Poems I Journey With 16

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 – 1861) was one of the most prominent English poets of the Victorian era, popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime. She was vehemently anti-slavery even though her father had earned much of his wealth from that much maligned, exploitative and cruel industry. She had married her husband Robert Browning in secret and went with him to live in Florence, having been disinherited by her father. Emily Dickinson was an avid fan of Barrett Browning and the latter’s work greatly influenced the American poet who admired her as a woman of achievement. Her popularity in the United States and Britain was further advanced by her stands against social injustice, including slavery in the United States, injustice toward Italian citizens by foreign rulers, and child labour.

Here, let me offer the reader of this blog two poems from Barrett Browning’s pen, “A Musical Instrument” published posthumously and her most frequently anthologized poem “How do I Love Thee?” Both poems speak eloquently for themselves and are rather ethereal and mystical in tone and sentiment. Barrett Browning was extremely spiritual and religious and a gifted linguist and scholar, all self-taught.  She knew Greek, Latin and Hebrew and translated many pieces from the early Fathers of the Church into English and read the Hebrew Bible. All her life she was sickly, but her delicate physical condition did not prevent either her intellectual or spiritual insights and visions.

A Musical Instrument

I.

WHAT was he doing, the great god Pan,

Down in the reeds by the river?

Spreading ruin and scattering ban,

Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,

And breaking the golden lilies afloat

With the dragon-fly on the river.

II.

He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,

From the deep cool bed of the river:

The limpid water turbidly ran,

And the broken lilies a-dying lay,

And the dragon-fly had fled away,

Ere he brought it out of the river.

III.

High on the shore sate the great god Pan,

While turbidly flowed the river;

And hacked and hewed as a great god can,

With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,

Till there was not a sign of a leaf indeed

To prove it fresh from the river.

IV.

He cut it short, did the great god Pan,

(How tall it stood in the river!)

Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,

Steadily from the outside ring,

And notched the poor dry empty thing

In holes, as he sate by the river.

V.

This is the way,' laughed the great god Pan,

Laughed while he sate by the river,)

The only way, since gods began

To make sweet music, they could succeed.'

Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,

He blew in power by the river.

VI.

Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!

Piercing sweet by the river!

Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!

The sun on the hill forgot to die,

And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly

Came back to dream on the river.

VII.

Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,

To laugh as he sits by the river,

Making a poet out of a man:

The true gods sigh for the cost and pain, —

For the reed which grows nevermore again

As a reed with the reeds in the river.

Elizabeth's husband Robert Browning and their son Robert Junior, called Pen

How Do I Love Thee?
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Sonnet XLIII
from Sonnets from the Portuguese, 1845 (published 1850)

Poems I Journey With 11

Clarity versus Unclarity

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

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

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

Louis Macneice 1907 - 1963

Entirely

If we could get the hang of it entirely 

   It would take too long; 

All we know is the splash of words in passing   

   And falling twigs of song, 

And when we try to eavesdrop on the great   

   Presences it is rarely 

That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate   

   Even a phrase entirely. 

If we could find our happiness entirely 

   In somebody else’s arms 

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

   Yammering fire alarms 

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

   Our flesh and almost hourly   

Bell or siren banishes the blue   

   Eyes of Love entirely. 

And if the world were black or white entirely 

   And all the charts were plain 

Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters, 

   A prism of delight and pain, 

We might be surer where we wished to go   

   Or again we might be merely 

Bored but in brute reality there is no 

     Road that is right entirely.

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 47

Poem 47

Without opening your door,
you can open your heart to the world.
Without looking out your window,
you can see the essence of the Tao.

The more you know,
the less you understand.

The Master arrives without leaving,

sees the light without looking,

achieves without doing a thing.

Commentary

Windvane on the lungomare in Catanzaro Lido, January 2016

It is becoming increasingly hard  to come up with new insights with respect to the Tao Te Ching and consequently avoid boring the reader unduly by too much repetition.  I have referred to the balance of opposites many times here already.  However, a central pair of polar opposities that springs to mind is that between Inner and Outer. Indeed, this polarity is quite common in early philosophy and theology in general.  The great early Christian scholar St Augustine of Hippo (354 - 430) was one of the scholars within the early Church to highlight its importance.  Augustine was a restless seeker who sought the meaning of life both in the outside material world and also in the inside spiritual world.  According to his own account of his quest for meaning which he delineated in his wonderful classical biography The Confessions he found the former, while sensually stimulating, to be spiritually stultifying:

Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you.  And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged in to those lovely created things which you made.  You were with me, but I was not with you.  The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness.  You were radiant and resplendent - you put to flight my blindness.  You were fragrant, and I dew in my breath and now pant after you.  I trusted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you.  You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.

