Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 44

Poem 44

Fame or integrity: which is more important?

Money or happiness: which is more valuable?

Success of failure: which is more destructive?

If you look to others for fulfillment,

you will never truly be fulfilled.

If your happiness depends on money,

you will never be happy with yourself.

Be content with what you have;

rejoice in the way things are.

When you realize there is nothing lacking,

the whole world belongs to you.

Commentary

Flowers on window sill, Hotel, Rome, Easter 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Journal of a Soul 74

Nothing New Under the Sun

The Kerry Cliffs, February 2015

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

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

Nothingness and Emptiness

Portrane, February 2015

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

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

The Power of Wonder

Cemetery, Portrane, Summer 2013

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

The Elusive Now

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

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

From Esoteric Dreams to Concrete and Dirt

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

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

Journal of a Soul 67

The Passage of Time

Interesting evergreen tree at Newbridge House, Donabate, Co. Dublin

The passage of time seems to be quicker the more one ages.  Indeed, as a friend of mine who is a mathematician stated: "This is quite logical because  to a 56 year old person like myself on the cusp of his 57th birthday another year is in comparative terms a mere one 56th or a one 57th of your life depending on how you calculate it.  One way or another ageing is inevitable.  Recently, I was quite intrigued when a past pupil who was about 19 declared that he would like to live forever.  Another young man in our company replied that such "would never happen and that his wishful thinking was in every sense delusional." St Augustine once defined time as "the measure of change." The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus averred that "one can never step into the same river twice," and further that everything was in "a state of flux." I was amused, as I say, by the wishful, if delusional, thinking of my young friend.  I thought to myself how great it was to be so innocent and full of enthusiasm for life. This was also quite ironic as we were in a local hostelry imbibing some alcoholic beverages in the wake of a commemorative service for one of his friends who had ended his life by suicide. Obviously this latter person had found living life totally unbearable.

The Importance of Philosophy

Philosophy is more an activity and a process than a learned body of reflections on life. While it may be the latter as is witnessed by all the countless books written on the subject, it is so much more.  It is the activity of questioning to the nth degree everything around us, the nature of the universe; what knowledge may be, if there is any such thing as Truth in an objective sense or is it always relative; what love, faith, hope and charity may be, indeed what emotions may mean; what the purpose and meaning of the life we humans experience is and so on and so forth.  There is also a philosophy of every subject under the sun.  We can surely ask what the nature of numbers is and what we are at when we do mathematics.  Are the tenets of mathematics universal and true everywhere in the universe.  We believe so and can adduce reasons to substantiate our contentions.  We can study the history of science and also its philosophy. What is the difference between practical knowledge and scientific knowledge? Is all scientific knowledge empirical?  In many cases, yes, but both at the subatomic and astronomical level, no - we need to use very abstract and much speculative thought there, but such thought is no less rigorous than the process of arriving at conclusions from empirical evidence. There are so many questions we humans can ask and none may be as important as the moral one as to what are right and wrong actions.  What is morality and why need we act in such and such way and so on. My young friend obviously had never encountered philosophy, that is, the radical questioning of one's own thoughts and opinions.  What would it mean to live forever?  Follow the thought experiment through, young man. Would you keep ageing and ageing and yet never die? Even simple tools eventually wear out? Humans are made of material stuff which breaks down.  Does not the simple physical law of entropy imply that everything eventually burns itself out? If we never died what would birth mean at all? There obviously would be no point in birth if there were no death! How would we deal with the population explosion? These are all philosophical questions, which at first glance may seem somewhat silly, but on reflection clarify superficial thought and silly shoddy thinking.  Essentially to live implies within its ambit the process of dying itself.  In fact, to live is to die.  Think of any simple plant or flower you might have at home or in the garden.  It grows, blooms and eventually dies.  I remember meeting a most interesting man who owned a pet shop.  One could see his total commitment to and love of animals of all varieties.  He opined that it was important for youngsters to keep pets, to nourish and see them grow and eventually die.  Keeping pets, he felt, taught children to accept that death and dying are parts of life.  As an animal, albeit human, I consume food, burn it and transform it into energy to keep my body going.  It is obvious that my body will wear out, break down and die - such is only natural.

