singer, the fact that he or she is mortal magnifies its significance to the nth degree.  Art is art because it is produced by mortal hands, sung by mortal voices, composed by mortal minds and is inspired by mortal imagination. Mortality gives value to the fleeting enterprise of human hands and minds.  The fact that Michelangelo or Goya or Leonardo da Vinci or more recently Francis Bacon is dead only adds to the value and significance of the work.

Then, when one reads about the silly attempts some humans make to prolong life beyond its reasonable limits, one wonders again about our significance, and not a little about the sanity of those who propose such an idea in the first place.  Cryogenics is surely based on mere wishful thinking and sheer shallowness of insight. That some poor fools among us might think we are that important in the scheme of things is surely the funniest and most pathetic joke possible at one and the same time.

It appears to the present writer of these marshalled thoughts that we must avoid two extremes – that of inflating our importance on the one hand and that of deflating our significance on the other.  We are the singers of songs, the composers of music, the writers of novels and poems, the creators of art in all its myriad forms and shapes, the builders of huge skyscrapers, bridges and roads that seek to shape our world to our needs.  We are the thinkers of thoughts, the possessors of feelings which we express as wonderfully and in a way that is as aesthetically pleasing as we can.  That we are dreamers of other worlds beyond our ken – mere pipe dreams or intimations of immortality none can tell – marks us out from our fellow animals.  And yet does it matter at all?  Does it really matter?  Perhaps the meaning lies solely in the poem written, in the song sung, in the story told, in the project done, in the sweat expended to bring it about.  Therein lies its value, made meaningful paradoxically by its sheer meaninglessness.  Perhaps the only meaning we can find in this life is the living of it to the fullest extent possible, and in making it as tolerable as we can for all those we love and, indeed, for every inhabitant of this little world spinning in the immensity of indifferent space.

Journal of a Soul 5

Clump of wood, Isca Marina Beach, June 2012

As I write a monastic silence prevails, and how I love periods of silence.  There is nothing to be heard around me and my little apartment except the twittering of the birds and the occasional noise as a neighbour moves.  The Carthusian Monks or Trappists speak of the Magnum Silencium – the Great Silence.  Whatever about a great silence, a small one - Parvum Silencium - is enough for me.  At this moment in time I am the recipient of a small silence which reigns in my Heart.  For these occasional small silences my Soul lives.  Enter into the sanctuary of your own Soul, a deep voice within tells me.  And yes, this peace of mind is what monks and nuns of old and of new mean when they say they meet their God in the great and small silences of their lives.

Just above, I have said that I am the recipient of the gift of silence.  And gift –“donum” as they call it in Latin – is one of the most powerful words we can use spiritually.  We experience life as a “given” or as a “gift,” as something we have no real control over – either in its coming or in its going, in its growing or in its passing away.  And, it is only when you reflect on your life in the silence of your own Heart or Soul that you know this, or learn in absolute humility to accept the bounty of life over which you have no absolute control, though we often like to fool ourselves with our technologies of all types that we have some.  However, the wonderful Anglican Divine and Poet, John Donne, had an answer to this egotistical hubris of humankind when he stated in one of his sermons that we should not ever ask for whom the bell tolls, for, verily, it tolls for us.  Our mortality is at once, then, our greatest strength and our greatest weakness which takes most of us almost a lifetime to accept.

Indeed, one does not have to be a monk or a nun, a Christian or a Buddhist to know this.  One can be a believer of any hue or none, indeed, to learn to appreciate the sheer gift and bounty that life is. Moreover, you can either learn this lesson positively or negatively, but learn it you will.  As I sit here now in the silence of my little Calabrian sanctuary I am learning it positively by being open to the gift that all life is to me and for me.  There were times when I encountered the gift negatively, that is, in all those times when I experienced loss, when little or indeed big things were taken away from me – the death of my father, the loss of a job, the disappointment in not getting promotion, the dissolution of a relationship, the slow dissipation of strength as I age, the odd bout of ill-health.  All these very negative things subtract much from life and sometimes they can bring us down into the very pits and dungeons of dread and despair. 

Then, thankfully, there are these moments of small silence as I call them, moments of sheer blessedness when one’s Heart almost sings for joy at the sheer giftedness and bounty of life.  As I say, this is where even an atheist can pray.  Spirituality is a most human thing, and in its sheer depths and heights, in it lengths and breadths, there are those who call it divine.  And, I say, “why not call it such, if you so wish?” because once I felt like that, too.  But for this solitary pilgrim, this word “divine” is a metaphor for the heights and depths of humanity at its best.  Religion, uncoupled from the energising power of spirituality, is a frightful thing indeed.  Uncoupled from spirituality, whose fruits are faith (faithfulness), hope (hopefulness) and of course, love (lovingness), religion descends into what its worst critics like Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens would have it – a veritable and unique source of evil in the world.  Unhitched from spirituality, religion becomes at best a tawdry and bankrupt, if arcane, system of rules, and at worst a corruption of truth in the pursuit of temporal power in the guise of the divine.

One of the local bars/restaurants in Isca Marina

And therein lies the moral of this short tale.  Seek out the silent places and spaces in your own Heart or Soul.  Drink at the wells of your own depths. Seek your own truth by travelling down into the dark passages of your own being.  Acquaint your Self with the shadowy corners of your own Soul and well as with its brighter pastures.  Climb the frightening cliffs of self-knowledge in the hope of gaining some little Self-acceptance.  But in all of this, dear friends, remember to linger often on your journey, and just sit in Silence and let it take you into its loving and sustaining embrace. Truly, you shall not be disappointed.