Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 66

Poem 66

All streams flow to the sea
because it is lower than they are.
Humility gives it its power.

If you want to govern the people,
you must place yourself below them.
If you want to lead the people,

you must learn how to follow them.

The Master is above the people,

and no one feels oppressed.

She goes ahead of the people,

and no one feels manipulated.

The whole world is grateful to her.

Because she competes with no one,

no one can compete with her.

Commentary

Malahide Estuary

We don't have to be in anyway astute to know that leadership is a difficult skill, or even set of skills.  Having been a teacher all my life, my only leadership role has been at classroom or at Year Head levels. Working with and leading adults is an area in which I have little experience.  However, I am old enough now to have "worked under" many leaders and to have observed and experienced many leadership styles.  Without a doubt we mostly abhor the autocratic or authoritarian style of leadership.  Who wants to be told what to do on a daily or even hourly basis? The opposite was the case - total lack of leadership - once in our school when a principal only lasted less than a year as the job was far beyond his capabilities. Luckily, the man realised this quite quickly and luckily got his old job back in the school from which he had come.  Anyway, all order and discipline disappeared in the school over night. Thankfully, this was just a slight hiccup in my 30 years in that school and all other leaders have been more or less satisfactory, with one outstanding leader.

Malahide Estuary

I have never studied leadership, but I would hazard the following qualities of good leadership from observation and experience or length of years on this earth: (i) good vision of where the organisation is going, (ii) good motivator, (iii) good listener, (iv) enthusiasm for the job, (v) knows his/her staff well - whether X, Y or Z will suit this or that job, (vi) can delegate and allow everyone to take ownership of their area without wanting to control things - in other words, she or he will never be a micro-manager.  I have experienced a more junior head of department who could never let go the reins of control and insisted on controlling everything.  In the end of course, such leaders don't control anything and things spiral into disorder, (vii) a good problem solver - able to deal with multiple problems at a time, and consequently be good at comparmentalising things (viii) has to have a hard skin, that is, they have to rise above the situation and learn never to take things personally.  If one puts oneself forward for a position in authority one has to learn to take citicism.  It has been my experience, and I take it that of most of the readers of this small blog, that leadership invariable attracts criticism by its very nature.  Everyone wants someone to blame, a quick scapegoat to blame all problems on.  Finally (ix) s/he who is a leader needs a very good sympathethic and empathethic deputy leader with whom they can share their problems, insights and vision.  Now, these are mere observations as the result of my life experience in my particular place of work, and bear in mind that I have never studied the aea of leadership ever.

In the above poem, I particularly love the image of the sea as the centre of power, and my goodness what a powerful phenomenon it it.  We all know that all life emerged aeons ago from the watery slime of our seas and oceans.  Without the oceans and seas there would simply have been no life as we know it.  The sea or the ocean consequently has always been a central symbol in all mythologies and cultures.  In psychoanalytical or Jungian terms the oceans or seas represent the great Unconscious, a source of much of our psychic lives.  Then, the image of all lesser water bodies, rivers and lakes and so on - the rivers all flow into the seas while the other water bodies are connected with the oceans historically and geologically in ways this writer could never understand.  However, what I am getting at here is the powerful imagery of all this for good leadership.  The leader, according to the Tao is the sea or the ocean and the workers are the rivers that flow into it.  Our poet tells us that the sea lies at a lower level to allow such an inward flow.  In this sense its power is very natural, and indeed a very humble one.  Interestingly the etymology of the work "humble" is "humilis" which means lowly or low lying.

One of my favourite all time quotes comes from Albert Camus, an atheist.  (Indeed, contrary to general belief, atheists do have a spirituality in the broadest sense of that term, obviously not in the religious sense of it.  See the marvellously comprehensive blog called Spirituality Ireland HERE.) The quotation reads: "Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."  Strangely enough - or maybe not that strangely as we are all human, no matter what our beliefs - the idea of accompanying others is central to spiritual guidance, counselling and chaplaincy.   This is more or less the sense of the final stanza above.  The Master is more a companion on the journey, and yet a leader who always wields an encouraging power, a power which at base is empowering of others.

