Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 68

Poem 68

The best athlete

wants his opponent at his best.

The best general

enters the mind of his enemy.

The best businessman

serves the communal good.

The best leader

follows the will of the people.

All of them embody

the virtue of non-competition.

Not that they don't love to compete,

but they do it in the spirit of play.

In this they are like children

and in harmony with the Tao.

Commentary

In the West non-competition would practically never be seen as a virtue. It's hard to see from our experience in the modern Western world where non-competition would fit in at all. Certainly, our professional sports are competitive as careers and a lot of money depend on the success of the various players or teams. Indeed, even the amateur sports people here in the West are nothing if not competitive.  Competition is so entrenched in our psyche that it is hard to see how we can transcend our competitiveness and become non-competitively playful.  Our schools, universities and our businesses all subscribe to the rules of competition as only the best in their field are chosen to partake in the courses  or jobs on offer. And yet, in the context of the existential nature of life, which involves much sorrow as well as joy, we know that everyone around us will pass on as we will, too.  We are often driven, through ill-health, mental breakdown or some other catastrophe that befalls us to question the purpose of our lives, and then we begin to put things in context.  What is the point of being so driven? Surely there are limits to success? Surely there is a limit to the money we can earn? If one wins Wimbledon five times, is it really important to win it a sixth? 

Again, we must remind ourselves that spiritual tracts or texts all attempt to provoke us into deeper thinking.  In that sense, the questions posed, the suggested answers are often necessarily exaggerated.  It is very hard to see how there could have been any progress and advancement historically in any society without there having been a sense of competition and competitiveness around.  While I find some wisdom in the above poem, its sheer impracticality bowls me over.  However, having spent an amount of years studying theology, philosophy and spirituality, I like to be challenged and pushed to the edge.  In a certain impractical but wise way the author of the poem is right - if only we could always take a bird's eye view of things.  If only our perspective were that of the director of the play or film, then we should see where everything fits in.  Likewise as we get older we (hopefully) gain more perspective.  We begin to see that quality and not quantity is what matters in life; the value of something is more important than its price; our time is more important than any extra money we can earn.  It is that perspective pushed to the nth degree that the poet is pushing us towards.  Life pushes us towards wisdom and if we are open and swim with and not against its tide we will be happier and wiser.

Bar the above thoughts, I am singularly lacking anything else to say.  Therefore, I will stop here.

Namaste!

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 55

Stephen Mitchell's translation of Poem 55 runs as follows:

He who is in harmony with the Tao

is like a newborn child.

Its bones are soft, its muscles are weak,

but its grip is powerful.

It doesn't know about the union

of male and female,

yet its penis can stand erect,

so intense is its vital power.

It can scream its head off all day,

yet it never becomes hoarse,

so complete is its harmony.

The Master's power is like this.

He lets all things come and go

effortlessly, without desire.

He never expects results;

thus he is never disappointed.

He is never disappointed;

thus his spirit never grows old.

The city of Prague from the castle walls

 Derek Lin's translation of the same poem runs thus:

Those who hold an abundance of virtue

Are similar to newborn infants

Poisonous insects do not sting them

Wild beasts do not claw them

Birds of prey do not attack them

Their bones are weak, tendons are soft

But their grasp is firm

They do not know of sexual union but can manifest arousal

Due to the optimum of essence

They can cry the whole day and yet not be hoarse

Due to the optimum of harmony

Knowing harmony is said to be constancy

Knowing constancy is said to be clarity

Excessive vitality is said to be inauspicious

Mind overusing energy is said to be aggressive

Things become strong and then grow old

This is called contrary to the Tao

That which is contrary to the Tao will soon perish.

Swan on the river Vltava, Prague, Feb 2016

Commentary

I have often heard it said that as we go further on our path in life in terms of our own personal development that we have to unlearn much of what we have learnt during our early socialisation as children and many of our inculturated opinions so as to eventually reach some level of self-knowledge or individuation.  What I am referring to here are crazy ingrained opinions like "children must be seen not heard," "boys never cry," "men must be strong," "women must be ladylike," "If I haven't a beautiful body I'm not really important," "not to have money is a supreme failure in life," "bad exam results mean failure" and a host of other opinions which can fester into downright prejudices against and hatred of self and others.  And the worst thing about all these ingrained opinions and prejudices is that for a long enough period of our growing as people we are blithely unaware of them.  However, if we are open at all to life, we won't be long about learning lessons in awareness.  After all, life does have a habit of slapping us in the face every now and then as if to say in no uncertain terms: "Wake up! Can't you see what life is doing to you? Do you really think all those things you have gathered around you in life are going to last?  Do you think you can take them to the grave with you? Do you think your thoughts are the only right thoughts? How much of you is ego? Is the price you are paying for all those ego trips really worth it?  Where lies your heart or your soul? Do you not realise that you too will pass as will everything in this world?

