Poems I Journey With 21

A young S.T. Coleridge

One of my favourite Romantic poets is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I was lucky to study him from two angles, once in an English Literature course at undergraduate level and once at the level of philosophical theology whilst studying at postgraduate level. That means that I have been lucky to have studied both his poems and his literary/theological/philosophical prose works. Coleridge (1772 –1834) was a complex individual and an extremely erudite dilettante, being a poet, a literary critic and philosopher as well as being an avid walker and lover of nature. He was also a wonderful raconteur who loved to regale his friends with stories and witticisms. Again, he was more Dionysian than Apollonian in temperament, yet in his philosophical and theological musings he could readily access and use profitably and aptly the higher reaches of logical argument and thought, thereby embracing both heart and head in a splendid and felicitous harmony.

With his friend and colleague William Wordsworth, Coleridge was a founder of what is called the Romantic Movement in England. His most anthologised poems and well known poems are The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan while his major prose work Biographia Literaria is an amazingly erudite, eccentric and extremely sui generis  work of his literary imagination. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was and is highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture through his studies in the German language and German philosophy at Gottingen University.  Coleridge, as a result of his concentrated studies, coined many familiar words and phrases, including “suspension of disbelief, the “esemplastic power of imagination” and many more. He is noted as a major influence on Emerson and American transcendentalism. In short, then, we may summarise by saying that it was through Coleridge’s writings and translations that German transcendentalism entered the English and American Romantic Movements.

On a personal level, throughout his adult life, Coleridge had crippling bouts of anxiety and depression. Some have speculated that he had bipolar disorder, though that is impossible to prove definitively. However, it is important to note that he became an addict of opium through its medicinal and all-too-easily attainable form called Laudanum. All of this feeds into the wonderfully complex and inspiring thought of a great poet and marvellously talented critic.

The poem I wish to offer the reader this evening is one of what is called his “conversation poems” namely “Frost at Midnight.”

Frost at Midnight

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud--and hark, again ! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings : save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not ;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, everywhere
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.

But O! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw ; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon. 

Briefest of Commentaries

Here in this wonderful poem we encounter the very quintessence of Romantic poetry: an openness to the splendour, wonder and magic of nature where even “[t]he frost performs its secret ministry.” In other words, from the very first line of this poem we encounter the mystery of nature in the wonderful patterns frost forms all around us on a winter’s night. It is important to note that Coleridge attributes power to the frost, namely the power to perform a ministry or ritual that brings the believer into communion with the very heart of nature, namely the Creator revealed through the mysterious and wondrous patterns performed by a minister called “frost.” Again, what we have here is the personification of nature in the workings of the frost. It is significant, also, the Coleridge ends the poem with a second reference to the frost’s ministry in the third last line of the last stanza.

From the first we are drawn into the profound solitude that obtains in the poet’s country cottage in Cumbria. We encounter all the sights and sounds of Coleridge’s surroundings depicted in wonderfully clear and vivid images: “my cradled infant slumbers peacefully,” “the thin blue flame lies on my low-burnt fire,” the “film which fluttered on the grate,” “the old church-tower,//Whose bells, the poor man's only music,” “My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart//With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,” “For I was reared//In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,” and so on and so forth.  Unlike his father, his son Hartley will be reared, attuned to the sounds of nature and not in a great and noisy city. Again, all these images and this last aspiration for his son are essentially Romantic in nature, that is, they serve to help us to commune with God in and through nature.

In conclusion, let me repeat here the final eleven lines of the poem, which essentially sum up the Romantic credo to which Wordsworth et al subscribed and that S.T. Coleridge so eruditely wrote about in his prose writings.  With that thought I leave the reader to contemplate these last lines of this great poem:

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Poems I Journey With 11

Clarity versus Unclarity

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

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

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

Louis Macneice 1907 - 1963

Entirely

If we could get the hang of it entirely 

   It would take too long; 

All we know is the splash of words in passing   

   And falling twigs of song, 

And when we try to eavesdrop on the great   

   Presences it is rarely 

That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate   

   Even a phrase entirely. 

If we could find our happiness entirely 

   In somebody else’s arms 

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

   Yammering fire alarms 

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

   Our flesh and almost hourly   

Bell or siren banishes the blue   

   Eyes of Love entirely. 

