Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 71

Poem 71

Not-knowing is true knowledge.

Presuming to know is a disease.

First realize that you are sick;

then you can move toward health.

The Master is her own physician.

She has healed herself of all knowing.

Thus she is truly whole.

Commentary

Humility is a virtue much to be prized according to many religious and spiritual traditions, though the great Greek philosopher Aristotle denied that it could ever be one because it actually sets itself against some of our most fundamental impulses like ambition and pride for example.  Instead Aristotle exalted "greatness of soul," what he termed wonderfully in Greek as "megalopsychia," which was for him where all moral values converged - a mean, as all virtues were essentially - between the extremes of vanity on the one hand and pusillanimity or extreme timidity on the other hand.

Again, a great soul, or as we say, a humble person, would acknowledge that not-knowing is true knowledge.  It is a Socratic epistemology insofar as one's starting point is always the acknowledgement of one's ignorance and then the gradual digging down or climbing up step by step in the pursuit of that knowledge. In keeping with our Taoist poet's analogy, there are far too many sick people in the world, that is, those who presume to know; those who think they have all the answers.  That is all ego stuff, that, in actuality.

When we realise we are sick, in sustaining our Taoist metaphor, we are on the way to healing.  How true it is that when we get a diagnosis for any illness we may have, that we are on the way to a certain type of healing - please note, I do not say cure here, as curing of illnesses is an entirely different matter.  Most counsellors, tharapists and even a growing number of medical doctors acknowledge that healing is more important than cure.  

I like the call of the Master or Mistress - the Teacher is both Masculine and Feminine in Taoism, maybe even beyond all sex, but that is a matter for another place and time.  In keeping with the sentiments of this wonderful Taoist poem, let us agree to heal ourselves of all improper and inappropriate knowing.

NAMASTE.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 18

18

When the great Tao is forgotten,

goodness and piety and appear.

When the body's intelligence declines,

cleverness and knowledge step forth.

When there is no peace in the family,

filial piety begins.

When the country falls into chaos,

patriotism is born.

Commentary

Once again, paradox lies at the heart of the Tao.  The above poem is seemingly, or at face value, contradictory.  As Oscar Wilde once said: “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” Goodness and piety in the above poem are looked upon as lesser, more superficial qualities than the wisdom that comes from the Tao.  Piety, uncoupled from just actions, is simply hollow and even hypocritical. Goodness that is self-serving and egotistic is certainly not loving kindness.  When the wisdom of the body is forgotten, even ignored, cleverness and knowledge come to the fore.  Cleverness smacks of striving either to impress the hearer or of attempting to ridicule his arguments.  Filial piety is merely respect out of duty rather than out of real respect for the person as person.  Patriotism often emerges from conflict and chaos and even bloodshed.

Unusually shaped tree, Newbridge House, Donabate, Co Dublin

Conclusion

Read over the above poem reflectively and allow a word or phrase to strike your imagination.  For five or ten minutes use that word or phrase as a mantra for a brief meditation.

Journal of a Soul 67

The Passage of Time

Interesting evergreen tree at Newbridge House, Donabate, Co. Dublin

The passage of time seems to be quicker the more one ages.  Indeed, as a friend of mine who is a mathematician stated: "This is quite logical because  to a 56 year old person like myself on the cusp of his 57th birthday another year is in comparative terms a mere one 56th or a one 57th of your life depending on how you calculate it.  One way or another ageing is inevitable.  Recently, I was quite intrigued when a past pupil who was about 19 declared that he would like to live forever.  Another young man in our company replied that such "would never happen and that his wishful thinking was in every sense delusional." St Augustine once defined time as "the measure of change." The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus averred that "one can never step into the same river twice," and further that everything was in "a state of flux." I was amused, as I say, by the wishful, if delusional, thinking of my young friend.  I thought to myself how great it was to be so innocent and full of enthusiasm for life. This was also quite ironic as we were in a local hostelry imbibing some alcoholic beverages in the wake of a commemorative service for one of his friends who had ended his life by suicide. Obviously this latter person had found living life totally unbearable.

