Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 10

Can you coax your mind from its wandering

and keep to the original oneness?

Can you let your body become

supple as a newborn child's?

Can you cleanse your inner vision

until you see nothing but light?

Can you love people and lead them

without imposing your will?

Can you deal with the most vital matters

by letting events take their course?

Can you step back from your own mind

and thus understand all things?

Giving birth and nourishing,

having without possessing,

acting with no expectations,

leading and not trying to control:

This is the supreme virtue.

Commentary/Reflections

One of the central problems experienced by the neophyte meditator is that of all the mental distractions that race through the human mind when one attempts to still it.  This is what the poet means above by his term "the wandering mind." In that field of thought called philosophy of mind, there is an interesting question: Do our thoughts think us or do we think our thoughts?  That question never really engaged me early in my life even though I had heard it discussed in that area of philosophy concerned with the nature of the mind. However, it did hit me very strongly and existentially when I had a major breakdown, or indeed a break-through really, at the age of forty - that is, at the time of the typical midlife crisis brought to a point where Yeats says, "the centre cannot hold."  It was then that I experienced my mind being literally hijacked by my thoughts.  The centre could not hold whatsoever: the hub of control had totally disintegrated and the spokes of identity had shattered and scattered into chaos.  Thoughts ran riot in my mind and there was no controlling them.  The nerve-centre of my identity, or if you like, the core of my self had undergone a meltdown.  

Good mental health essentially means that the person is on the way to establishing an identity that is individuated (Jung), integrated (Storr) or actualized (Maslow et al).  In other words the person is as fully their real or true self as is possible: metaphorically we are a series of spokes (character qualities and traits) centred around a hub called the "Real Self" rotating on a unique path. None of us probably ever reaches the acme point in that process. Spiritually, the parallel term in Eastern philosophy would be "the enlightened mind."  The poem above is as deep as can be and has many layers of meaning as the language struggles to express the spiritual quest of life. Quieting or stilling the mind is a wonderful metaphor for getting under the chaos that our unstilled mind can be.  Spiritual writers speak about the task of achieving a Still Point below that agitated surface of existence.  In the above poem, this task is expressed in the words "original oneness."  Each couplet is another way of expressing the search for this elusive Still Point.

If a true pilgrim of the way or a faithful disciple of enlightenment achieves a position of leadership s/he will be able to "love people and lead them without imposing their will."  In other words, their ego will be firmly under control and integrated into their personality. They will have no need for petty jealousies, for "getting their pound of flesh," for settling old scores, for one-up-man-ship of any kind or for any sort of micro-management.  They will be visionary leaders able to bring their staff with them while allowing everyone the freedom to grow and to succeed on their own terms without interference.  Stepping back and not wishing to control things is central to good spiritual and indeed psychological development. We all learn quite quickly that the only people we can change are ourselves, never ever anyone else.  Some of us only learn that lesson painfully and the ego-ridden person makes that mistake all too often. And so, in light of these comments, the following lines from the above poem are worth repeating and reflecting on here:

Can you deal with the most vital matters

by letting events take their course?

Can you step back from your own mind

and thus understand all things?

Another way of saying this is that the person further on the road to enlightenment is getting ever more detached from the non-essential things of life; is getting nearer to that elusive Still Point of being; that primordial state of being our Taoist poem calls "the original oneness."

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 2

Tao Te Ching

Poem 2

When people see some things as beautiful,

other things become ugly.

When people see some things as good,

other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.

Difficult and easy support each other.

Long and short define each other.

High and low depend on each other.

Before and after follow each other.

Therefore the Master

acts without doing anything

and teaches without saying anything.

Things arise and she lets them come;

things disappear and she lets them go.

She has but she does not possess,

acts but does not expect.

When her work is done she forgets it.

That is why it lasts forever.

Reflections

Paradoxes have long been a means of expressing an abstract thought or feeling or some experience that goes beyond the ordinary. A paradox is a statement that apparently contradicts itself and yet might be true (or, indeed false at the same time). Poetry is, by its very nature, replete with paradoxes. The most memorable paradox that we learnt at school way back in the early 1970s was one from the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth: "The child is father of the man," a line from a short lyric entitled "My Heart Leaps up When I Behold," a poem from 1802 that we all had to learn off by heart.  The line makes no literal sense obviously, but metaphorically it means much, as the child will eventually grow into a man who will in turn father a child.  So, therefore, humankind stretches language as far as it will go to get at a deeper understanding and meaning.  To remain at a literal level is to be two-dimensional and superficial.

