Poems I Journey With 11

Clarity versus Unclarity

This contrast is one that has always confounded me. On the one hand each of us desires clarity and yet there is pretty little of it to be found in this world - at least, of the logical variety. At college we had to read Albert Camus' short book The Myth of Sisyphus for our philosophy class. For Camus, the philosopher of the absurd, or the absurd person, demands clarity or certainty above all, but again there is little or none to be found in the world around him. The sense of the absurd, then, results from the the conflict that is created between human reason that demands clarity and the unreasonable universe that is very unclear indeed.  

I remember many years ago when I was a green young teacher walking into a staff room early one winter's morning to find a colleague named Gerard Smith, one very smart young gentleman, asking me the following question, "Well, Tim, what is it all about?"  What a huge question that was, and I was taken aback to be asked it so early in the morning.  I don't remember what I replied, but I certainly would have said little of worth as I was quite a shy young man then with little confidence. A few years later we were all to learn that poor Gerard had died in America, having taken a career break from school. It as only then that we found out that the poor man had a congenital and fatal heart defect from his youth and that there remained little time on earth for him when he asked his question.  In hindsight, I then understood why he had asked that weighty question.  Again, he would have known that I had a background in theology and philosophy, and he perhaps believed that I could furnish him with some sort of answer to his deep question.

Most religious or spiritual gurus and writers acknowledge the unclarity of the world and the sheer lack of any logical answers. They simply have a different take on things, a much different perspective. Often they even seem to delight in the sheer unclarity of things, and speak about mysticism, wonder and mystery, especially that mystery which the divine is, that mystery that simply cannot be caught in a net of words or in dogmatic phrases no matter how intricate or sublime. There are other ways, apparently of encountering the world, outside the logical. Those who have this perspective are often fond of quoting the words of Blaise Pascal: "Le coeur as ses raisons que la raison ne connait point" - "The heart has its reasons which reason itself cannot understand." It is with this background in mind that I now invite the reader to read Louis Macneice's very fine poem called "Entirely:"

Louis Macneice 1907 - 1963

Entirely

If we could get the hang of it entirely 

   It would take too long; 

All we know is the splash of words in passing   

   And falling twigs of song, 

And when we try to eavesdrop on the great   

   Presences it is rarely 

That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate   

   Even a phrase entirely. 

If we could find our happiness entirely 

   In somebody else’s arms 

We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city’s 

   Yammering fire alarms 

But, as it is, the spears each year go through 

   Our flesh and almost hourly   

Bell or siren banishes the blue   

   Eyes of Love entirely. 

And if the world were black or white entirely 

   And all the charts were plain 

Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters, 

   A prism of delight and pain, 

We might be surer where we wished to go   

   Or again we might be merely 

Bored but in brute reality there is no 

     Road that is right entirely.

I love this poem because of its complete honesty and total authenticity.  The poet does not trot out old pieties or standard traditional phrases that simplify life. Rather, he honestly presents a perspective on life which is all too common and all too realistic - that is, that life is exceedingly complex and often beyond our understanding of it.  In short, the poet admits to being somewhat stumped about the mystery that life faces us with. The theme is clear, and that theme is that there is no ultimate clarity. Camus drove himself wild looking for such clarity.  

In stanza one the poet recounts how we simply cannot "get the hang of it entirely," and even if we could, we simply would not live long enough to figure it out.  When we listen we often only pick up a fraction of what is said.  Indeed, we readers can add in our minds to this that we often do not see the full picture as we are only granted a certain perspective on events, often from an awkward angle. MacNeice hints at religious and spiritual themes when he says that when sometimes we try to "eavesdrop on the great Presences" we scarcely succeed in that endeavour at all.  