The Importance of Philosophy

Philosophy is more an activity and a process than a learned body of reflections on life. While it may be the latter as is witnessed by all the countless books written on the subject, it is so much more.  It is the activity of questioning to the nth degree everything around us, the nature of the universe; what knowledge may be, if there is any such thing as Truth in an objective sense or is it always relative; what love, faith, hope and charity may be, indeed what emotions may mean; what the purpose and meaning of the life we humans experience is and so on and so forth.  There is also a philosophy of every subject under the sun.  We can surely ask what the nature of numbers is and what we are at when we do mathematics.  Are the tenets of mathematics universal and true everywhere in the universe.  We believe so and can adduce reasons to substantiate our contentions.  We can study the history of science and also its philosophy. What is the difference between practical knowledge and scientific knowledge? Is all scientific knowledge empirical?  In many cases, yes, but both at the subatomic and astronomical level, no - we need to use very abstract and much speculative thought there, but such thought is no less rigorous than the process of arriving at conclusions from empirical evidence. There are so many questions we humans can ask and none may be as important as the moral one as to what are right and wrong actions.  What is morality and why need we act in such and such way and so on. My young friend obviously had never encountered philosophy, that is, the radical questioning of one's own thoughts and opinions.  What would it mean to live forever?  Follow the thought experiment through, young man. Would you keep ageing and ageing and yet never die? Even simple tools eventually wear out? Humans are made of material stuff which breaks down.  Does not the simple physical law of entropy imply that everything eventually burns itself out? If we never died what would birth mean at all? There obviously would be no point in birth if there were no death! How would we deal with the population explosion? These are all philosophical questions, which at first glance may seem somewhat silly, but on reflection clarify superficial thought and silly shoddy thinking.  Essentially to live implies within its ambit the process of dying itself.  In fact, to live is to die.  Think of any simple plant or flower you might have at home or in the garden.  It grows, blooms and eventually dies.  I remember meeting a most interesting man who owned a pet shop.  One could see his total commitment to and love of animals of all varieties.  He opined that it was important for youngsters to keep pets, to nourish and see them grow and eventually die.  Keeping pets, he felt, taught children to accept that death and dying are parts of life.  As an animal, albeit human, I consume food, burn it and transform it into energy to keep my body going.  It is obvious that my body will wear out, break down and die - such is only natural.

Reflections on Death and Dying 

Having been brought up in a rural setting one could say that I am somewhat at home with the cycle of the seasons, with the sowing of seeds, the growth of plants, their cultivation and harvesting and so on in a never-ending cycle.  Within that scenario, death and dying are seen as a natural process. The peasant folk had and obviously still have their traditions like the waking of the dead - the celebration of the life of the departed one about the open coffin that is positioned centrally in the house of the departed.  Within this context not alone is grief made bearable but the sting is taken out of death at least for a short while.  These ancient rituals grew up within various communities as they attempted to help the grieving party cope with their sorrow and to make some social or communal sense of the experience of death.

And yet, existentially we all face our own extinction in a very private way - we each of us have to make some personal sense of our mortality, that is, if we are at least half thinking or even semi-reflective persons, as quite simply, no matter how many or how few are our family or friends, we die alone.  It is, alas, a journey only we ourselves can embark upon as we pass through the portals of death alone. Perhaps the greatest myth in our modern culture is the growth of sheer individualism with all that it entails. Modern individuals have built up around themselves their own private worlds of prestige, social achievement and material possessions - private worlds that give them a sense of identity - and all of that far too superficial or lacking in any depth.  Very soon we tire of superficiality, of building up  these rather tawdry worlds of vast egotistical proportions - rather like that portrayed in the novel, The Great Gatsby and most effectively indeed in the film of the same name.  All of these fantasies of individual power and prestige cannot keep the gnawing tooth of mortality at bay. Nor can any of these superficial attempts to build identity on the shifting sands of materialism keep the lonely soul protected from anxiety, angst and a host of concomitant emotional and psychosomatic complaints.

