Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 21

Poem 21

The Master keeps her mind

always at one with the Tao;

that's what gives her her radiance.

The Tao is ungraspable.

How can her mind be at one with it?

Because she does not cling to ideas.

The Tao is dark and unfathomable.

How can it make her radiant?

Because she lets it.

Since before time and space were,

the Tao is, 

It is beyond is and is not.

How do I know this is true?

I look inside myself and see.

Commentary

The Yin Yang is perhaps one of the most known of the symbols of Taoism.  It is a symbol made up of two halves that together make wholeness. Yin and Yang are also the starting point for change. When something is whole, by definition it is unchanging and complete. So when you split something into two halves – into its Yin  and its Yang, it upsets the equilibrium of wholeness. This starts both halves chasing after each other as they seek a new balance with each other. As you will notice from the diagrammatic representation of this symbol one half of the circle is white (or Yin = masculine, logic, head and so forth) with a small black dot (that is a small amount of the Yang = feminine, feelings, heart and so on); the other half is black or dark (or Yang = feminine, feelings, heart and so on) with a small white dot (that is a small amount of Yin = masculine, logic, head and so forth).  It is interesting to note that the word "Yin" comes out to mean the “shady side” or mysterious side of something like the dark side of the moon and Yang “sunny side” or bright side of something.  

It is also worth noting that neither Yin nor Yang are absolute in themselves alone. In short, nnothing is completely Yin or completely Yang. Each aspect contains the beginning point for the other aspect. For example: day becomes night and then night becomes day gradually as one welcomes the other to the fore and vice versa. Yin and Yang are interdependent upon each other so that the definition of one requires the definition for the other to be complete. And so in keeping with this healthy tension of opposite our translator links two sexual poles male and female in calling the "Master" a she, i.e., in referring to "her mind."  Also the Tao or its truth is ungraspable in its entirety.  This Master is "at one" with the Tao insofar as she does not "cling to (hard and set) ideas."  Another polarity is that of the Tao's being dark and mysterious on the one hand and yet fully radiant on the other.  Here we are at the very heart of what the Yin Yang symbol represents - the complexity and mysteriousness at the very heart of existence.  Another opposing pair in this spiritual reality is "is" ("being") and "is not" ("non-being").

Man contemplates life on Monasterace Beach, August 2015

Looking inside is no mere navel-gazing or solipsism as meditation requires one to check one's experiences with those of the community of meditators, with the various traditions and their teachings to which the meditator belongs in the first place.  Wisdom arises or is experienced within a culture or a community and simply cannot be accessed alone. (Here, I am not, of course ruling out the thrust towards eremitism as this latter only occurs when the hermit has been fully schooled within the community in the first place: all hermits break away from monasteries or sanghas where they first learnt to meditate with a master in a community setting.)

Once more, by way of conclusion, I invite the reader to reflect contemplatively on the above short poem.  Perhaps a word or a phrase or a line may suggest itself to you as a mantra for a short five or ten minutes meditation here.

Namaste, Shalom, Peace!!

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 20

Poem 20

Stop thinking and end your problems.

What difference between yes and no?

What difference between success and failure?

Must you value what others value?

Avoid what others avoid?

How ridiculous!

Other people are excited

as though they were at a parade.

I alone don't care,

I alone am expressionless,

like an infant before it can smile.

Other people have what they need;

I alone possess nothing.

I alone drift about

like someone without a home.

I am like an idiot,

my mind is so empty.

Other people are bright,

I alone am dark.

Other people are sharp,

I alone am dull.

Other people have a purpose,

I alone don't know.

I drift like a wave on the ocean,

I blow as aimless as the wind.

I am different from ordinary people.

I drink from the Great Mother's breasts.

Commentary

Elsewhere it is written that the reality of the Tao transcends the human power of reason and simply has to be grasped or apprehended intuitively: "It is beyond words, beyond all differences and distinction; it is the unchanging, permanent reality of constant change; it is the ground of being and non-being; it is akin to the Hindu concept of the Brahman" (See HERE). Hence, when we read a poem from the Tao Te Ching or any work of perennial philosophy or spirituality we must rely on our instincts, our intuition and our inner wisdom or heart to guide us.

The opening stanza repeats an old gem of wisdom, namely that too much thinking is very bad for us.  With too much thinking we can create a problem that was not there in the first place. People who are stressed or under pressure and those who are depressed or suffer from some mental illness most times fail to go to sleep at night because their minds are so over-wrought that they simply cannot turn their thoughts off.  Often people drink or take drugs to attempt to shut their over-wrought and troubled minds down.  Beginners especially, but also improvers and skilled practitioners can and do experience difficulty in shutting out distracting thoughts.  That's why the books and experts all recommend returning to concentrating on the breath or a simple mantra to dispel such distracting thoughts or at least to minimise them as far as possible. 