Polarities

Our poem above is replete with polarities.  In philosophy polarities are called dualisms, dichotomies or binaries.  In poetry/literature polarities are often referred to as opposites (Coleridge spoke a lot about this dynamism) and even antinomies (a word much favoured by our own national poet William Butler Yeats).  Anyway, it really does not matter what name you call polarities by, because they all amount to the same thing, viz., pairs of opposing concepts.  Our stanza above maintains that each side of a polarity requires the other.  These polarities shoot through much literature of either a religious or spiritual nature and even of none.  A partial list of such polarities would be:

• Light vs Dark
• Night vs Day
• Clear vs Opaque
• Heavy vs Light
• Tall vs Short
• Good vs Bad
• Soft vs Hard
• Rigid vs Loose

and so on and so forth - you can add your own examples to this list.  It would seem that like the positive and negative poles of a magnet or of a spherical body like the earth itself, it would seem that one pole cannot exist without the other.  In like manner, the great psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung spoke about there being a Shadow aspect to every Self.  He argued that it was by incorporating the shadow aspect of the Self that we become whole.

The above poem pushes these polarities even further and stretches language to the very  breaking point of incomprehensibility.  The poet tells us that the Master "acts without doing anything" and that he the Master is actually a "she" when we would be expecting a "he." Obviously Male vs Female would be another example of a polarity.  Bisexuality and androgyny obviously both share in this polarity. Indeed, the Master/Mistress can teach without saying anything.  It's often in silence that we learn much.  I love the healthy tension set up in the following polarity in stanza 3 above: "She has but she does not possess."  This is a wonderful spiritual insight and is really, once again, the second noble truth that dukkha or suffering is caused by our craving of or clinging to our baser and even higher desires.  How often do our possessions possess us?  It is surely possible to own something without being "possessed" by it? We could even be possessed by our relationships as in over-dependence on another.  Again the Master/Mistress is not possessed by her work as "When her work is done, she forgets it."

Again, there is much about "living in the now," that classic statement, that is a plank underpinning every spiritual tradition worth its salt hinted at and implied in the above poem. There is also in these lines a sense of the cyclic nature of things - that the cycle of life endures and perdures and goes on forever.  Maybe that is the sense of eternity hinted at here.  

Conclusion: One again, I invite you to read the above poem and meditate on it for 5 or 10 minutes.

Namaste, friends.

Journal of a Soul 63

From the Ashes of Despair

It's hard to know where to start.  Like drawing a circle, I suppose one can put the compass point anywhere on a sheet of paper, set the radius randomly and start at any point to describe it.  Writing about the Soul or Self or Meaning, or lack of any one or all of them, is somewhat similar, I guess.  The alcoholic writer, Charles Bukowski, whom 1986 Time called a "laureate of American lowlife," described despair as only an alcoholic could as: “my beer-drunk soul is sadder than all the dead Christmas trees of the world.”  What, I hear you chorus in response to these words brings you to write about despair?  Well, I suppose when we are inundated on all sides by pain, suffering, dying, death, war and destruction we can be forgiven for at least being a little sad.  What motivates these thoughts forming themselves in words upon this virtual screen is the well publicized death of the brilliant, inimitable actor and stand-up comic Robin Williams, whom the director Steven Spielberg has described as "a lightning storm of comic genius" and the on-going murder of innocents in Gaza, not to mention other places in the world that we forget so easily where such wanton killings of innocents continue to scar and mar the human face of the world.  We forget these poor souls because other more recent horrific news gains sway in the headlines. As I type these poor inadequate words, I am listening to a live radio show here in Dublin, Ireland where parents, sons and daughters and siblings are describing their pain at the suicide of one of their relatives.  If anything, the late great, wonderful human being Robin Williams is still touching our lives all over the world by helping raise our consciousness of this issue. Robin Williams R.I.P.

No Substitute for Experience

The subtitle here says it all, I think.  There is, indeed, no substitute for first hand experience.  Also to sound a very old tune in these pages the cerebral or intellectual only captures such a small, albeit a significant part, of the human phenomenon.  There are so many other dimensions of that phenomenon that can only be described after one has experienced them. These are all those non-cerebral, non-intellectual sides to our character like relationships, experiences of beauty, truth, love, compassion, companionship, care, love, hope, spirit, genius, laughter, genius and even that spark of madness all of which Robin Williams so much embodied in his sheer humanity.  And to that list, dare I say it, I must, of course, add despair.