And if the world were black or white entirely 

   And all the charts were plain 

Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters, 

   A prism of delight and pain, 

We might be surer where we wished to go   

   Or again we might be merely 

Bored but in brute reality there is no 

     Road that is right entirely.

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 66

Poem 66

All streams flow to the sea
because it is lower than they are.
Humility gives it its power.

If you want to govern the people,
you must place yourself below them.
If you want to lead the people,

you must learn how to follow them.

The Master is above the people,

and no one feels oppressed.

She goes ahead of the people,

and no one feels manipulated.

The whole world is grateful to her.

Because she competes with no one,

no one can compete with her.

Commentary

Malahide Estuary

We don't have to be in anyway astute to know that leadership is a difficult skill, or even set of skills.  Having been a teacher all my life, my only leadership role has been at classroom or at Year Head levels. Working with and leading adults is an area in which I have little experience.  However, I am old enough now to have "worked under" many leaders and to have observed and experienced many leadership styles.  Without a doubt we mostly abhor the autocratic or authoritarian style of leadership.  Who wants to be told what to do on a daily or even hourly basis? The opposite was the case - total lack of leadership - once in our school when a principal only lasted less than a year as the job was far beyond his capabilities. Luckily, the man realised this quite quickly and luckily got his old job back in the school from which he had come.  Anyway, all order and discipline disappeared in the school over night. Thankfully, this was just a slight hiccup in my 30 years in that school and all other leaders have been more or less satisfactory, with one outstanding leader.

Malahide Estuary

I have never studied leadership, but I would hazard the following qualities of good leadership from observation and experience or length of years on this earth: (i) good vision of where the organisation is going, (ii) good motivator, (iii) good listener, (iv) enthusiasm for the job, (v) knows his/her staff well - whether X, Y or Z will suit this or that job, (vi) can delegate and allow everyone to take ownership of their area without wanting to control things - in other words, she or he will never be a micro-manager.  I have experienced a more junior head of department who could never let go the reins of control and insisted on controlling everything.  In the end of course, such leaders don't control anything and things spiral into disorder, (vii) a good problem solver - able to deal with multiple problems at a time, and consequently be good at comparmentalising things (viii) has to have a hard skin, that is, they have to rise above the situation and learn never to take things personally.  If one puts oneself forward for a position in authority one has to learn to take citicism.  It has been my experience, and I take it that of most of the readers of this small blog, that leadership invariable attracts criticism by its very nature.  Everyone wants someone to blame, a quick scapegoat to blame all problems on.  Finally (ix) s/he who is a leader needs a very good sympathethic and empathethic deputy leader with whom they can share their problems, insights and vision.  Now, these are mere observations as the result of my life experience in my particular place of work, and bear in mind that I have never studied the aea of leadership ever.

In the above poem, I particularly love the image of the sea as the centre of power, and my goodness what a powerful phenomenon it it.  We all know that all life emerged aeons ago from the watery slime of our seas and oceans.  Without the oceans and seas there would simply have been no life as we know it.  The sea or the ocean consequently has always been a central symbol in all mythologies and cultures.  In psychoanalytical or Jungian terms the oceans or seas represent the great Unconscious, a source of much of our psychic lives.  Then, the image of all lesser water bodies, rivers and lakes and so on - the rivers all flow into the seas while the other water bodies are connected with the oceans historically and geologically in ways this writer could never understand.  However, what I am getting at here is the powerful imagery of all this for good leadership.  The leader, according to the Tao is the sea or the ocean and the workers are the rivers that flow into it.  Our poet tells us that the sea lies at a lower level to allow such an inward flow.  In this sense its power is very natural, and indeed a very humble one.  Interestingly the etymology of the work "humble" is "humilis" which means lowly or low lying.

One of my favourite all time quotes comes from Albert Camus, an atheist.  (Indeed, contrary to general belief, atheists do have a spirituality in the broadest sense of that term, obviously not in the religious sense of it.  See the marvellously comprehensive blog called Spirituality Ireland HERE.) The quotation reads: "Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."  Strangely enough - or maybe not that strangely as we are all human, no matter what our beliefs - the idea of accompanying others is central to spiritual guidance, counselling and chaplaincy.   This is more or less the sense of the final stanza above.  The Master is more a companion on the journey, and yet a leader who always wields an encouraging power, a power which at base is empowering of others.