Reflections on Death and Dying 

Having been brought up in a rural setting one could say that I am somewhat at home with the cycle of the seasons, with the sowing of seeds, the growth of plants, their cultivation and harvesting and so on in a never-ending cycle.  Within that scenario, death and dying are seen as a natural process. The peasant folk had and obviously still have their traditions like the waking of the dead - the celebration of the life of the departed one about the open coffin that is positioned centrally in the house of the departed.  Within this context not alone is grief made bearable but the sting is taken out of death at least for a short while.  These ancient rituals grew up within various communities as they attempted to help the grieving party cope with their sorrow and to make some social or communal sense of the experience of death.

And yet, existentially we all face our own extinction in a very private way - we each of us have to make some personal sense of our mortality, that is, if we are at least half thinking or even semi-reflective persons, as quite simply, no matter how many or how few are our family or friends, we die alone.  It is, alas, a journey only we ourselves can embark upon as we pass through the portals of death alone. Perhaps the greatest myth in our modern culture is the growth of sheer individualism with all that it entails. Modern individuals have built up around themselves their own private worlds of prestige, social achievement and material possessions - private worlds that give them a sense of identity - and all of that far too superficial or lacking in any depth.  Very soon we tire of superficiality, of building up  these rather tawdry worlds of vast egotistical proportions - rather like that portrayed in the novel, The Great Gatsby and most effectively indeed in the film of the same name.  All of these fantasies of individual power and prestige cannot keep the gnawing tooth of mortality at bay. Nor can any of these superficial attempts to build identity on the shifting sands of materialism keep the lonely soul protected from anxiety, angst and a host of concomitant emotional and psychosomatic complaints.

Some Personal Memories

The first death I can remember was that of my Grandmother Mary Phoebe Brophy in 1968 when I was ten years of age.  My young mind soaked in the experience as my mam and dad, as well all my uncles and aunts (all 11 of them) were very upset.  Perhaps the most consoling moment of the whole experience was being requested to kneel down and say a prayer at my grandmother's bedside and to touch her beaded hands.  I can still conjure up the vision of my grandmother's body in that bed all those years ago.  However, all in all, it was a positive experience, one that we were unconsciously taught to accept as a part of life, the final  mile stone along the journey of life if you like.  Then the second death I remember was that of my Uncle Paddy Quinlan at 58 of a rare cancer in 1970 - I remember so well the packed church and all the people who came to say goodbye on the day of his funeral.  I can still hear and feel the crunch of gravel under my shoes as I walked up to the graveside.  As I stood beside my father as they lowered the coffin, I saw a little white one and my father said gently, "that's your little angel brother Thomas who died many years ago." Since then, of course, there have been many other deaths, not the least of which were the deaths of my father and mother - experiences which I have recounted here and elsewhere in the blogosphere. Those particular deaths were wrenches to my being that I find quite difficult to describe.  One knows that when one has experienced their leaving of this world that your generation is next.

Existentialism

Sundown, Phoenix Park, October 2014

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?”(Lavine, T.Z. (1984) From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest New York: Bantam Books)

Making Meaning

We are meaning-making creatures.  We are forever forming and moulding meaning from the very stuff of life.  If we do not do so we are an empty, hollow people whom T.S. Eliot describes so vividly in his poem The Hollow Men:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken grass
In our dry cellar.

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion ...

These people who are hollow are the superficial people we described in one of our opening paragraphs.  They are the ones who have built their identities on the shifting sands of their own private worlds of prestige, social achievement and material possessions - private worlds that give them a false sense of identity - and all of that, as I have said, far too superficial or lacking in any depth. Something in us is repulsed by lack of meaning and superficiality.  It's almost as if there is something in us - some divine spark - that wishes to ignite and set the fire of enthusiasm and joy alive in our our hearts.  We feel, indeed intuit or know at a deep level, that there is something somewhere drawing us on towards meaning, some amazing, if imaginary lodestone, drawing us ever onwards.  This spiritual spark in me demands that I call it God.  Perhaps, that is overstating my case.  And yet, those are the words that came out as I wrote these lines.  There is a fullness of life to be experienced if only we have the courage to reach out and embrace it.

