Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 28

Poem 28

Know the male,

yet keep to the female:

receive the world in your arms.

If you receive the world,

the Tao will never leave you

and you will be like a little child.

Know the white,

yet keep to the black:

be a pattern for the world.

If you are a pattern for the world,

the Tao will be strong inside you

and there will be nothing you can't do.

Know the personal,

yet keep to the impersonal:

accept the world as it is.

If you accept the world,

the Tao will be luminous inside you

and you will return to your primal self.

The world is formed from the void,

like utensils from a block of wood.

The Master knows the utensils,

yet keeps to the the block:

thus she can use all things.

Commentary

Old, partially rotted wood, Newbridge House, North County Dublin

Once again we find the Taoist balance of opposites most apparent in this short poem. Modern popular psychology and psychotherapy speak about men needing to integrate their feminine side and about women needing to integrate their masculine side.  The late great Professor Carl Gustav Jung would have certainly popularised that idea.  There is indeed much sound argument to support the fact that males and females contain a "seed" of the opposite sex to speak metaphorically.  In the human psyche the Mother archetype looms large, is almost all encompassing.  We speak of Mother Earth, the Motherland and call almost everything we hold dear by the feminine pronoun.  "She's a lovely little boat/car/bicycle or whatever..." I read somewhere that Jung made much of the fact that Nazi Germany spoke of the Fatherland and that this archetype was the main common psychological preoccupation of that fascist regime.  There is possible more than a grain of truth in that observation.

Our Taoist author advises the pilgrim on his/her journey to self-knowledge "to know the male" yet to "keep to the female."  Perhaps one could do worse than suggesting that here in this poem the male could represent the head (intellect/mind/the rational) whereas the female could represent the heart (feelings/emotions/intuition/the non-rational).  A blend of both is needed.  In other words, the call is to an integration of opposites yet again as a way to the Truth.

Another quality often associated with femininity is that of openness and receptivity - an openness like that of flowers blossoming into the rays of the sun.  In like manner, our poet philosopher is inviting us to be open and receptive to everything in the world, all objects, all animals. indeed to all beings, not just the human ones.

The Réalt na Mara (Star of the Sea) monument on East pier, Howth

Again, the poet uses the images of black and white.  He calls upon us to know the white (the masculinity and the possibility of growth) and yet to keep to the deep mystery of the black (femininity and fertility).  In such a way, we become a pattern for the world.  In being so whole and open - in other words, being so wholly open or so openly whole, we become patterns for the world and will attract all beings to us in our acceptance of them.  All of this means that we have to accept the world largely as it is, because, truly, we can change no one but ourselves.  It is in changing ourselves that we can change the world almost in spite of our best efforts.   In accepting the world, the Tao begins to live inside us.  Now, this is not a call to passivity or to the state of inertia where we do nothing.  It is a call to radically look inside ourselves, change what we can change and accept what we cannot.  From there on we are called to be compassionate to self, others and to the world.  In this way, we change ourselves and, in the course of doing that, change the world for the better.  Again, here we are right in the very heart of enigma and paradox.

By way of conclusion, I invite the reader to read over the above poem slowly and meditatively and to let any line, phrase or word suggest itself as a possible mantra for a five or ten minute slot of meditation.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 27

Poem 27

A good traveler has no fixed plans

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

lead him wherever it wants.

A good scientist has freed himself of concepts

and keeps his mind open to what is.

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

He is ready to use all situations

and doesn't waste anything.

This is called embodying the light.

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

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

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

however intelligent you are.

It is the great secret.

Commentary

Skeleton of a coracle, Dingle Interpretative Centre - 

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

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

Oceanic Tapesty Ionad an Bhlascaoid - Kerry

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

John Bunyan (1628 - 1688)

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 23

Stanza 23

Express yourself completely,
then keep quiet.
Be like the forces of nature:
when it blows, there is only wind;
when it rains, there is only rain;
when the clouds pass, the sun shines through.

If you open yourself to the Tao,
you are at one with the Tao
and you can embody it completely.
If you open yourself to insight,
you are at one with insight
and you can use it completely.
If you open yourself to loss,
you are at one with loss
and you can accept it completely.