Charles Bridge, Prague, February 2016

Solid things after a while begin to seem less solid as we grow older.  Things begin to lose their gloss and sparkle as our body ages.  And yet, are there not things of the soul, goods of the spirit?  Traditional wisdom teaches us that there are.  Things of the soul or goods of the spirit or spiritual values are perhaps, our Taoist poet tells us, whatever is unconsciously pure and natural just like a newly born baby that is totally in harmony with itself.  It is in that natural state of being that approximates, I'd imagine, to what the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi means by "flow," that is the total absorption of the person in what the person is doing, an actualised being in the now. For an article on the concept of flow see HERE.

Montbretia flowers in my garden, Summer 2007

The natural power of life is seen in the potential power that the infant naturally possesses. In the above poem the author refers to the classic infant grasp reflex.  I have always loved putting my little finger into a young baby's open palm and them to feel that wonderful natural grasp - that wonderful infant tenacity of life, that natural thrust there is in every newborn life to cling on and to survive.  In a sense, what the Tao Te Ching is about, as is the case with all true religions and spiritualities, is finding that natural current of life, tapping into life's Still Point, discovering the Source of our natural power as it were.  As we grow up and become inculturated into whatever society we are born into, we learn to put on the ways of the world; to learn off all the various roles we have to play in life if we are to survive - in other words, we learn to put the ego firmly in the driving seat or into the saddle.  That is part of our survival skills and is very important to do if we are to get on in life.

Montbretia, my garden, Summer, 2007

However, problems emerge when we become besotted with success; when we begin to become enthralled by our own ego; when we begin to believe in the literalness of our own constructed identities; when we begin to believe that any single one or even a combination of some of the masks we are forced to wear is the real us. These obsessive and compulsive parts of ourselves which almost suffocate by times the real us are essentially what Buddhism means by the vices of clinging to and living in dependence upon the apparently real world. Let me liken the real or total self to a diamond with a multitude of faces.  Every face is a face of the diamond and all the faces together conspire to reveal the unique mystery of each individual self.  Spirituality helps us to transcend over-identification with any one face of the diamond, with any one mask of our many workaday masks.  Its the totality of faces/masks/identities and the ability to move with ease from one to another as required and then to deepen our pursuit of the real self through going into the heart or depths of the diamond through meditation and prayer.  There we will encounter the real if elusive self. When one starts out on this spiritual quest for the real self, the "follower of the way" or the "disciple" is drawn into a magical web of discovery that transcends even the self.  However, this writer has only touched on the outer perimeters of this growing reality.  Readers desiring deeper or higher spiritual truths will have to search elsewhere for such insights, into the writings of more powerful and enriching spiritual teachers, those rare souls who have travelled further on the path to self-awareness, awareness of others and an awareness of the abiding presence of the Other, some of us, including this writer, dare call God.

Ireland's Eye from Baldoyle, Summer 2006

Our Taoist author sees the naturalness of the little child, how at-one the little creature is in itself; how united it is in body and soul; how unsplit mind and body are in this natural new little being.  The world is about to work its spell on the little infant and socialise it in its ways and mostly in the ways of the ego and in the ways of its obsessions of humanity.  The new human being will begin to learn the lessons of separation, of how to separate body from mind; body from soul, if you prefer and then be taught the tough lessons of life when the mind ignores the body to the sore cost of both.  Then all the psychologies and all the spiritual paths will kick in for the person who desires to be whole again.

The little baby boy, according to our Taoist writer, experiences arousal in the erection of its manhood and yet it is a sexually unaware arousal insofar as it only experiences the power of life in its member and not the thrust to penetrate its feminine counterpart.  This natural power is felt in his little body, akin, I should imagine, to the generative and receptive powers felt in the female infant's little womb. All this is natural and unselfconsciously natural.