And as a meaning-making species we have conjured religions up from our collective unconscious to guide us and lead us ever onward on our human journey to meaning and personal truth.  We have embraced spiritualities of various types to give us the courage and the sustenance to support us on our journey.  Whether such religions and spiritualities are actually the result of our own imagination matters not a whit.  Perhaps it comes from an outside power, namely God, and of this I am quite convinced some of the time, especially at moments when I experience all too transiently beauty, truth, love, wonder and mystery.  But yet, in another sense that matters not a whit either.  What matters is that we have a meaning, a reason to live and a reason to die.  In our faith, in our imagination or in our soul, our very meaning lives on, and that is what makes all the difference, a difference that no proselytizing atheist can ever take from us.  And death and dying in this scenario are surely as natural as birth and growth.  Yes, indeed. Amen to that!!

Journal of a Soul 48

The Validity of Experience 3

Swan on the river Liffey, March 17th, 2014

Gerard Hall,* a well known and well respected Catholic theologian from Australia speaks about three turns in modern Catholic systematic theology, viz., (i) the anthropocentric turn, (ii) the turn to political theology and (iii) the embracing of liberation theology in Latin America and further afield.  All these three concerns are inextricably linked with the human experience element of belief. Green theology or ecological concerns in theology can also be brought in under this major direction in modern theology, as indeed can feminist theology. Prior to the early twentieth century, and most especially prior to Vatican II in Catholic circles, theology was almost completely done from a theo-centric or God-centred viewpoint. Faith was seen as the answer or response to divine revelation solely, with little human input. However, the more modern concerns with human experiences in theology take human beings as central to the whole enterprise and allow the more religious or divine dimension to come in after that, or perhaps, more conservatively, simultaneously with that.  In more theological terms, one could say that in more traditionalist theological circles the emphasis was particularly on the transcendence of God, while in more modern theological thinking the emphasis lies squarely on the immanence of the divine godhead in humanity.  This latter type of thinking could actually be construed as a return to an early Christian understanding of humanity that emphasized the fact that there was "a spark of the divine in man." ( This idea, most common to Gnosticism but also present in most Western Mystical Traditions such as Kabbalah and Sufism argues that all of mankind contains within itself the Divine Spark of God which is contained or imprisoned in the body.)

A Brief Account of Phenomenology

Edmund Husserl

Like all things that are studied, the resultant terminology is often confounding, and more often than not, leads the beginner to lose heart.  However, for my purposes here, there is no great complexity involved with this term, though any good philosopher will have to wrestle much with this subject if he is studying it academically.  That task, thankfully, is beyond our purposes here.  Briefly, phenomenology refers to a philosophical movement founded by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938) that concentrated on the reflection upon and the study of the structures of consciousness and those phenomena that appear in such acts of consciousness.  The empiricists had argued strongly that knowledge comes from sensory experience only, that is through the five senses solely, while phenomenology would see knowledge as coming through the total and fuller experience of consciousness itself. In other words, our experience is simply a broader phenomenon than our individual and even collective senses might allow.  Somehow, consciousness, then, is more.  Here, I return to what I particularly like to describe our humanity as, namely a phenomenon that is more than the sum of its parts.  My philosophical anthropology may be simply put as attempting to delineate "the more" that is humanity.

