Poems I Journey With 28

T.S. Eliot said in “Burnt Norton,” the first poem in the sequence of poems called “Four Quartets,” that “human kind cannot bear very much reality.” Reality here, I contend, can be interpreted as all that wears us down as human beings as we try to negotiate our way through life, as we try to cope with its many highs and lows and make some meaning of our own journey through it. Again, I repeat this great poet’s words merely to highlight our need for some form of escapism from time to time: a good holiday, an inspiring read, celebrations of all kinds, concerts, drama, plays, music recitals, and all the cultural conventions and traditions that attempt to help human kind cope with the “jagged edges of existence” or “reality” as T.S. Eliot puts it in the above quoted poem.

Here, I’d like to return to two poems from the pen of our great national Nobel Laureate for Literature, W.B. Yeats and reproduce here for the readers of these musings two lovely refreshing poems that quite soothe my drooping spirits in these stressful days after a traffic accident.

Poem 1: The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1888):

Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Poem 2: The Song of Wandering Aengus

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

Source: The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)

Briefest of Commentaries

Yeats was born in 1865 and so he was only 23 when he wrote “Lake Isle of Innisfree” while he was 34 when he wrote the second poem. Eleven years is a long time in anyone’s life, and the second poem is obviously a far more mature and far deeper poem than the first. However, they are both written against the background of the nourishing and sustaining power of nature for us humans. In short, a good walk out in nature can heal many a broken heart and lift many a depressed spirit. These poems help me cope with life then at this first level, that is, at the level of the balm, the comfort and the healing that nature can offer us if we are open to her charms.

As Yeats grew older he became much more interested in what we in Ireland call the “Celtic Twilight” period, namely that Romantic turning back not alone to nature, but also to mythology and the strong links that mythology had with nature as it developed.  Also Yeats as a poet became far more enchanted with anything to do with mystery, mystique and, indeed the mystical. To commune with nature was to commune with the sustaining power behind that universe – the pagan Celtic gods as represented in that wonderful body of Gaelic Celtic mythology that he himself did much to preserve and to promulgate.

The “fire” that was in his head is a very potent line because it shows the passion for nature that is in Aengus’s mind and indeed in that of the poet himself. Again, Aengus cuts and peels a “hazel wand” and we are immediately enchanted with a magical act that brings us into a more mystical world to which we can escape from the harsh reality around us.  Everything around Aengus is magical and mystical and shot through with the powers of the gods of nature. There are moths on the wing there while the very heavens contain the mystical “moth-like stars” and the repetition of words serves to enchant us further as this is indeed the song of a wanderer through nature with all its healing attributes – indeed it yields up a “silver trout” to feed us on our journey.

Then we are invited into Aengus’s company as he lights a fire on the forest or wood floor, and then some mysterious person calls Aengus, or indeed us the reader, by our name. For sure, we are now in the mythical and mystical woods of the Celtic imagination, of the Celtic Twilight.  Indeed, we are so enchanted that we want to stay there with Aengus.  Like a fairy presence, this female voice changes into a beautiful girl who enchants Aengus and us the readers:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Reading the final verse, this commentator writing these few reflections feels old like Aengus in the poem: “old with wandering” or old and worn out from looking for meaning in an often sad and painful world.  But this final verse is full of promise and hope; full of beauty and truth; full of wisdom and inspiration, for we truly can live in an enchanted world when we read those wonderful final lines of this second poem:

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 73

Poem 73

The Tao is always at ease.

It overcomes without competing,

answers without speaking a word,

arrives without being summoned,

accomplishes without a plan.

Its net covers the whole universe.

And though its meshes are wide,

it doesn't let a thing slip through.