The Master is above the people,

and no one feels oppressed.

She goes ahead of the people,

and no one feels manipulated.

The whole world is grateful to her.

Because she competes with no one,

no one can compete with her.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 27

Poem 27

A good traveler has no fixed plans

and is not intent upon arriving.
A good artist lets his intuition

lead him wherever it wants.

A good scientist has freed himself of concepts

and keeps his mind open to what is.

Thus the Master is available to all people
and doesn't reject anyone.

He is ready to use all situations

and doesn't waste anything.

This is called embodying the light.

What is a good man but a bad man's teacher?

What is a bad man but a good man's job?

If you don't understand this, you will get lost,

however intelligent you are.

It is the great secret.

Commentary

Skeleton of a coracle, Dingle Interpretative Centre - 

Another staple recommendation, indeed tenet, of anyone involved in the spiritual quest from whatever religious background is surely that the journey itself is more important than the destination. Today pilgrimage is becoming important once more as many people discover anew the spiritual quest through making a journey.  Accordingly, even here in Ireland, the Camino pilgrimage to Santiago or the town or Cathedral Church of St James in Catalonia, Spain. The physical journey is a solid outward sign or symbol of the inward journey of the self, or soul indeed.The greatest story of pilgrimage was perhaps written in verse by the famous Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 - 1400), the text of which most of us studied at some stage in our academic career, or at least read excerpts from.

We know these stories as The Canterbury Tales which Chaucer began working 0n from 1386 onwards. They recount, in verse mostly, the stories told by way of a friendly contest between a group of pilgrims as they travel together on a journey from London to Canterbury in order to visit the shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.  The prize for the winner is simple indeed: a free meal at the Tabard Inn in Southwark.  Chaucer's take on the idea of pilgrimage is humorous, a tad raunchy in parts, but for all that very appreciative of the importance of pilgrimage in the social life of the people among whom he lived at the time. Many other books have recounted the importance of pilgrimage and have pointed  out that life is a journey in many senses: in the physical sense as we grow up and move from one phase to another in our lives and often travel about the world in so doing; in the psychological sense as we journey to get to know ourselves; in the spiritual sense as we seek to make sense and meaning of our lives in an often inimical world. John Bunyan's (1628–1688) Pilgrim's Progress (1678) is a good example of a more serious presentation of pilgrimage in the spiritual life from an evangelical Protestant point of view.  It is a wonderfully profound read written in the simplest and most direct of language.

Oceanic Tapesty Ionad an Bhlascaoid - Kerry

Again, the verses of the above poem are full of paradoxical writing.  Setting up oppositional points of view is a preferred method of our author, and indeed one of the methods mostly used by writers of spirituality or mystical theology in any tradition.  It is important, indeed, to plan out any journey we wish to undertake as well as we can, though it is often wonderful to take a few diversions on our way here and there along our path - diversions that make our travelling far more interesting.  However, our Taoist writer does not mean just doing that as he suggests that we have no fixed plans at all.  That advice is ridiculous in worldly terms, though not in a deeper spiritual sense.  Indeed, we can make the greatest of plans in our lives and then have them ruined totally by accident or by chance. These unexpected happenings, even tragedies, do befall us as we make our journey.  Perhaps, the author is getting at the truth of that as it unfolds in our lives, that is, by making his exaggerated demands on us so that we don't become too ambitious and ego-driven to the extent that we lose a healthy intuition about what really matters in life - loving and being loved by others and so on.

John Bunyan (1628 - 1688)

Inspiration and intuition are undoubtedly very important in art.  Of course, so is talent and hard work to achieve a certain mastery in it.  The hard work does pay off as the more the artist practises the more s/he is open to being inspired and being intuitive.  Our Taoist author sees the scientist as being open to inspiration and not being too tied down by traditional concepts.  Openness to the new is the order of imagination.