The Master is above the people,

and no one feels oppressed.

She goes ahead of the people,

and no one feels manipulated.

The whole world is grateful to her.

Because she competes with no one,

no one can compete with her.

Thoughts on the Tao te Ching 39

Poem 39

In harmony with the Tao,
the sky is clear and spacious,
the earth is solid and full,
all creatures flourish together,
content with the way they are,
endlessly repeating themselves,
endlessly renewed.

When man interferes with the Tao,
the sky becomes filthy,
the earth becomes depleted,
the equilibrium crumbles,
creatures become extinct.

The Master views the parts with compassion,
because he understands the whole.
His constant practice is humility.
He doesn't glitter like a jewel
but lets himself be shaped by the Tao,
as rugged and common as stone.

Commentary

Pont des Arts, Paris, June, 2007

There are so many questions that any thinking and reflecting human being can ask about the world in general, about life as we experiences it and about how we might explain that meaningfully to ourselves.  Big and small questions like: Where does the rain come from? Where do I come from?  Is there more to these questions than the how of their physical formation? Why is there pain and suffering in the world? Is there a meaning to life?  Does Truth exist in itself?  What is reality?  Does God exist?  What is life about anyway?  Why does the world exist? Why do I exist? Who am I? What is identity? What is meaning? Why do we pursue meaning? What is love? What is colour? Why is there something rather than nothing?  

As I have just returned from the rather wonderful film Room directed by Lenny Abrahamson and written by Emma Donoghue, my mind is quite full of these types of question outlined above.  The screenplay is based on the book of the same name that Donoghue also wrote. As a result the film is particularly true to the original novel.  The plot is very simple: after having been held captive for a period of five years in a garden shed - called "Room" by the little boy  - a young woman and her five-year-old son finally manage to gain their freedom.  The film follows the attempts by both mother and son to cope with, in turn, their experiences of captivity and freedom. In this film, the imagination of both mother and son helps them cope with the complexity of their situation both inside and outside of the room.  Big questions crop up for the viewer as they undoubtedly do for the characters:  What is the real world? What is reality?  What is the imagination?  Where are the demarcation lines between reality and imagination? Do not imagination and reality overlap anyway? Indeed, what is the real world? Is not what's real for us the world of our perceptions anyway?  In other words, does reality equate solely with our perception of it?  Indeed, all literature, film, music or whatever cultural means we conjure up are essentially ways of creating meaning or structure so that we can survive in the world around us.  The mother (just a grown-up adolescent anyway who was kidnapped five years previously as a teenager) needs to create a world where her son can learn to live within a dreadfully confined space.

Compassion and care for the young: Work experience: TY 2003

Why this seeming wandering away from our given text?  Well, as I reflectively ponder the above Taoist poem, I am struck by the power of the human faculty of perception.  What are the ways we perceive the world? Are there different perspectives we can take?  If I look on my own life as a story I am writing or as a film I am directing then perhaps an author's or a director's viewpoint can be more objective and indeed more creative for me, and consequently I may be less likely to grow depressed and less likely to indulge in narrower and more restricted perceptions of any particular situation I might find myself in? Hence, the power of the following lines of the final stanza of Poem 39.  Let me quote those two powerful lines here:

The Master views the parts with compassion,

because he understands the whole.

There is one take on perception that has always appealed to this author since he first learnt a bit about rudimentary psychology as a trainee teacher, namely Gestalt psychology.  It is really a theory about how the human mind perceives and makes sense of the world. Its central contention is that the mind forms a "global whole" with self-organising tendencies. To my mind Emma Donoghue's book and Lenny Abrahamson's film illustrate this dynamic in the human being to make his/her world meaningful through imagining it as a "global whole" that has inherent self-organising tendencies.  The human mind is hardwired to form a gestalt or total or unified perception of its world as a whole or as an overall or over-arching unit.  This overall or over-arching perception has its own reality independent of its parts.  It is interesting to note that the original phrase used by one of the first Gestalt psychologists, Kurt Koffka is "The whole is other than the sum of its parts" and not its usual misquotation as "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."  There is a particularly important difference and nuance contained in "other than" that is not contained in the idea of "greater than." What Koffka wished to underline or stress is that the whole simply has an independent existence apart from its constituent parts, not that it was greater which is far too mathematical or quantitative a concept.

