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 80

Poem 80

If a country is governed wisely,

its inhabitants will be content.

They enjoy the labor of their hands

and don't waste time inventing

labor-saving machines.

Since they dearly love their homes,

they aren't interested in travel.

There may be a few wagons and boats,

but these don't go anywhere.

There may be an arsenal of weapons,

but nobody ever uses them.

People enjoy their food,

take pleasure in being with their families,

spend weekends working in their gardens,

delight in the doings of the neighborhood.

And even though the next country is so close

that people can hear its roosters crowing and its dogs barking,

they are content to die of old age

without ever having gone to see it.

Commentary

This poem is certainly one we moderns would not understand as we live in a global village where the whole world has become our home. We can travel anywhere, now that air travel has become relatively cheap and within almost everyone's capacity.  Very few of us in the Western world do not go abroad for holidays or business or whatever.  Indeed, should we not wish to travel somewhere physically we can even journey there virtually by way of cinema or the Internet, both of which can bring us anywhere we wish imaginatively.  And the imagination and reality are next-door neighbours in a sense. 

As a man of 58 years who was born in a small rural Irish town in 1958 and who experienced at least for a few years pre-television era in that country setting, I would have an inkling of what the poet in the above poem is getting at.  I well remember a young friend's parents having bought their first tv set as RTE, the Irish public broadcaster began life on the 31st of December 1961.  They must have bought it soon enough thereafter, so I would have been about 4 years of age at the time. The TV ushered in the New Ireland, as from then on the global visited in a virtual and imaginative sense the sitting rooms of all the homes in Ireland. Therefore, I can slightly understand the above poem.  Now, we must remember that the Tao Te Ching was written roughly around the sixth century BCE in a very rural and primitive setting so the values of a small community would have been the prevailing ones: working in the fields, ploughing, planting seeds, watering the crops, going to the market, harvesting, participating in  the local gatherings, chatting and conversing.  Everything would have revolved around the extended family or clan, and then around the local tribe or community. The home and the community and the values asssociated with both would have been the origins of the only values known to anyone.  Therefore, it is against this background that we have to understand the above poem.

The above poem presents us with the ideal, indeed with the idyll.  It is purely romantic and is filled with Utopian sentiments.  No such place on earth could possible exist.  However, when we remember that it is a poem, that it was written so long ago and that as a poem it should not be taken literally. Bearing all this is mind, we may then read it and meditate upon it and see what wisdom we might learn from it.

One lesson is that of valuing our lives, valuing our experiences of life in the now, valuing simply being.  We are all so busy rushing to succeed, make more money, get a better job, travel to more countries, gain more wealth, acquire X, Y or Z new item that we often forget that it is the simple things in life that really make us happy like those mentioned in the poem: (i) enjoying our workaday life, (ii) getting in touch with nature, (iii) gardening, (iv) building up and enjoying our homes, (v) enjoying simple but good meals with our families and friends, (vi) supporting all the events that take place in the community, and (vii) happily growing old listening to the sounds of what naturally occurs in nature.

These are obviously extremely romantic and Utopian ideas, but the poem hints that we may experience an intimation of that blessed state by being more mindful and attuned to living in the now.

Namaste, friends. 

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 74

Poem 74

If you realize that all things change,

there is nothing you will try to hold on to.

If you aren't afraid of dying,

there is nothing you can't achieve.

Trying to control the future

is like trying to take the master carpenter's place.

When you handle the master carpenter's tools,

chances are that you'll cut your hand.

Commentary

ST Augustine defined time as the measure of change.  John Henry Cardinal Newman stated that to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.  Change is of the very essence of things.  This is a very old philosophy dating back to the sixth century B.C., the time of Heraclitus at least.  So it isn't hard to believe that the Tao Te Ching from the fourth century B.C. should preach something similar. 