Likewise, the Master of meditation is open to everyone and in totally non-judgemental and accepts everyone as they are in an unprejudiced and unbiased fashion.  All situations he finds himself in is looked upon as "grist for the spiritual mill."  

In the final stanza of the above poem our Taoist writer shows that there is really very little difference between the good and the bad man in a sense as we all are made up of good points and bad points. The so-called good people just manage to control their baser instincts and more evil desires better than the so-called bad people do.  That reminds me of the old moral poem we learnt as children: "There is so much good in the worst of us// And so much bad in the best of us// that it hardly behooves any of us//To talk about the rest of us." (Edward Wallace Hoch)  And indeed, here we must agree vehemently with our Taoist poet that this piece of wisdom can guide us well through life: in our parenting of children, in our teaching of children, in our leadership of others: in short, in how we greet others as being as important as we ourselves are in the overall scheme of things.

Finally, as is my usual habit in ending these short posts on the Tao Te Ching, I invite the reader to go read slowly over the above poem and let whatever line, phrase or word offer itself to you as a possible mantra for a short five minute meditation.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 26

Poem 26

The heavy is the root of the light.

The unmoved is the source of all movement.

Thus the Master travels all day

without leaving home.

However splendid the views,

she stays serenely in herself.

Why should the lord of the country

flit about like a fool?

If you let yourself be blown to and fro,

you lose touch with your root.

If you let restlessness move you,

you lose touch with who you are.

Rocks on Donabate Beach

Commentary

As we have outlined many times before in these pages, spiritual writers like to proceed by way of pardox, by setting up contradictions to make the reader or aspiring disciple think, ponder, meditate and contemplate.  Spirituality engages all faculties, not just that of the intellect.  It takes into account all the dimensions of the human being - intellect, heart, feelings, the unconscious, the non-rational and the irrational at times.  The last two lines make me ponder and wonder and they are worth re-quoting even at this close juncture to their former mention:

If you let restlessness move you,

you lose touch with who you are

These lines in the third stanza of the 26th poem brings the early philosopher and theologian St Augustine of Hippo to my mind.  Augustine (354 - 430 A.D.) often described himself as a restless seeker more so than a systematic and profound thinker.  He tells us in his Confessions that he restlessly sought out the truth (or the Good or God) behind the so-called world of the senses.  He declared that he had sought God everywhere, in his many travels around the then known world and in his relationships - some of them failures in worldly terms - and studies.  He tells us that he finally found God in the stillness of his own heart - within himself rather than in the world without. Those Augustinian thoughts seem to contradict outright what the Taoist poet is getting at. Once again, the contradiction is only apparent at one level.  I constantly refer to the predilection of spiritual writers with the healthy tension of opposites.  We have it here, both in Augustine and the Taoist poet. Augustine realised finally that truth or the Good or God could really only be found within his inner self, or heart or soul. So restlessness led Augustine to find rest for his weary soul within his own soul or heart through prayer of meditation, a process of contemplation or meditation he called "interiority" or the "interior way."  In this sense, he is actually in agreement with the Taoist author.

Icon of St Augustine of Hippo

In ways, even if we do not travel in a physical sense, we can travel in our inner selves or minds.  If we are seekers of peace, we shall certainly only find it within ourselves after much meditation and facing and integrating our own individual shadow as Carl Gustav Jung recommends. 

If we are overwhelmed by the weather, it is often good to recall that it is the inner weather of our minds that is the most important thing in anyone's life.  Then, no matter where we go, we will not need to complain about the outer weather.  A good traveller is one who is "at home" in his or her own mind, comfortable with themselves, happy with the lives with which they have been gifted.  In this sense, then, a good traveller never gets homesick.  Let us now add to the above paradoxes by suggesting that a person who stays at home because of some anxiety or depression or other mental problem can be a very restless traveller in his/her own mind.  In fact, they simply are not "at home" with themselves - and this is a very painful mental disequilibrium.

Once again, I invite any reader of the above lines to read over the above Taoist poem and let a word, phrase or line vibrate like a mantra in their minds for at least five minutes of peace and restfulness. 