Once again the writer of the Tao Te Ching proceeds by way of paradoxes and seeming contradictions and by equating opposites; by suggesting that there is no difference between a yes and a no.  He even sees no difference between success and failure.  This is all the stuff of koans; in the wisdom tradition of Zen, it is akin to asking the meditator to listen to the sound of one hand clapping. Somewhere in these paradoxes, in these enigmas and koans there lies a deep, deep wisdom that stretches beyond our ken.  Yet, there is a truth within them that draws us ever onward in contemplation like a powerful hidden magnet. 

Once again, here I would like to return to the wisdom of that wonderful American President Abraham Lincoln who endured much failure in his life as a prelude to his successes.  He was able to see failure as that which helps us put things in perspective.  He was granted a philosophical mind and a spiritual insight that helped him gain from such real failures, failures he could see contained within them the seeds of his later success.  Moreover, I love the Irish wit and wisdom of one of our famous international novelists, the great James Joyce, that his intention in life was "to fail bettter."

The "I"  and its voice in the poem are, of course, that of the Tao himself/herself/itself.  The Great Mother, mentioned in the final stanza, is also the Tao.  She(he/it) is "expressionless", the very countenance of a baby before it can smile, possessing nothing, with an empty mind, dark and mysterious, drifting with the ease of a wave and blowing as aimlessly as the wind.  She/he/it is the quintessence of mystery itself.  To reflect on this twentieth poem is to dive into the mystery of mysteries.  Don't expect to be enlightened.  Just ponder and wonder at the very darkness of the mystery.

Conclusion:

Finally, I invite the reader to ponder the above poem contemplatively and let any line, phrase or word suggest itself to you as a mantra for a ten minute meditation.

Namaste, Friends.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 11

Poem 11

We join spokes together in a wheel, 

but it is the centre hole

that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,

but it is the emptiness inside

that holds whatever we want,

We hammer wood for a house,

but it is the inner space

that makes it livable.

We work with being,

but non-being is what we use.

Reflections:

Once again when it comes to the big questions of life, like the" why" of it, we are singularly at a loss, and are indeed left existentially in a chasm of doubt or in an abyss of mystery that can invite different responses according to our culture and our physical/mental make-up.  Some will respond by faith in a religious deity, others by an atheism that denies all possible design by a higher power and still others will declare their inability to be sure about what life is about at all - that position is known as agnosticism.  In between these three major options a myriad of other nuanced positions can be held.  None of us, as we grow older, will be satisfied with asking merely the "how" questions of science and digesting their rather dry bland answers alone.  We somehow desire and demand  a more appetizing and tastier meal of knowledge.  In this regard, we are in the company of the great Nobel Prize winner for Theoretical Physics, Richard Feynman who declared: "I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned!"  This statement appeals to me because it shows the thrust towards knowledge and truth which, I would argue, is at the centre of all good religious inquiry as well as that of the sciences.  I would also believe firmly in the contention of the great nineteenth century theologian and scholar, John Henry Newman, that no truth in any area of human exploration into knowledge can contradict another truth found in another area of such exploration: he declared that no truth can contradict another truth as such was axiomatic by very definition of truth in the first place.

And so we return to the paradoxes and the unity of opposites or of binaries or of polarities. I have spoken of this concept many times in the preceding posts. A partial list of such polarities would be:

• Light vs Dark
• Night vs day
• Clear vs Opaque
• Heavy vs Light
• Good vs Bad/Evil
• Rigid vs Flexible
• Emptiness vs Fullness

The poem above returns us once again to the image of the wheel which is a wonderful symbol for life which continues to persist and perdure in a cyclical sense.  The paradox at the heart of the first stanza of the above poem is worth repeating: "it is the centre hole that makes the wagon move."  This is obviously paradoxical.  I remember once, when attempting to write on the mystery of suffering as an undergraduate in philosophy and theology, coming across the image of a word carved in stone which sought to contend that the word itself exists for us in the emptiness carved from the stone.  I also remember finding an image of the word "evil" carved in stone in some book or other.  What these artists and authors were getting at is the Augustinian theory/theodicy that evil is simply a lack of the good that should be there in the first place: "MALUM EST PRIVATIO BONI."

In the second stanza above, we are presented with the image of the emptiness in the pot having the potential to hold the substance of its contents.  The potential of emptiness for fullness is also paradoxical and essentially mysterious, belonging to the sense of wonder which is the beginning of all philosophy and indeed of all knowledge.