Cycle Path, Baldoyle, 2006

The Tao works by flowing through all the good and natural things of life.  As an erstwhile theologian, I can see parallels here with what classical Catholic Theology referred to as the Natural Law which was concerned with morality mostly and how moral laws can be deduced by human reason by observing nature - in other words, all human values are there already in nature and have only to be deduced or discerned therefrom through the faculty of reasoning. However, that's a shallow enough parallel, but a parallel nonetheless.  Note the Catholic concept would not embrace the vitality associated with either a Pagan or New Age concept of what is natural.

Another traditional Eastern analogy that the writer of this blog likes is that of how the wise person is not like a tree in the storm which can be fractured, broken, even uprooted if the wind is strong enough, but rather like a blade of grass which can bend in the wind and consequently not be harmed.  This is the sense that the above Taoist writer is getting at above when he says in the second stanza that the Master "lets all things come and go," or as I've already said above he learns to "go with the flow."

Finally, in this Holy Week as we fast approach Easter Sunday, read the above verses reflectively again and let their words have an effect on your soul.  Happy reading and peaceful meditating, friends.  Namaste!

Journal of a Soul 50

Introduction: Towards the More in Humanity

Our winning all-Ireland Science debaters! Towards the More!

I've been arguing that the phenomenon of our consciousness in itself is a greater entity than the mere sum of the signals or perceptions we register on our brains.  Indeed, I have also been arguing that the mind in the sense of consciousness is also greater than that organ known as the brain in which it is said to mainly reside.  What our personhood or selfhood may be is also somehow linked to our consciousness of what or who that person or self may be.  These are major areas that can be learnedly discussed in philosophy, philosophy of mind, psychology, philosophical psychology, anthropology, philosophical anthropology, neurology and indeed in psychiatry and cognitive science. (I'm sure there are many other learned areas of study in cognate areas that I have not listed here!)  Indeed, the arts in general explore that complex area of self-identity through all the various creative media: painting, sculpture, architecture, music and writing in all its incarnations.  Come to think of it, we should not leave the sciences out either. After all, they too, share in the creative impulses that make up our human consciousness.  Maths, Engineering and Technology also capture on the one hand the beauty, magic and brilliance of the human mind as well as its sheer practical application to human affairs on the other.

In my last post, I spoke about human passions that mark us out as different from the other animals in the Animal Kingdom.  I referred to (a) our desire for knowledge, (b) our desire to love and (c) our desire to be loved as demarcating qualities.  There are others, too.  I briefly referred to our desire for peace and justice.  As Pope Paul VI put it rather pithily, peace is the work of justice.  Let me turn to this last desire or passion here as a demarcating trait of the human person.

The Desire for Justice

One thing that has always inspired me about human beings is their idealism that is shown in many ways, and most especially in their desire to see justice done.  That we are instinctively drawn to causes which promote justice is certainly undeniable.  The Civil Rights Movement, headed up by the late great Martin Luther King Jnr., great prophetic figure, is an excellent example of this human trait I am describing here.  Then, closer to home, we had the Civil Rights Movement in the North of Ireland which sought to do the same for the Roman Catholic population of North of Ireland as its sister movement had achieved for the black population in the USA.  People gave their lives, and still do give their lives in great numbers in all parts of the globe for causes that promote justice for all.  And why do it?  Why put your life on the line for the cause of justice among others, especially when you yourself have those rights that are denied to those for whom you fight?  Why?  Because you believe that there are some values that are universal, and that those values point to what is great and good in the human being; that those values transcend the person and are interpersonal and even trans-personal;  that they somehow point to an author of values beyond us, to an horizon of meaning beyond us*, and perhaps point to some Giver of values beyond us... perhaps.  I will leave these thoughts open to a possible greater meaning or horizon of values above and beyond us.  I will stay with that tentativeness because I just cannot prove this last observation one way or another.