Journal of a Soul 72

Looking Within

Portrane, Co. Dublin, February, 2015

Do you ever just sit and think? Do you ever take time out to see where life is going for you? Or is your life so busy that you rush from one activity to the next? If you are reading this, chances are that you have a few free moments at your disposal. This is a short invitation to look inwards, to answer the call to step within yourself.

At the start of most journeys we are full of expectations and sometimes anxieties. We don't know what surprises are in store for us further down the line. The journey inwards is no different. In fact it is probably the most frightening of all journeys - we are afraid of what we may find or uncover in our real selves. We may find a lot which we don't like, and which we may not want to change. Certainly we will find the negative, but if we journey long and deep enough we will unearth the positive too.

Life today happens at such a fast pace. We constantly rush to keep appointments and run to catch the bus or train. With a little reflection it becomes apparent that not alone are we rushing to somewhere or other, but we are also running from somewhere or other. With a little more reflection we realise that we are running away from ourselves a lot of the time.

When you are alone in your home what do you do with the silence? Do you fill it with every possible distraction? Do you hurry to turn on the television, radio or stereo? Must you always find something, no matter how trivial, to keep yourself occupied? What about positively deciding not to do any of these things? For once why not do nothing? Yes, that's what I've said, simply try doing nothing. We are all afraid to look into silence, perhaps because we really hate feeling lonely, feeling alone, being just an island cut off from the mainland of life.

Reflections on a Rock: Portrane, Co. Dublin, February, 2015

Next time you are alone why not try challenging silence or even embracing it. As the legendary Snoopy of cartoon fame says, "Sometimes I sits and thinks. Sometimes I just sits." There is a lot of wisdom in that. Try just sitting in silence with your eyes closed. Get yourself into a relaxed position with your back straight - a kitchen chair is ideal. Too soft or comfortable a chair and it's bedtime! A simple exercise like tracing all the sounds both inside and outside the house, letting them come and go into your consciousness, is a simple way to begin. Just relax and let all of the strain drain from your body, down your arms and legs and out. This is not just simply an exercise in relaxation. Yes it is that, but it is much more. It is an exercise in awareness, becoming aware of yourself most essentially. The more you become aware of yourself the more you will know yourself. Of course, this is a long journey, and it will not just happen all at once. As soon as you have begun to become present to yourself you are ready to start out on the most important journey you can take - the journey into self and to self -awareness.

Journal of a Soul 71

The Journey Continues

Howth, Christmas Eve, 2014

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

Heraclitus in Raphael's School of Athens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TS Eliot

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

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

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

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

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

Making Sense of Life and the Turn to Meditation

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

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

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

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

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

Journal of a Soul 51

To Travel or Not to Travel

To travel or not to travel, sometimes that is the question.  We are a restless species at base. The great St Augustine described himself as "a restless seeker."  In a sense, that fifth century saint summed up the human predicament nicely.  An acquaintance of mine who died over a year ago was not alone a "restless seeker," but he was also a restless traveller.  The way he dealt with his imminent demise was to take to travelling with an increased compulsion, if his previous obsession with it had not been intense enough.  Even to meet this man, you instinctively and intuitively picked up his restlessness.  He was always on the move, always going places, always living in the future, always making plans and more plans and more plans.  He was a deeply discontent person, and evidently unhappy in the moment. 

This road in Marley Park will eventually lead into the mountains

As I write these lines on the screen before me, I am at home in my attic study, having just finished one of Deepak Chopra & Oprah Winfrey's online meditation sessions.  Usually, I would be down in Isca Marina in Calabria for Easter, but this time I chose to stay at home while both my brothers travelled southward to the Mediterranean.  I have also just completed an eight week guided course on mindfulness in my local university -DCU.  Maybe that was one of the contributing reasons to why I did not wish to travel this Easter. However, there were also issues of getting my house into a more homely state to dwell in.  I have managed to get some long-standing jobs done about the house, and so not travelling did help.

