Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 54

Poem 54

Whoever is planted in the Tao

will not be rooted up.

Whoever embraces the Tao

will not slip away.

Her name will be held in honor

from generation to generation.

Let the Tao be present in your life

and you will become genuine.

Let it be present in your family

and your family will flourish.

Let it be present in your country

and your country will be an example

to all countries in the world.

Let it be present in the universe

and the universe will sing.

How do I know this is true?

By looking inside myself.

Commentary

Random stones on a random street, Prague, February, 2016

One of the abiding questions that has always intrigued me is how progress is measured.  As a teacher I am well used to setting examinations and correcting them.  As a student myself of one thing or another for the most of my life I have obviously subjected myself to such assessments, too.  Further, most workplaces insist on certain levels of self-assessment these days.  It can be quite easy to measure specific things without a doubt, like temperature, air pressure, blood pressure, water pressure, traffic speed, acceleration and so on.  Likewise, our measurements of such forces have become more refined and more precise as society progresses.  We can ask many questions with respect to progress and measuring it.  One such question, among many, we can ask is whether we can accurately measure intelligence? The answer is in the affirmative, but first we have to agree on what we mean by intelligence. With the ground-breaking psychologist, Daniel Goleman, most educationists and psychologists agree that traditional IQ tests are pretty restrictive and restricting and are only measuring a very narrow range of native intelliegence.  Goleman and others now recognise some nine forms of intelligence, and indeed there may be more.  Furthermore, there have also been many geniuses who failed miserably at school, not because they were unintelligent or stupid, but essentially because they did not learn in the restricting ways most school systems require.

That leads us on to whether we can measure our emotions and feelings.  How can we measure compassion and loving kindness, or even our love for one another or for a particular friend or sweetheart or our attraction to this, that or the other piece of art or sculpture or architecture or music?  There are so many immeasurable things - indeed, we often call them priceless as we cannot fix any monetary value to these works of art, to these cultural entities - that we humans are caught up in by the sheer accident of our birth. 

Girl with here dog, Prague, February, 2016

The further question, a big existential question for this writer here, is how do I measure my spiritual progress at all?  I have read many philosophy, theology and spiritual books in my time - certainly since I was 18 and went to college - and am still reading them, and yet at a certain level I feel as far away from my goal as I ever did at the age of 58.  Progress along the spiritual path is often very hard for me to measure at all.  Sometimes I wonder if I have really made progress at all? One day I feel that I have comprehended this or that deep truth, experienced this or that spiritual delight, and then, to my utter disappointment, these small comprehensions and minute illuminations seemed to have slipped away overnight into the ether upon waking the following day.  It's as if I was back at the beginning again and had to struggle on and find new and more compelling experiences and insights. (I am, of course, here reminded of T.S. Eliot's great spiritual insight that "We shall not cease from exploration//And the end of our exploring//Will be to arrive where we started//And know the place for the first time." In other words, I often take a little encouragement from these profound words, and realise that my knowledge has deepened rather than increased! "Little Gidding")