I have said that there is no substitute for experience.  I have also written about my own experience of clinical depression when I was 40 years of age, now some 16 years ago.  That place or space was one where there was no soul, no meaning, no self.  That was a place or space of despair that only seven weeks hospitalization in a psychiatric hospital could mend. Thankfully, due to medical intervention, I have never had the experience of revisiting either the hospital or that space or place of pain since.  Important here has been a comprehensive understanding of the nature of depression which can be (i) of the clinical or endogenous variety (in other words, a biochemical disorder that can be corrected as far as possible by pharmacological intervention or medication) and (ii) the reactive variety where our life situation brings us down.  In this second variety, counselling and therapeutic intervention are very effective, though sometimes prescribed drugs can help to kick start the process, medicines that can later be withdrawn.  Also, I find that in the case of clinical depression, care of the soul through the creative arts and reading and attending self-help courses also helps.  The worst thing for anyone who knows anyone who is depressed  is to offer them cheap black and white advice.  There is no simple answer as depression varies from person to person in its symptoms, and a "both/and" and not an "either/or" response is the correct approach with regards to medical and therapeutic interventions and helps.

In matters of the mind, cheap advice can be useless at best and destructive at worst.  In all cases I have found that to be with and to accompany others in their crisis is the right approach.  What's said, in the end, does not matter much.  Being there is what matters. It's about presence or being present with others who suffer.  Of course, that is more easily said than done.  The accompanying person or companion will often feel helpless and so useless and more often than not seemingly ignored as the poor wretch suffering their despair simply cannot respond or reach out because they are not able to.

Falling Apart

Often in these times I find turning to poetry one of my resources.  Again, at the risk of repetition ad nauseam in these pages, let me come to William B. Yeats.  He wrote a wonderful poem in 1919, shortly after the ending of The Great War called "The Second Coming", some appropriate lines of which I will quote here:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

While Yeats spoke about the disintegration of the outer world in the wake of the Great War, the lines touch and move me on a personal existential level of inner disintegration and inner falling apart.  To that extent those words of Yeats are really very apt indeed. In this experience of inner disintegration, I am so much reminded of other lines from the wonderful father of Existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard that run:

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.” 

                            (― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death)

Pulling the Parts Together: Standing Together in Hope

Early Christian thinker, Origen, 185 - 254 A.D.

This is so hard to do and so much easier said, so the naivete of the subtitle here has to be forgiven, at least momentarily.  If anything, we humans have to learn over and over again the lesson of our brittleness as human beings. Too often, we believe the myths we have created about our power over all things and even, God help us, our power over ourselves. The old writers and artists often got it right: An early Christian theologian, Origen, presented a response to the problem of evil which cast the world as a schoolroom or hospital for the soul. It is interesting to note that the great Romantic poet John Keats saw the world as the "vale of soul-making" and his thoughts were very much in line with those of Origen.  In other words, to be truly human is to be a carer, a nurse, a doctor or a paramedic for each other.  To be truly human we must be soul-makers, not soul-breakers.  Too much of modern life is into soul-breaking rather than soul-making. To be a soul-maker is to be a compassionate healer.  The answer is seen in all the ways we can become caring communities rather than anonymous urban sprawls that dislocate and break souls down. Indeed, pulling the parts together is no easy task.  We live in a world that almost prefers disintegration to integration.  We care little about others, especially strangers.  We care little even about our neighbours, and often even less about ourselves.  Anonymity is seemingly preferred to being accepted as belonging. Indeed, it is so hard to put down roots in the masonry and concrete of our modern cities.  And yet there are so many reasons to hope as is shown in these two wonderful videos I am placing here below. The first is the moving video of the meeting of two wonderful young human beings one a Palestinian American and the other a Jewish American, both of whom were beaten up by Israeli police at various times in the last several years. Its viewing brought tears of hope and peace and brotherhood to my eyes.  The second is even more moving recent video as the human hands of love speak so powerfully by scratching at the earth and lifting stones and rubble to bring a wonderful little child back to the fresh invigorating air of life. My heart breaks in hope for our stained humanity.  Maybe the youngsters of today will teach their children better than we have done ours: (i)Two Modern Heroes and Healers  and (ii) The Healing Hands of Love.