"[S]plash of words" and "falling twigs of song" are two powerful images with the second one blending two totally opposite realities - twigs (physical) and song (immaterial). Love is fleeting, not just the romantic idea of it, but its physical reality, as we are not entirely satisfied in our physical experience of it.  The imagery of "spears" reminds us of Shakespeare's line "to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" and the intended meaning of both is the same, namely a battle image to sum up the misfortunes we encounter in our lives. The "yammering fire alarms" are those that are constantly calling out to warm the citizens of London about the fires consequent on enemy attack.  Those bells "banish the Blue Eyes of Love entirely."

The last stanza is as succinct as the other two and points out that it is ludicrous to approach life in a "black and white" manner as there are too many other colours in between the two that manifest themselves through "a prism of delight and pain." Indeed, even the maps we get are not one hundred per cent clear and logical. They are, rather, more than somewhat unclear as they often manifest themselves in actuality as "a mad weir of tigerish waters."  Then there are times that we merely grow bored of trying to find our way through the maze of unclarity that much of life can be. Whatever our reaction to our situation in life is, we can be fully sure that there is "no road that is right entirely."

Finally, the title is a most apt and succinct summary of the poem, that is, that we can never be totally sure entirely. I find this a comforting poem in the down periods of my life as I begin to be less hard on myself as a result of the wisdom garnered here. After all, we will never get everything right entirely. Not even the commentary on this poem.

Poems I journey With 9

This morning I want to introduce the reader to another favourite poem, this time from the pen of the great twentieth century English poet, W.H. Auden (1907 - 1973) whose work never failed to inspire me and set me thinking.  One of my favourite poems of his is "Musée des Beaux Arts," a short poem that was composed in 1938 and which was published a year later in a newspaper.  The eponymous title of the poem is the museum in question and it is situated in Brussels, Belgium.  The painting is by the Dutch Pieter Brueghel, the Elder (c. 1525 - 1569) and is called "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." (1558)  This is a fairly simple poem and it basically sums up the thoughts and feelings inspired by a viewing of this great painting.  The description is ekphrastic that is it verbally describes all the images that occur in the painting. In short, the poem does "exactly what it says on the tin" or exactly what it says it will do in the title. 

The Painting in question

Musee des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

I love the opening as it draws the reader in with its inversion of the normal way of saying thimgs as we have to read on to find out who was never wrong about suffering.  Why were they never wrong?  In the second line we know it was the Old Masters, those old painters from the Dutch School.  Those old Masters were never wrong about human suffering.  When one views this painting, according to W.H. Auden, one realises quickly that while someone is suffering (like Icarus hitting the water after flying too close to the sun that caused the wax to melt on his constructed wings) others are blithely going about their daily tasks: like eating, opening a window or "just walking dully along" and so on.  They simply never notice Icarus' suffering and pain. If they never noticed the tragic fall of Icarus to his watery destruction how would they ever notice ours either?  He tells us also that the elderly people amongst us hold out some desperate hope for some miracle to transform their brittle and fragile lives. While these elders amongst us vainly hope, the children play on in their own constructed reality, totally unconcerned and oblivious to all worry and anxiety.  Even a saintly martyr must die on the margins of society. Those who live are too busy going about their daily tasks to note even a martyr's demise: they are just too busy living. 

The young Wystan Hugh Auden

Auden states his conclusion even more clearly as we proceed down through the poem: Brueghel's depiction of poor Icarus' falling from the heights of his hubris to his watery grave shows how uncaringly "everything turns away" from this disaster which is simply sidelined. The ploughman might have heard the splash as Icarus hit the water, but even if he did he chose to ignore it and get on with his work.  The passengers on the nearby ship must surely have noticed this tragic disaster, but again, even if they had, they chose to sail away to wherever they were going.  It would also appear that scenes from other pictures by Brueghel, also hanging in the Musée des Beaux Arts are alluded to in Auden's poem as his lines about people "dully" walking along and the elderly waiting for a miraculous birth and children skating may derive from a painting called "The Numbering of Bethlehem."  Furthermore the following lines:

They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

may be inspired by another of Brueghel's paintings, namely, The Massacre of innocents.  In this latter painting, there are indeed dogs and horses.