And then we are faced with the final paradox that Being and non-Being are the major balance of opposites that we encounter in human existence.  That tension of polarities suffuses everything we do in life.  Life occurs somewhere somehow as the very energy that shoots between both those poles of Being (Life) and Death (Non-Being).  In a sense, to live is to die and mortality is central to what life essentially means.  I wrote more fully on this particular tension by way of reference to the Second Law of Thermodynamics HERE in this blog so I shan't run the risk of repeating myself ad nauseam. 

Meditating on non-being as well as being is important, and that's the reason why Buddhists place a lot of significance upon the student in search of enlightenment learning to meditate upon his/her dying and death.  Such a meditation is never in any way morose or depressing as it essentially liberates the meditator to more fully live in the "now" and to embrace the presence of his/her existence.

Conclusion: One again I invite the reader of these few words to re-read the above Taoist poem and to let a remembered word or phrase or line act as a mantra for a meditation session of say five or ten minutes.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 7

Poem 7

The Tao is infinite, eternal.

Why is it eternal?

It was never born:

thus it can never die.

Why is it infinite?

It has no desires for itself;

thus it is present for all beings.

The Master stays behind;

that is why she is ahead.

She is detached from all things;

that is why she is one with them.

Because she has let go of herself,

she is perfectly fulfilled.

Commentary

The great enigmatic pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (c. 535 - 475 B.C.) springs to mind immediately when I ponder this seventh poem from the Tao Te Ching. He is famous for his insistence that all life is in motion and that everything is change or flux as expressed in his famous line, known to anyone who ever studied philosophy, viz., "you cannot step into the same river twice."  Another famous phrase attributed to him comprises two words only, viz., "panta rhei" = "everything flows."  This latter Heraclitean quotation is mentioned in Plato's Cratylus.

Heraclitus, unknown artist, Sheffield Museum

Heraclitus is also renowned for his enigmatic style and paradoxical expression leading him to be called "Heraclitus the obscure."  Also, his style has been described as "wondrous," that is, in the sense in which Plato has defined the beginnings of philosophy as being in wonder. In this sense much ancient philosophy is spiritual in effect and thrust.  Hence this style of philosophizing has much in common with the spirituality and philosophy set before us in the Tao Te Ching. 

Once again, it is no surprise to learn that Heraclitus was much concerned with what I have termed in these several posts on Taoism the tension of opposites or binaries or polarities. Commentators on Heraclitus call this his predilection for the "unity of opposites," and his most famous statement in this regard is that "the path up and down is one and the same." This idea as we have seen is common to a lot of religious and spiritual traditions.

Now, our poem above is about time vs timelessness as our author mentions both infinity and eternity.  Time may be defined as the measure of change and this is where both the Tao and Heraclitus come in for my commentary here.  What does infinite mean?  All religions speak of their God as being both eternal - always having existed - and infinite - without beginning or end.  The author tells us, then, that the Tao was never born, that it existed always. He/she also describes the notion of infinity in an interesting and unusual way, viz., in that it is present for all beings consequent on its having no desires for itself.  One needs much meditation and consideration on these sentiments to tease out the possible meaning of that line. However, we are in the realm of mysticism where paradox and enigma abound.  Much of that area of study is ineffable and can only be expressed in a poetry that stretches language almost to breaking point.

Again the second stanza of the above poem is replete with paradoxes expressed by way of the "unity of opposites," e.g., "Behind" and "Ahead" and "At One" and "Detached"  at one and the same time.

Invitation to Meditate

Once again as what we are engaged with here is more a spiritual practice than an intellectual exercise it would be profitable to read the above poem again and to let a line or a word therefrom jump from the page as it were into your mind.  Then, with eyes closed, you could do worse than meditating for five or so minutes using that word or phrase as a mantra.

Namaste, friends.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 3

Tao Te Ching

Poem 3

If you over esteem great men,

people become powerless.

If you overvalue possessions,

people begin to steal.

The Master leads

by emptying people's minds

and filling their cores,

by weakening their ambition

and toughening their resolve.

He helps people lose everything

they know, everything they desire,

and creates confusion

in those who think that they know.

Practise not-doing

and everything will fall into place.

Commentary

In the above poem not-doing equates to being.  Traditionally, in most philosophical and spiritual traditions, there has been a polarity set up between being and doing.  In the Christian Scriptures there is the lovely story of Martha and Mary that refers to an episode in the life of Jesus which appears only in the Gospel of Luke, and can be read immediately after the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:38-42). 