Admittedly, Augustine went on to condemn the material things of this world, most especially those related to the body as vitiated with evil and to elevate the spiritual realm to a rather esoteric stratosphere.  In other words, I believe he did not manage to hold the two poles in a healthy balance.  However, whatever about our criticisms of Augustinian philosophy and theology, we cannot overlook his insight that a spiritual dimension inheres within us.  In fact, Augustine spoke of his community of fellow friars as being on a shared journey to God and that this same God could be met in their code of practice (moral behaviour), the priciples they subscribed to (the Christian creed) and in their cultic practices (what I mean here by the word "cult" is any particular system of religious practice or worship: religious ceremones like Mass and so forth). He aslo recommended a life of prayer and meditation that followed a process which he called "interiority," namely that it was by a process of "going within" in prayer that one communed with God.

Now back to poem 47.  Our Taoist author is in essence doing exactly as St Augustine recommended above, namely that he suggests that we can be open to the Tao without physically opening our door and going outside.  Even without doing that, we can open our hearts out to the whole world.

Again, the idea of humankind's ignorance is an old epistemological tenet dating back many years.  Socrates encouraged his hearers to continually declare their ignorance as they sought out deeper and wider knowledge.  That knowledge could best be discovered by a process of asking tough questions to elicit ever clearer answers.  Augustine built on Socrates through Plato by recommending what he described as a "docta ignorantia" or "learned ignorance." This is the sense of the second stanza which declares that "the more we know, the less we understand." If one imagines a sphere as being the amount of accumulated knowledge learned by humankind then as knowledge grows the sphere obviously grows and while we have amassed more knowledge and wisdom there is a gowing surface of knowledge over against an ever-expanding universe of unknown knowledge and wisdom.  In that very same sense, it is often said that the more we know, the more we know what we don't know. This is, in effect, the epistemological thrust behind the lines of the second stanza.

Sometimes we need to rest and to cease from all activity to be open to life.  To be busy is a great pastime but it can often lead to mindlessness and drift on the one hand or an obsession with work or with pleasure on the other.  It is in this sense that we must read the lines of our final stanza:

The Master arrives without leaving,

sees the light without looking,

achieves without doing a thing.

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 68

Patterns

A pencil mandala I drew today - an attempt at a pattern in geometric terms.

In my last post in this blog I spoke about our being a meaning-making species.  For us, it is not enough to experience life in all its vicissitudes and vagaries.  No, we have a deep drive to make sense of it, to see some shape or pattern in the course of our worldly affairs.  We believe that everything we do must be meaningful and have some purpose.  We in the Western world seem to be caught up in rationalizing even our moments of joy and sorrow by attempting to explain these by philosophizing, psychologizing, theologizing, sociologizing, anthropologizing and so on and so forth. That is, we try to superimpose the shape or pattern of our own take on philosophy, psychology, theology, sociology, anthropology and indeed any other "-ology" we may know upon those experiences.  Hence, my title.  

We are the shapers and pattern-makers of our lives.  Indeed, one of the core drives in humanity, it seems to me, is the drive to knowledge, or to know more.  We might even describe this drive as the infinite desire to know. (see the work of the Jesuit theologian and philosopher, Bernard Lonergan, 1906-1986) To me this drive seems to be as strong as the drive within us to love others and be loved in return.  In our desire to learn ever and ever more about our world and indeed about ourselves we have discovered much order in the universe - common principles of mathematics, physics, science and technology and so on. And yet despite all our knowledge there is so much more still unknown.  Further there is also much disorder and chaos around us that we are striving to understand.