However, for me as I live alone, I enjoy the peace and solitude of my Easter holidays.  I find that when I stay put alone I do a lot mental travelling - sometimes maybe too much. However, such internal journeying can be either stimulating or even disturbing.  Let me spell out what I am about here.  Restlessness can result in our desire to physically travel, but it can also see us staying put and travelling the equally hazardous roads of our own inner landscape.

And so as I sit here typing these words on the screen of my laptop I am travelling the roads of my own inner landscape.  Thankfully these are mostly interesting pathways leading me to a great extent along scenic routes to the discovery of a newer and deeper sense of Self. Moreover, I am also painfully aware that inner exploration for anyone of a depressive nature can be most disturbing, deeply unsettling and not a little scary.  I have written much over the years in various blogs about my suffering from clinical depression of the uni-polar variety.  Hence, I have known only too well the back-roads and side-roads of sadness and depression for a good number of years in my past life.  Thankfully, I have had no reason to travel those dreadful by-ways of the lonely depressed mind in the last sixteen years. Knowing them only too well, and my consequent awareness of what can pull me away from the more secure roadways and pathways to the real self and  into those dreadful by-ways of depression has led me to leading my life with a good map, both medical and therapeutic.

So journeying to the centre, or journeying to the Real Self, can and often is a painful one. However, as I have just stated, like any journey we set out on, we must make preparations, arm ourselves with the best maps, bring passports, visas, money and so on.  For the journey inward, we need the help of friends, spiritual guides, reading, discernment, patience, humility, openness and above all compassion for the Self.  All self-exploration, then, must be done with sound preparation and guidance, because as all spiritual teachers, guides, counsellors, therapists and any good, solid and well-trained facilitators of it will know, any form of deep meditation or mindfulness must be accompanied by solid sustenance for the journey. 

Flowers in Ardgillan Castle & Demesne, Skerries

In a nutshell, the difference between mindfulness and meditation is that the former is the secular face or incarnation of the latter.  Mindfulness is meditation divested of its religious garments, to use a metaphor.  However, in practice, to my mind at least, they are very much the same thing.  In short, I believe that mindfulness can be done at several levels.  The basic or foundational level is that of being mindful of the body and breathe.  The next is the level of being mindful of the thoughts, feelings and emotions.  A further and deeper level would be mindfulness of the Inner Self or the Real Self.  Again, more religious incarnations of mindfulness, would speak of a spiritual, if not a divine, experience associated with either meditation or prayer.  However, I do believe my nutshell explanation in the first sentence in this paragraph gets at the essence of the thing for the beginner. 

Yesterday and the day before I went out walking with my camera in hand, after I had done my period of meditation.  I found on both occasions that I had a new and more aware sense of the beauty of things than I usually would have if I had not done any mindfulness practice at all. Having said that, I was also somewhat overcome, too, by the fragility and beauty of life.  I had a sense of the destructiveness of the power of the more worldly pursuits of humankind, namely the despoiling and destruction of nature that is occurring at an alarming rate.  One would have to be living in a cocoon not to be aware of the environmental destruction we are subjecting our planet to literally on a minute by minute basis.  

Now, as an experienced meditator, I know myself only too well and realize that I cannot let myself dwell too much or too deeply on the flip-side or negative side of the "realization of the fragility and beauty of life" as such would bring morbid thoughts on.  Enough to go out into my garden, mow the lawn, and do my own little bit to nurture nature, and in so doing nurture my own soul.   Likewise, I recommend getting involved in one or other green campaign because so doing lessens the negativity that can be overwhelming when we contemplate how humankind threatens the very survival planet Earth.