Meditation, no matter what its provenance in whatever religious or non-religious context, is always about attaining perspective, of retreating from the noisy world of conflicting parts, of centering self in some interior unity or one-ness or whole, of finding a still point of existence, of collecting or recollecting the self, of reassembling or re-member-ing or putting the self back together.  It is essentially about attaining and rejoicing in the view of the whole, in the unity of the totality while having complete compassion for the disjointedness and disunity for the parts.  It is in that disjointedness and disunity that evil, suffering and pain exist.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 1

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

A depiction of Lao Tzu

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

Poem 1:

The tao that can be told

is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be named

is not the eternal Name.

The unnameable is the eternally real.

Naming is the origin

of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realise the mystery.

Caught in the desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestation

arise from the same source.

This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.

The gateway to all understanding. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Namaste.

Journal of a Soul 75

Of Living and Dying

"Live in the Now" - that's the lesson of Meditating on Death

“None of us gets out of life alive” is a quotation that remains in my mind.  I even remember the occasion of my first hearing it way back in the early 1990s.  I was listening to a radio programme by the Irish journalist Colm Keane on the subject of “Death Row” in some penitentiary in one of the southern states of the USA.  Our intrepid journalist interviewed a convicted murderer, who was placed behind a protective glass screen.  I remember that this man showed absolutely no remorse for the murders he had committed and saw life as being just a sort of game which one played; a game where it did not matter if one broke the rules as long as one got away with it.  In fact, the prison guards called him, “the animal.”  I remember the hair standing upright on my neck as I listened to this cold, unfeeling, rational, and obviously very intelligent man, express his thoughts and feelings on the crimes he had committed and on life in general. However, he expressed in eight short words the very heart of the human predicament – our temporality or our transitoriness on this minuscule planet that is a mere dot in the infinity of space. This state of affairs, when it hits home in the thinking and feeling and self-conscious human being, is exactly what we mean by the adjectives “existential” or “existentialist.” In short, our mortality lies at the heart of what essentially existentialism boils down to.

Freud used to say that the real repression in humankind was that of the base sexual desires that were deeply rooted in the dark pit of the unconscious.  However, Jung and others since have pointed out most wisely that the ultimate or real repression is that of death.  In one sense, this repression is a survival mechanism.  After all, the denial of death allows for egocentric humankind to push forward against all opposition – coming from either others or nature – to amass property, wealth and acquisitions of all kinds.  One might say, in quite a convincing sense, that all culture is created in the face of death – a sort of myth of significance and permanency in the teeth of the very impermanence and transitoriness of life itself.

Daffodil, Easter 2014

Here is where a philosophy of life comes in on the one hand and where the spiritual and religious traditions on the other have had some insightful things to say.  Admittedly religions in their more structural, authoritarian, hierarchical and indeed forbidding senses have been all too doctrinaire in their tenets and often murdered many who opposed them throughout the course of history.  However, here I am referring to a more devotional and spiritual model or aspect of such religions.  It is arguable that when religions lose vital contact with what the philosopher Eric Voegelin, called their “engendering experience” (or spiritual source or originating vision) they become monolithic, heartless and forbidding structures capable of dehumanising others.

The novelist, literary critic and professor of philosophy Umberto Eco opined that we read literature to learn how to die.  That notion is perhaps a bit one-sided.  I prefer to say that we read literature in order to learn how to live and die.  Living and dying are, in fact, the two sides of the one coin and are somehow paradoxically inextricably linked.  To be a living being is to be a dying being.  Essentially, death and dying are consequences of The Second Law of Thermodynamics or of the results of what’s called entropy.  A thorough understanding of this concept is beyond me as I have little background in Physics, but I can grasp some of its intentions and implications.  To my mind, Walter E. Requadt explains entropy very well for the ordinary person in the street in his wonderfully thought-provoking and stimulating blog called “The Happy Iconoclast” by invoking “Murphy’s Law”:

Unless we constantly insert new energy into a house by maintaining it, painting it, repairing it, the structure will eventually but inevitably be levelled to the ground. Its molecules will move from a lower level of randomization, from structure, to a higher level of randomization, towards unstructured debris.