One of the most pleasing features of this poem is its straight-forward description of life in the various paintings in clear images, that is, what we mean when we use the Greek term "ekphrasis."  Another is its lack of more poetic and formalised language.  However, the most satisfying feature for the present reviewer is Auden's lack of didacticism or direct moralising. The poet is far too authentic an individual to be a self-righteous preacher. Rather, he is making a subtle point as indeed did the Grand Masters who were so right about the human condition.  Humans really don't so much care about the fate of their fellow men and women insofar as they have to get on with their own concerns to eek out a living and survive. In this context, it is interesting to underscore the fact that this poem was written about a year before the outbreak of the Second World War.  One might not be too far from the truth to guess that the poet was picking up the international feeling of this lack of concern for the welfare of others. To my mind, this is a well-structured poem with considerable poise and delicacy shown by its oblique criticism of mid-twentieth century humanity.

Poems I Journey With 1

Introduction

Having written on and pondered the meaning of life from a spiritual point of view for nearly forty years now, I return again and again to poetry for spiritual sustenance.  Over the next several months I should like to record here the poems - with a short commentary on each - that have inspired me throughout those years. They are the poems to which I return again and again for comfort.

Pearse as a Barrister

Given the significance of 2016 for us Irish, namely the centenary of the 1916 Rebellion or Rising as we more commonly call it, I should like to start with a poem by one of our major national heroes, namely Patrick Pearse (1879 - 1916) who, along with many others, gave his life for the future freedom of the Irish nation.  I will start with one wonderfully deep poem from his pen in English.  It is called "The Wayfarer"

The Wayfarer

The beauty of the world hath made me sad,
This beauty that will pass;
Sometimes my heart hath shaken with great joy
To see a leaping squirrel in a tree,
Or a red lady-bird upon a stalk,
Or little rabbits in a field at evening,
Lit by a slanting sun,
Or some green hill where shadows drifted by
Some quiet hill where mountainy man hath sown
And soon would reap; near to the gate of Heaven;
Or children with bare feet upon the sands
Of some ebbed sea, or playing on the streets
Of little towns in Connacht,
Things young and happy.
And then my heart hath told me:
These will pass,
Will pass and change, will die and be no more,
Things bright and green, things young and happy;
And I have gone upon my way
Sorrowful.

Commentary

This poem captures for me one of the central issues in life, namely its transience, transitoriness or impermanence, call it what you will.  I suppose most of us encounter this impermanence most essentially through experiencing loss, especially that loss we encounter in the death of our loved ones.  Another way of expressing this is to say we encounter in those losses our mortality and the brevity and brittleness of the enterprise we call life.  

There are many history commentators with divergent views on Patrick Pearse, but not one can deny his ability as poet, author and perspicacious educationist.  In this poem, "The Wayfarer,"  Pearse expresses his encounter with his own mortality.  Undoubtedly, for those who understand the broader historical motivations of the author, the above poem will have resonances for the reader about dying for one's country.  Pearse knew, indeed believed, that the freedom of the Irish Nation could not be achieved in any other way but through the sacrifice of his life for his country.  However controversial his political beliefs were, and however much we can see their influence in the above poem, nevertheless, anyone knowing nothing of the author will meet the poem in itself, within its own internal coherence without historical interference. It is in this sense of the poem's own internal integrity that I love it. 

The great contemporary psychiatrist and psychotherapist Professor Irvin Yalom has outlined four main ultimate concerns that lie at the heart of every patient or client who comes to his consulting rooms namely (i) existential aloneness, (ii) freedom, (iii) meaninglessness and (iv) mortality.  These four ultimate concerns, he argues, make up the very ground of our being in the world and portray themselves in a vast array of mental complaints in the clients or patients who frequent his therapy sessions.  They also form the four main planks of what he describes as Existential Psychotherapy. 

Pearse as a young boy

Using Professor Yalom's insights into Existential Psychotherapy, and indeed his basic insights into the nature of the human condition we may say that Patrick Pearse engages the two main ultimate concerns of (i) existential aloness and (ii) mortality in his wonderful little poem "The Wayfarer."