Indeed, there is nothing we can really hold onto in the world, even though the lessons of our ego is such: that we can hold on to things.  Not alone does our ego insist on holding onto things, it also insists on getting more and more things, on expanding the human grasp on things.  Nations do the same as the historical rise of nationalism and two world wars have taught us.  Yet, we still haven't learnt the lessons of history.  Every generation has to learn its lessons the hard way, it would appear.  When I was growing up my father used to quote an old proverb: "There are no pockets in a shroud" or sometimes he used to put it even simpler still, "You cannot take it with you."  We spend a lifetime building up ourselves (i) getting a good education, (ii) being successful at our jobs or professions, (iii) reading a family, (iv) stocking our brains/minds with the highest of cultural acquisitions and yet all these things in the end will fade from our grasp.  All religions and all spiritualities worth their salt teach this wisdom.  Yet, it should not be used to frighten us from living.  It should be used like the Buddhists do, learn to live life all the fully, with deeper values.  They do this through meditating on how transient are the things of this world and by realising deep within that everything changes and we change too within those changes.  When I was a student of the Latin language our teacher used to quote Ovid who declared:  "Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis."  It translates: "The times change and we change with them."  We cannot even bring all our learning, all our well-stocked minds with us either.  We simply disappear when we die.  Perhaps we may linger in the memories of those who love us, those who are still left alive after us.

The lesson to us from these few stanzas are to learn to be humble, to declare our ignorance, to say "no" to the blandishments of the ego and to value the dignity of life by living in the present.  That is why the writer advises us not to attempt to control the future.  Such is as foolish as trying to catch the wind or like trying to be a master carpenter with none of the skills.  It would seem that our egos lead us often into false expectations and we simply "cut our hands" with the carpenter's tools.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 64

Poem 64

What is rooted is easy to nourish.

What is recent is easy to correct.

What is brittle is easy to break.

What is small is easy to scatter.

Prevent trouble before it arises.

Put things in order before they exist.

The giant pine tree

grows from a tiny sprout.

The journey of a thousand miles

starts from beneath your feet.

Rushing into action, you fail.

Trying to grasp things, you lose them.

Forcing a project to completion,

you ruin what was almost ripe.

Therefore the Master takes action

by letting things take their course.

He remains as calm

at the end as at the beginning.

He has nothing,

thus has nothing to lose.

What he desires is non-desire;

what he learns is to unlearn.

He simply reminds people

of who they have always been.

He cares about nothing but the Tao.

Thus he can care for all things.

Commentary

Modern building, Milan, Easter, 2016

At the risk of boring the reader let me repeat what I have said here in this sequence of posts many times.  One concept I have underlined before is that of the psychological concept of flow as proposed by the Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csikszentmihályi.  Flow is a central concept in positive psychology, and it is also known as the zone.  Children can far more readily enter this zone than we adults because they are closer to their hearts and to their intuition that we adults are.  We adults are far more likely to be locked in the world of logic and intellect.  Flow or the zone is the mental state or that state of being where the person doing some action or activity is fully immersed in his/her experience of the moment, and is fully energized and well focused on the task at hand.  Flow is characterized by complete absorption in what is being experienced.  

In a sense, what the above amounts to is an appreciation for the quality of living and being in the now of experience, of going with the natural flow of life, by doing everything that is not using and abusing energy by pushing against its natural flow.  It is in this sense that we read our first stanza above:

What is rooted is easy to nourish.

What is recent is easy to correct.

What is brittle is easy to break.

What is small is easy to scatter.

Milan Cathedral, Easter 2016

The second stanza is about very much being prepared and proactive, of planning out things in a natural way, consistent with the flow of life, of living and of being.  In this stanza we read the  often quoted line that "the journey of a thousand miles" begins with our taking the first step now. 

Stanza three makes for good sound wisdom.  Forcing an item into a space it will not naturally fit into will distort or break the item.  Pushing one another in a queue for a bus or train will certainly not improve matters - indeed, it will most likely slow the loading of the bus down and actually delay the departure time, and perhaps even result in injury to some one.  Rushing into things never helps, while doing things mindfully certainly will. 

When we meet spiritually advanced people, no matter what their overt religious or even non-religious affiliation, the striking characteristic we notice is that of equanimity, calmness, peace of mind and a sense of deep attention to living in the now.  We are singularly blessed when we meet these beacons of hope and peace in our lives.

Let us read the above poem reflectively and mindfully once again and let any line or phrase offer itself to us by way of a short meditation to begin our day with the goal of being present to all whom we meet and most essentially to our own self.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 56

Poem 56

Those who know don't talk.
Those who talk don't know.

