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 41

Thoughts on the Eve of 2014

A very wet Lungomare, Soverato, Jan 2nd 2014

I remember once reading in the works of the great Victorian theologian, scholar and writer, John Henry Newman, that essentially how (not why) we believe was as much a mystery as how we remember.  And indeed, memory is one of those great mysteries in life.

As I write this post here in Isca Marina (Sullo Ionio) on the last day of the year of 2013, bereft of Internet connections as the rain pours down – almost as inexorably as it does in Ireland – I am indeed awash with memories, most of them random, though somewhere my inner Self (whatever or whoever that is) is giving them some structure and form. Being without any instant Internet connection for the week to come means that this post will not see “light of day” on-line until sometime later than this last day of 2013 - more than likely very early in The New Year.

Is memory (which here I am equating with what many of us have come to define as the Self) really all about nothing more than the random connections and interconnections made by all those millions upon millions of neurons through those even more numerous dendrites that randomly spark off one another through this or that neurotransmitter?  Or is the Self more than a biochemical or even a psychochemical mass?  Whatever, the Self may be it always has a sense of being so much more.  Indeed, every human being wants his or her Self to mean more, to be more, than just a “bundle of perceptions” as the great Scottish empiricist and atheist philosopher David Hume had it.  After all, what client or patient comes to a psychotherapist, counsellor, clinical psychologist or psychiatrist with the complaint that they don’t really feel that they are being true to their “real bundle of perceptions,” or that they have not yet found their “real bundle of perceptions”?  We believe deeply that we are more.  Intuitively we grasp that the whole (Self) is always greater than the sum of its parts, greater than a mere “bundle of perceptions.”

And so for this present post I am defining myself as my memories.  At the end of any year we so love to trace what has happened not alone in the world or the country at large, but what the dying year has made of us.  Even, what all our years to date have made of us as we stand on the threshold of yet another year.

An old picture from 1945 or there abouts.  My mother is at the back on left

Memories crowd my neural memory pathways somewhat randomly, but with some little dictation from some centre of control – some area of “self-awareness.”  There I am, a three year old boy sitting on the dirt lane at the back of our house in Roscrea playing with a toy lorry and filling its trailer with lollypop bags of sand.  The old half-blind cat sits on the line pole, a great comforting presence.  The backyard is full of geranium plants.  The sting of the nettles on my legs as I run through the neighbouring fields. The fading sound of the train leaving Roscrea station with my daddy aboard, click, clack, click, clack, ...  Sad feelings.  Missing him again.  The move to Dublin. No electric light. Just candles till the power is restored.

My grandmother laid out in death in a bedroom in the old Crumlin house. I was ten. So still. Beyond us. Then and now. Only old faded photos remain. Uncle Pat’s funeral in 1970 when I am twelve.  The sound of leather shoes crushing the gravel as we followed the coffin up to its final resting place. The sound of clay falling on the wooden lid. Prayers intoned.  Men in gray coats condoling with my father. My mother comforting him in Granny Saunders’ garden when he cried. I buy ice cream for the same old woman – the oldest woman I have ever known as a young boy.  How I think she might expire at any second.  That horrible big yellow blister on her leg when she spilled boiling water on it. The time she told us that once as she dozed at the fire a mouse had run up here leg.  How we laughed.

The old Christian Brother who takes us for catechism and who tells us stories both to frighten and uplift us, though more of the former.  The smell of chalk dust mixed with stale urine, the steam that rises from wet coats as they lie draped over radiators on a rainy day.  The ice that covers the school yard making it a skating rink.  How we skate free on it before the bell tolls for class and lessons.  The young boy whose name I forget who is knocked clean from his bike to dusty death at only ten years of age.  The black hands of the old wind-up clock with Roman numerals that counts out our education in loud tick tocks.  The old brother winds it up every other day.

And there are so many other memories vying for attention with that self-aware centre of control that they could overpower, swamp and almost smother it at once, if all the controls were off.  Maybe this is the place to stop this wet last day of the dying year that is 2013.  Maybe too many memories have been summoned up.  Some centre of my inner Self has summoned them up, given them life, and shape and pattern.

Indeed how true is the opening statement I quoted from the venerable Cardinal John Henry Newman.  How we believe is as much as mystery as how we remember.  Perhaps a greater mystery is what we remember and how we choose to construct those memories, what shape and pattern, what form we may wish to give them.  That is the mystery of the Self, the centre of our identity which is an on-going construction, ever a work in progress.