The title of the poem is, for me, a very spiritual one, namely that we are all pilgrims or wayfarers on our journey through life.  Without a doubt, the image of pilgrim, wayfarer or journeyer is essentially a religious or spiritual one.  Central to all religions and spiritual traditions is the notion that life is a journey on the way to some destination.  Most religions call such a destination by the name of Heaven or Nirvana or whatever.  Yet within many religious traditions, there are also spiritual sub-strands that emphasise that the journey or pilgrimage itself is what matters and that the NOW of life is what is important, not the goal! If there is a goal, well so much the better, but that often distracts us from the task at hand, namely making the most or the best of the life we live in the now of existing.

Transience (mortality, mutability, transitoriness, impermanence) is noticed in these lines: "This beauty that will pass," "shadows drifted by," and "These will pass//Will pass and change, // Will die and be no more."  Also the beauty of the world will sadly pass, too.

Pearse, when he wrote this poem was obviously overcome with sadness, the sadness of leaving the beauty of the world behind him at his death.  And yet for me, I am never saddened by this poem as I understand his predicament at the time, namely what his sacrifice of his life would cost him.  Moreover, with an understanding of existential psychotherapy as proposed by Irvin Yalom and Emmy Van Deurzen and others of that approach to therapy and to life, it is by encountering our mortality head on that we come to prize life and living all the more highly.  

In the Buddhist tradition, meditation upon dying and death is highly recommended, not from the point of view of wallowing in depression or sadness, but rather in the consequent appreciation of the power of living in the now and valuing all the painful beauty we may meet in that now: of valuing the beauty of the brittleness of the world and the fragility of life, "the leaping squirrel," the beauty of "a red lady-bird upon a stalk," or "some green hill," or even barefooted children running on the sands of the coastal strands, little beautiful towns, "things young and happy," and "things bright and green."

There is no need, like the wayfarer, to go on your way sorrowful that things will pass, but rather to begin the journey to learn to appreciate the presence of life in the now, even if it is fleeting and transitory.  In the end, we are, after all, just a little part of a more eternal cycle. Let us appreciate our little part in that great cycle of things that makes life in the first place. 

For an alternative commentary and a recording of an actor reading the poem see the following LINK.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 70

Poem 70

My teachings are easy to understand

and easy to put into practice.

Yet your intellect will never grasp them,

and if you try to practise them, you'll fail.

My teachings are older than the world.

How can you grasp their meaning?

If you want to know me,

look inside your heart.

Commentary

I remember years ago at college a lecturer fulminating against those who attempted to paraphrase poetry, quite simply because it destroyed the magic, the very essence of the poem and the poetic enterprise.  In similar manner, that same lecturer and many other colleagues encouraged us never to ask the question "what does a poem mean?"  They believed that a poem just was what it was or is what it is and that the readers should allow the words to work their magic on them in  their own way and in their own time. Let's use a mathematical concept here in order to further our understanding of what these lecturers were at.  Those of you accustomed to mathematics will know all about functions and the one to one correspondence of elements in the domain and the range.  No element in the domain can be mapped onto two elements in the range.  If we use this mathematical concept we could say that a paraphrase attempts a one to one correspondence between words and their significance, between poem and meaning: in short, it tries to make the poem out to be a mere one dimensional functional thing.  A poem cannot denote like a function denotes; rather it connotes many levels of meaning.  Hence, no simplified paraphrase will ever suffice; no on-to-one correspondence will be adequate.

Likewise, our above spiritual poem defies simplification or oversimplification.  Once again, our Taoist poet uses exaggeration and paradox and he either overstates or understates things thus: He tells us his teachings are easy to understand; that our intellect will never grasp them (two contradictory sentiments); that if we try to practise his teachings of the Master or of the Tao we will fail; that the teachings of either Master or Tao are beyond our human understanding; and that the journey into the Tao begins with diving deep into our own hearts. This latter assertion is pure Augustinianism or pure "interiority" as St Augustine called the meditative or contemplative way of discovering God within our own souls.  He also called that that phenomenon the "indwelling of the Holy Spirit."