Some Personal Memories

The first death I can remember was that of my Grandmother Mary Phoebe Brophy in 1968 when I was ten years of age.  My young mind soaked in the experience as my mam and dad, as well all my uncles and aunts (all 11 of them) were very upset.  Perhaps the most consoling moment of the whole experience was being requested to kneel down and say a prayer at my grandmother's bedside and to touch her beaded hands.  I can still conjure up the vision of my grandmother's body in that bed all those years ago.  However, all in all, it was a positive experience, one that we were unconsciously taught to accept as a part of life, the final  mile stone along the journey of life if you like.  Then the second death I remember was that of my Uncle Paddy Quinlan at 58 of a rare cancer in 1970 - I remember so well the packed church and all the people who came to say goodbye on the day of his funeral.  I can still hear and feel the crunch of gravel under my shoes as I walked up to the graveside.  As I stood beside my father as they lowered the coffin, I saw a little white one and my father said gently, "that's your little angel brother Thomas who died many years ago." Since then, of course, there have been many other deaths, not the least of which were the deaths of my father and mother - experiences which I have recounted here and elsewhere in the blogosphere. Those particular deaths were wrenches to my being that I find quite difficult to describe.  One knows that when one has experienced their leaving of this world that your generation is next.

Existentialism

Sundown, Phoenix Park, October 2014

The theme of anxiety was at the very heart of existentialism from its very origins. This is a sense of anguish which can be defined as a sense of dread at the nothingness of human existence. This theme goes back as far as Kierkegaard in modern existentialism though it stretched way back further into ancient philosophy, too. In fact, anxiety as a theme pervades this philosopher’s work. Kierkegaard lived his relatively short life (1813-1855) in Denmark. The meaninglessness of his existence filled him with anxiety and despair and a sense of hopelessness and deep depression. At base his anxiety was a deep despair at the very nothingness of human existence. In the great universal scheme of things we are mere minuscule ants on a minuscule anthill called earth, lost in the infinity of space. How do we cope with the fact that we as thinking and feeling subjects will come to nothing in the end? Let’s hear Kierkegaard’s words: “I stick my finger into existence – it smells of nothing. Where am I? What is this thing called the world? Who is it that has lured me into the thing, and now leaves me here? Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?”(Lavine, T.Z. (1984) From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest New York: Bantam Books)

Making Meaning

We are meaning-making creatures.  We are forever forming and moulding meaning from the very stuff of life.  If we do not do so we are an empty, hollow people whom T.S. Eliot describes so vividly in his poem The Hollow Men:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken grass
In our dry cellar.

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion ...

These people who are hollow are the superficial people we described in one of our opening paragraphs.  They are the ones who have built their identities on the shifting sands of their own private worlds of prestige, social achievement and material possessions - private worlds that give them a false sense of identity - and all of that, as I have said, far too superficial or lacking in any depth. Something in us is repulsed by lack of meaning and superficiality.  It's almost as if there is something in us - some divine spark - that wishes to ignite and set the fire of enthusiasm and joy alive in our our hearts.  We feel, indeed intuit or know at a deep level, that there is something somewhere drawing us on towards meaning, some amazing, if imaginary lodestone, drawing us ever onwards.  This spiritual spark in me demands that I call it God.  Perhaps, that is overstating my case.  And yet, those are the words that came out as I wrote these lines.  There is a fullness of life to be experienced if only we have the courage to reach out and embrace it.

And as a meaning-making species we have conjured religions up from our collective unconscious to guide us and lead us ever onward on our human journey to meaning and personal truth.  We have embraced spiritualities of various types to give us the courage and the sustenance to support us on our journey.  Whether such religions and spiritualities are actually the result of our own imagination matters not a whit.  Perhaps it comes from an outside power, namely God, and of this I am quite convinced some of the time, especially at moments when I experience all too transiently beauty, truth, love, wonder and mystery.  But yet, in another sense that matters not a whit either.  What matters is that we have a meaning, a reason to live and a reason to die.  In our faith, in our imagination or in our soul, our very meaning lives on, and that is what makes all the difference, a difference that no proselytizing atheist can ever take from us.  And death and dying in this scenario are surely as natural as birth and growth.  Yes, indeed. Amen to that!!

Journal of a Soul 58

So Many Colours in the Rainbow

Who can forget the lyrics of  the chorus of the late great Harry Chapin's song "Flowers are Red"?  Let me remind you of them:

But the little boy said
"There are so many colors in the rainbow
So many colors in the morning sun
So many colors in the flower and I see every one."