In this regard, we have also become aware of the seeming randomness of things and the sheer apparent chaos of both the origins and nature of the universe.  So much so that today scientists are exploring this latter through the use of what they term chaos theory. Epistemologically, coming up with a theory of chaos is in itself by association of the very terms "theory" and "chaos" a way of superimposing order on chaos anyway.  In other words, we are searching for a pattern and order in chaos itself.  Now, that to me is simply mindbendingly wonderful.  Only we humans could come up with that. The WIKI has a wonderfully insightful article on chaos theory within which we read about what the author terms "spontaneous order in chaos" of which he writes: "Under the right conditions chaos will spontaneously evolve into a lockstep pattern." (See HERE ) 

In the field of knowledge we try to discover patterns that are there already in nature in general - such is very pertinent to the growth of all knowledge especially in the natural sciences in general - whether that be the theory of evolution, the discovery and definition of gravity, the discovery of electricity and so on and so forth.  The furtherance of knowledge in the sphere of the natural sciences obviously led to the growth of machines and technologies of all kinds. Likewise, empirical or clinical observances and experiments done with animals and human beings have led to the growth of medical knowledge both in its physiological and psychological aspects.  Scientists have a very simple but effective approach to knowledge in general, that is, that all conclusions offered must be based on the sound foundations of scientific method understood in an objective and unbiased fashion.  

I understand the scientific method as being somewhat open-ended in the sense of the Socratic declaration that we must always declare our ignorance first and not be too quick to jump to narrow conclusions.  No scientist should take a very narrow optic on things, but rather be open to being surprised by the wonder of the universe.  In this sense, I am arguing for an open-ended scientific method that in its practice rules out a narrow scientistic reductionism that reduces all mystery and wonder to mere materialistic or mechanistic constituents. I hasten to add here that as a believer in good solid science I also decry a sort of reverse reductionism - maybe an "inflationism" if I may coin a term - like the approach of fundamental religionists and creationists that seek to look at the mystery and wonder of the universe through an equally narrow optic of Biblical literalism. (Here, let me cite the work of The Institute for Creation Research, which lists a good number of apparently eminent scientists on its web page, but starts off with a very narrow premise, namely one of Biblical literalism. Now, how they can square their very unscientific first principles with science is beyond this writer. They are equally as fundamental as those scientists who preach a narrow scientism that has scant regard for any theology or even philosophy , no matter how well reasoned and academically well researched. (See HERE for information on creationism and its efforts to prove God from science.) In my opinion all good science, and any authentic quest for knowledge in any sphere at all, should start from a neutral and objective first principle, namely a sheer openness to describe as objectively and as clinically as possible what it finds before it.  Starting off from a position of "The Bible is literal truth and everything we seek to find must be viewed from this first principle or axiom" is self-evidently unscientific and indeed unphilosophical in the extreme.  Being a believer after-the-fact is more objective and authentic than being a believer before-the-fact in my opinion.

More than the Intellect

I return here, yet again, to an old chestnut that I repeat so many times in these pages, namely that the intellect is just a small, albeit important, element of what goes to make the human phenomenon.  Multiple Intelligences, a broad theory of the nature of intelligence, offers us an important perspective on the mystery of humanity and of the universe that humanity encounters.  This model was proposed by Howard Gardner in his 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Gardner articulated eight incarnations of human intelligence: (i) the musical–rhythmic, (ii) the visual-spatial, (iii) the verbal-linguistic, (iv) the logical–mathematical, (v) the bodily–kinesthetic, (vi) the interpersonal, (vii) the intrapersonal and (viii) the naturalistic.  To these listed intelligences or kinds of intelligence he later suggested that existential and moral intelligences might also be worthy of being added.  Daniel Goleman, another pioneering and popular American psychologist, has spoken learnedly about what he terms our Emotional Intelligence (EQ). This particular take on the emotions equates more or less with Gardner's Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Intelligences.  There are many other scholars who argue for more intelligences, not the least of which is called Spiritual Intelligence (SQ).  All these categories of intelligence, of course, are an effort to give the lie to the reductionist (another of my favourite terms in these pages, which no doubt the reader is by now bored with to the point of nausea!) pigeon-holing of people by traditional IQ tests as spearheaded by the great 19th century psychologist Alfred Binet and his followers.

More rather than Less

Here is where the proof mentality of reductionists like Dennett and Dawkins and so on can be seen as delimiting. Such philosophers and scientists wish to reduce what the phenomenon of humankind may be to certain categories within a narrow vision of what science and indeed knowledge itself may be.  They would be working from a very narrow take on intelligence, I firmly believe.  They show scant regard for either a philosophy of science broadly understood or a broad take on epistemology. For them epistemology is largely a quaint take on linguistics that is nothing short of meaningless.  The "how" question features largely in their vocabulary to the detriment of the "why" question.  Indeed, some of their number positively avoid the latter question.

