Journal of a Soul 19

Connectedness

If spirituality is about anything, it is about connecting in a real and authentic way with self, others, whatever life force you believe in (you may be one of the many millions who call this force God) and indeed with Mother Earth or Gaia,of whom I have talked much in this and other blogs.  I was reminded of this connectedness we have with the Earth by listening to Pat Kenny this morning interviewing the author George Monbiot on his new book Feral, the review of which you will find HERE 

As a young country boy, I loved running free (or wild) through the fields and meadows which were so close to our house in a little rural Irish town.  The smells of those fields, of the grasses, the flowers and the cow pats still linger in my nostrils.  We city dwellers are a long way from the wild-ness of nature.  To walk through the fields and hills of one's locality (after all we can all find access to such places if we really want to with a little effort!) is in a very powerful way to connect with one's Real Self (Carl Ransom Rogers) or with the Soul (Religions, New Age Spirituality and Popular Psychology).

In a very real way, we are embodied souls or ensouled bodies and the link between the two is inextricable.  That is why I love the term BODY-SOUL or SOUL-BODY.  That is also why I find the concept of a Cartesian Dualism, not alone intellectually difficult to get one's head around, but very silly indeed.  As the philosopher Gilbert Ryle famously put it, such dualism, which says that the soul somehow inhabits the husk of the body rather like a liquid in a bottle, could simply be called "a ghost in a machine" and is ridiculous as such.  Whatever the Soul is, it is embodied or enfleshed.  Can it exist apart from the body?  That is a big question indeed.  Perhaps it can!

Moreover, a lot of us have experienced powers that play through us or inspire us, though, of course, this is not the same reality as the soul, although one could presume that the spirit works through the medium of that soul. I was once invited by a cousin to an AA meeting which he was chairing and everyone there attested to a higher power whom they believed pulled them out of their pit of despair rather like being attracted to a magnetic north.  They also attested that they could not become sober without trusting in the goodness of such a higher spiritual force.  I have myself experienced my being filled with a spiritual power several times while meditating on my own and with groups, and while attending various concerts, religious ceremonies, funerals, celebrations, plays and poetry readings and so on.  Whether this spiritual power is psychic - intra-psychic or inter-psychic - or from a different realm I am not too sure.  However, I am very open to there being spiritual powers beyond my finite and limited ken.  Moreover, I certainly believe that the soul is a spiritual principle somehow connected to the body, that is, it is certainly not something unconnected that rattles around within the husk of my body.  Any way, enough of this idle philosophical speculation.  Let me get down to the point of this post.  Like a river, I suppose it is nice to meander now and then, so, forgive me...

Commenting on the CAP (that is, the Common Agricultural Policy of the EU - a policy that had been cornerstone of the original Treaty of Rome which set up the EEC as it then was called), George Monbiot told Pat Kenny of RTE Radio that this policy had contributed to environmental damage by encouraging farmers to increase output through intensive practices such as the application of chemical insecticides and pesticides, and through the removal of hedgerows.  The CAP has furthermore been criticised due to its impact on farmland bird populations.  Wiki reports the following: "Between 1980 and 2009, the farmland bird population has decreased from 600 million to 300 million, implying a loss of 50%. Among the species that have been hit hardest are the starling and the tree sparrow, which have both declines by 53%. The removal of hedgerows and ploughing over meadows are two significant factors that may have contributed to more efficient farming, but that also caused a decrease in farmland birds' habitats."  See HERE 

It would seem that in our efforts to increase our wealth we are helping to destroy our planet.  In a newly produced TV programme on the River Shannon, Ireland's largest river, the presenter/writer Colin Stafford-Johnson alludes to the virtual disappearance of the corncrake (rare bird in these parts) due to farming practices.  This is a wonderfully filmed series and is currently being broadcast by our national broadcaster. See IWT and RTE Player. That this wonderful river is teeming with life in all its bio-diversity and interconnectedness is manifestly obvious.  That such an intricate and wondrous nexus of life is delicately balanced is also a given fact.  Further, that humankind can pollute and destroy such a web of life is also sadly a growing reality.