What impresses this writer here is that Husserl was a brilliant mathematician, who after achieving his Ph.D. in mathematics, turned to philosophy. (Indeed many mathematicians were to turn to philosophy, as did also the famous Bertrand Russell in England).  What further impresses me is that Husserl never ruled out religious experiences, quite simply because his phenomenology was broad enough to embrace all experiences, including the religious.  The following quotation from Prof. Herbert Spiegelberg is especially significant for this writer: "While outward religious practice never entered his life any more than it did that of most academic scholars of the time, his mind remained open for the religious phenomenon as for any other genuine experience." (See this link Here)

To cut a history of a very complex philosophy short, for our purposes here, Husserl influenced his friend and pupil Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), on whose existential phenomenology, the great Catholic Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner (1904-1984) was to base his transcendental phenomenology.  Rahner's approach, consequently, highlights the transcendental qualities of human experience, those qualities that open experience ever outwards, that is, in my words, to the more.  We are, according to Rahner, first and foremost a question to ourselves.  We live within mystery as fish live within the sea.  All our human longing and knowing do not dint or curb or lessen the deepest human transcendental questioning: Who are we? Why do we exist rather than not exist? What is it that we are called to be? Who or what does this calling to human beings in the world?

I remember struggling with Rahner's last great work The Foundations of Christian Faith, way back in the late 1970s.  One way or another, it seemed to me at the time, and still does, that this great work saw human experiences as foundational to christian experience, or, if you like, to faith.  Let me, therefore, finish this section with the words of Rev. Dr. Gerard Hall:

The Christian message is addressed to the totality of the human person--what Rahner calls the "experience of subjectivity" or the "original experience" of being human. This is the experience of mystery and radical self-questioning through which we transcend the limitations of the self and confront the whole. This radical self-questioning is what makes us who we are: we ask if death is final, if there is a purpose to life, if there is ultimate meaning to our existence? The searching human person experiences him/herself as "self-transcending being": one's self is revealed as 'more' than one's self. There is this fundamental relationship to mystery, God, Being or Holy Truth. To be human is to be called to be something 'other' than what we know ourselves to be at any moment of our earthly, human lives. (See HERE)

It seems to me that the human person is a mystery to himself or herself, a mystery that asks deep and ultimate questions of the human mind and heart.  Philosophy, if it is worth its salt at all, is that subject matter, or that method of thinking that teaches the human person much humility.  The human mind is indeed finite and yet is filled with a desire to ask a veritable infinity of questions.  We desire to know more and more and more.  And yet, no matter what amount of knowledge we amass, and no matter what amount of love we experience, we are fated to be extinguished just like a weak candle flame that can be blown out by the weakest of breaths.  It is sobering, indeed, to be a true philosopher of life.  The words that Shakespeare puts in his hero Hamlet's mouth, words issued to his friend Horatio, come to my mind here: "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy..." (Act 1, Sc 5) And these are sobering words that all of us should take to heart. They are, indeed, Socratic in temper, and justly so.  Socrates, after all, had advised any good philosopher to first admit his ignorance and thence proceed.

It is in generalizing from all too particular and limited viewpoints that much untruth and falsity emerge.  In this regard, the fallacy of reductionism blurs all truth.  And so it is that the turn to experience in its wholeness, in its sheer fullness, through a phenomenology that reaches for the more, appeals so much to this writer here.  I conclude, this rather strained post with the reflection that we encounter life in its mystery rather like a pool (or ocean) into which we dive than as a problem that presents itself like a wall against which we might vainly and meaninglessly bang our heads.  And the more, the more, the more... it opens out into so much wonder, so much mystery, so much that is beyond us, and it draws us ever onward into the more, the more, the more...

* Rev. Gerard Hall, sm is the Head of the School of Theology at McAuley Campus, Banyo, Brisbane -Australian Catholic University. His home page can be accessed HERE

Journal of a Soul 44

And What or Who Keeps you Going?