Open yourself to the Tao,
then trust your natural responses;
and everything will fall into place.

The good old worker bee,  I took this photograph in 2010

Commentary

The above poem is essentially about the twin skills of openness and listening.  Both these skills lie at the heart of the practice of meditation.  When we sit to meditate we firstly relax our bodies and de-stress it bit by bit.  Then we concentrate on the rhythm of our breath as it oxygenates our body and expels carbon dioxide through our nostrils - that basic process physiologists and biologists call respiration.  In meditation circles we call the attention to our respiratory apparatus simply "the act of returning to or paying close attention to the breath." This simple act is one of sheer receptivity to the breath that keeps our very body alive in this moment in time.  In holistic practices like that of Focusing, invented by Dr. Eugene Gendlin the person engaged in the process focuses on the "felt sense" of some problem,  Essentially focusing like mindfulness uses those skills used for thousands of years by the different masters and practitioners of meditation in the various religious traditions.  

The sand on Donabate Beach, 2013

In focusing one is literally listening to how we hold certain feelings in our bodies.  I would argue that meditators actually do that very naturally anyway.  It is also my contention that mindfulness is secular meditation and that modern authors who peddle their wares in the form of books, CDs and DVDs on mindfulness stole the clothes of the traditional meditators, but that is a story for a different post than this one.

Another major theme in the above poem is that of self-expression.  Such expression can be done in many creative ways: in art of all kinds, in literature, in poems, in music, in dance, in mime and in sculpture and architecture and so on.  Then, once one has expressed how one feels, the author recommends that we learn to keep quiet.  This is good wisdom as we must for sure express all our emotions, especially negative ones as unexpressed feelings will eat and gnaw away at us forever until they are given expression through one medium or another,  However, there is nothing worst than someone who continually repeats the same old moan and never has the courage to do anything about it.  Such is not what our Taoist writer has in mind.  He (or she) sees the expression of feelings as being therapeutic once expressed.  In this way, the person gets whatever is weighing them down or even lifting them up off their minds.

The second stanza sings the praises of openness which it also sees as essentially healing and therapeutic.  Such openness allows us to feel empathy with our inner self, with others and indeed with the source of all life which some of us dare call God.  Interestingly, the poet recommends that we be open both to negative and positive experiences: On the one hand we can be open to the positive experience of insight and by being so open we become one with it.  On the other hand, we can be open to the negative experience of loss and in so doing becoming one with loss.  Such an openness paradoxically helps us accept that loss and learn to live with it from day to day.  In short, such openness allows the human spirit to heal.

The author invites us in essence to open ourselves to the Tao and in so doing we open ourselves to the healing powers of the universe.  The final stanza works like a chorus and is worth repeating as it is really a summary of the whole poem:

Open yourself to the Tao,
then trust your natural responses;
and everything will fall into place.

In conclusion, some word or phrase or line may suggest itself as a matra for meditation or as a thought to inspire a short period of contemplation.  I wish the reader of these few words peace and happiness in the now of experience.  Namaste, friends!

Journal of a Soul 33

General Reflections

Chestnut tree Candles

It is amazing how certain, and indeed dogmatic, some people can be in their position vis-a-vis the world in general and the meaning of life in particular.  This happens when some of these people reduce their method of approach to life to a narrow scientific one, or one properly called "scientism" which allows of no other avenue of approach to life except that of the natural sciences.   On the other hand, as a philosopher, I must allow that there are equally certain and dogmatic believers who see the world through the narrow lens of their own religious optic and allow science very little look in.  In other words, narrow-mindedness is a quality that can be shared by people of all hues of belief and unbelief. 

I was not at all surprised, then, by a recent interview between Pat Kenny and the illustrious evolutionary biologist, ethologist and polemical atheist Richard Dawkins (born 1941), that he has a very narrow "scientistic" outlook.  You can access this interview, which took place on Newstalk Radio, 106-108 FM on 12 September 2013, HERE. I will attempt hereunder to transcribe just a very short piece of that interview:

PK: "... with something as small as viruses we can see Natural Selection and evolution at work... as they adapt to protect themselves in the face of threats. But, then, you go back to the whole idea of who designed the system... who designed the rules of nature, if you like, everything from gravity to quantum physics...?"