Close your mouth,

block off your senses,

blunt your sharpness,

untie your knots,

soften your glare,

settle your dust.

This is the primal identity.

Be like the Tao.

It can't be approached or withdrawn from,

benefited or harmed,

honored or brought into disgrace.

It gives itself up continually.

That is why it endures.

Commentary

Picture of myself some years back

The line that jumps out at this commentator as he reflectively reads the above poem is the one which runs: "This is the primal identity."  What a wonderfully loaded line.  Using the literal meaning of the word "primal" we could substitute into one meaning of the word the following synonyms for it in this statement, namely "original," "first," "initial" or "early."  A second meaning given for "primal" renders the following synonyms: "basic," "fundamental," "essential," "vital" and "central." Therefore, other meaningful ways of stating our Taoist assertion would be: "This is the real identity," or "This is the true identity" or "This is the essence of identity" or "This is the vital identity."  From the moment of first consciousness we are meaning seekers and meaning makers, and certainly the older we get the more strongly we pursue our rather elusive identity.  It would seem that for us moderns that the search for meaning and the search indeed for ultimate meaning is what often keeps us going in life. The question of personal identity looms large for all of us.  "Who am I?" is a question to which we all seek an answer and one to which we do give an answer insofar as we manage to live any kind of meaningful lives. 

My shadow on Donabate Beach

In the philosophy and practice of psychotherapy, and indeed in that of psychiatry, the question of personal identity is essentially very central.  Listening to the client is an empathetic and affirming way is one sure way of helping him or her to greater self-awareness and greater self-acceptance.  And yet, it is surely a huge question as to what the nature of personal identity is in the first place.  One of the founders of humanistic school of psychotherapy, namely Carl Ransom Rogers stated that the goal of all therapy was the actualization of the Real Self, and this is a very good modern equivalent of what our Taoist poet is getting at in the above poem when he mentions "primal identity."  The task of all meditation practices, and indeed what more secular psychologists and psychotherapists refer to as the practice of mindfulness is in a strong sense one and the same.  They both seek to establish a strong sense of the Real Self or of a real sense of living in the Now of existence. Therefore, the turn to the East - and by this I mean both the actual journeys made by many psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, creative writers and musicians and many religious scholars to India and Tibet, as well as the written accounts of their experiences and newly gained knowledge and so on - in the middle of the twentieth century should not surprise us at all.  So many Westerners of note began living in ashrams and studying and meditating under various gurus and masters.  From this there emerged a wonderful blossoming of esoteric scholarship that flowed into the New Age Movement that in turn spawned an almost universal interest in Self-Development, Pop Psychology and Self-Help.  Therefore, mindfulness is merely a secularized account of the meditation practices used in the various religious denominations of Hinduism and Buddhism.

The author as a young lad aged 7.  Is this actually the me I am now?

The second phrase that jumps off the page at this commentator is "settle your dust."  How many times have we heard the old wise saying that we must let the dust settle on this, that or the other problem?  We have other similar phrases like: "Let's let sleeping dogs lie for a while" or "Let's sleep on this problem for a while" or "Don't make important decisions when you are upset in any way!" or "Choose your battles carefully!"  These phrases or sayings are all getting at the same wise advice, namely not to be reactor to this or that situation.  The easiest thing for anyone to do is to "shoot from the hip" as another phrase puts it.  Still another saying offers this piece of wisdom: "Act in haste, repent at leisure!" Meditation is all about slowing down and taking our time, of getting centered in the "Now" of being, of achieving a point of equanimity we may call the Still Point of life, of stilling the body, of becoming aware of what it's really like to inhabit or to live in this body, or even more correctly still, what it's like to be this body here in the now of existence.  I have always loved the statement, also a very wise one, that our minds tend to either live in the past (regrets and remorse and sad memories and so on) or in the future (expectations, ambitions, anxieties and/or fears and so on) while our bodies most definitely live in the present.  That, indeed, is why all meditation or mindfulness practices begin with stilling the body, of becoming aware of the body at first, then becoming aware of our feelings and just letting them go, then becoming aware of our thoughts and letting them so and so on and on, and deeper and deeper into the stillness of the "Real Self" or what our Taoist poet calls the "Primal Self."