Commentary

What we have here is a short lyric praising the Tao.  Once again, commentary is perhaps more than usally superfluous, given its sheer succinctness.  Also, as is the case with most devotional and spiritual treatises, their authors praise the object of that act to the highest degree.  Once more, as in praises of the beloved in all love poetry, exaggeration is used again and again, e.g., "It overcomes without competing" - it is at once paradox as well as sheer exaggeration. "It answers without speaking" and accomplishes all it needs to "without a plan."  Quite obviously, we humans cannot get our head around any of these exaggerations and paradoxes as they contradict our lived experiences of the world.

However, once again, we are confronted with the nature of reality - what is the real world? What is reality in itself? As everything eventually breaks down according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics perhaps contemplating the wisdom that everything on this side of the grave will fade and pass - almost into oblivion when the last people who could possibly remember little us have passed, too - might help us to appreciate the wisdom our Taoist poet is presenting for our contemplation in the above poetic lines.  

It would seem also that our author wants his readers to learn to go with the flow; to realise that, in this world of experience everything does fit in, that there is an underlying pattern to things that is beyond our ken; that nothing is ever lost, that everything forms part of a greater whole; that there is an order despite the seeming disorder.

Namaste. 

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 45

Poem 45

True perfection seems imperfect,

yet it is perfectly itself.

True fullness seems empty,

yet it is fully present.

True straightness seems crooked.

True wisdom seems foolish.

True art seems artless.

The Master allows things to happen.

She shapes events as they come.

She steps out of the way

and lets the Tao speak for itself.

Commentary

Howth Harbour, 2003

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on the Tao te Ching 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 36

Poem 36

If you want to shrink something,

you must first allow it to expand.

If you want to get rid of something,

you must first allow it to flourish.

If you want to take something,

you must first allow it to be given.

This is called the subtle perception

of the way things are.

The soft overcomes the hard.

The slow overcomes the fast.

Let your workings remain a mystery.

Just show people the results.

Commentary

Forest Walk, Dalgan Park, 2006

Once again the Taoist poet indulges his predilection for the balance of opposites.  How can one know what white is unless one knows what black is and vice versa? I won't bore the reader by repeating what I said on balance in my last post here.  However, the last two lines of the first stanza contain the essence of the poem.  What is perception? The Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley (1685 - 1753) explored the nature of perception in depth.  He was obsessed with the contrasting ideas of immaterialism versus materialism as a result of his reading the empiricist philosopher John Locke and the skeptical writings of Pierre Bayle. Originally, he had based his line of argument for immaterialism on the fact that colour, taste and other sensible qualities were purely subjective in nature.  However, he later replaced this early thinking by a profound  analysis of the meaning of that quintessential experience of all human beings, namely that of being or, as he, in the footsteps of Shakespeare, called the "to be" question.  What, he asked, did it mean "to be"?  His answer can be simply stated as follows: "To be," when it refers to an object, means "to be perceived." When "to be" refers to a subject it means "to perceive."  Traditionally when discussing Berkeley's philosophy, lecturers used start with his famous statement in Latin, that phrase or formula: "Esse est percipi aut percipere" = "To be is to be perceived or to perceive."

Bishop George Berkeley (1685 - 1753)

Whatever about the views of Bishop Berkeley, who is classed as an idealist in philosophical terms, that is, a follower of any philosophy that maintains that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental or immaterial, or old time or modern day materialists who look on all reality as fundamentality reducible to actual material objects, our Taoist poet, like all writers from any spiritual tradition, speaks about a spiritual realm either beyond the physical one or a more subtle spiritual essence that pervades the physical one.  The person who is open to the Tao is one who has a "subtle perception" that can achieve a sense of the way things are in themselves or as they interconnect.  Again, such a "subtle perception" of reality could be equated with what people of a religious persuasion commonly call a "religious experience," or what certain psychologists and sociologists have called "depth experiences," or "height experiences" or "peak experiences" (Abraham Maslow).  I imagine also that James Joyce's concept or notion of "epiphany" is akin to the meaning all the foregoing expressions.

