Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 80

Poem 80

If a country is governed wisely,

its inhabitants will be content.

They enjoy the labor of their hands

and don't waste time inventing

labor-saving machines.

Since they dearly love their homes,

they aren't interested in travel.

There may be a few wagons and boats,

but these don't go anywhere.

There may be an arsenal of weapons,

but nobody ever uses them.

People enjoy their food,

take pleasure in being with their families,

spend weekends working in their gardens,

delight in the doings of the neighborhood.

And even though the next country is so close

that people can hear its roosters crowing and its dogs barking,

they are content to die of old age

without ever having gone to see it.

Commentary

This poem is certainly one we moderns would not understand as we live in a global village where the whole world has become our home. We can travel anywhere, now that air travel has become relatively cheap and within almost everyone's capacity.  Very few of us in the Western world do not go abroad for holidays or business or whatever.  Indeed, should we not wish to travel somewhere physically we can even journey there virtually by way of cinema or the Internet, both of which can bring us anywhere we wish imaginatively.  And the imagination and reality are next-door neighbours in a sense. 

As a man of 58 years who was born in a small rural Irish town in 1958 and who experienced at least for a few years pre-television era in that country setting, I would have an inkling of what the poet in the above poem is getting at.  I well remember a young friend's parents having bought their first tv set as RTE, the Irish public broadcaster began life on the 31st of December 1961.  They must have bought it soon enough thereafter, so I would have been about 4 years of age at the time. The TV ushered in the New Ireland, as from then on the global visited in a virtual and imaginative sense the sitting rooms of all the homes in Ireland. Therefore, I can slightly understand the above poem.  Now, we must remember that the Tao Te Ching was written roughly around the sixth century BCE in a very rural and primitive setting so the values of a small community would have been the prevailing ones: working in the fields, ploughing, planting seeds, watering the crops, going to the market, harvesting, participating in  the local gatherings, chatting and conversing.  Everything would have revolved around the extended family or clan, and then around the local tribe or community. The home and the community and the values asssociated with both would have been the origins of the only values known to anyone.  Therefore, it is against this background that we have to understand the above poem.

The above poem presents us with the ideal, indeed with the idyll.  It is purely romantic and is filled with Utopian sentiments.  No such place on earth could possible exist.  However, when we remember that it is a poem, that it was written so long ago and that as a poem it should not be taken literally. Bearing all this is mind, we may then read it and meditate upon it and see what wisdom we might learn from it.

One lesson is that of valuing our lives, valuing our experiences of life in the now, valuing simply being.  We are all so busy rushing to succeed, make more money, get a better job, travel to more countries, gain more wealth, acquire X, Y or Z new item that we often forget that it is the simple things in life that really make us happy like those mentioned in the poem: (i) enjoying our workaday life, (ii) getting in touch with nature, (iii) gardening, (iv) building up and enjoying our homes, (v) enjoying simple but good meals with our families and friends, (vi) supporting all the events that take place in the community, and (vii) happily growing old listening to the sounds of what naturally occurs in nature.

These are obviously extremely romantic and Utopian ideas, but the poem hints that we may experience an intimation of that blessed state by being more mindful and attuned to living in the now.

Namaste, friends. 

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 36

Poem 36

If you want to shrink something,

you must first allow it to expand.

If you want to get rid of something,

you must first allow it to flourish.

If you want to take something,

you must first allow it to be given.

This is called the subtle perception

of the way things are.

The soft overcomes the hard.

The slow overcomes the fast.

Let your workings remain a mystery.

Just show people the results.

Commentary

Forest Walk, Dalgan Park, 2006

Once again the Taoist poet indulges his predilection for the balance of opposites.  How can one know what white is unless one knows what black is and vice versa? I won't bore the reader by repeating what I said on balance in my last post here.  However, the last two lines of the first stanza contain the essence of the poem.  What is perception? The Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley (1685 - 1753) explored the nature of perception in depth.  He was obsessed with the contrasting ideas of immaterialism versus materialism as a result of his reading the empiricist philosopher John Locke and the skeptical writings of Pierre Bayle. Originally, he had based his line of argument for immaterialism on the fact that colour, taste and other sensible qualities were purely subjective in nature.  However, he later replaced this early thinking by a profound  analysis of the meaning of that quintessential experience of all human beings, namely that of being or, as he, in the footsteps of Shakespeare, called the "to be" question.  What, he asked, did it mean "to be"?  His answer can be simply stated as follows: "To be," when it refers to an object, means "to be perceived." When "to be" refers to a subject it means "to perceive."  Traditionally when discussing Berkeley's philosophy, lecturers used start with his famous statement in Latin, that phrase or formula: "Esse est percipi aut percipere" = "To be is to be perceived or to perceive."

Bishop George Berkeley (1685 - 1753)

Whatever about the views of Bishop Berkeley, who is classed as an idealist in philosophical terms, that is, a follower of any philosophy that maintains that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental or immaterial, or old time or modern day materialists who look on all reality as fundamentality reducible to actual material objects, our Taoist poet, like all writers from any spiritual tradition, speaks about a spiritual realm either beyond the physical one or a more subtle spiritual essence that pervades the physical one.  The person who is open to the Tao is one who has a "subtle perception" that can achieve a sense of the way things are in themselves or as they interconnect.  Again, such a "subtle perception" of reality could be equated with what people of a religious persuasion commonly call a "religious experience," or what certain psychologists and sociologists have called "depth experiences," or "height experiences" or "peak experiences" (Abraham Maslow).  I imagine also that James Joyce's concept or notion of "epiphany" is akin to the meaning all the foregoing expressions.

In conclusion, the old proverb that the "proof of the pudding is in the eating" captures a good deal of what I am attempting to convey in this short post.  Is it not true that everything in the end boils down to our lived experience, rather than to our most exquisite and fine thinking?  This proverb I have just quoted means that the real value of something can be judged only from practical experience, and not from appearance or theory.  It would seem to this commentator that the last two lines of our second stanza above is getting at the same truth, and maybe at times we should do just as those lines counsel us.  Therefore, I'll repeat them by way of conclusion here:

Let your workings remain a mystery.

Just show people the results.

Journal of a Soul 45

Wooden sculpture, Botanic Gardens, Belfast

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

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

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

Body and Mind/Soul/Self

Art on concrete path, Baldoyle, Dublin

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

Where does all the foregoing speculation lead?

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