Thoughts on the Tao te Ching 39

Poem 39

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

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

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

Commentary

Pont des Arts, Paris, June, 2007

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

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

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

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

The Master views the parts with compassion,

because he understands the whole.

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

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

Journal of a Soul 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.” 

Journal of a Soul 9 - The Dark (K)night of the Soul

The journey of the Self to Self-knowledge is a long and arduous one as any pilgrim will tell you.  To put this in a spiritual (or "religious" in the best sense of that word) way is to say that the journey of the Soul to God is indeed a difficult one.  As an agnostic Buddhist I see this second sentence in a metaphorical way - another way of expressing our journey to authenticity, self-knowledge or greater self-awareness.  I am happy with all expressions of this journey which is very important to the life of every individual no matter what his or her spiritual allegiance from theistic to atheistic and all the shades in-between the two polarities. 

In my life I have read as much spiritual literature as well as general literature as a way of making sense of the life I am confronted with (as Heidegger puts it, I did not ask to be born - I was thrown out there into existence - dasein which literally means being-there) or indeed gifted with (many philosophers, outside Christian believers have used the idea of life's giftedness quality, e.g., Michael J. Sandel (b. 1953), professor of political philosophy at Harvard.  Here's what my own favourite male actor says: “I figure life's a gift and I don't intend on wasting it. You don't know what hand you're gonna get dealt next. You learn to take life as it comes at you... to make each day count.” ― Leonardo Di Caprio).  I tend to look on life in this second sense.  The former is an existential way of looking at life while the latter is a spiritual one.  Needless to say, these two are "twins" as it were, and need not necessarily be mutually exclusive.

I spent some three years in my mid-twenties, from 25-28, in religious life in the Order of St Augustine (OSA).  While there I was introduced to all the major classics of Christian theology and spirituality over the years, e.g., the mysticism of St John of the Cross as well as that of St Augustine of course.  But it is that of the former with which I am interested here.  John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz) (1542 – 1591), born Juan de Yepes Álvarez, was a major figure of the Counter-Reformation, a Spanish mystic, Catholic saint, Carmelite friar and priest, born at Fontiveros, Old Castile.

Anyway, this Saint John of the Cross wrote a great and famous  poem called Dark Night of the Soul. This poem narrates the journey of the soul from its bodily home in this human body to its union with God. This journey is called "The Dark Night", because darkness represents the hardships and difficulties the soul meets as it attempts to detach itself from all the worldly concerns and materials.  At the end of the journey, hopefully, the soul will reach the light and live in union with the Creator.  The main idea of the poem can be seen as the painful experience that people endure as they seek to grow in spiritual maturity and union with God.

Now my title obviously is deliberately a pun, given the horrific happenings a screening of The Dark Knight Rises yesterday on July 20, 2012, during a midnight showing of the film at the Century 16 cinema in Aurora, Colorado.  A gunman, James Holmes,  wearing a gas mask opened fire inside the cinema, killing twelve people and injuring some 58 others. At the time of his arrest, Holmes identified himself as the Joker— one of the main antagonists within the Batman series — to police.  Warner Bros. stated that it was deeply saddened by the shooting, and announced the cancellation of the Paris premiere of The Dark Knight Rises.

One may say that those poor relatives who are left bereaved in the wake of this massacre, and indeed all those poor innocent wounded victims are now experiencing their dark night of the soul.  Evil is an extremely difficult problem which faces every human being in this world.  Indeed, I have written much on this theme in my former blog Still Point and I shall not rehearse here any of the arguments I adumbrated and explicated there.  Indeed, The Mystery of Evil was the title of my thesis for my first undergraduate degree.  However here, I want to say some words on how the mystery of evil weaves its way into the very fabric of our lives.  Consequently, no human life can be lived without tasting its bitter and sorry mystery.

The face of a mass murderer - James Holmes: See Here

The journey of the Self to Self-awareness or Self-knowledge or, if you are a firm believer in God, the journey of the Soul to God, is one littered with a lot of human and animal and indeed material wreckage along the way.  (Now, I respect totally both these versions of the human journey.  Neither is more correct nor more authentic than the other.  To my mind both are equally valid ways of steering the human person along the road of life.)

Those poor people who were out for a night's entertainment were suddenly thrown deep into the darkest night of soul that they ever could have experienced.  I have the same feeling as I type these lines as I had in the wake of the Norwegian massacre by the lone gunman and murderer Anders Behring Breivik.  Can we do anything about these madmen (all mass murders are men as far as |I am aware)?  What is happening us at all?  I believe the answer lies is the fact that today people lack a spiritual sense, a sense of connection with the world.  Another way of saying this is to state that the borderlines between reality and unreality has broken down.  Society is at fault here as it bombards everyone with countless pieces of information and all of it unsorted and uncensored.  Anyone anywhere can have access to anything.  The current mass murderer James Holmes purchased some 6,000 rounds of ammunition over the Internet before carrying out his massacre at the midnight screening of Batman.

Whether this man was mad or deluded is not the point.  The point is that today human beings are lacking a moral compass.  Traditional moral compasses have all now virtually broken down in the Western World for most of the younger generations all around the world.  Every little boy can access anything he wants on the Internet from serious porn to seriously sick and depraved actions of all descriptions.  When I was growing up the local library was my spiritual home where I was entertained and edified.  Now I love the Internet and spend many hours on it and am well aware of what can be found there across the spectrum.  Now, strangely, I'm not arguing for tighter censorship.  What I am arguing for is tighter self-censorship and self-control.  The questions we need to ask is what are we doing in society that allow people like Holmes and Breivik to perpetrate their evil deeds.  It is far too easy to write them off as psychopaths or sociopaths.

As we all struggle with our own spiritual advancement we encounter evil and suffering.  We must constantly question our own motivations as we proceed on our way.  We must take responsibility for the life we have been gifted with, whether by a spiritual source in God or from a scientific source in the Big Bang.  Whichever one of these is the commitment which you, dear reader, hold does not really matter.  However, what does matter is how I behave and live out my spiritual quest.  Also we are all responsible for keeping our fellow citizens in the real world where ethics are grounded in our very being.  Let us ask ourselves what have we as a society done that has allowed mass murderers like Breitvik and Holmes to commit such life-denying and life-destroying crimes.

The answer, dear friends, is certainly a spiritual on - one deeply rooted in values, and values that have some realistic horizon.