However, my advice to any reader of poems is to let the poem be, let it call forth all the associations, personal and otherwise that it sparks in the mind and heart of the reader.  My recommendation is similar for spiritual writings.  All such works are attempting the nigh impossible - to capture the movement of the human heart towards God and the movement of the Divine towards humankind.  Insofar as it is engaged in that task, those spiritual writings, of necessity, employ the use of metaphors, similes, comparisons, parables, stories, allusions and connotations, and all these devices serve to strike resonances of all kinds in the mind and heart of the reader.  In like manner, that is what we have to do with the above rather paradoxical and enigmatic poem.  Read the words in a contemplative way, seeking not to understand them in the head, but rather to accept their multiple and contradictory meanings with the heart.

Namaste, friends. 

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 60

Poem 60

Governing a large country
is like frying a small fish.

You spoil it with too much poking.

Center your country in the Tao

and evil will have no power.

Not that it isn't there,

but you'll be able to step out of its way.

Give evil nothing to oppose

and it will disappear by itself.

Derek Lin's translation  of this poem is as follows:

Poem 60

Ruling a large country is like cooking a small fish

Using the Tao to manage the world

Its demons have no power

Not only do its demons have no power

Its gods do not harm people

Not only do its gods not harm people

The sages also do not harm people

They both do no harm to one another

So virtue merges and returns.

Commentary

I have given two versions of this poem to give me some inspiration, because what the poet is getting at is somewhat hard to unravel.  I use the word "unravel" intentionally, as the above poem needs to be contemplated deeply as it does not render forth its meaning easily, but that is often the case with mystical, and certainly with Zen-like, poetry.  So, therefore, let me here state clearly that I am offering a very personal and tentative interpretation. 

Garden, Glenview Hotel 1

Who would want to be a politician?  For me the answer to that question is crystal clear, a most definite, "No, certainly not me!"  Politicians put themselves up for election and stand before the judgement of the people at regular intervals. Once elected they have to put in amazingly long hours at the service of the State and of fellow citizens. Sometimes they make mistakes and sometimes they achieve much. However, they often get vilified by some sectors of the population for one decision or another.  All too often, they will fail to get re-elected because they must face their electorate at the end of their political term. Further, their moral and daily personal affairs are an open book as far as the media and the public are concerned. Who would want to be so much in the eye of a very judgemental public?  That's one reason why I admire politicians  because quite simply they have the balls to stand up and be counted, express their vision for the improvement of society and work towards achieving their goals.

Garden, Glenview Hotel 2

Now that I have expressed some of my ideas about politics and politicians and the governance of any state, I must now turn to where the above Taoist poem touches me.  What lines spring off the page?  The image of "frying a small fish" offers itself vividly to the mind of this reader, and poking it too much will certainly break it up into little pieces on the pan. That image courts another image in my mind, an image which is also culinary, namely "too many cooks spoil the broth!" The wisdom of this saying is obvious.  Someone has to be the main chef or cook.  Someone has to make the decisions or be the leader; otherwise there will be chaos and the big fish of State will break into little pieces. There has to be order in society. And yet, the realists among us know all too well that this is the very reason that politicians of Right and Left are often caught in verbal fights most of the time. However, verbal fights are far superior to fist fights and, God forbid, wars between nations. Moreover, the realists among us become aware all too quickly of the virtual inevitability of wars. Another image that springs to my mind here is a famous phrase uttered by the great wartime U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill: "Jaw, Jaw, not War, War!"  

Garden, Glenview Hotel 3

What makes this interpreter of the above poem pretty much lacking in hope, but certainly not despairing, is that our writer is so impractical, so unrealistic, so thoroughly positive that he or she appears to be a totally dyed-in-the-wool idealist who believes that our politicians can be motivated by being steeped in the Tao or in the Still Point of Being. Yes, indeed, like any of you reading this post, I should dearly like that such would be the case, that all the politicians that lead my country, Ireland, should be centered in the Tao and that "evil will have no power."