That is a good question indeed.  Especially when some people give up on life, while others apparently, no matter how tough life is for them, manage somehow to "keep on keeping on." In case you don't know the provenance of those last several words, they come from a song of Bob Dylan called Tangled Up In Blue.  That song is one of my favourites from the pen of Bob Dylan as it has haunting lyrics which show the deep inner longing of a drifter for love, companionship or meaning in his life.  Interestingly, Dylan mixes past, present and future tenses in this song with consummate ease, with an readiness of transition that is magical. Indeed he changes person, too, from verse to verse, even changing the "I" of the first verse to "he" and "she" in his later concerts.  But that only adds to the magic, wonder and beauty of this wonderful song.  Lest I lose my path in this post, I had better curb my musical passions here, and point out that the phrase "keep on keeping on" is an important one for me that shows the strength, persistence and determination of the traveller or wayfarer in life. Now let me turn my attention to the question posed in the title of this post.  What, indeed, you may ask, keeps me going?  Let me attempt to list those reasons in no particular order.

1. My Job.  

I remember Pat Kenny, one of our foremost broadcasters here in Ireland, remarking that he was lucky as his hobby became his profession.  He was luckier still as he is currently the best paid broadcaster in the country at 66 years of age.  While few of us can boast the contentment Kenny talks about, some of us do get immeasurable satisfaction from our work.  At the moment, I count myself one of those lucky souls.  Not that my job was always that rewarding.  It's just that I was lucky to realize that m  y job was driving me crazy at 48 and I decided to change track.  In all of that, self-awareness is of utmost importance. There is simply no sense in staying in a job that is soul-destroying.  So I retrained as a Resource and Special Education teacher and left the main stream classroom to begin working with autistic boys, mainly those with Asperger's Syndrome in the area of Social Skills and Communications.  I also do learning support in Mathematics for the school at large.  This is all extremely rewarding work as I can see the results of my labour on a daily basis.  I suppose the big thing in this work on a personal level is simply being needed.  That is why being unemployed leads to such depression in the lives of those afflicted with that dreadful problem.

2. My Creative Outlets

Creativity can never be underestimated as it is literally the food of the soul if I may use a metaphor.  Ever since I can remember I have been a writer, and over the years I have had many bits and pieces published here and there.  In these more recent days I have been engaged in blogging.  This latter has been a soul-saver for me as it allows me to instantly publish online the ideas and, more correctly and importantly, my concerns online.  I also write poems in two languages, English obviously, and then, also, in my native tongue, Gaeilge or Gaelic or as it is more commonly called Irish.  By writing, I am engaged in getting to know myself better, and consequently becoming more contented.  If one reads and writes poems as I do, then you will appreciate that poetry does not really sell, that getting published is difficult to say the least.  However, I remind myself often, as one poet wisely counselled me once, that it is more important that a person writes a poem than that many people read it.  If only a few others read it, in a writing group or in some community setting, then that is the reward.

Other creative outlets are reading, listening to music, travelling and going out with friends. Lest this become like a boring list of my hobbies as would appear on a CV, let me proceed onto the next point.

3. My Spirituality or Religion 

In more recent times, religion has become a somewhat sullied word, while spirituality has become a more positive one.  In my young day, I remember the good things about religion: (i) the sense of wonder evoked by what seemed to me as a child to be very colourful and dignified services, (ii) the sense of a mystery or something divine beyond me, (iii) the beauty of the Latin language and of the hymns and (iv) the sense of the unity within the community. I have long ceased to be a practising Catholic, but I can still tap into some of those old feelings when I attend funerals, baptisms, and Christmas and Easter services.  

However, secularization has long since consigned the role of religion in Ireland to the periphery of life.  As well as a more secularized society, there were indeed intrinsic and endemic problems within the Catholic Church itself.  Those problems in short were the corruption of power and the abuse of that power through allowing child abuse by clerics to go unchecked.  One of the most crippling aspects of any organised religion is the abuse of power. It happens in all and every religion, and let none of us forget that.  Such happens in every human organization: there will always be people who hunger for power and control over others, and they will use every doctrine under the sun to hang onto that power so that they can use it and abuse it.  In every human organization, be it church, state, government, medicine, law, or any other one, those who hunger for power will manage to get their way into the top echelons.  It is only now - in the last ten or so years - that we here in Ireland are properly watching and checking all professions. It is a truism that needs repeating that no organization can monitor or check itself Here I recall that old Latin quotation attributed to Juvenal:  "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" "Who will guard the guards?" A question still worth asking 2000 years later.