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 45

Poem 45

True perfection seems imperfect,

yet it is perfectly itself.

True fullness seems empty,

yet it is fully present.

True straightness seems crooked.

True wisdom seems foolish.

True art seems artless.

The Master allows things to happen.

She shapes events as they come.

She steps out of the way

and lets the Tao speak for itself.

Commentary

Howth Harbour, 2003

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 44

Poem 44

Fame or integrity: which is more important?

Money or happiness: which is more valuable?

Success of failure: which is more destructive?

If you look to others for fulfillment,

you will never truly be fulfilled.

If your happiness depends on money,

you will never be happy with yourself.

Be content with what you have;

rejoice in the way things are.

When you realize there is nothing lacking,

the whole world belongs to you.

Commentary

Flowers on window sill, Hotel, Rome, Easter 2007

The famous American Nobel Laureate for Physics, Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988) once said that he would prefer to live with unanswered questions than with unquestioned answers. Long ago when I entered college as a young man of eighteen, I remember the then Director of Studies, Rev Dr Patrick Wallace telling us that we would more than likely leave the college with more questions than answers.  While we might not have deep and meaningful or clear answers we would, he insisted, have really good mature questions to ask of ourselves and of the world. There is a lot of wisdom then in both these pieces of advice.  There simply are no easy answers to life's big questions.  In like manner, the questions that are asked in the above Taoist poem are asked in the spirit in which the advice of both scholars was offered us in our opening remarks.

In a deep, spiritual or religious sense, then, the opening questions in our poem are rhetorical as they assume the answers are obvious.  Perhaps, like a lot of poems, the final lines really clinch the argument which the poet is attempting to hammer home.  Let's repeat them here for effect:

When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you.

Footprints of a dog, Donabate Strand, Feb., 2008

These lines appeal to me more than any of the others in the poem as they plumb the depths of spirituality.  The further we travel along the way of life, the more we realise that life is more about the journey than the destination and that happiness is not the destination, that it is, in fact, the way.  Moreover, the further we journey along the road of life, the more we realise also that everything is linked, that we are all connected, that union, unity, compassion and peace are all interwoven and interconnected; that the present moment is all we have got; that living in the past is to be avoided because it is almost always either filled with regrets or painful memories; that living in the future is almost always filled with anxiety or fear; that if we learn just simply to be in the moment that we begin to realise that "there is nothing lacking and that the whole world belongs to us."

Journal of a Soul 76

Summer Retreat

La Basilica di San Pietro, Roma, giugno, 2015

It is hard to say something new. That is surely the greatest problem facing anyone who wishes to write something. With regard to spiritual/meaning matters I feel this is especially true. Travelling on one's own I feel is a form of pilgrimage as one is journeying inwards as well as outwards as it were; the spiritual journey mirrors the outer physical one.  One thing I like about such travelling is that one ends up talking to people out of necessity simply because of the desire to hear one's own voice again as well as the natural desire to reach out and communicate with others.  Sitting on some steps in Piazza San Pietro, Rome, just three days ago, a young Australian lad struck up conversation with me, opining that it was "very peaceful here." Our conversation spanned from Irish to Australian cultural similarities and differences, and why so many young Irish people wished to take a year out and backpack "down-under."  He shook my hand as I departed: the desire to acknowledge another human being who had the courtesy to listen. 

And yet the existential trials of life walk with us as we make our pilgrimage.  Indeed, we mostly repress those existential trials in order to survive.  But there is a further "and yet" that needs to be acknowledged.  That "and yet" is that the existential trials of life, and most especially death and dying are the greatest repression of modernity, as the great contemporary existential psychotherapist and psychiatrist Irvin Yalom has so perspicaciously and wisely pointed out.  Let me illustrate for the briefest moment.  If you are Irish or Irish-American you will be well aware of the tragic deaths of those young 21 year old J1 students from Ireland who died when a balcony collapsed recently in Berkeley California and the number of others seriously injured, especially those who suffered life-changing injuries.  The trials of these last mentioned are only beginning.  Or to put it in more poetic words: their pilgrimage truly begins now.