Howth Harbour by night, three days ago 

The song is a good one as its message is perennial, namely, that it reminds us that "variety is the spice of life," that differences are not alone to be acknowledges but to be celebrated. It is a timely reminder not alone for politicians, law makers and legislators but also for academics, teachers, and indeed preachers.  Who wants to live in a monochrome world where everything is boringly staid, monolithic and grey? These reflections were occasioned by reading about how changes are occurring for the better in certain churches in the world: "US Presbyterian Church Votes to Allow Same-Sex Marriages," see Here.

Many Narratives

Bronze statue, UCD

Another phrase that stays in my mind is one I heard just last week used by our former President (Uachtarán na hÉireann), Mary McAleece, viz., "there is not just one narrative, you know," in response to a question on the centralized power structures of the Church. In other words, why is there just one monolithic approach to every moral and dogmatic question?  Surely, there are many approaches to and many perspectives on one or other truth.  Is there one monolithic Truth with a capital 'T'? Oh for a broad-Church mentality, not a narrow straitjacket approach where the take of a certain period in history is petrified or set in stone for millennia?  

Likewise, we tire from the same old rants by the tabloids that sell through sensationalist stories, many often blown totally out of proportion.  The narratives they proclaim and sell are all of a certain unseemly nature.  Many years ago my now deceased mother used always say: "good news never sells: bad news does!"  It is so easy to sell certain narratives only.  There are so many other stories, and many of them good, that could be given more public space and acknowledgement.  One further thing that does annoy me considerably is the almost deliberate avoidance of good journalistic practices of investigation before going to print with the publication of the latest  exposure of X, Y or Z.  

I Fear the Man of One Book

An old friend of mine used always quote the Latin phrase (he was a teacher of a certain era) from the pen of St. Thomas Aquinas, viz., "hominem unius libri timeo" which means "I fear the man who quotes one book (all the time)." As an academic of many years standing, I have never read or written a paper that did not make allusions to and citations from as many learned sources as possible.  In that way, academics attempt to bring out as many sides of the truth as possible.  After all, there are many ways of approaching every problem.  Let's take the field of geometry within the subject area of mathematics.  When I was at school, it was thought that Euclid was the final word on geometry, but when I got to college I learned about many other geometries: analytical geometry, algebraic geometry, descriptive geometry, differential geometry, projective geometry and so on.

Colloquialisms and Old Sayings

How often have we all heard that old chestnut: "There is more than one way to skin a cat"? This is a dreadful thought, and as to why one might want to skin a cat, I'll never know. I could understand it better if instead of the word "cat" one substituted that of "rabbit" as the latter provided much needed food to many of our forebears in less fortunate times.  The following is an interesting and learned conjecture as to its provenance: 

To a lexicographer, all phrases are interesting, it’s just that some of them are more interesting than others ... There are many versions of this proverb, which suggests there are always several ways to do something. Charles Kingsley used one old British form in Westward Ho! in 1855: “there are more ways of killing a cat than choking it with cream”. Other versions include “there are more ways of killing a cat than by choking it with butter”, and “there are more ways of killing a dog than choking him with pudding”. The earliest version appears as far back as 1678, in the second edition of John Ray’s collection of English proverbs, in which he gives it as “there are more ways to kill a dog than hanging”. (see Here )

Celebrating Difference

Marley Park, April, 2014

Surely the celebration of difference is one of our greatest possibilities as educated and progressive humans?  You don't need to be a zoologist or a botanist to celebrate the wonderful variety which the flora and fauna of the world present us with on a daily basis or a physicist or a chemist to celebrate the mystery of the microscopic world and even the submicroscopic world of atomic structure.  Neither do we need to be astronomers to appreciate the vastness and mystery of our universe.  Nor do we need to be college professors to marvel at the sheer exponential growth of knowledge.  All of this adds to the wonder of difference and the importance of celebrating this variety that seems to have one underlying thrust that biologists and physicists chase after in their desire for one overall comprehensive theory of the universe.  Perhaps, even if we are believers, we might see this as a quest for the Creator God?