Like the Dalai Lama, the smile on Pope Francis' face says it all!!

Religion, uncoupled from spirituality, is a mere power structure that aims at controlling people, at least in certain people's hands.  That's why the election of Pope Francis was/is one of the more prophetic things that have happened in the Roman Catholic Church in the past 50 years.  For me, as for many Catholics, Francis is on a par with another prophetic Pope, namely John XXIII who inspired and opened the historic and prophetic Vatican II.   It was not by chance that Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose Francis as his name as pontiff, as St Francis was the apostle of the poor and unfortunate, with a deep commitment to ecology.  It is more than apparent by his actions that Pope Francis is a highly spiritual man who loves ministering to the poor, and all his actions speak of one with a deep conviction and commitment to Christian principles.  In short, he is Christlike, not church-like!  And there lies the difference between him and  his immediate predecessor. Here is an interesting post written by an unusual but firmly believing (non-Catholic) Christian on why he admires Pope Francis:  Boeskool.com.  His comments are really worth reading and I have signed up to be a member of his blog: they boil down to the fact that Pope Francis is Jesus-like, that is he is more interested in spirituality and in acting like Jesus than in the power structures of the Church.  He is an old man of 77, but his spirituality allows him to walk, smile, talk, and obviously think and feel like a far younger man,  Maybe, just maybe, this man can turn the tide for the Roman Catholic Church, but he must be meeting some opposition within its power structures.  Unfortunately, that is why the bigger Churches are losing so many members: they are too petrified literally - "petrified" means stone-like, unmoved and unmoving.  That is where and how power corrupts, and boy does it corrupt no matter where frail human beings belong.  Finally, it is no wonder to this writer at least that Pope Francis is a Jesuit, one of the foremost orders in the Roman Catholic Church who truly believe in discerning the signs of the times, in discerning their own relationship with Christ and with humanity as a whole.

Spirituality for this writer is all about connection or connectedness with all of creation, which obviously includes other humans.  It is about union with whatever power or spirit runs through the heart of this universe and keeps it "together."  It has involved me in community work, in helping others through the Society of St Vincent de Paul and so on.  It inspires me to meditate and do yoga practices with others.  It also inspires me to read spiritual classics from all traditions.  That's what I love about these modern times where pluralism is more important than uniformity.  I remember a scholar once informing me that unity never means uniformity, and I have never forgotten that piece of wisdom.  (Interestingly Pope Francis realizes that as he says that even atheists can get into heaven if they live moral lives. Mind you, he's only repeating the teachings of Vatican II here!) No matter what religion one belongs to, even none, everyone has a spiritual sense.  I will write later in these posts about the spirituality of atheism, and indeed this topic has been written about by a few scholars in more recent years.

And what is it all about?

I will finish this rather meandering post with this question as it was one put to me when I was only 22 and a young teacher beginning my career.  I was so innocent and "green about the gills" back then that it is almost embarrassing to remember the way I was.  However, such is life and such is the cost of experience.  Anyway, one morning a man called Ger Smith asked me that question.  I was too young and too busy to take the man seriously, far too caught up in my own little world.  It was only some three years later when I had learnt that Ger had died from a congenital heart condition that none of us his colleagues ever knew about at the time., that I realized the import of Ger's question both for him and indeed for all thinking and feeling beings.  If you like, that question, along with legions of others over the years, opened up a giant unknown world to me, a world of infinite questions seeking answers or at least seeking better forms of questions as Rev Dr. Patrick Wallace used to put it back in the day.  Really good and deep questions open us up to mystery and never confusion.  And mystery, as they say, is an ocean we dive into, and never ever a wall against which we bash our cognitive heads. And so to Ger, RIP, I owe a debt of gratitude for opening up the vistas of mystery to me all those years ago.  I do hope that someone somewhere holds you in their heart.