Icon of this Lucan story: See HERE

In this story Mary sits at the Lord's feet listening (that is, a metaphor for contemplating or meditating or praying or simply being in a state of reverence for the holy) while her sister was anxiously doing preparations so that the welcomed guest (the Lord Jesus) would have all the generosity the household could offer (that is, action or doing). All traditions of spirituality recommend a balance between both, while in this Biblical story Jesus tells Martha that Mary has chosen the right course of action in this case, that is, not-doing, meditation, contemplation or prayer.  Once again, and it bears repeating, that all traditions emphasize the balance between both and how both are necessary to good spiritual practice.  However, there are, of course, stories that emphasize either one according to the intentions of the author at that particular time to get his message across.  All Scriptures, whether Christian or Taoist or Buddhist or Hindu have to be taken on balance.  There is nothing as bad as Scriptures used to prove a polemical or didactic point without an appreciation of context, good scholarship and that elsewhere in the same Scriptures that there are other balancing texts giving a different perspective on the question but never necessarily being self-contradictory.  That's why a knowledge and understanding of polarities or binaries or opposites is so crucial to our spiritual journey. Doing and Being are both important aspects of the Doing-Being polarity.  (For readers with an interest in graffiti here is an interesting article on the origins of the graffito joke: To Do is To Be - Socrates, To Be is To Do - Aristotle and Do Be Do Be D0....  - Sinatra: Quote Investigator ).

What is appropriate in life is obviously BALANCE.  All good mainline spiritual traditions recommend such balance.

Avoidance of Extremes

In keeping with the notion of balance the above poem opens with a call to the reader/meditator to avoid extremes.  Over-esteeming some people, our author poet argues, disempowers others.  Over-valuing possessions leads people to steal.  The question of over-valuing is an interesting concept in itself.  We all too often hear of the polar problem of undervaluing.  Indeed, it is interesting to follow this line of argument philosophically and spiritually.  Moot questions would be: Is it possible to over-value human life?  Is it possible to over-value humankind's place in the world? Is over-valuing anything, including ourselves, a mark of our ego-driven ambitions and sheer hubris? These are all questions, not statements, of course.  In this regard, I firmly believe that what the Physics Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman said is totally correct, that we should "..... rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned."  However, a good pilgrim on the path to self-knowledge or spiritual-awareness will know that it is the balance between the extremes that counts; that it is the healthy tension set up between the poles that is important, not either pole in itself.  Over long years of spiritual questioning and questing, I have become enamoured of how close theoretical physics can be to spirituality.  As the great nineteenth century theologian John Henry cardinal Newman used say: no truth from any area of knowledge can contradict another truth from another area if it is to be the truth at all - this, in short, is axiomatic or foundational to all knowledge or truth. 

Emptying and Becoming Empty

These notions are central to most mainline religions also.  The believer has to empty himself or herself of his/her EGO, pride, hubris and all other lesser attributes so that they can become receptacles or vehicles or conduits of the divine.  In meditation and prayer in all traditions, the seeker has to empty his/her mind of distracting thoughts and baser desires. Even if we are not religious qua religious or spiritual qua spiritual in the specific sense, we are all spiritual in a general or generic or psychic sense.  There is always much in us that has to be healed, or made whole in the process of Integration of the self (Anthony Storr et al) or in the process of Individuation (Jungian Analysis), or in the process of Self-Actualization (Carl ransom Rogers and Abraham Maslow) or in that Self-realization (general). In spiritual terms, if we belong to a specific religious or spiritual tradition we might call it an emptying in order so we can be filled by the divine.  In a sense, of course, these are all human words that stretch language to breaking point in an attempt to describe a religious or spiritual experience.  For Christian believers, St Paul advanced the notion of the kenosis undergone by Jesus Christ in order to save the world.  As a discourse on this Christian concept is beyond our needs here, please refer to the following links if you wish to read about it: WIKI  and  Theopedia. 

There is throughout the Tao Te Ching,  then a call to humility, a call to declaring first our ignorance before going on our spiritual way.  Please note how close this is to Socrates' call to all who would wish to be philosophers or followers of what is true to first declare their ignorance and that knowledge will follow from there by a process of radical questioning of all our thinking.  St Augustine, the fifth century A.D. philosopher and theologian maintained that even with the aid of Christian revelation that divine knowledge was so far beyond our ken in this world that the most we could achieve, after all our intellectual and spiritual travail, is merely what he termed a "docta ignorantia" or learned ignorance.

Meditation:

Read the above poem again and let whatever line or  phrase or word jump out of the text for you and repeat it in your mind slowly like a mantra.  Then close your eyes, centre yourself and meditate on those words for five minutes.