In conclusion, the old proverb that the "proof of the pudding is in the eating" captures a good deal of what I am attempting to convey in this short post.  Is it not true that everything in the end boils down to our lived experience, rather than to our most exquisite and fine thinking?  This proverb I have just quoted means that the real value of something can be judged only from practical experience, and not from appearance or theory.  It would seem to this commentator that the last two lines of our second stanza above is getting at the same truth, and maybe at times we should do just as those lines counsel us.  Therefore, I'll repeat them by way of conclusion here:

Let your workings remain a mystery.

Just show people the results.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 12

Poem 12

Colours blind the eye.

Sounds deafen the ear.

Flavours numb the taste.

Thoughts weaken the mind.

Desires wither the heart.

The Master observes the world

but trusts his inner vision.

He allows things to come and go.

His heart is open as the sky.

Reflections:

My father used often say that too much of anything is never good for us.  It is a truism worth repeating that moderation is possibly the best key to life in order to open up all its possibilities.  There is something in us that drives us to want more and more and more. That drive is more than likely part of our primordial instinct to survive. We all want success in life and some of us equate that with status, position in society or wealth.  One just has to take a few steps back and observe how obsessive people become about all of these things. Human beings, in building up an identity, accumulate all of the aforementioned and further a lot of our number become driven to acquire more and more.  And yet none of these things in themselves, either singly, or together necessarily brings us happiness.  Something else is needed.  Onto this scene, then, enter the various religions and spiritualities that seek to offer paths to happiness.   

Attachment and Detachment

Once again, let us return to the Second Noble Truth of Buddhism which reflects the message intended by the above Taoist poem.  This truth insists that there is a definite cause to human suffering and, that is, that all our desires and cravings are based on our ignorance of reality. This ignorance causes us to cling to the things of the world like wealth and success and all their appurtenances  as that which is truly valuable and real.  This Second Truth, also known as Samudaya, tells us that we will be hurt proportionately to the intensity of our attachment or clinging to all these things. Craving can be for sensual experiences like love, money, comfort, success, fame, power and all sorts of pleasant feelings.  Or there can be a craving for being/becoming that leads to a craving that life will continue forever, that there will be an eternal life.

The standard rendering of the Second Noble Truth is that dukkha (suffering or stress) is caused by greed or desire.  Apparently, the actual word for this desire is "tanha," but it is more accurately translated as "thirst" or "craving."  This truth is not telling us that we must give up everything we love and then go live an ascetic life in order to find happiness.  The real issue for us here is far more subtle - it is the issue of our attachment to what we desire and it is this attachment that we must learn to control because if we don't it gets us into trouble (stress or suffering). 

Trees: Newbridge House

In commenting on the above Taoist poem in a rhetorical way, we may say that more and more colours won't necessarily make our lives more colourful; more and more sounds won't necessarily add to the harmony; more and more flavours won't necessarily make the food tastier; more and more thoughts won't necessarily make the mind more intellectually profound nor will more and more desires necessarily make the heart grow fonder. 

Inner versus Outer

St Augustine tells us that he searched for God (we may use this term as a metaphor for meaning if you like) everywhere in the world, through the satisfaction of all the senses and his intellect, but finally found him within, in his own inner self or soul.  He described his way of meditating as that of "interiority." Like the Taoist poet he trusted his "inner vision." All of meditation is about going on that inner or interior journey, that journey down to the real or inner self or still point of being below or above (depending on your preferred spatial metaphor) all our agitated and agitating thoughts.

Candles: Vienna Cathedral

Openness

It is so hard to be open about things: to be open to the self, to others, to the world, to life, to the universe or to whatever is its underlying power.  And yet, that openness is the fruit of much meditation and the promise of all great traditions of spiritual practices.  The intention of this poem is that our hearts too will be "as open as the sky."

Conclusion

In these final lines, I will once again invite the reader to peruse the above poem and let any word, phrase or line strike your attention and then to use that as a mantra for a short ten minute meditation.