The Wonder of Children

As a little primary school boy I was fascinated with the following quotation from the great English scientist Isaac Newton that our teacher Mr. Murray made us learn off by heart.  I remember it to this day: “I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” This childlike wonder at mystery and truth celebrates life in its great diversity.  It was the same wonder and innocence that Jesus meant when he said to all the adults around him:And he said: "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." ' (Mat 18:13)

Journal of a Soul 26

Order versus Disorder

Clouds over Baldoyle recently

Somewhere, sometime, long ago at the dawn of consciousness, which, I should imagine, roughly corresponded to the emergence of civilisation around the great rivers of the world from Mesopotamia to Egypt to China and so forth, there was a first great push for order among humans.  Humankind had begun to order itself, to create systems to help itself better survive in a hostile world.  Together, human beings could create and invent ever easier and better ways of surviving.  And so, progress was now possible with these first steps of co-operation. And so, indeed, prehistory gave way to history as civilisation after civilisation sought to record all their efforts at self-betterment, both successful and unsuccessful.

And today, we are the rich inheritors of multifarious cultures and we possess a sheer abundance of ever-expanding knowledge which has its foundations in those early cultures we described above.  Having been born in a relatively poor and young nation, namely Ireland, in 1958, I was, like my contemporaries exposed to very little new knowledge as it were – most of it was then contained in the written media and in the school books from which we learned our traditional school subjects. I recall well the arrival of the first television set into our little town of Roscrea, Co Tipperary in 1962 when I was only four years old. The National Television Service, RTE, was founded on January 1 that year.

And so as I grew up, the world became simultaneously and paradoxically both larger and smaller.  Larger, insofar as we would gradually come of age by learning through the medium of the TV how bigger and richer nations lived.  We would also desire the goods they had and to do the activities they engaged in.  We would want to travel more and experience and learn at firsthand what it was like to live elsewhere.  It became a smaller world, too, insofar as we are now beneficiaries of what Alvin Toffler long ago so aptly described as “the acceleration of change” in the early 1970s – so much so, indeed, that we can now call up any amount of relevant (and irrelevant) information at our fingertips through modern technologies such as smart phones and i-pads etc.

Obsessed with Information and with organising it

The Public Library, Baldoyle

In short, we are still obsessed with information – indeed, we might truly describe it as information overload – and we are equally obsessed with ordering that information into all its relevant categories and classes, subcategories and subclasses.  The web of knowledge gets evermore intricate as the world seemingly progresses.  Note the adverb here, as human progress is surely a matter of philosophical importance, and questions can indeed be raised as to what exactly progress consists in – thoughts for another post there, I should think. The internationally famous contemporary British professor of philosophy, A.C. Grayling puts it thus, and many are wont to agree with the learned professor:

“The development of science and technology shows us that, as a species, we have grown clever; their misuse for war and oppression shows us that we have not yet grown wise.  Moral heroism is required for us to teach ourselves wisdom” (The Choice of Hercules, Phoenix, Orion: London, 2007, p.68)

Disorder breaks in

If you own a property you will realise how much maintenance is required and much if not all of it on-going.  Things naturally break down – The Second Law of Thermodynamics and all that.  As soon as a house is unlived in, nature begins to have its way all too quickly with grasses and weeds growing from every available crack and crevice.  In other words, we have to constantly labour to bring about order, and also to keep order in place lest it suddenly descend into disorder and chaos.

Meditation as a Coping Strategy

I remember one of my acquaintances remarking many years ago that no one gets out of life alive.  In spite of all our individual efforts to keep order in our individual lives we grow old and die.  The existentialists were keenly aware of this patently obvious absurdity at the very heart of the human predicament: - the self-project which each individual sets out to accomplish will come to nothing in the dust of our death.  Admittedly, collectively as a culture we amass mounds of information, much art, buildings of great architectural value, languages, the intricacies of mathematics and sciences of all types as well as the more creative stuff of poetry, novels, drama and so forth.  And yet, as individuals we come to nought.  This was at the heart of Irish National Broadcaster, Marion Finucane’s interview with the dying writer Nuala O’Faoláin some two years back.  Nuala was heartbroken, she said, on learning that her death was imminent because all the order and shape she had built up in her individual life would now simply become nothing – all the facts she had learned, all the experiences she had gained, all the insights, the teeming brain, the languages, the literature, the writings, the music she so loved, the art, her three or so apartments, her wonderful friendships, her next writing task – all gone, forever, dissolved into nothing as her individual life, her little selfhood of her own creation, was snuffed inexorably out.  That, indeed, is the human dilemma, the existential condition under which we all live. 