As I write, I have just read that another mad gunman - appropriately dressed in black - has gunned down countless tourists on a beach in Tunisia, among whom one Irish mother was murdered.  The mind boggles. Moral evil raises its ugly head all too often.  Indeed, let us add another "and yet" here: if none of us risked anything in life humanity would amount to very little.  Life is about risk.  Without risk it is hard to envisage any life worth living at all.  How true that old proverb is: "Nothing ventured, nothing gained!"  If you don't go a J1 visa to USA you miss out on a lot.  I had not got that opportunity due to family circumstances and financial constraints at the time.  It is a super opportunity for personal growth.

Life is fickle and chance-bound.  I remember when I first started in my present school some 27 years ago that as I descended the bus at a stop near the school that a motor cyclist nearly mowed me down; that as a young four year old boy I was nearly killed by a lorry from the local bacon factory - I can still hear the screech of brakes and so on.  Recall here your own near misses.  We have all had near misses - some nearer than others.  And yet, if we had not had the courage to venture forth, we simply would not be the people we are today, in this moment of time.  That is what life is about - the courage to take risk or as the existentialists put it the COURAGE TO DARE.

There are other thoughts and feelings that throng my conscious mind, and yet like a meditator of some thirty years or more, I know that I must learn to still those thoughts and feelings, to just let them come and go as the waves of the sea, and then attempt to let them slide from consciousness and dwell in pure awareness.  No easy task, that, I assure you.  And yet, I believe that is the goal of life.  Recently I was at a conference and a Ph.D, candidate, dedicated teacher, committed family man with wife and family and a former student of mine (who had lost both his parents when he was all too young) asked that old chestnut of a question: "What's it all about, anyway, Tim?  I was brought back thirty years to Ger Smith, a teacher colleague who had asked me the same question.  It was only a couple of years later that I had learnt that Ger had died of a congenital heart disease to which there was no cure. I was not then to know that man's inner tormenting question in its fullness.  Today I understand it better having been through my own personal wringer of which I have written about widely in these pages, so there is no need to repeat the obvious.

And so as we journey we carry all the above questions in our backpack, and that is no harm at all.  Indeed, it is a gift.  Meditating on death and dying, chance and mischance, accidents and life-altering occurrences are all part of the deal.  Risk is simply part of the deal with life and let us not forget that.  In short, what are these pages, these writings, these reflections teaching me?  Well, they are teaching me to DARE TO BE, to keep right on, or as one of my favourite singer-songwriters puts it, "to keep on keeping on."  Those words as no doubt you will know are sung by the infamous Bob Dylan. That's what it's all about: to keep right on till the end of the road.  Once, when my mother had fallen in her early eighties and had crawled to the wall for support. she marvelled out loud to me when I had picked her up: "I wonder is it coming near the end, Tim?"  I asked her how she was and she said: "I'm fine. I slipped after dressing myself and couldn't get up, but as I knew you'd drop by at lunch time I'd only have to wait four or five hours here!" She died at 96 in a nursing home.  Her whole motto was simple: "Keep going!" Or as the great poet Robert Frost once remarked rather succinctly, when asked what life was all about: "It goes on!" The same wisdom as that of most of humanity. All spiritualities teach us to live in the "now," to have no regrets about the past or fears for the future, but simply to appreciate the now.  Dear reader, let us learn to Dare To Be, To Dare to Risk or to Dare to Live!!  Aude Vivere!!

Journal of a Soul 74

Nothing New Under the Sun

The Kerry Cliffs, February 2015

In Ecclesiastes 1:9, the writer tells us in succinct words: "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." (NIV).  I often ponder these words whenever I might possibly think that I may have come up with a startlingly new insight into anything.  Indeed, I suppose, one of the few people for whom the thought is new is indeed I, the thinker of the thought. Often, I struggle to come up with something new for this particular blog because it is the most personal of any of the blogs I author or contribute to.  "How far have I progressed in self-knowledge?" has always been a constant question in my life since I was a young man.  Many years ago as a young novice I was a student in religious life for three years and for the duration of that time I would have attended a spiritual director/counsellor on a regular basis.  Hence, that question was to become and to remain an important one by which I measure my existence on this planet.  