More flowers, Ardgillan Park, Skerries

Recently, I was counselling a young boy who is suffering with depression.  He is also attending a psychologist. He was sent onto me by the school counsellor as she felt that my teaching him some meditation and visualization practices might help him.   Usually, I make a brief sketch of the client's state of mind on the whiteboard, with his help.  Needless to say, I work with all the good advice given by his psychologist and school counsellor, ensuring at all times that I do not contradict what they say, as working with others and on the same path is always crucial.  I sketched out what he was doing with his psychologist.  She was working with what made him Happy and what made him Sad.  We listed both these on the whiteboard.  What made him sad was that life was ultimately about loss, that everything and everyone grew old and died.  What made him happy was everything to do with living.  These were polar opposites as we sketched them out.  The birth of his little sister in more recent times has been a moment of singular happiness and joy for him. "Seek life", "go on living", "live in the now" were all messages we felt were good for living.  I recommended that he buy a present for his little sister and one for himself to celebrate the option for life.  When he returned the following week he had bought both presents and was a far happier boy.  As we were talking we spoke of the cycles of life and that often the life-death cycle can be a unity which we must respect as we are integral parts of it.  To get lost in either end of the cycle might not be the whole truth somehow.  Certainly getting lost in a cycle of depression, where we choose the dark and the negative and the deathly and death-ridden will lead us to despair.  Choosing sheer hedonism, a life of sensual pleasures may be choosing life as nothing but empty satisfaction after empty satisfaction.  Such a choice may, in fact, be very superficial.  Choosing to hold the hand of a sick or dying person, may paradoxically be choosing life, because those last moments of that person's life are so worthwhile.

Now, this is what I mean by travelling within.  Another metaphor could be "internal weather."  What's the weather like in your mind now? Stormy? Sunny? Cloudy? Grey? Dark? Dismal? Rainy? Windy? Night? Day? Sunset? Sunrise? and so on.  We do mindfulness and meditation and we travel ever deeper or ever higher (depending on your directional metaphor) into the Real Self, but that journey has many twists and turns, many obstacles, many hills and valleys, many rivers to be crossed, even seas and mountains at times - all of which means that we need to be well prepared and always look for help.  Going it alone is always dicey, to say the least.

To all the readers of this journal of a soul, I say "Buon viaggio!"

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 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 9 - The Dark (K)night of the Soul

The journey of the Self to Self-knowledge is a long and arduous one as any pilgrim will tell you.  To put this in a spiritual (or "religious" in the best sense of that word) way is to say that the journey of the Soul to God is indeed a difficult one.  As an agnostic Buddhist I see this second sentence in a metaphorical way - another way of expressing our journey to authenticity, self-knowledge or greater self-awareness.  I am happy with all expressions of this journey which is very important to the life of every individual no matter what his or her spiritual allegiance from theistic to atheistic and all the shades in-between the two polarities. 

In my life I have read as much spiritual literature as well as general literature as a way of making sense of the life I am confronted with (as Heidegger puts it, I did not ask to be born - I was thrown out there into existence - dasein which literally means being-there) or indeed gifted with (many philosophers, outside Christian believers have used the idea of life's giftedness quality, e.g., Michael J. Sandel (b. 1953), professor of political philosophy at Harvard.  Here's what my own favourite male actor says: “I figure life's a gift and I don't intend on wasting it. You don't know what hand you're gonna get dealt next. You learn to take life as it comes at you... to make each day count.” ― Leonardo Di Caprio).  I tend to look on life in this second sense.  The former is an existential way of looking at life while the latter is a spiritual one.  Needless to say, these two are "twins" as it were, and need not necessarily be mutually exclusive.

I spent some three years in my mid-twenties, from 25-28, in religious life in the Order of St Augustine (OSA).  While there I was introduced to all the major classics of Christian theology and spirituality over the years, e.g., the mysticism of St John of the Cross as well as that of St Augustine of course.  But it is that of the former with which I am interested here.  John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz) (1542 – 1591), born Juan de Yepes Álvarez, was a major figure of the Counter-Reformation, a Spanish mystic, Catholic saint, Carmelite friar and priest, born at Fontiveros, Old Castile.

Anyway, this Saint John of the Cross wrote a great and famous  poem called Dark Night of the Soul. This poem narrates the journey of the soul from its bodily home in this human body to its union with God. This journey is called "The Dark Night", because darkness represents the hardships and difficulties the soul meets as it attempts to detach itself from all the worldly concerns and materials.  At the end of the journey, hopefully, the soul will reach the light and live in union with the Creator.  The main idea of the poem can be seen as the painful experience that people endure as they seek to grow in spiritual maturity and union with God.