And yet, it is so right that the Scriptures of any religion, that the ideals of any belief system, theist, atheist or agnostic should propose values which we should, of necessity, strive to achieve.  Otherwise, we would be so much poorer in being bereft of some guiding star, some goals and hopes to reach for.  

Garden, Glenview Hotel 4

Our poet does underline the fact that we will always have evil out there in the world, and often, unfortunately, even in here in our hearts, but he tells us that if we ground ourselves in the Tao we will be able to avoid such evil.  Meditation and mindfulness do help us ground ourselves in the essence of life, in the Still Point of Being, in following the path of the good in our lives and in avoiding evil.  The final two lines are very hopeful, even if they smack of wishful thinking and a positivity that does not seem to allow for the jagged edges of existence and the seeming deep-roooted-ness of evil in the world to rear their ugly heads. 

Yet, such is the challenge of spirituality and all spiritual reading, no matter what its provenance, that we must read and re-read, contemplate and re-contemplate its words and be challenged to the core of our being with the truth of the lines such as the ones with which our writer challenges us by way of concluding the poem:

Give evil nothing to oppose

and it will disappear by itself.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 35

Poem 35

She who is centered in the Tao

can go where she wishes, without danger.

She perceives the universal harmony,

even amid great pain,

because she has found peace in her heart.

Music or the smell of good cooking

may make people stop and enjoy.

But words that point to the Tao

seem monotonous and without flavor.

When you look for it, there is nothing to see.

When you listen for it, there is nothing to hear.

When you use it, it is inexhaustible.

Commentary

The persistence of life - wild butterfly bush at Dollymount, 2006

Balance is both a physical and a mental necessity if we are to live a life characterised by well-being. Indeed, one is more than a little likely to connect balance to the old Greek philosophical idea of moderation in all things or what Aristotle termed the "Golden Mean," namely the desirable middle or balancing point between any two polar extremes. For example, Aristotle saw courage as that virtue which was the mean or balancing point between recklessness on the one hand and cowardice on the other.  In these pluralistic times, it is interesting to point out that such a teaching of moral balance is also found in the ancient Chinese teaching of Confucius who lived approximately from 550 to 480 B.C.  He called his teaching "the doctrine of the mean" while Buddhist philosophers spoke of the concept of "The Middle Way" which basically is a summary of the essence of the Nobel Eightfold Path.

One could, of course, argue that much of Jesus Christ's teaching could be boiled down to a similar ethic of balance summarised in "love your neighbour as yourself."  However, let me return here to our Taoist poem which recommends such balance, not alone in the above quoted stanza, but in the whole work we call the Tao Te Ching. Balance essentially is at the very heart of Taoism as is witnessed in its major symbol, that is, the Yin-Yang emblem.

Spanish Chestnut Tree - Dalgan Park, November 2006

Our translator, Stephen Mitchell, who is steeped in his subject, often uses the feminine and masculine pronouns interchangeably as the Tao is both, more indeed, beyond all gender and in that sense is very much transgender, not in a sexual sense, but in a philosophical sense.  If we are creatures or beings of balance we will have no fears at all as we are centered in the Tao and this means that we are "at home" with ourselves always and we never fear going anywhere.  This is the meaning of the opening lines of our first stanza above.  The word "Tao" means the "way," also a word must loved in all spiritual traditions, e.g., Jesus proclaimed himself to be "the way, the truth and the life."  Now the Tao or Jesus or any other spiritual leader very seldom, if ever, promise an easy way or an easy path to our destination.  Indeed they sometimes explicitly, and mostly implicitly, say that the "way" or "path" is the destination. Pain and suffering are parts of the human lot as we all know.  I shan't rehearse here my personal woes as I have outlined and pointed to them at various times in this blog and in others.  Anyway, those personal incidents are only tangentially of importance here.  The Tao will help us keep our balance when the "storms of life" rock our fragile "ship of self."  Again, all spiritualities offer the same advice and the same sustenance basically when everything is boiled down to the essentials.