Entropy is the reason why paint peels, why hot coffee turns cold. Furthermore, entropy is the reason why investments have a pre-ordained inclination to go sour -- unless we enhance success by inserting into the investment system additional energy in the form of strategy, work, calculated risk or other forms of energy. Entropy ensures that sugar, which becomes more randomized when it is dissolved in water, will not reconstitute itself in the crystalline form -- unless we apply heat energy from outside the system and evaporate the water.

Wherever we look, whatever we do, we must be acutely aware of the immutable laws of thermodynamics, especially the easily overlooked Second Law: Entropy. This fundamental law of physics ranks with other fundamental manifestations of the universe such as gravity, time and electromagnetism.

Anything that can go wrong not only will go wrong, it must go wrong, as decreed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (See here: The Happy Iconoclast)

To say that we humans die is to say that we like the entire flora and fauna of the earth are subject to the inevitability of the various laws of the universe, and most essentially to the law of entropy.

Along similar lines, Stephen Hawking told his biographers (Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science by John Gribbin and Michael White, 1992), who had once been Ph.D. students under his direction, that he had never succumbed to anger at life when he was stricken down with motor-neurone disease because essentially life was just chance anyway, and that it all boiled down to the randomness of nature – that is, to the chances involved or the probability of one’s parents meeting and then in the combinations of genes allocated by nature to your particular embryo.  These were, to say the least, random.

Professor Stephen Hawking

While Hawking likes to style himself an atheist, this stance is quite akin to that of a Buddhist spirituality (which some say is not religious anyway) that states that all suffering is caused by our attachment to things animate and inanimate.  All meditation practices and wisdom learnt therefrom and from study, and indeed from life in general, all help us to break free from such suffering by learning detachment. In other words, this is the implication of what is known as the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism that can be stated in simple terms as:

1.  Suffering exists: dukkha. (Life is unfair essentially, with much chance involved – Hawking’s position)

2.  Suffering arises from attachment to desires. (Wishing that things were different – that I shouldn’t get Motor Neurone disease and so on). It is called either samudaya or tanha in the various traditions and is the vain desire to have and control things. 

3.  Suffering ceases when attachment to desire ceases. (When I cease to be attached to unfulfillable desires or even fulfilled ones). The end to suffering is called nirodha. It is achieving Nirvana, which is the final liberation from suffering. The mind experiences complete freedom, liberation and non-attachment. It lets go of any desire or craving. It is an attaining of dispassion.

4.  Freedom from suffering is possible by practicing the Eightfold Path

It is important to note that in the Eastern religions, to meditate on dying and death is no mere negative action.  Nor is it a particularly morose one.  Only at first sight does it appear to be such.  Once one has meditated on either dying or death one comes from one’s sitting with a renewed commitment to living life more fully, and more especially living it more fully in the now.  To realise that truly life is fleeting and that we all end up either “six feet under” or being cremated is to deeply realise that the only answer is to live life more fully, more intensely by being aware of the sheer importance of living fully in the now.  After all, now is all we have.  In a sense, neither the past nor the future exists because the first has ceased to be and the second has not yet come.  In a deeper sense, all that exists is the present moment or the now.  In fact, conscious life is just that – an awareness of the abiding present or the passing now. (Or, as I look at these previous words anew, why not write "the abiding presence of the passing now"?

Picture of a Poppy I took April 2014

 Meditating on dying and death should never bring us down into the pits of despair because its real message is to deeply value and live in the enduring present.  Obviously, I don’t mean by this combination of words that everything stays the same or that nothing changes.  What I mean is that we only can really live in the now of time as it moves – that’s what I mean by the enduring present.

We read in the Tao Te Ching:

If you realise 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.

(Tao Te Ching, verse 74, Lao Tzu, translated by Stephen Mitchell)

In summary, then, we have two choices and the choice recommended by all spiritualities worth their salt is to choose life not death everyday of our lives by practicing living in the now.

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.