And yet, meditation is only too aware of this. After all, it was Siddhartha Gautama’s (the Buddha) own lived dilemma, too, how to deal with suffering in all its manifestations – mental, spiritual and physical.  For him, the key was to learn to become detached from the concerns of life, to learn to get over clinging to either things or persons – in short, to learn acceptance and detachment.  This is the Buddhist philosophy of life, a way to live serenely and sanely in an all too frenetic and insane world.   

And so, what does living wisely mean? I argue that it means something along the following lines:

To learn that there are no easy answers to life’s big questions and that  those who propose such easy answers are singularly unwise, misled and misleading.

Sometimes we have to learn to accept events in life that we can never ever understand.  Acceptance, of course, here is never blind acceptance which is sheer fatalism.  By acceptance here, I mean that graced place of equanimity where one arrives spiritually, having worked hard at either solving the problem at hand, looking for help from as many quarters as possible, seeking advice, doing one’s best to come up with some partial solution and so on.  There is little or nothing more one can do against the inevitable at that stage.  Hence, acceptance is a wise position because one has expended all the necessary energy and a further expending is nothing short of wasteful and useless.

Knowing one’s strengths and limitations, and playing life’s game in that knowledge.

Forming good relationships and working at them like a gardener cultivates his patch of ground.

Learning the limits of human knowledge.

Being humble in a Socratic way – the admission of ignorance can be the beginning of knowledge and wisdom.

Learning things by doing – the practical knowledge or wisdom (phronesis) advocated by Aristotle.

Learning through meditation to accept whatever order there is in chaos.

Doing things slowly, mindfully and consequently well.

Perfection does not exist – it is an unobtainable ideal.  Everything has slight imperfections somewhere.  Excellence is a different matter.  To excel at something need not mean being perfect at it.  The nearest description I found for “perfection” was in the Bible where one translation described it as being “whole” or complete.

Finally, one must learn the harsh truth of all existence, namely that life is not fair, and by all the logic of statistics could never be.  Mostly, life is a matter of sheer randomness and luck.  How, when, where, to whom and in what medical and monetary circumstances we are born are all matters of varying circumstances.  We are dealt a specific hand of cards and we had better play them as best we can to our advantage if we are to engage positively at all with life!

Journal of a Soul 17

Memories

O'connell School, mid 1950s

A few minutes ago I was happily and nostalgically surfing a site for past pupils of my old alma mater - O'Connell School, North Richmond Street, Dublin, 1.  Old memories came flooding back when I was viewing some old pictures thereon.  As I sit here typing these thoughts, I am caught in a web of nostalgia, literally being "brought home" ("nostos") or back to a place that contains many happy memories for me. The second Greek word from which the compound "nostalgia" derives its origin is "algos" which means pain or ache.   And when we remember this or that person, this or that event, long since past, we are both happy and sad at one and the same time, hence the sense of ache or pain. 

I recall many years ago my Uncle John Saunders from San Francisco and my father Tom sitting at the kitchen table way back in the early 1970s polishing off a bottle of good Irish whiskey and their both weeping into their drinks with nostalgia for the old days when they were boys growing up in Roscrea, County Tipperary.  We all have such moments, because memory makes us who and what we are.  Without our memories, who or what are we at all?  That is why Alzheimer's and Dementia are such curses to humankind as they begin to wipe away our memories bit by bit.  Another way of putting this is that these dreadful diseases begin to wipe out inexorably the personality or true identity of the individual.