Again, Dawkins et al  seem to give short shrift to the concept of holism, that the whole might be greater than the sum of its parts, that the network or grid of connections in the universe just might be more rather than less.  Apologies if this journal of the soul is getting lost sometimes along the back-roads and sometimes veritable labyrinths of theology and philosophy, but once again if we are to take holism for what it truly means we must always stretch for what is more in the human person at all times and this may mean journeying down those by-ways as well as the more obvious highways. 

It is salutary to call to mind that the very term "mind" is in itself a commonly accepted one that refers to a very abstract reality that we intuitively assume exists.  We cannot see it or prove that it exists per se or in se and yet we believe it exists as it gives us a way of describing what the human phenomenon entails.  In fact, many of our human sciences are based on the assumption that it exists: psychology and psychiatry are two major ones that so depend.  We also assume that the mind somehow resides in the brain - at least that was the general assumption until in more recent years research has shown that the mind may also encompass much of the nervous system itself.  There are even those philosophers who maintain that all of human information is an extension of the human mind and so on and so forth.  Here, needless to say, we need to employ the fields of epistemology, philosophy of mind, the psychology of consciousness and so on again.

That anyone of us can assume that either we or our fellows within our various disciplines have a monopoly on knowledge or indeed on how we may find it is sheer arrogance in the extreme.  What's needed here, again, is a Socratic ignorance, or what St Augustine termed a "docta ignorantia", that is a "learned ignorance," an epistemology that leaves us open to greater discoveries and to the sheer wonder of the universe.

It is my argument here the the notions of personality, "the self,"the "soul," "the heart" and the "spirit" are all equally intuitive assumptions akin to that of the mind and symbolise realities we intuitively assume exist.   They are, in my opinion, equally valid working assumptions that make life more livable and more humane. Admittedly, they are terms that may be hijacked by the lunatic fringe which we will always have with us.  That they are easily so hijacked is no reason at all to jettison them from either our vocabulary or our deeper beliefs.   

A Hymn to the More 

A coloured mandala I drew today - the magic and mystery of geometry

Let me here end on a more poetic or soulful note.  Let me sing a hymn to the mind, to the self, to the soul and to the spirit, acknowledging their intuitive presence and their similarities and differences.  Let me sing a hymn which intuitively acknowledges their presence or at least my experience of their presence.  Let me sing a hymn to the "more" in humankind, to its possibilities, to its hopes and desires, to its limitless possibilities and to its dreams and visions of a better world for all, for a greater peace than that which we know now. The hymn that I sing is one that acknowledges so much beyond my limited and finite ken, that bows down in wonder as a minuscule dot on a minuscule planet orbiting a Sun that is itself minuscule in infinite space.  This is a hymn that notes that I am a grace-filled being that experiences his little life as a gift beyond his own making.  Truly mine is a poetic yet humble spirit gifted with a life I am so thankful to live.  My little mind is overwhelmed by the beauty and the wonder that surrounds it, a mind whose desire to know is infinite, that in stretching out its puny boundaries against the huge weight of the universe is awe-struck even that it exists to know anything at all.  This is a prayer of a small mind with an infinite desire to know.  It is a mind that prays the traditional prayer of the old sailors in Brittany long ago "Oh Lord, thy sea is so great and my ship so small."  This is a mind even that allows that this quoted prayer may be metaphoric and not literal, and yet it is a mind that needs to pray, that needs to acknowledge its littleness before the awesome mystery of life and of the universe.  This is a hymn to the "more" in the phenomenon that is human life. This is a hymn to the self that I want to be, to the dreams and visions of the True Self, of the Real Self that resides in the depths within.  This is a hymn to the "more" that is the soul whose home and habitat lies somewhere in the mists of mystery, in the highways and by-ways of an identity greater than the individual, whatever that might be.  This is a prayer that acknowledges the "more" of the great Spirit of the universe that astounds the little self  with its awe and beauty.  This is a hymn to those grace-filled moments of encounter with the "more" which some dare call God.                                                                                                                                          

Journal of a Soul 64

Of Torment

Sand on Donabate Beach

Humans beings are complex creatures.  All our sciences - both natural and human - have attempted to plumb both our depths and our heights.  From depth psychology, person-centered counselling, cognitive behaviour therapy and existential psychotherapy on the one hand to biochemistry, neuroscience and psycho-pharmacology on the other we seek to map both the landscape and the mindscape of what it means to be human.  Whether we have achieved much or not in that task, I suppose is for the scholars in those various areas of specialty to delineate and their clients or patients to give either oral or written testimony as to the efficacy of the various approaches.  Be that as it may, some of our number do remain tormented souls.