German Philosopher M. Heidegger

In our present sufferings, we are invited to see beyond the superficial flavours and smells of food to the "real food" or "invisible food" or if you like raise our hearts to a spiritual realm. This is so hard to do, so I cannot do more than repeat what the Taoist poet so well expresses above.  I often feel that those who attend AA or Narcotics Anonymous or Weight Watchers or any of the many other self-help groups are reaching out to a help or a power that is somehow greater than them, some trans-temporal power, some power that at one level can be evoked by the group but yet they can experience it as a power from another dimension reaching down and into them.  This is very hard to explain unless you know the experience of being grasped by something greater than oneself.  On one level, the rationalist in me will explain this by saying it is mere parapsychology, mere emotions and/or spiritual experiences whipped up by the enthusiasm of the group.  On another deeper level, I definitely experience this quite often as a divine or spiritual element from outside me or from outside the group reaching down or reaching in. It helps to call to mind that we are not just computer-like brains that are cortical only. There are many other intelligences - Multiple Intelligences - as Howard Gardner has pointed out. It also heartens me to realise that there is more to life than is dreamt of in my little intelligence.  Furthermore, the sheer wonder of life and both the exhilaration and trials of that same life lead me often to figuratively fall down in awe at its very mystery bringing me back to that wonderfully powerful question posed by the philosopher Heidegger of all thinking beings, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" That is a big metaphysical question that all cultures attempt to answer.  Indeed, one might contend that cultures are indeed humankind's attempts to answer that thorny but crucially important question.

Viktor Frankl, founder of logotherapy

Let me finish with a quotation from the great psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, amazing survivor of Auschwitz, who founded the existentialist therapy called "logotherapy" on the basis of his experiences in that death-camp, that hell of hells:  "Those who have a 'why' to live can bear almost any 'how'." (from Man's Search for Meaning.)  All spiritualities worth their salt are about offering their followers a "why" to go on with the prospect of living.  The Taoist poet is offering us one way or one "why" to keep on going.

Happy New Year, friends.  For a few minutes now, I invite the reader to reflect on what are his/her motives or his/her main "why" in their life journey. This is a small but paradoxically great exercise to do!

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 1

Writing any kind of spiritual diary is a very difficult task as one finds one begins to to exhaust the well pretty quickly as it were, and, indeed, the worst results of that is the dreadful experience of repeating oneself to such an extent that one begins to doubt whether one has really progressed any further along the road to spiritual enlightenment.  That is the way I feel about this spiritual journal in the shape of this particular blog. I have often found, that in such periods of aridity and emptiness it is better to go to another well to slake one's spiritual thirst.  Over the next several posts, I am going to visit Lao Tzu's well by way of commentary on that wonderful spiritual work attributed to his hand, namely the Tao Te Ching. Lao Tzu, according to some sources, was a philosopher and poet and founder of the philosophical school called Taoism and author of the spiritual/mystical book just quoted above, and on which I'll attempt to comment here.  Some scholars say that he lived around the 6th century BCE and was a contemporary of Confucius while others reckon that he existed some time during the Warring States period of the 5th or 4th centuries BCE.  Others still, argue that he was a purely legendary figure and that, like the works of other spiritual traditions, there may have been more than just one person involved in the composition of the Tao Te Ching.  While a little bit of background information is always good for us, there is really no need to know much about the author of this spiritual classic as its riches lie purely in the text and its transformative spiritual power on its meditative reader.  Therefore, let us turn now to a meditation on the text itself.

A depiction of Lao Tzu

For my purposes here, I shall be commenting on the following version of the text: Tao Te Ching: An Illustrated Journey, translated by Stephen Mitchell, London: Francis Lincoln Ltd., 1999.