Journal of a Soul 25

A Note on Repetition

bank of Ireland, College Green, Dublin, June 2013

Good teachers and lecturers often repeat important points in their classes or lectures.  I remember reading somewhere that when T.S. Eliot was asked why he repeated certain themes so often he replied to this effect (obviously I'm paraphrasing his words as I don't recall them exactly), "Ah, but I always repeated them in different ways!"  Thus it is with any good teacher - he or she will repeat their important points in as many ways as possible to hammer them home.  I am  conscious that I may be repeating things here for the same reason, but I am also aware that I may be unconsciously repeating things, too, like a broken record, as my mother used to say.  I hope that when I repeat things that they are in the former manner not the latter here.  Preachers or politicians who speak off the cuff often repeat themselves unawares.  Hopefully these thoughts are not in that fashion either.

Life Interrupts

What makes life so interesting is its sheer complexity and uncertainty.  No matter what plans we make, the sheer randomness and chaotic nature of life insists on interrupting us.  We think we are in control of our own little lives.  I suppose that is the way we moderns have been brought up - that is with a sense of our own sheer individuality and separateness as an autonomous self.  Those who read history, especially the history of ideas, will know that individuality is a concept that has only loomed large in the last 200 years or so.  We somehow stupidly believe the world revolves around us.  We are stuck in an outmoded concept of selfhood.  Let me call this idea of selfhood the Ptolemaic notion of the self.  However, if we really reflect upon it, any really worthwhile, practical or commonsense (ironically, this is not all that common at all) notion of the self will be what I call a Copernican or Postmodern one which acknowledges that the self is orbitting with many other selves around each other.  Whether we like it or not, reality interrupts our tiny plans, and that's what they are, tiny, though not insignificant for us - indeed very significant for us, but terribly insignificant for others.  Hence we need perspective and not a little humour.  A sense of humour is important so we do not take our "self" too seriously.

Acknowledging Life's Interruptions

O'Connell Bridge, Dublin, June, 2013

I'll finish off this current posts with some reflections in the form of questions as well as in the form of statements as there are no general answers when one speaks about personal development, human development, counselling or meditation that will fit every one's situation precisely.  Of course, like all human sciences, there are general principles and axioms, but they have to be tailored to the individual's situation.  Therefore a mix of both is the best methodology for our purposes here.

• What are my main preoccupations at the moment? (Personal health or that of loved ones; financial worries;professional concerns; personal disagreements; depression etc)
• What are my senses being bombarded with from day to day?
• How stressed am I?
• What do I need to let go of?
• Who do I need to let go of?
• Can I let go of them?
• What do I need to accept in my life?
• Who do I need to accept in my life?
• What does A or B event show me about my self?
• What does Xor Y person and my interaction with them show me about my self?
• How do I deal with a, b, c, d, e, etc interruptions?  Can I just let them come or go in an objective fashion?
• Why should I let my "self" be buffetted about by events and by others rather randomly in the sense that I let them consume me?
• Why can't I accept them objectively and let them go without consuming me?

Erich Fromm, the great social psychologist and psychoanalyst used to say that "nothing human is alien to me!"  I remember a former lecturer in spirituality saying something on similar lines: "Nothing human is foreign to spirituality!"  All is grist to our mill.  In this sense, then, in the sense of all my above paragraphs, there is never a denial of life in all its vicissitudes at play in meditation.  In other words, there is never a denial of good and evil in meditation or any real spirituality because what meditation and spirituality are about is acceptance, recognition and attitude.  We can choose our attitude to life, to all its ups and downs, ins and outs.  In a certain sense meditation, spirituality, and counselling and psychotherapeutic practices have much in common with Stoic philosophy, being able to stand back and observe life from a still point or from an objective place which the author I was discussing in my last post, namely Singer calls "the seat of self!"

I wish whoever reads this wee post as well as my own self a hearty welcome and the persistence in practice to reach that objective seat!