Namaste, friends!

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 2

Tao Te Ching

Poem 2

When people see some things as beautiful,

other things become ugly.

When people see some things as good,

other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.

Difficult and easy support each other.

Long and short define each other.

High and low depend on each other.

Before and after follow each other.

Therefore the Master

acts without doing anything

and teaches without saying anything.

Things arise and she lets them come;

things disappear and she lets them go.

She has but she does not possess,

acts but does not expect.

When her work is done she forgets it.

That is why it lasts forever.

Reflections

Paradoxes have long been a means of expressing an abstract thought or feeling or some experience that goes beyond the ordinary. A paradox is a statement that apparently contradicts itself and yet might be true (or, indeed false at the same time). Poetry is, by its very nature, replete with paradoxes. The most memorable paradox that we learnt at school way back in the early 1970s was one from the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth: "The child is father of the man," a line from a short lyric entitled "My Heart Leaps up When I Behold," a poem from 1802 that we all had to learn off by heart.  The line makes no literal sense obviously, but metaphorically it means much, as the child will eventually grow into a man who will in turn father a child.  So, therefore, humankind stretches language as far as it will go to get at a deeper understanding and meaning.  To remain at a literal level is to be two-dimensional and superficial.

Polarities

Our poem above is replete with polarities.  In philosophy polarities are called dualisms, dichotomies or binaries.  In poetry/literature polarities are often referred to as opposites (Coleridge spoke a lot about this dynamism) and even antinomies (a word much favoured by our own national poet William Butler Yeats).  Anyway, it really does not matter what name you call polarities by, because they all amount to the same thing, viz., pairs of opposing concepts.  Our stanza above maintains that each side of a polarity requires the other.  These polarities shoot through much literature of either a religious or spiritual nature and even of none.  A partial list of such polarities would be:

• Light vs Dark
• Night vs Day
• Clear vs Opaque
• Heavy vs Light
• Tall vs Short
• Good vs Bad
• Soft vs Hard
• Rigid vs Loose

and so on and so forth - you can add your own examples to this list.  It would seem that like the positive and negative poles of a magnet or of a spherical body like the earth itself, it would seem that one pole cannot exist without the other.  In like manner, the great psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung spoke about there being a Shadow aspect to every Self.  He argued that it was by incorporating the shadow aspect of the Self that we become whole.

The above poem pushes these polarities even further and stretches language to the very  breaking point of incomprehensibility.  The poet tells us that the Master "acts without doing anything" and that he the Master is actually a "she" when we would be expecting a "he." Obviously Male vs Female would be another example of a polarity.  Bisexuality and androgyny obviously both share in this polarity. Indeed, the Master/Mistress can teach without saying anything.  It's often in silence that we learn much.  I love the healthy tension set up in the following polarity in stanza 3 above: "She has but she does not possess."  This is a wonderful spiritual insight and is really, once again, the second noble truth that dukkha or suffering is caused by our craving of or clinging to our baser and even higher desires.  How often do our possessions possess us?  It is surely possible to own something without being "possessed" by it? We could even be possessed by our relationships as in over-dependence on another.  Again the Master/Mistress is not possessed by her work as "When her work is done, she forgets it."

Again, there is much about "living in the now," that classic statement, that is a plank underpinning every spiritual tradition worth its salt hinted at and implied in the above poem. There is also in these lines a sense of the cyclic nature of things - that the cycle of life endures and perdures and goes on forever.  Maybe that is the sense of eternity hinted at here.  

Conclusion: One again, I invite you to read the above poem and meditate on it for 5 or 10 minutes.

Namaste, friends.

Journal of a Soul 52

The Courage to Leave the Orbit of Little Self or Ego Self

Imbalance: Going it Alone

Fast flowing stream, Marley Park, April, 2014

I finished my last post by saying that going it alone is always dicey.  Why?  Because the Soul or Self is a very fragile craft that can all too easily founder on the rocks of despair rather than taking to the open sea of promise and of life lived fully.  If any of you is a reader of this blog you will have read quite often in these pages that I say that the Self is a work in progress, never complete, but always on the way, as it were.  The development of Soul or Self is one that takes place through the interplay with other Selves (I mean other people essentially here, of course) who guide us and help us in that development.  Our identities, then, not alone have a personal psychological dimension but also a social and interpersonal one.