RD: "The point about... eh...  The basic principle from which we started is that they are very simple and don't, therefore, need a designer.  You only need a designer if you have something very complicated, and you can't explain how it became complicated.  If you've got a good explanation of how it became complicated, having started out simple, then that is the explanation you seek.  To say that it was designed is to re-import something complicated right at the start which entirely defeats the object of explanation."

It is apparent that both Dawkins here and Hawking elsewhere (most notably in the book he co-wrote with the physicist Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design, Bantam) have a very narrow idea as to what philosophy is.  Philosophy for this writer here is that approach to reality in its entirety (I'm taking it in the sense in which Wittgenstein describes it in his Philosophical Investigations) which asks all questions of the world or reality before it.  Why can we not ask the further question, which patently Dawkins here won't allow, namely, why should we not ask where these simple structures came from in the first place.  Why are we not allowed ask the question, "Where did these simple structures come from in the first place?"?  In philosophy, and indeed in science, surely, this is a reasonable question to ask.  I remember once reading the great philosopher and atheistic mathematician Bertrand Russell who proclaimed that some questions like metaphysical questions were never allowed in good philosophy as they were as ridiculous as asking questions about whether a teapot orbited the earth.  However, this question here, which I am admitting could be pushed to its metaphysical limits, can also be asked in a more practical sense, in an inquisitive sense which I would argue is that starting point for all good sciences.  I'm simply asking the question, yes, while I accept that the simple structures come before the more complicated ones in evolution and that the more complex ones do issue in theories to explain their complex structures which have evolved, I can still ask the question, what actually caused or brought about those simple structures?  I can also ask other questions like, "Were these simple structures always there?" "If so, what are the implications of such a statement?"  And so on.  Notice, I have not  once mentioned the G-word!

The World as a Whole

Rotten timber, but beautiful nonetheless

That Professor Dawkins, and many other atheistic authors, who are evangelical in their convictions and may wish to convert us to their viewpoints, are very intelligent there is no doubt.  However, that they confine their debate to the mere cerebral is a tragedy, I believe. If one enters debate with them one must confine oneself to the limitations of their arguments as they do not allow for the full complexity of the human brain; for the full complexity of the human mind; or for the full complexity of human culture as it engages with reality in its totality. To engage in debate with them one is confined to only using 3 or so of the nine intelligences outlined by modern psychology, especially by Howard Gardner in his book Multiple Intelligences (1993: Basic Books.  Dr Gardner's web page is accessible HERE) and they simply do not at all allow for the possibility of either EQ (Emotional Quotient: Daniel Goleman and others.  Note especially that Dr Goleman also talks about Social Intelligence and Ecological Intelligence.  See his web page here: GOLEMAN) or SQ (Spiritual Quotient: See HERE).  They will, no doubt, dismiss these theories as pseudoscience, but once again philosophy will come into play, because a good philosophy of science will ask questions about what is admissible and inadmissible in science.  After all, when the observer uses an electron microscope s/he by using it alters what is before them by bouncing electrons and other particles out of their original places.  How objective are the very pure atheistic scientists, then, anyway? Philosophy allows us to ask questions about their presuppositions, presumptions and axioms. After all, Euclidean Geometry is a very precise and fine system with tightly defined arguments.  However, there are many other geometries of the plane in existence which start from different axioms.  They are not mutually contradictory.  No. They are just different systems with different starting points or assumptions or axioms. Philosophy teaches us that we can always ask further questions.  That is its beauty.

Let us beware, then, of dogmatism and narrow-mindedness no matter what their provenance - whether in religion, science, politics or whatever.  The beauty of philosophy, (and note that every subject under the sun, including science has its respective philosophy), in that it is open-ended, and is always seeking the truths behind the seemingly apparent facts, the generally accepted theories and all those working hypotheses we humans are wont to invent for our development as individuals and as a society.