At an an in-service programme I attended as a new Resource/Special Education teacher I remember the instructor telling us that many autistic children make progress in millimeters. I loved her analogy, and I suppose, in answer to my above question of myself, I could respond in like manner.  Along with the spiritual classics and the scriptures, I have always found reading every and any poem I can get my hands on thoroughly rewarding.  Poems in general contain a distilled wisdom in shape and sound that resonate in my heart.  Readers of this blog will know that I have a particular liking for the poems of T.S. Eliot and that I am wont to quote him often.  Once when accused of repeating himself a tad too often in his poetry, he replied in some such words as: "Ah, but I always said it in a new way each time." In other words, by implication, we can look at a problem or indeed the mystery of life itself from many different angles, from many different perspectives.

Nothingness and Emptiness

Portrane, February 2015

In The Myth of Sisyphus, that basic seminal text of absurdism, Albert Camus tells us that the thought about the sheer absurdity of life can strike us at any time and may occur as simply as when we might enter or exit a building through a revolving door.  Heidegger and the other philosophers of that amorphous and rather untidy group of writers/thinkers called existentialists stress that philosophy begins in this very experience of the nothingness and emptiness of life.  Now and again I hear friends and acquaintances ask the rather  common but exasperatingly desperate question of life, viz., "What's it all about, anyway?"  Richard Kearney reminds us that "through the experience of nothing, something emerges as important." (Life Lessons, ed. Rita de Brún, Dublin: New Island, 2014, p. 252)

Again, I was always taken by the question that Heidegger argued was the most important one that anyone could ever ask in philosophy since I first heard it, viz., "Why is there something rather than nothing?"  I first heard that question when it was addressed to us by Fr Patrick Carmody, our wonderful philosophy lecturer, way back in the 1970s.  Indeed, it is a question well worth pondering and indeed meditating on as a mantra in prayer.  Further, if you do so, as I have done from time to time, you will then understand what Wittgenstein meant when he declared "(T)hat this world is; that is the mystical."

The Power of Wonder

Cemetery, Portrane, Summer 2013

In other words, a sense of the mystical is experienced in our being driven to wondering what life is all about in the first place.  No wonder Socrates opined that "philosophy begins in wonder." [Plato puts those words in the mouth of Socrates in the Theaetetus 155 d (tr. Benjamin Jowett)] Or again, I am often reminded of an old Peanuts cartoon by Charles Schultz from my college years which featured Snoopy the dog and had the following caption underneath it: "Sometimes I sits and I thinks. Sometimes I just sits." (The dog in the said cartoon happened to be sitting on either a potty or a toilet bowl, I cannot remember which at this distance in time.)  These moments of wonder or even bewilderment - often expressed through tears, laughter, screams of joy, mania or even pain - represent the beginning of the philosophical quest.  We are figuratively thrown outside ourselves, or made to sit or stand "beside" ourselves and in doing so we put ourselves, others and everything in our world into question.  This is what the theologian Karl Rahner means when he says that "man is himself the question."  It is further most interesting to note that this brilliant theologian was long a philosophical disciple of the equally brilliant philosopher Heidegger who said that the human being is the only creature whose being is an issue for it.  

The Elusive Now

As far back as the early 1700s the Jesuit priest (and mystic in my opinion) Jean Pierre de Caussade S.J. (1675 – 1751) was encouraging those in his spiritual care to live in the present moment or in the "now" of experience. He was telling them that the present moment is a sacrament from God and that self-abandonment to it and its needs is a holy state.  And we think that Eckhart Tolle's teaching is new!   Indeed, many spiritual scholars have found Caussade's writings very similar to those of both Mahayana and Zen Buddhism. Again, our minds are rarely in the now because many of us may neurotically live in the past - regretting this, that or the other action or occurrence - or in the future - desiring or indeed fearing this, that or the other state or this, that or the other material thing.  Bringing the mind into the immediacy of the now of present experience is no easy task.  At a recent mindfulness retreat, the director reminded us that our bodies were always in the "now" and that this is why when we meditate we first return to mindfulness of our bodies, most especially to our breath, as a way of stilling the mind.  Meditation brings us back from that "standing beside ourselves" or outside ourselves that we have said is the beginning of philosophy.  Richard Kearney opines that "(i)n many respects, prayer, yoga, being one with nature, alcohol and food can be different ways of responding to the gap, of bringing us back to a certain kind of presence." (Op. cit., pp. 254 - 255)