Namaste, Friends. 

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 54

Keeping it Real

Ardgillan Park, April, 2014

"Keep it real," is a colloquial phrase that has become very popular in more recent times. The online Urban Dictionary explains it as "being true to oneself and representing oneself in an authentic manner," see here.  Strangely, this explanation all sounds very philosophical, if not existential in its import.  I like to define it as not allowing ourselves the comfort or luxury of escaping into either a dream world or a world of make-believe or quite simply into a world of pure denial.  After all, we all like to take the easy way out, but if we do so continually we become very unreal people, or in the words (actually one word) of the hero or antihero even of Catcher in the Rye, we become "phony."*  That's why I like teaching adolescents, especially Special Needs kids, as they surely do keep me in the real world.

Getting Lost in Abstractions 

Ardgillan Park, April, 2014

I have always found taking flight into abstractions to be one of my weaknesses, in the same league indeed as my love for chocolate.  In my last post I indulged in this a little.  Being of a philosophical and literary frame of mind my imagination can often take flight... and indeed, it is so easy to do so.  After all, which of us does not like indulging himself or herself in either chocolate or philosophy.  However, that's where the import of my opening paragraph comes in. Philosophy, Theology, Mathematics, or whatever subject you wish to mention here becomes quite irrelevant to the man and woman in the street unless it is seasoned well with the spices of reality.  All subjects have to be applied to the very living of life.  Now I am not decrying or vilifying Pure Philosophy, Pure Theology or Pure Maths or any of the pure sciences, I am merely saying that while they all impact upon their applied variety, for the man and woman in the street they are almost wholly irrelevant. (No wonder, all subjects have their applied branch!)

And yet, dear reader, there is a sort of symbiotic relationship between the pure and the applied in all the sciences, both human and natural/physical.  However, life has a way of keeping us all real, and there are no better ways at its disposal than illness, dying and death.  When any or all of these three events hit us we are taught in no uncertain terms "to keep it real!" Let me indulge in a little poetic allusion here by quoting one of my all time favourite poets, T.S. Eliot:

Unreal City,	60
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.	65
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. (See here)

That's one thing you will find in all T.S. Eliot's poems, namely the reality of death.  For the modernists contemporary culture was moribund, lacking in depth and in meaning.  People were almost the "living dead," existing on a superficial level, especially in the cities where it is so hard to put down roots in the unfeeling and lifeless concrete.  Reading such poems always kept life real for me. 

Again reading autobiographies and biographies has always been another passionate hobby of mine, especially those that sought as far as possible to tell the truth in all its naked honesty.  Two recent memoirs come to mind here, that of Nuala O'Faolain and that of Michael Harding, the latter of which I reviewed here.  

In a now famous and moving interview that the writer Nuala O'Faolain did with one of our leading radio presenters Marion Finucane (12 April, 2008) on her then recent diagnosis of cancer in late 2012 she said:

Even if I gained time through the chemotherapy it isn't time I want.  Because as soon as I knew I was going to die soon, the goodness went out of life.... 

For example, I lived somewhere beautiful, but it means nothing to me anymore -- the beauty. For example, twice in my life I have read the whole of Proust. I know it sounds pretentious, but it's not a bit. It's like a huge soap opera. But I tried again the week before last and it was gone, all the magic was gone from it.... 

You see, the cancer is a very ingenious enemy and when you ask somebody how will I actually die? How do you actually die of cancer ?... I don't get an answer because it could be anything. It can move from one organ to the other, it can do this, that or the other. It's already in my liver, for example. So I don't know how it's going to be. And that overshadows everything. And I don't want six months or a year. It's not worth it....  

I actually don't know how we all get away with our unthinkingness. Often, last thing at night I walk the dog down the lane and you look up at the sky illuminated by the moon and behind the moon the Milky Way and, you know, you are nothing on the edge of one planet compared to this universe unimaginably vast up there and unimaginably mysterious.  And I have done that for years, looked up at it and given it a wink and thought 'I don't know what's going on' and I still don't know what's going on, but I can't be consoled by mention of God. I can't.... 