Now my title obviously is deliberately a pun, given the horrific happenings a screening of The Dark Knight Rises yesterday on July 20, 2012, during a midnight showing of the film at the Century 16 cinema in Aurora, Colorado.  A gunman, James Holmes,  wearing a gas mask opened fire inside the cinema, killing twelve people and injuring some 58 others. At the time of his arrest, Holmes identified himself as the Joker— one of the main antagonists within the Batman series — to police.  Warner Bros. stated that it was deeply saddened by the shooting, and announced the cancellation of the Paris premiere of The Dark Knight Rises.

One may say that those poor relatives who are left bereaved in the wake of this massacre, and indeed all those poor innocent wounded victims are now experiencing their dark night of the soul.  Evil is an extremely difficult problem which faces every human being in this world.  Indeed, I have written much on this theme in my former blog Still Point and I shall not rehearse here any of the arguments I adumbrated and explicated there.  Indeed, The Mystery of Evil was the title of my thesis for my first undergraduate degree.  However here, I want to say some words on how the mystery of evil weaves its way into the very fabric of our lives.  Consequently, no human life can be lived without tasting its bitter and sorry mystery.

The face of a mass murderer - James Holmes: See Here

The journey of the Self to Self-awareness or Self-knowledge or, if you are a firm believer in God, the journey of the Soul to God, is one littered with a lot of human and animal and indeed material wreckage along the way.  (Now, I respect totally both these versions of the human journey.  Neither is more correct nor more authentic than the other.  To my mind both are equally valid ways of steering the human person along the road of life.)

Those poor people who were out for a night's entertainment were suddenly thrown deep into the darkest night of soul that they ever could have experienced.  I have the same feeling as I type these lines as I had in the wake of the Norwegian massacre by the lone gunman and murderer Anders Behring Breivik.  Can we do anything about these madmen (all mass murders are men as far as |I am aware)?  What is happening us at all?  I believe the answer lies is the fact that today people lack a spiritual sense, a sense of connection with the world.  Another way of saying this is to state that the borderlines between reality and unreality has broken down.  Society is at fault here as it bombards everyone with countless pieces of information and all of it unsorted and uncensored.  Anyone anywhere can have access to anything.  The current mass murderer James Holmes purchased some 6,000 rounds of ammunition over the Internet before carrying out his massacre at the midnight screening of Batman.

Whether this man was mad or deluded is not the point.  The point is that today human beings are lacking a moral compass.  Traditional moral compasses have all now virtually broken down in the Western World for most of the younger generations all around the world.  Every little boy can access anything he wants on the Internet from serious porn to seriously sick and depraved actions of all descriptions.  When I was growing up the local library was my spiritual home where I was entertained and edified.  Now I love the Internet and spend many hours on it and am well aware of what can be found there across the spectrum.  Now, strangely, I'm not arguing for tighter censorship.  What I am arguing for is tighter self-censorship and self-control.  The questions we need to ask is what are we doing in society that allow people like Holmes and Breivik to perpetrate their evil deeds.  It is far too easy to write them off as psychopaths or sociopaths.

As we all struggle with our own spiritual advancement we encounter evil and suffering.  We must constantly question our own motivations as we proceed on our way.  We must take responsibility for the life we have been gifted with, whether by a spiritual source in God or from a scientific source in the Big Bang.  Whichever one of these is the commitment which you, dear reader, hold does not really matter.  However, what does matter is how I behave and live out my spiritual quest.  Also we are all responsible for keeping our fellow citizens in the real world where ethics are grounded in our very being.  Let us ask ourselves what have we as a society done that has allowed mass murderers like Breitvik and Holmes to commit such life-denying and life-destroying crimes.

The answer, dear friends, is certainly a spiritual on - one deeply rooted in values, and values that have some realistic horizon.