In the wake of the Nazi atrocities committed against innocent people before and during World War II, it was hard for the Allies to convict the accused before their courts of justice at Nuremberg without appealing to a higher court than those of mere mortals.  It has always appeared to this writer here that without the atrocities committed by both Hitler and Stalin; that without, as it were, falling into the pit of sheer atrocity and knowing the sheer depths of depravity to which we humans can descend; that without plumbing the depths of human evil we should never have been inspired to conceive of, write and agree to the International Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.  Article 1 states:

• All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

We are all endowed with reason and conscience.  As to the nature of conscience the Declaration, needless to say, has nothing to say.  After all it is a international document listing and declaring solemnly the rights of all men and women everywhere in the world.  As to where that conscience comes from, this document does not state, nor should it, indeed, as it is neither philosophy, theology or ethical theory.  Perhaps like Newman, and Kant before him, that conscience could be the voice of a higher power, an author of such universal human rights, before whom in conscience we stand accountable.  Perhaps.  I'm not saying, obviously, that this is definitely so.  I am merely stating it and leaving it out there as one of some few main propositions on the matter.

The Power of Vision

The power of vision: St Vincent's celebrate victory in our School

Another characteristic that describes humanity, both in its essence and in its actions, is that of having a vision of how things could be if we dream big dreams of progress, not alone in technology per se, but in technology which has an ethical and humane dimension to it, namely to improve the lot of other human beings.  Undoubtedly, this is linked with the desire for justice, but here in this paragraph I wish to emphasize the visionary aspect of the desire, rather than the work of justice itself.  In other words, I am talking essentially about the same thing, but from a different perspective.

Vision belongs equally to the engineer the technologist as it does to the poet and novelist.  It belongs to all peoples, to all cultures, to all faiths and to all colours.  In short, it belongs to the man and woman in the street, no matter what their profession, or indeed, their lot in life.  Here, I am reminded by those wonderfully apt words composed by the great Irish writer, socialist and dramatist,  George Bernard Shaw (1856 -1950) in Back to Methuselah (1921): ' "You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?' '  For me as an Irishman, the first time I heard these words was in the famous speech of John F. Kennedy before the Irish Parliament or Dáil in June 1963.  In the context of his speech, he was highlighting the very heart of justice, which is essentially the work of democracy.  Both he and his extended family have not alone been associated with the Democratic Party in the USA, but with the work of justice on an international level in an effort to bring about world peace.  That the Kennedys passionately believed in the work of justice as central to the democratic process is without doubt.  That John F.Kennedy openly embraced the vision of The Civil Rights Movement and of its prophetic leader Martin Luther King Jnr is also beyond question.  That JFK's brother Bobby was the bearer of his brother's beacon of justice for all after the latter was assassinated is a question of historical fact.  However, that Bobby Kennedy was perhaps the more courageous and more passionately driven of the two is not without evidence.  That the two were assassinated for their beliefs in peace as the work of justice can never be denied.  Their assassination as the asssassination of Mohandas Gandhi, Ruth First and Martin Luther King Jnr., just to mention a few, happened because their outspokenness for justice and equality for all stepped on the toes of those powerful interests within all societies that look to exploitation of the weak and poor for their selfish aggrandisement.  This is all incontrovertible.  The human drive to a vision of how things could be, the innate drive for a Utopia almost lies at the very heart of human dreaming, it seems...

And yet, history teaches us the very sad lesson that while we have such visions of how things might be, in reality wars and injustices abound.  However, without such visionary drives in humankind as witnessed in the lives and sacrifices of great prophets for peace as the work of justice, we should be in even a worse state of moral disintegration.  There are so many prophets of peace who have paid the ultimate price for their vision besides those few whom I have named above, and, indeed, many of them are unacknowledged and many more unknown.  Their sacrifice has not been in vain, as many countless others have benefitted by their sacrifice by either achieving their freedom or in escaping from injustice with their lives.

A Final Word

And lastly, dear reader, how do we account for the courage of heroes putting their lives at risk for those of others?  Where does that fit into an atheistic or indifferentist scheme of things or in an agnostic Darwinian structuralist view of what we humans really are?  Or push the idea of heroism further, and one comes up with the actuality of someone sacrificing their lives for those of others, many of whom are unknown to the hero or sacrificial victim to put it in more religious terms, as it were? How do we explain this in the overall scheme of things? These are all big cultural questions, all big philosophical and anthropological questions. Perhaps they are even spiritual and religious questions.  One thing is sure, they are not cold scientific ones at any rate.  Whoever we are essentially is a work in progress, and sadly we find out more and more about that essence by experiencing how low at times some of us can stoop.