Poem 1:

The tao that can be told

is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be named

is not the eternal Name.

The unnameable is the eternally real.

Naming is the origin

of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realise the mystery.

Caught in the desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestation

arise from the same source.

This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.

The gateway to all understanding. 

If we think about it, even a little, it is very hard to determine what is actually real. What is the real? What is reality?  These are deep philosophical questions that have been dealt with by great philosophical minds over the long history of philosophy.  From Plato's discussion of this question in his story of The Cave in his book The Republic right down through the centuries, through the works of many philosophers, most especially that of René Descartes on the cusp of the modernist period, right down to the recent film The Matrix (1999) where the character Morpheus raises this question with another character named Neo, the burning issue of what reality actually is has besotted us as human beings and obviously still does. Being a spiritual being, as well as a material one, or being a material-spiritual reality and often being quite troubled as to the interrelationship between both, our journey through life is often painful and not a little interesting, intriguing and wonderful at times in consequence.

Our life journey is a meaning-making one, a project in which we are called upon to create our own selves, our very own identity or indeed, often our own reality.  It is up to each one of us to fashion our own meaningful self from a world of myriads of often mind-blowingly different choices. And that is no easy task.  To say the least, it is a life-long undertaking.

And so, we might do worse than turn to some of the spiritual classics like the Tao Te Ching.  the first stanza quoted above resonates with a Buddhist-like sensibility.  What is real may indeed be somewhat nebulous and intangible, always somewhat beyond us and yet somehow we are attracted by its mysterious magnetic pull.  Somehow, the truth or the tao cannot be caught - it is like the wind, in that regard. It certainly cannot be caught in words.  Anyone who has ever attempted to explain what his heart desires is often stuck for words.  In the Jewish tradition, the name of God is so revered that it cannot be spoken aloud and even today some Jews write G-d or G!d when they have to inscribe or write his sacred name.  This is a way of stating that whatever absolute "meaning," "truth" or "reality" may be, it is always unutterable and ineffable and certainly cannot be captured in words. This, I feel, is the sense of the first two lines in our first stanza above, and indeed that of the entire stanza.

I am also struck by the power of the second stanza which also has resonances with Biblical texts as the capacity to name a thing was always traditionally seen as being very much an act of creativity and creation.  To name is to exercise power and control over others and over things.

The third stanza is very Buddhist in its meaning and is basically the second noble truth of Buddhism, namely that our cravings and desires cause us to transform our pains into deep suffering.  We can so easily get so caught up in our weaker and baser desires whether they be material or emotional or ego-based.  When we free ourselves from our desires and the all-too-easy clinging to the crutches of material or emotional supports, this stanza promises us more than a mere taste of mystery.

The fourth stanza brings us to the much disputed area of the relationship between material things "out there," as it were, "in the world" and our perceptions of those things.  The reader of these words will think of the many philosophers who were concerned with these questions over the past two and a half thousand years - Locke, Hume and Berekeley et al to name several.  Reality exists perhaps somewhere between "the world out there" and my experience or perception of it "in here.".  And yet, all of this is so mysterious and wonderful really as it defies our very thinking powers, and any statement of it seems to fall so far short of what we would wish to express.  However, some wonder is the very heart of spirituality really, is it not.  After all, they used to say that philosophy begins in wonder (Socrates said this, according to Plato in Theaethetus).  Surely, the same may be said of spirituality, that it, too, begins in wonder at the mystery of things as we encounter them.

Like all traditions, the Tao Te Ching suggests that much wisdom begins in darkness, and even in "the darkness within darkness."  Resonances here would be the "dark night of the soul" as found within the Roman Catholic Spiritual tradition of St John of the cross.  A scriptural text that comes to mind here, as I finish these reflections, is that from St Paul that here on earth "we see through a glass darkly."(1 Cor 13:12)

Exercise: Now that you have read the above words from the Tao Te Ching you could do worse than meditating upon them for five minutes or so as a way of centering yourself.

Namaste.

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.