Journal of a Soul 23

Humpty Dumpty Has A Great Fall

Sunset, Malahide, Co Dublin, June 2013

When we are stressed, things begin to shatter and scatter all over the place.  It is as if the windscreen of our view on the world has shattered into a million pieces.  We might even recall the apt words from W.B. Yeats' poem The Second Coming: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."  Yeats was, of course, referring to a global crisis or disintegration of civilization in the wake of the First World War. The next line, which most people do not quote, strongly confirms  this truth: "mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." However, perhaps the idea of personal disintegration is as horrible an experience or fear as that of the more global disintegration of the outer world.  Yeats had summed up wonderfully in these first quoted words the experience of either inner (micro or personal) or outer (macro or global) disintegration.  One thing is sure, disintegration is a horrifying experience as anyone who has experienced any form of break down or falling apart will aver.

Putting Humpty Dumpty Together Again

We humans are at base a contradictory and paradoxical sort.  We are, on the one hand driven by greed, envy, anger or ego to conquer, desecrate, rip apart and destroy both things and other sentient beings, and, on the other hand, we are inspired by justice, generosity, pity or love to help, consecrate, embrace, lift up and bind together both things and other sentient beings.  Those of us who are by nature optimists believe that the second human impulse to the good vastly outweighs the former, the impulse to evil.  In other words we are here brought back to the inevitable mystery of squaring good with evil.  Freud spoke about these in terms of The Desire to Live: Eros and The Desire to Die: Thanatos.  Indeed, in speaking so, he was commenting on the basic paradoxical nature of the human condition.

Meditation Helps Put Humpty Together

I better begin this paragraph with a caveat which I will write is capitals here: THERE SIMPLY IS NO EASY ANSWER: THERE IS NO PANACEA.  Meditation is no panacea, no instant quick fix.  Rather it is a help, a sort of brush to help us clean up the breakages of our life - excuse the rather awkward metaphor here.  There is a centre of agency, a Still Point, a Seat where the Observer or Witness sits and from which we calmly review the scattered and broken pieces of our life.  As one who tries his best to pull himself together, I find that time spent in meditation helps me to "get my act together,"  a very common metaphor indeed, but nonetheless very true.  Meditation has to be practised on an on-going and regular basis to give one equanimity and peace of mind where things somehow hold together or cohere for us as we go through our daily tasks.  One won't feel 100% most of the time, if ever, but certainly  you will not be in the failure or no grade stakes where everything shatters completely.

My shadow, June 2013

Michael A. Singer in The Untethered Soul (See last post for details of this book and a link to his home page) suggests that we must move from "an outer solution consciousness" to "an inner solution consciousness" (p. 16).  He goes on to stress that there is a part in all of us that can "actually abstract from your own melodrama.  You can watch yourself be jealous or angry..." (p.16)  I admit that this is far easier said than done.  If one has fallen apart there is no amount of meditating that will bring you back together.  You may have to have medical intervention first, as I did, before I had gained enough stability to sail alone and embrace meditation as a repaired yacht might sail anew into the wind.  I have dealt with students with ASD and OCD where CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy) had not a hope of being deployed until the lads had been brought to stability by psychiatric intervention.  Hence,  my caveat in the first few lines of this paragraph.  However, once this caveat has been accepted, reality and commonsense being equally embraced, meditation, then and then only can and does work wonders.

Pointed Questions on the Road to the Still Point or Observer's Seat

Singer refers to one of his teachers Romana Maharshi (1879-1950) who used to recommend that the way to attain inner freedom was to "continuously and sincerely" ask the question "who am I" as you meditate. (p. 23)  In this way, I believe, that such questioning will bring one ever nearer the Still Point of Being or the Observer's Seat (my metaphor for SP).  To finish this post I'm going to use the questions I will use for my meditation session immediately after writing this post:

• Who am I that sits here?
• Who is the thinker of these thoughts?
• Who is the feeler of these feelings?
• Who is feeling this sadness that now inhabits my soul?
• Who is experiencing this confusion?
• Who is feeling this fear?
• Who is feeling this love?
• Who is the one who asks these questions?
• Who, O who is this "I"?

And so on, ever inward to the Still Point... ah but the journey is so long and so slow... caveat, caveat... caveat...