Balance: Being Lost and Being Found

Over the years I have always been fascinated with literature, and William Blake has been a luminary in my pantheon of poetic heroes.*  Why?  I suppose the simple answer is that not alone did I love the vivid imagery of his poems, but I was always truly moved by his balancing of opposites or polarities, and his ability somehow to sustain that tension all the way.  Hence, we have the title of one of his earlier books of poems, namely Songs of Innocence and Experience.  Notice the balance of opposites here, or the interplay of "antinomies" as William Butler Yeats would call it nearly 200 years later.  John Keats had a similar insight where he writes in his letters about "negative capability," that is where a great thinker is “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” A poet, then, has the power to bury self-consciousness, dwell in a state of openness to all experience, and identify with the object contemplated.  Lest I get lost by too many literary allusions and end up roaming the back lanes of my literary past, I will return immediately to my initial point about the balancing of opposites.  While Blake wrote the Songs of Innocence, he also wrote the Songs of Experience.  Therein, he wrote about little boys and girls who were lost, and balanced those poems with ones about those same little boys and girls being found. 

Journeying is quite like that, I suppose, sometimes we get lost, we have to ask directions, consult maps, take help, hitch lifts, find fellow travellers to journey with us to find the right road, even to accompany us part of the way.  Big question, that, the right road, that is.  What is the right road?  What direction should we be travelling in?  Maybe, we can only work that out together.  Education certainly helps us - all the knowledge and wisdom of the ages that are handed on culturally.  

Depression: The way Out  and the Journey Towards Healing

Love: always a sign of hope: Ardgillan Park, April, 2014

These thoughts were also inspired by my reading in one sitting today the autobiography of the Irish playwright, actor and novelist Michael Harding called Staring at Lakes.  As I will review this book over on my other blog, I shall not say too much about it here, save to say that it is a tour de force of deeply personal insight into the highs and lows of one human being's life.  However, that book, in my opinion, shows more of "the little boy lost" than it does "the little boy found," though towards the end  we realise that he is making great strides on the way to either finding himself, or being found, as it were.

To be lost is a dreadful state in which to be as anyone who has ever been so will testify.  However, for the sake of our mental health, none of us can remain lost for too long.  Otherwise, we will end up in "the Slough of Despond" (as the great John Bunyan put it in his Pilgrim's Progress) or the depths of depression, to put it in more contemporary terms. In the above named book, Harding admits he has been a sufferer from depression for most of his life, but really had never admitted it until more recent times, because like a brave soldier he felt obliged to tough his experiences out. There is much despondency in this book, though there is the light of hope at the end where he wishes to start anew.  We feel instinctively that he will find himself, that he is being found in the comforting arms of his family and others, and perhaps by the Source of Life itself,  by what we traditionally term God, if his image of that God has not been totally destroyed by the more negative theology and spirituality harshly promulgated by some reactionary strands in the Catholic Church in Ireland over the years.  And yet, he, a former priest, is a truly spiritual one, truly a real pilgrim on the way to Self-acceptance and Self-healing.

The Fear of Extinction in Death

Portrane Graveyard, July 2013

As I type this post a good friend of mine has just informed me that his mother is dying and that he has to go to her bedside.  That feeling of mortality is very close to the bone for me as my own mother died last July and my two brothers and I waited over twenty hours by her bedside until she breathed her final breath.  It was agony watching her, though we were informed that she could feel no pain.  I am very much with my friend in spirit as he goes through these final hours of his mother's life.  The wound of mortality is the one wound we can never heal.  It is the one great common denominator that makes us human, or rather our consciousness of it does, more to the point.   In short, this awareness of the brevity of life leads to the very heart of what philosophers call existentialism, namely, what the so-called founders of this amorphous and disparate school of thought described as the feeling of angst or anxiety. **

This is the very heart of the existential dilemma, that is, the fear or anxiety of the very nothingness of our existence. This fear, Kierkegaard tells us can never be objective at all, because effectively it is a subjective anxiety that everything that I hold dear, including myself, will in the end, sooner or later, crumble into nothingness. Death takes everything away and, ironically, the very uncertainty of when it will happen only adds to our anxiety or angst.  Such angst is at the very heart of Harding's book.