Now, quite obviously the animal does not exist (from the Latin "ex-istere" which means "to stand out or apart from") in the same way as we humans do.  They can never stand out or apart from themselves a s we do.  Indeed, inanimate objects can certainly never exist in such a fashion at all.  Kearney again reminds us that for these reasons we are most likely ".... to relax with animals: they calm us and bring us back to earth, to basics and peace and quiet. Think of a purring cat or a sleeping dog." (Op.cit., p. 255)

From Esoteric Dreams to Concrete and Dirt

It is good to get stopped in our tracks, held up, brought to our knees, even onto all fours from time to time.  Some six weeks back I was walking all too quickly and blithely across our school yard lost in reverie, and indeed lost to the world.  As my late mother would have put it, I was "away with the fairies."  Then suddenly, crash, bang and wallop.  I had run into a huge garden planter that has been in the school yard for many years.  I cut both knees and both shins in my collision.  As I was doctoring myself with some medications from the  First Aid Kit some moments later I began to laugh at how ridiculous this whole existence is; how stupidly serious we actually take ourselves in our nothingness and emptiness and how desperately and sillily we want to fill that emptiness with our pipe dreams. Meditating some hour or two later, I realized that my collision with the garden planter was serendipitous as it was calling me back to an awareness of my body, or re-calling me to the now-ness and immediacy of the present, to be really and truly present to myself in the here and now.  This is essentially what all meditation, what all mysticism is about.  Further, some clay spilled out of the planter and it reminded me that as the Bible said we were made of such and to such we would return.  It also reacquainted me with the fundamental meaning of being "human" which is etymologically linked with the Latin word "humus" which simply means clay or earth.  

Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does the planter exist in the first place? Why do I exist?  These are questions we will never get a final answer to, but that is not what life is about at all, is it, dear reader?  It's the wonder and mystery of all those questions that keeps us going; that pushes us on to ever new horizons; that inspires us to strike out for the next hill or valley, to set off to foreign lands, to explore the mysteries of space and to wonder at our own littleness and brittleness against such vastness.  We were made to wonder.  We were created to be philosophical and spiritual beings.  May we never stop wondering and may we never stop asking those big questions of ourselves.  

Journal of a Soul 66

The Futility of Obsessional Searching

Galicia, Spain, not far from Allariz

Having observed at close quarters an ASD pupil who suffered from severe OCD was a great lesson for me in my life's journey.  Having encountered others since who have relatives with this mental ailment further convinces me of how disabling any form of obsession can be to us as individuals. Prior to this I was well used to encountering people and students with hosts of other problems from depression to schizophrenia, from anxiety to panic attacks and so on, and I knew how these were very crippling - indeed I have written many times in these pages and others about my own diagnosis of clinical or endogenous depression at the age of forty.  But the obsessional lesson, if I may be so bold as to call it that, was particularly enlightening.  At this juncture in my life as a 56 year old Special Needs Teacher, with a background in philosophy, theology and counselling as well as in the usual more academic subjects - Mathematics and Languages - I have been searching for the truth of who I am for longer than I care to remember. Every time I look back over my progress over this earthly pilgrimage I constantly observe that it was often during those periods when my search was most intense that the "answers" or at least the consolations were always surprisingly few, and that it was the times when I was not pushing myself so hard and so obsessively for answers that the so-called "answers" and consolations were surprisingly more.  As a writer I often find that this is also the case with inspiration - the muses come to us when they wish, in their own time as it were, and often don't come when we are obsessively searching for them.