A Brief History of Torment 

By torment I mean the proclivity within a certain number of us to mentally torture ourselves.  The history of self-inflicted torment is as old as humanity itself.  I remember when I was studying Scripture many years ago one of our more erudite lecturers introduced us to the ancient Egyptian poem known in English as The Man Who Was Tired of Life or The Dialogue of a Man and His Ba (or Soul). This composition is universally regarded as one of the masterpieces of ancient Egyptian literature. It is also one of the most difficult and continually debated, as well as being the subject of more than one hundred books and articles.  It is the author's mental anguish or torment that intrigues this writer here - one could say, to use a definite anachronism, that this early poem is pure existentialism. This poem dates back to the Twelfth Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, a period that spanned from 1991-1803 BCE.  In the text the man accuses his soul of wanting to desert him, of dragging him towards death before his time. He says that life is too heavy for him to bear, that his heart would come to rest in the West (i.e. the afterlife), that his name would survive and his body would be protected. He urges his soul to be patient and wait for a son to be born to make the offerings the deceased needed in the afterlife. His ba describes the sadness death brings and retorts to the man's complaints about his lack of worth, his being cut off from humanity and the attractiveness of death by exhorting him to embrace life and promises to stay with him. Scholars have disputed as to whether the author is intending to take his own life or not.  One way or another the author of the piece is a highly tormented being and one full of angst to use yet another anachronistic term associated with existentialism. Here is a brief snatch from this rather pessimistic and angst-ridden poem:

To whom can I speak today?
Hearts are rapacious
And everyone takes his neighbour's goods.   [To whom can I speak today?]
Gentleness has perished
And the violent man has come down on everyone.
To whom can I speak today?
Men are contented with evil
And goodness is neglected everywhere.
To whom can I speak today? (see HERE)

Moonlight over Donabate strand this evening

There are other ancient documents, too.  For example, the earliest is the Sumerian text  A Man and His God, dating from 2000 - 1700 BCE describes the unjust and innocent sufferings of a righteous man. An Akkadian text called Ludlul Bel Nemeqi (I will praise the Lord of Wisdom), dating from 1000 BC, describes a nobleman praising the Babylonian god Marduk. This god had healed the stricken nobleman on account of his religious and cultic piety. Yet another ancient text is the Babylonian Theodicy which was composed between 1400 and 800 BCE. It consists of a dialogue between a sufferer and a comforter that seeks to explain why an innocent and good-living man should suffer. All these ancient compositions thematically resonate with the book of Job and demonstrate that the themes of theodicy were important pieces of the theological discourse in the ancient Near East. 

Of the Book of Job the WIKI records that it is:

one of the Writings (Ketuvim) of the Hebrew Bible, and the first poetical book in the Christian Old Testament.^[1] Addressing the theme of God's justice in the face of human suffering - or more simply, "Why do the righteous suffer?"^[2] - it is a rich theological work, setting out a variety of perspectives.^[3] It has been widely and often extravagantly praised for its literary qualities - "The greatest poem of ancient and modern times," according to Tennyson,^[4] and the only book of the Bible on one list of "The 100 Best Books of All Time". (HERE)

Job simply cannot understand why he is seemingly being punished by God as quite obviously he has been a righteous and good-living man all his life.  The ancient theology is quite rightly debunked by Job, that is, the traditional theology that argued that retribution always followed an evil man's deeds and that the good and righteous always prospered. That's why he gets so upset with his so-called comforters who argue that he must have done something wrong to merit God's retribution.  However, Job will have none of their arguments.  For him, the questions of God's justice and of human suffering are far more complex than traditional  theological thought was able to comprehend.  I shan't rehearse any of Job's arguments and protestations here save to illustrate how tormented a soul Job was. Very early in Chapter 3 he laments the fact that he was even born at all:

“Why is light given to him who is in misery,
    and life to the bitter in soul,
21 who long for death, but it comes not,
    and dig for it more than for hidden treasures,
22 who rejoice exceedingly
    and are glad when they find the grave?
23 Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden,
    whom God has hedged in?
24 For my sighing comes instead of[a] my bread,
    and my groanings are poured out like water.
25 For the thing that I fear comes upon me,
    and what I dread befalls me.
26 I am not at ease, nor am I quiet;    I have no rest, but trouble comes.” (Job 3: 20-26) ESV

There are many other quotations from the Book of Job that illustrate all too vividly his tormented state of mind, but quoting more of them would be redundant to my argumentation here.  I merely wish to comment on the angst or torment dimension of his mind. Let me place a quotation here from the father of Existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard, a quotation I'm sure I have used here on too many occasions:

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?” 

One can note the same existential angst and torment in all these quotations, both ancient and more modern.  One might also mention here another tortured literary soul, viz., Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) As I noted some years ago in a previous blog (Dostoyevsky):  The first book I read by Dostoyevsky was Notes From Underground.  This book was written in 1864 and  is a short novel that is quite easily read.   It is considered by many to be the world's first existentialist novel. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as "The Underground Man") who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg.  I was transfixed by this nameless character's alienation as a young nineteen year old student.  The "Underground Man's" life is quite dry and meaningless and without purpose and he seems to delight in pain and suffering which alone seem to keep him conscious of actually being alive.  He describes war early on in this small novel as being people's rebellion against the assumption that everything needs to happen for a purpose, because humans do things without purpose, and this is what determines human history.  Hence, life is wearisome, tedious, frustrating and tormenting.  Here, our anonymous antihero tells us that “I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.” Consciousness itself is the problem.  The fact that suffering exists is a given but the fact that I am aware or conscious of it just adds to my human burden.  Our man is a highly educated and sophisticated human being who is deeply disillusioned and he savages both the lofty romanticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the contemporary socialist principles that correspond to his middle age.  This is a very dark novel, written in equally dark times. However, we also must bear in mind that its author is also a deeply suffering, tormented and alienated individual.

Fairview Park, Autumn 2013

Torment Today

That torment exists in our world today is wholly and patently beyond doubt.  In the past few days here in Ireland a young lad of eighteen years of age took the lives of his eight year old twin brothers and then drove some distance and ended his own life in a lonely spot on the bank of a river.  What desperation of soul or torment of mind drove him to that awful crime and sad denouement in the taking of his own life?  perhaps we'll never know.  One could list many more examples of such lonely despair, of such inner desperation and painful torment, but such a rehearsal would only serve to sicken both this writer and his intended readers. This contribution to the journal of a soul was not meant to be a sad one.  Rather, it was meant to be a sobering one calling us back to a realism that means we have to have our feet firmly planted in the ground of meaning in our own lives.  All these instances of torment must call us to a new and strong realism that is able to accept the pain and suffering that is obviously there in the lives of all human beings and to have the strength to work to help assuage it. Denial of mental torment and suffering is an avoidance of the important issue of mental health both in our families and in our communities.  This reflection is a call to be active and pro-active, to be on the alert for signs and symptoms of distress, depression and torment in the lives of significant others.

Choosing Life

The tormented want escape from their troubles.  Our task is to help them realize that an action like suicide is too extreme a reaction to what may be a mere temporary though significant problem.  There is always a possible solution to every problem if people are taught only to reach out to all the aid that is available all around them today.  Sigmund Freud spoke about two drives in life: Eros - the drive to procreate and indeed to live and Thanatos - the drive towards death and extinction.  When these two options present themselves to us we must train our hearts and minds to choose Life always and to avoid the drive towards death as an extreme answer to what are often temporary problems.  We choose life everyday when we get up and face the world, when we go out there to work and to be with others, to help them and care for them and to simply do our best in everything that we do.  We choose death every time we are in denial, ever time we are negative to self and others, every time we chastise and complain, refuse to get up or go to work, every time we intentionally malinger or put obstacles in the way of others.  Let us have courage always to face life head on, to choose it over death as a way of living happily and cheerily on Mother Earth.  Let us always be kind and compassionate to self and others and to plant those seeds of kindness and compassion in the hearts of our fellows.