Transcending and Healing Our Fears

And yet we cannot afford to dwell at such depths of angst or anxiety for too long, because it is essentially a bedfellow of depression, possibly even its author for more susceptible and fragile souls.  Living, I believe, requires us, not so much to overcome in as many ways as possible that anxiety at our essential fragility, but rather to transcend it - paradoxically, by acknowledging its role in the task of living.  Such acknowledgement means seeing death and dying as part of the great cycle of life.  That's what I wrote about in the immediately preceding post to this one.  There is the upside as well as the downside to life, the upswing and the downswing, the rising and the falling, the growth and the decay - essentially, the great wheel of life (or Rotha Mór an tSaoil  as we call this in our native tongue), the great circle, the eternal cycle of things. However, an appreciation of the foregoing requires amazing humility, an objectivity that demands an uprooting of the great tap root of obsession with self, that is, with the ego-self.  Further, it requires great courage by demanding a perspective that entails a moving out from our puniness and littleness in the scheme of things, a moving away from being grossly preoccupied with our pride as crafters and shapers of our little lives.  Preoccupation with the ego-self is a loss of perspective that can lead to the depths of despair.  This moving out into the world of Greater-Self or True Self or Real Self is one of sheer humility before the awesome power of the Universe, one of sheer wonder at its beauty and terror The origins of the word "sublime" and all it denotes and connotes lie in that latter paradoxical contrast of beauty and terror.  And yet, the true voyager beyond the small orbit of the little self often instinctively knows or intuits a safety or safeness of being embraced by a greater more benign power.  Some dare call that an experience of God, the truth which like the Sun, we stare at to our peril.

Notes

* I have written about William Blake on many occasions.  A short essay I wrote about this startlingly original genius, artist and great pilgrim on life's spiritual way can be found here William Blake

**The theme of anxiety was at the very heart of existentialism from its very origins. This is a sense of anguish which can be defined as a sense of dread at the nothingness of human existence. This theme goes back as far as Kierkegaard in modern existentialism though it stretched way back further into ancient philosophy, too. In fact, anxiety as a theme pervades this philosopher’s work. Kierkegaard lived his relatively short life (1813-1855) in Denmark. The meaninglessness of his existence filled him with anxiety and despair and a sense of hopelessness and deep depression. At base his anxiety was a deep despair at the very nothingness of human existence. In the great universal scheme of things we are mere minuscule ants on a minuscule anthill called earth, lost in the infinity of space. How do we cope with the fact that we as thinking and feeling subjects will come to nothing in the end?Let’s hear Kierkegaard’s words: “I stick my finger into existence – it smells of nothing. Where am I? What is this thing called the world? Who is it that has lured me into the thing, and now leaves me here? Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?” [Quoted Lavine (1984, p. 322)]

Journal of a Soul 51

To Travel or Not to Travel

To travel or not to travel, sometimes that is the question.  We are a restless species at base. The great St Augustine described himself as "a restless seeker."  In a sense, that fifth century saint summed up the human predicament nicely.  An acquaintance of mine who died over a year ago was not alone a "restless seeker," but he was also a restless traveller.  The way he dealt with his imminent demise was to take to travelling with an increased compulsion, if his previous obsession with it had not been intense enough.  Even to meet this man, you instinctively and intuitively picked up his restlessness.  He was always on the move, always going places, always living in the future, always making plans and more plans and more plans.  He was a deeply discontent person, and evidently unhappy in the moment. 

This road in Marley Park will eventually lead into the mountains

As I write these lines on the screen before me, I am at home in my attic study, having just finished one of Deepak Chopra & Oprah Winfrey's online meditation sessions.  Usually, I would be down in Isca Marina in Calabria for Easter, but this time I chose to stay at home while both my brothers travelled southward to the Mediterranean.  I have also just completed an eight week guided course on mindfulness in my local university -DCU.  Maybe that was one of the contributing reasons to why I did not wish to travel this Easter. However, there were also issues of getting my house into a more homely state to dwell in.  I have managed to get some long-standing jobs done about the house, and so not travelling did help.

However, for me as I live alone, I enjoy the peace and solitude of my Easter holidays.  I find that when I stay put alone I do a lot mental travelling - sometimes maybe too much. However, such internal journeying can be either stimulating or even disturbing.  Let me spell out what I am about here.  Restlessness can result in our desire to physically travel, but it can also see us staying put and travelling the equally hazardous roads of our own inner landscape.

And so as I sit here typing these words on the screen of my laptop I am travelling the roads of my own inner landscape.  Thankfully these are mostly interesting pathways leading me to a great extent along scenic routes to the discovery of a newer and deeper sense of Self. Moreover, I am also painfully aware that inner exploration for anyone of a depressive nature can be most disturbing, deeply unsettling and not a little scary.  I have written much over the years in various blogs about my suffering from clinical depression of the uni-polar variety.  Hence, I have known only too well the back-roads and side-roads of sadness and depression for a good number of years in my past life.  Thankfully, I have had no reason to travel those dreadful by-ways of the lonely depressed mind in the last sixteen years. Knowing them only too well, and my consequent awareness of what can pull me away from the more secure roadways and pathways to the real self and  into those dreadful by-ways of depression has led me to leading my life with a good map, both medical and therapeutic.