I think look how comfortably I am dying, I have friends and family, I am in this wonderful country, I have money, there is nothing much wrong with me except dying... (See here.  In fact, this whole transcript is worth reading, as is listening to the podcast itself which is even more moving, see here. )

Now, if after reading the above, or perhaps having either read or listened to the interview with Nuala O'Faolain either in part or in full, you are not brought into the real world, then you are totally unfeeling and lacking in even a little empathy.  

The Spire, Dublin's O'Connell St., April, 2014

"Keeping it real" means always living with an awareness of our mortality in the background, even if it is only somewhere in the background.  In other words, I am in no way advocating an obsession with death or dying or even that we become somewhat morbid or pessimistic in our outlook on life.  Most religions see death as not the end of life, but rather as a gateway to another more spiritual realm.  Our above quoted author and journalist, Nuala O'Faolain was an unbeliever, and indeed all humans, believers and unbelievers alike, have a spirituality, a system of beliefs that give their lives meaning.  So, I am in no way decrying any one spirituality or any one belief system at the expense of another.  My thoughts here are about "keeping it real," maintaining a perspective on our mortality that sees illness, dying and death as an inextricable part of the very fabric of life and not an end of that life.  After all, we are creatures of nature ourselves and nature proceeds in a cyclical sense, to such an extent that life goes on despite us.  In a sense our individuality is just one little inconseqential and insignificant dot in an ever expanding universe.  Again such considerations lead me to marvel at the very wonder of existence, at its sheer plenitude and beauty, and at the very wonder of my own mind's drive and passion for knowledge and wisdom, that is a veritable infinite desire to know.  This sheer wonder at the mystery of living endows me with a deep spirituality which makes me fall down in humility before the wonders of the universe.  One of my favourite poets and philosophers, more properly I suppose a philosopher poet, one Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the quintessential philosopher of The English Romantic Movement, once paid a wonderful homage to his father by saying that ever since as a young boy his father had brought him walking out in the countryside to view the night sky his mind had "become habituated to the vast." In Coleridge's sense, he had become a believer in God the Creator of such a vast universe.   And yet Nuala O'Faolain could look at the same vista and remain an unbeliever.  It all depends on one's perspective and one's own feelings in a way. I am inclined to belong to the Coleridgean crew myself! One way or another, whether you are a believer or unbeliever, you have a native or innate spirituality which seeks to make meaning and sense of your own lived experience, of making your own life worthwhile.  

Conclusion

These soul outpourings were inspired by the death of the mother of a friend of mine.  I drove up to the funeral home in Drogheda, some 35 km. away, through the hubbub of speeding traffic and weaving motorways, travelling towards the stillness of death.  There is a lovely tradition in Ireland, which I very much like, and that is reflectively touching the joined hands of the departed.  I noticed several people doing it before me.  That sense of touch brought me back to all the other many times that I touched the hands of the dearly departed: my late grandmother Mary Phoebe Brophy (when I was only 10), those of my father (1993), my mother (2013) and some relatives, friends and even departed pupils over the years.  That feeling is like touching the stone or marble on the altars of my youth.

I would like now to conclude with some quotations on death and dying that are hopeful and inspiring rather than morose or dispiriting:

• The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. ~ Mark Twain

• Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live. ~ Henry Van Dyke

• While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die. ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

• Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.  ~ Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Footnotes:

* The hero or antihero's name is Holden Caulfield and the novel is, of course, written by  J.D. Salinger as long ago as 1951.  However, that book remains all too contemporary in the very universality of its sentiments and indeed in its attempt to make meaning of our little lives.  Here is just one quotation from Holden on the phoniness of life. “I was surrounded by phonies...They were coming in the goddam window.”