Classical Musician, Prague, Feb, 2016

As I sit here now I remember all the people who impressed me in my life with their spiritual commitment or  insights.  I think of my mother for her spiritual strength, a woman who never let life get here down, who quite simply was willing to begin again and again everyday, literally to start the struggle to survive and to provide for her family over and over on a daily basis.  Further, I think of the kindness of the old people I knew as a child who lovingly gave us a few coins for doing this or that message for them and I recall their kind words. I remember the older boy, Lar Cranny, who brought me to the children's hospital when I was badly bitten by a dog when I was a boy of 6 or 7 years.  Poor Lar, who became a teacher like myself, is now dead, R.I.P., having been tragically killed in a motor accident some years ago. I remember how my father refused to be victimised by the illness of polio through which he lost the use of his right arm and how he kept going for us his children.  I recall the wisdom of our teachers at school and college.  Those who influenced me spiritually I can list here as Rev Dr. Paddy Wallace, a wonderful visionary and prophet, and Rev Dr. Michael-Paul Gallagher S.J. who taught me how to meditate, Rev. Dr. Brian McNamara, S.J. who taught me how to wrestle with even the most complicated of theologies and Rev Dr John Macken who taught me to appreciate the way of "wise ignorance" or what St Augustine called the "docta ignorantia."  John had that gift in abundance and his gentle scholarly soul led me through many intricacies is post-graduate theology.  I tried to internalise all the lessons these wonderful people have taught me in my life, and yet as I go on, I find life is still somewhat of a struggle, that the journey continues.  I recall here, Robert Frost's famous answer to the question as to what he had learnt from life as being simply, "It goes on!"  Yes, life goes on, and that is surely both its beauty and its challenge at one and the same time.  All we hold dear would be so much superficial dressing were it not for suffering and death, two realities which raise the value of human life in its fragility to the nth power as it were.

Love is.... Prague, Feb, 2016

What keeps the heart going?  What keeps us from giving up? Each of us must, of necessity have some aim or a goal in life; have some reason to get out of bed in the morning; have some courage to keep going no matter what the cost; have some hope in the face of despair - maybe that's what Jean-Paul Sartre meant when he said that life begins on the far side of despair?; have some reason to live and some reason to die. We have to put down roots somewhere, otherwise we will wither and die all too quickly.  That's why commitment to values, to religions, to deeply held beliefs even outside the religious fold, to goals and visions to give us courage to keep going are so important in the human prject of making sense of our little brittlr lives.  That's why our Taoist poet above calls upon us "to be rooted in the Tao," to work at getting a spiritual centre, a Still Point of being to give us focus in our lives so that we can carry on.

It often seems to me that spiritual progress can be somewhat cyclic and that it can lead us further down (depth psychology or depth spirituality) into the profundity of mystery or further up (height psychlogy or height spirituality) into the sublimity or heights of mystery. In that cyclic journey it can seem that one is returning to the same place. (See quotation from T.S. Eliot above)  I think here of the analogy of the spiral staircase - as one is either going up or down, it can often seem as it one is going around and around in the same space and yet that is the deception.  One is in fact moving - either up or down - while all the time on the journey, it may seem as if no progress is being made.

Here, I would like to finish with a very siritual poem - one of my all time favourites by a contemporary Irish poet, whom it has been my privilege to meet many times in my life, namely Brendan Kennelly - which sums up for me the heart of all great spiritualities and in our particular sense what our Taoist poet has been expressing so well in the above stanzas.  

Once again, I invite the reader to read the above Taoist poem as reflectively as possible and then do the same for this equally beautiful and equally spiritual modern poem:

Begin

Begin again to the summoning birds
to the sight of the light at the window,

begin to the roar of morning traffic

all along Pembroke Road.

Every beginning is a promise

born in light and dying in dark

determination and exaltation of springtime

flowering the way to work.

Begin to the pageant of queuing girls

the arrogant loneliness of swans in the canal

bridges linking the past and future

old friends passing though with us still.

Begin to the loneliness that cannot end

since it perhaps is what makes us begin,

begin to wonder at unknown faces

at crying birds in the sudden rain

at branches stark in the willing sunlight

at seagulls foraging for bread

at couples sharing a sunny secret

alone together while making good.

Though we live in a world that dreams of ending

that always seems about to give in

something that will not acknowledge conclusion

insists that we forever begin.

— From The Essential Brendan Kennelly

Swans, Prague, February, 2016

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 45

Poem 45

True perfection seems imperfect,

yet it is perfectly itself.

True fullness seems empty,

yet it is fully present.

True straightness seems crooked.

True wisdom seems foolish.

True art seems artless.

The Master allows things to happen.

She shapes events as they come.

She steps out of the way

and lets the Tao speak for itself.

Commentary

Howth Harbour, 2003

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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