Stream of Consciousness:

All too infrequently I do a written exercise in stream of consciousness composition where I just let the words roll onto the page without either censoring them or using any form of punctuation.  Punctuation would obviously be a way of hindering the flow as it would  be an obvious shaping or ordering of the words.  Those of my readers who are into literature will know that our great and wonderful Irish author James Joyce was a master of this technique. I was taught it several times over the years at various creative writing classes I attended. However, to cut to the chase here, let me add a brief extract from my most recent stream of consciousness exercise:

some flowers will appear like lotuses from the muck and gunk and bilge and all that slime and all that slime and somewhere deep within it there will be something fine formed like a poem coming to birth coming to a shape forming forming from all those Freudian depths from that cesspit from which rises the Self like some exotic phoenix (see Stream )

It would seem that everything is grist to the mill for a writer or shaper of words, indeed for any artist at all.  Furthermore, everyone is an artist in the sense that they are the shapers of their own lives, of their own Self. We have to learn to be unobsessive shapers of our lives, that is, we definitely have to learn to mould and shape our lives but we have to learn to do so in an unobsessive manner, that is, not in an obsessive manner that could certainly cripple us in our pursuit of real happiness.  That's the sense behind the quotation above from my recent stream of consciousness, that the Self does rise like an exotic phoenix if only we would learn "to go with the flow" of life and learn to tap into its overall energy.  Shaping our lives means going with the flow, pushing with the energy of life, not pushing against it. We certainly have to work and shape, mould and form our lives, often with the sweat of our brow, but always by going with the flow of the energy around us.  Obviously, this is never ever a sense of aimless drift - the exact opposite to what I am talking about here. Going with the flow is never the easy way out. It requires a level of honest effort, too.

Going with the Flow

Here I wish to say a little about the contemporary psychologist and psychotherapist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.  He discovered that we find genuine satisfaction during a state of consciousness that he called simply "Flow". In this state we are completely absorbed in an activity, especially an activity that involves our creative abilities. During this “optimal experience” we feel “strong, alert, in effortless control, unselfconscious, and at the peak of their abilities.”  Here, in the footsteps of Abraham Maslow, Csikszentmihalyi insists that happiness does not simply happen. It must be prepared for and cultivated by each person, by setting challenges that are neither too demanding nor too simple for ones abilities. The Pursuit of Happiness (see Here) website gives as an example of flow an advanced skier's conquering of a difficult slope.  We might add any other skill we have learnt, even typing these few words on my laptop.  We have to put in the effort obviously, and then allow ourselves to tap into the energy that's out there to enliven us.  Of course, going with the flow can involve all the simpler exercises like good conversation, listening, encouraging, helping, being compassionate, joining in the fun, playing a game and so on.  However, the major point here is that it is never a lazy drift that will lead nowhere.

Cziksentmihalyi defines flow as “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” (Cskikszentmihalyi, 1990, p.4)

Allariz, Galicia, Spain

Again, I have experienced this state at work, most especially when I am involved in helping others cope with life; especially more recently where I have been called on to listen to the upset of a seventeen year old at his brother's hospitalization or of another's experience of depression. A more powerful experience of flow that I participated in (and I use these words deliberately as I felt that there was another power literally flowing through me) was that of visiting with a family who had been recently bereaved by a suicide of a young man of twenty - the essential topic of my last post here. My experience of being part of a flow of energy, of a higher power even, that I was somehow directing rather like a conductor of an orchestra was and is surely inspiring.  As I sat with that young man's friends and his family I knew I had to be there, felt drawn there, knew what I was about, could use all my organizing skills to their best to celebrate that young man's short life, to help support family and friends in their almost unspeakable grief.  Going with the flow is very empowering.  It does take courage but once you start the flow itself energizes you.

It would seem to me at this stage in my life's journey that (i) learning to search for meaning without obsession is a healthy thing to do.  Such a searching is something akin to, though not the same as, John Keat's famous concept of "negative capability" that he defined in his Letters as: that state of mind "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" (See Here) (ii) that being open to lessons from our own unconscious through dreams, visualizations, meditation exercises, yoga, singing, writing or art of all kinds  and (iii) going with flow are all valuable skills to learn so that we can begin to navigate the Ship of Self through the choppy seas of life if I may be permitted to use a somewhat extravagant though useful metaphor here.  One, of course, can use other descriptors for these suggested skills like soul, spirituality, Higher Power, Inspiration, God, Holy Spirit, Mysticism, Living in the "Now," and so on.  In the end, the language is a surface matter.  What really is important is the real-life experience of the energy of Flow.