Journal of a Soul 23

Humpty Dumpty Has A Great Fall

Sunset, Malahide, Co Dublin, June 2013

When we are stressed, things begin to shatter and scatter all over the place.  It is as if the windscreen of our view on the world has shattered into a million pieces.  We might even recall the apt words from W.B. Yeats' poem The Second Coming: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."  Yeats was, of course, referring to a global crisis or disintegration of civilization in the wake of the First World War. The next line, which most people do not quote, strongly confirms  this truth: "mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." However, perhaps the idea of personal disintegration is as horrible an experience or fear as that of the more global disintegration of the outer world.  Yeats had summed up wonderfully in these first quoted words the experience of either inner (micro or personal) or outer (macro or global) disintegration.  One thing is sure, disintegration is a horrifying experience as anyone who has experienced any form of break down or falling apart will aver.

Putting Humpty Dumpty Together Again

We humans are at base a contradictory and paradoxical sort.  We are, on the one hand driven by greed, envy, anger or ego to conquer, desecrate, rip apart and destroy both things and other sentient beings, and, on the other hand, we are inspired by justice, generosity, pity or love to help, consecrate, embrace, lift up and bind together both things and other sentient beings.  Those of us who are by nature optimists believe that the second human impulse to the good vastly outweighs the former, the impulse to evil.  In other words we are here brought back to the inevitable mystery of squaring good with evil.  Freud spoke about these in terms of The Desire to Live: Eros and The Desire to Die: Thanatos.  Indeed, in speaking so, he was commenting on the basic paradoxical nature of the human condition.

Meditation Helps Put Humpty Together

I better begin this paragraph with a caveat which I will write is capitals here: THERE SIMPLY IS NO EASY ANSWER: THERE IS NO PANACEA.  Meditation is no panacea, no instant quick fix.  Rather it is a help, a sort of brush to help us clean up the breakages of our life - excuse the rather awkward metaphor here.  There is a centre of agency, a Still Point, a Seat where the Observer or Witness sits and from which we calmly review the scattered and broken pieces of our life.  As one who tries his best to pull himself together, I find that time spent in meditation helps me to "get my act together,"  a very common metaphor indeed, but nonetheless very true.  Meditation has to be practised on an on-going and regular basis to give one equanimity and peace of mind where things somehow hold together or cohere for us as we go through our daily tasks.  One won't feel 100% most of the time, if ever, but certainly  you will not be in the failure or no grade stakes where everything shatters completely.

My shadow, June 2013

Michael A. Singer in The Untethered Soul (See last post for details of this book and a link to his home page) suggests that we must move from "an outer solution consciousness" to "an inner solution consciousness" (p. 16).  He goes on to stress that there is a part in all of us that can "actually abstract from your own melodrama.  You can watch yourself be jealous or angry..." (p.16)  I admit that this is far easier said than done.  If one has fallen apart there is no amount of meditating that will bring you back together.  You may have to have medical intervention first, as I did, before I had gained enough stability to sail alone and embrace meditation as a repaired yacht might sail anew into the wind.  I have dealt with students with ASD and OCD where CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy) had not a hope of being deployed until the lads had been brought to stability by psychiatric intervention.  Hence,  my caveat in the first few lines of this paragraph.  However, once this caveat has been accepted, reality and commonsense being equally embraced, meditation, then and then only can and does work wonders.

Pointed Questions on the Road to the Still Point or Observer's Seat

Singer refers to one of his teachers Romana Maharshi (1879-1950) who used to recommend that the way to attain inner freedom was to "continuously and sincerely" ask the question "who am I" as you meditate. (p. 23)  In this way, I believe, that such questioning will bring one ever nearer the Still Point of Being or the Observer's Seat (my metaphor for SP).  To finish this post I'm going to use the questions I will use for my meditation session immediately after writing this post:

• Who am I that sits here?
• Who is the thinker of these thoughts?
• Who is the feeler of these feelings?
• Who is feeling this sadness that now inhabits my soul?
• Who is experiencing this confusion?
• Who is feeling this fear?
• Who is feeling this love?
• Who is the one who asks these questions?
• Who, O who is this "I"?

And so on, ever inward to the Still Point... ah but the journey is so long and so slow... caveat, caveat... caveat...