So journeying to the centre, or journeying to the Real Self, can and often is a painful one. However, as I have just stated, like any journey we set out on, we must make preparations, arm ourselves with the best maps, bring passports, visas, money and so on.  For the journey inward, we need the help of friends, spiritual guides, reading, discernment, patience, humility, openness and above all compassion for the Self.  All self-exploration, then, must be done with sound preparation and guidance, because as all spiritual teachers, guides, counsellors, therapists and any good, solid and well-trained facilitators of it will know, any form of deep meditation or mindfulness must be accompanied by solid sustenance for the journey. 

Flowers in Ardgillan Castle & Demesne, Skerries

In a nutshell, the difference between mindfulness and meditation is that the former is the secular face or incarnation of the latter.  Mindfulness is meditation divested of its religious garments, to use a metaphor.  However, in practice, to my mind at least, they are very much the same thing.  In short, I believe that mindfulness can be done at several levels.  The basic or foundational level is that of being mindful of the body and breathe.  The next is the level of being mindful of the thoughts, feelings and emotions.  A further and deeper level would be mindfulness of the Inner Self or the Real Self.  Again, more religious incarnations of mindfulness, would speak of a spiritual, if not a divine, experience associated with either meditation or prayer.  However, I do believe my nutshell explanation in the first sentence in this paragraph gets at the essence of the thing for the beginner. 

Yesterday and the day before I went out walking with my camera in hand, after I had done my period of meditation.  I found on both occasions that I had a new and more aware sense of the beauty of things than I usually would have if I had not done any mindfulness practice at all. Having said that, I was also somewhat overcome, too, by the fragility and beauty of life.  I had a sense of the destructiveness of the power of the more worldly pursuits of humankind, namely the despoiling and destruction of nature that is occurring at an alarming rate.  One would have to be living in a cocoon not to be aware of the environmental destruction we are subjecting our planet to literally on a minute by minute basis.  

Now, as an experienced meditator, I know myself only too well and realize that I cannot let myself dwell too much or too deeply on the flip-side or negative side of the "realization of the fragility and beauty of life" as such would bring morbid thoughts on.  Enough to go out into my garden, mow the lawn, and do my own little bit to nurture nature, and in so doing nurture my own soul.   Likewise, I recommend getting involved in one or other green campaign because so doing lessens the negativity that can be overwhelming when we contemplate how humankind threatens the very survival planet Earth.

More flowers, Ardgillan Park, Skerries

Recently, I was counselling a young boy who is suffering with depression.  He is also attending a psychologist. He was sent onto me by the school counsellor as she felt that my teaching him some meditation and visualization practices might help him.   Usually, I make a brief sketch of the client's state of mind on the whiteboard, with his help.  Needless to say, I work with all the good advice given by his psychologist and school counsellor, ensuring at all times that I do not contradict what they say, as working with others and on the same path is always crucial.  I sketched out what he was doing with his psychologist.  She was working with what made him Happy and what made him Sad.  We listed both these on the whiteboard.  What made him sad was that life was ultimately about loss, that everything and everyone grew old and died.  What made him happy was everything to do with living.  These were polar opposites as we sketched them out.  The birth of his little sister in more recent times has been a moment of singular happiness and joy for him. "Seek life", "go on living", "live in the now" were all messages we felt were good for living.  I recommended that he buy a present for his little sister and one for himself to celebrate the option for life.  When he returned the following week he had bought both presents and was a far happier boy.  As we were talking we spoke of the cycles of life and that often the life-death cycle can be a unity which we must respect as we are integral parts of it.  To get lost in either end of the cycle might not be the whole truth somehow.  Certainly getting lost in a cycle of depression, where we choose the dark and the negative and the deathly and death-ridden will lead us to despair.  Choosing sheer hedonism, a life of sensual pleasures may be choosing life as nothing but empty satisfaction after empty satisfaction.  Such a choice may, in fact, be very superficial.  Choosing to hold the hand of a sick or dying person, may paradoxically be choosing life, because those last moments of that person's life are so worthwhile.

Now, this is what I mean by travelling within.  Another metaphor could be "internal weather."  What's the weather like in your mind now? Stormy? Sunny? Cloudy? Grey? Dark? Dismal? Rainy? Windy? Night? Day? Sunset? Sunrise? and so on.  We do mindfulness and meditation and we travel ever deeper or ever higher (depending on your directional metaphor) into the Real Self, but that journey has many twists and turns, many obstacles, many hills and valleys, many rivers to be crossed, even seas and mountains at times - all of which means that we need to be well prepared and always look for help.  Going it alone is always dicey, to say the least.

To all the readers of this journal of a soul, I say "Buon viaggio!"