Journal of a Soul 7

The universal call to be Mindful: The Bell

It is said well that the longest journey is from the Head to the Heart.  In making our slow way through life we have to engage both, otherwise we are in danger of doing damage to both the Self and to the Other.  The philosopher in me tells me that there is also the faculty of the Will to be engaged also.  Thinking and Feeling alone will not bring me safe and sustained along the road of being and becoming.  There is also the ethical drive in me to will to do the right thing.

When literature really speaks to me is when the author either consciously or unconsciously engages at least two of the three faculties of Head, Heart and Will.  I have just recently finished reading John McGahern’s wonderful book That They May Face The Rising Sun, and therein the author writes with a lightness of touch that can only come after much practice at his craft and after a deep melding of Head and Heart and Will.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge once said that the signs of a great style of writing in any author were simply the right words in the right places.

Now, to get the right words in the right places is no easy task orally, let alone in its written format.  How often do we “put out foot in it” with others by insensitively using the wrong words?  In short we often don’t engage heart and head in unison. 

Indeed, in the old days a lot of people who made it to the top were often what the MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicator) called high Ts or high Thinkers.  Nowadays all Business and Administrative courses use many different indicators to train their students so that those who get into any position of power will know more about what makes us humans tick.  Heart and Head have to be deployed in unison for the better (I won’t say best) decisions to be made by any of us in any human encounter.

Then, there is the classic quotation from T.S.Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral which deals with the assassination of Saint Thomas a Becket which our author places in Thomas’s mouth: “It is far better to do the right thing for the right reason, than merely doing the right thing for the wrong reason.”  Now, the words I have quoted here are not verbatim, but they capture the essence of what Eliot had in mind.  It is easy, and indeed right to give money to charity.  It is perhaps easier to give it if you know that others will be impressed.  However, we all know that in this latter case the person’s motivation is selfish and ego-centric.  He or she is doing the right thing for the wrong reason.  There are, then, those who give to charity and they do so quietly – these are doing the right thing for the right reason.  Those who belong to the existentialist school speak of the second of these actions being authentic and the first inauthentic.

To travel the road to Selfhood is no easy task.  When one questions one’s motivation from time to time one often finds that we are a cauldron of contradictions.  We are a mix of motivations, and have not really sorted out what the Self is at all. 

Even the art of grafitti can call us to Meditation!

Meditation, I find, is a good tool to help the Self reach some sort of equilibrium, but it has its high points and its low points.  Let me explain.  There are some people who literally cannot sit still – they have to be up and doing all the time.  This is more than likely because sitting still will cause them to look inside to face the abyss within.  Slowing down, then, is a far too costly thing to do if it means facing what they cannot accept about themselves.  It is often crises in their lives like a heart attack, a bout of cancer, or the sickness or death of a loved one which makes them stop in no uncertain manner to face the real Self within.

Even for those of us who have looked inside and faced the abyss, all is not a garden of roses either.  Sometimes within I find a sense of a very fragile and brittle Self, a Self that can be buffeted way too much and way too easily by the winds of change.  Now, indeed, at other times I find a stronger and more solid sense of Self, too.  But, I can never guarantee which Self I shall encounter.  As I say, even though I have been meditating for years, and possibly not as often and as regularly as I should over those years is no guarantee that I still don’t have to wrestle with “my inner demons.”  That’s why meditation is no panacea, no quick cure for a troubled soul. Meditation brings us down into the abyss of the Self and we will find many frightening things below in the unconscious level of the Self.

However, that’s where the practice of literally concentrating on one thing only, say the breath can bring a stillness or, in the title of a previous blog I wrote, a Still Point – the method of concentration or still-pointedness, if you like. The other main method of meditation – that of awareness – can lead, I find to a dissipation or separation or scattering of the Self as there may be too much going on to be aware of.  Hence, to return to the method of concentration can draw the dissipated, separated and scattered parts of the Self somewhat together.

There is nothing as bad as when I am scattered or “all over the place” or confused or pulled in many directions at any one time.  It is at these times that meditation can help.  It is also at these times that I attempt to engage the Heart as well as the Head, and, indeed the Will.