In fact, we could argue that memory makes us who we are.  It gives us our hold on life; defines us; identifies us; gives us a strong sense of our selfhood and roots us in a certain place, in a certain country, with certain people and particular events and so on.  We mull over ideas in the present with our short-term or working memory - all the things we are able to do and keep in our mind to perform our everyday functioning. However, we store past events and learned meanings in our long-term or episodic (or semantic) memory.  Moreover, the psychologists inform us that memory is malleable - and it tends to decay with age. Indeed, often our imaginations add in little extra details and colourings that were not part of the original remembered event or happening.

I have just resumed this post some twelve hours after I last wrote the preceding paragraphs.  At this juncture, I have just returned from visiting my 96 year old severely demented mother.  In fact she is physically quite good, but her memory has been almost wiped 100% clean, except for a few random words and a lot of garbled sounds of words and non-words crashing into one another.  And yet she smiles and seems happy.  In fact she ate two small yogurts for me and drank a half glass of orange juice. Other than that, I sat by her side reading my latest copy of Philosophy Now.

The nineteenth century theologian and Catholic apologist, John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) used say that how we believe is a s much a s mystery as how we remember.  Cognitive scientists would most likely say that our memories are sparked off by some image or word or feeling we associate with something or someone we encounter, and that the whole thing is as simple as cause and effect or stimulus and response.  And yet it is more.  I am very much a Gestaltian in tendency and see things in wholes and patterns and overall shapes.  For me, and I am sure that for most of you reading this blog entry, the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts.  Whatever moves us is deeply rooted in who we are, in our identity as a person, in our very self or soul.  We simply believe (perhaps just like to believe) that we are more than a random collocation of atoms, or organs or whatever.

O'Connell School today

And life, what is it at all?  Just a small question that never ceases to cause us to ponder deeply on our human condition.  As I type these few words I remember back to 1980, some 33 years ago.  My memory carries me back to the staffroom in O'Connell School where I had just become a teacher.  I was teaching Religious Education and Mathematics at the time, though my timetable was made up of most of the former.  One winter's morning I arrived in somewhat early and found Gerard Smith sitting beside the electric fire.  He greeted me and asked me "What is it all about at all, at all?"  I replied that this was a very heavy question to be asking me at that hour of the morning.  I deliberately did not answer him, as I simply couldn't. However, I knew that that question had come from the depths of Gerard's being.  To make a long story short, Gerard, unknown to any of us his colleagues, had a congenital heart disease from which he was to die sadly some years later.  Another one of his great friends on the staff, Gerard Donnelly, who joined us in 1982 as a Science and Maths teacher died all too young two years ago from cancer at the young age of fifty. I remember this second colleague of mine being very upset at the other man's demise.  And so these memories come.  They are not random memories but extremely focused ones.

We are left with the mystery of who we are, of what the whole point about life really is, of how does it add up at all.  Then there is that wonderful question which runs: Why is there something rather than nothing?  What is nothing?  Can nothing exist?  What does it mean to be conscious anyway - what is consciousness?  If a tree falls in the wood and there is no one there to hear it does it make a sound? What is knowledge?  How should we act towards others?  What is right and wrong? Why is there Evil in the world?  Why do we die?  Why do we suffer?  Why do we live at all in the first place?  Why do we exist? and so on and so forth.  There are, of course, philosophers who declare such questions meaningless as they see such questions as essentially ones based on bad logic and very poor reason.  Such metaphysical questions are beyond the scope of their type of philosophy.  And yet, we experience ourselves as persons who search for patterns and meanings, who are enthralled by the mystery and wonder of the universe of which we are such a minuscule part.  We can rightly wonder at our small role in that one great mystery.  After all, philosophy, and all good art and all good science, begin exactly there - in wonder!!

And so whether I am weeping nostalgically into a shared drink with another human being, perusing a past pupil website of my Alma Mater, discussing a crisis or problem with a friend or spouse, writing a poem, singing a song, remembering my school days, visiting the graves of relatives and friends, reading a good novel or poem, viewing old photographs, reading old letters, visiting old haunts, I am doing things that essentially make me human, that confirm me in my identity as of such and such a family, as coming from this or that town or county or country or continent, as being really the stuff "on which dreams are made" as Shakespeare so sublimely puts it.

It's time to go an have a nightcap - a nice glass of Irish whiskey - A Jameson preferably.  Good night and sleep well.