Spirituality, as I have outlined in my opening paragraph is about connectedness or connection or about the ability to make connections, to interconnect, to reach out beyond the individual and to feel part of a whole network of life or of being.  It is about the flow of energy or power or spirit.  In this sense spirituality is about making whole or healing the planet, the very opposite to polluting and destroying it.  In a very real sense, then, to claim to be spiritual and to engage in non-spiritual practices is a contradiction in terms!  Ponder this point as it is worth so doing!

We humans are unusual creatures in that we are at once the overseers of and part of the world which we observe - being both the observer and the observed at one and the same time.   That we are gradually polluting and killing our planet inevitably means that we are gradually poisoning and killing ourselves.

That we are part of the planet is also very much an integral part of our spirituality.  We are constituents of the wonderful, intricate and wondrous nexus of life that makes up Mother Earth or Gaia.  Most spiritualities today insist that ecology plays a central part in the way we interact or connect with the world around us. However, this is not surprising as nature always played a central role in traditional religions.  One has only to refer briefly to the Old Testament Psalms which saw/see creation as the work of a loving God who had/has set humankind over creation as its stewards.

The Home Tree - Avatar

We take our symbols from nature, and one of the greatest we have is possibly that of the tree.  In the Book of Genesis we have The Tree of Knowlege of Good and Evil.  In a lot of religions, theologies and indeed science fiction films we have references to the famous Tree of Life. This tree symbolises the interconnection of all life on our planet and serves as a metaphor for common descent in the evolutionary sense. The term tree of life may also be used as a synonym for sacred tree.  The Wiki tells us succinctly that  "[t]he tree of knowledge, connecting to heaven and the underworld, and the tree of life, connecting all forms of creation, are both forms of the world tree or cosmic tree, according to the Encyclopædia Britannica, and are portrayed in various religions and philosophies as the same tree."  Is it any wonder, then, that such a potent symbol of the tree played a very central role in the wonderful sci-fi film Avatar? (It is called the Home Tree or the Tree of Souls in that film, if my memory serves me at all well!)

I began this post by aluding to the recently published book called Feral  by George Monbiot wherein he calls for the "wilding" of our flatlands and farmlands, much of which we have simply cut back with no reason except to gain CAP payments.  And what a marvellous neologism is that word "wilding" which he composes!  In the concrete jungles that we humans have made for ourselves, it is very hard indeed to put down roots.  It's very hard, again, not to be alienated from nature, from the Earth, and also from ourselves, indeed.  Maybe the price we pay for supposed progress is far too high a price to pay!  Maybe. Maybe!  

Given the use of the verbal noun "wilding," let us finish this post with a few lines from one of W.B. Yeats wonderful poems which mention the word "wild" therein:

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand.

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

(from "The Stolen Child" published in 1889. )

Journal of a Soul 18

The Nub of it is the Now of it

Metaphors intrigue us just as life does.  We forge them in the smithy of our soul in an effort to explain the seemingly incomprehensible, i.e., life in all its vagaries and vicissitudes.  "Nub" or "Knub" ( a less frequent spelling) refers to the core or essence of something.  My alliterative title refers to the nub or essence of life or of existence.  The major lesson from every spiritual tradition under the sun is to live in the NOW!  Hence my pithy and alliterative title: The Nub of it is the Now of it.

Oak sapling growing in our resource room at school

As I said many times in these posts and in other blogs elsewhere, the goal of life can be expressed many ways, viz., self-actualization (Abraham Maslow, Carl Ransom Rogers and the Humanist School of Psychotherapy in general), integration (Anthony Storr, Ronnie Laing, Rollo May, Irvin Yalom), individuation (Jung),  and self-realization (Hinduism).  While we could spend days on end reading the writings of all these scholars and exploring their different emphases on what they consider to be the essence of life, we may, I believe, boil it all down to what my title succinctly states:  THE NUB OF IT IS THE NOW OF IT.

Not for the Faint-Hearted

However, the NOW OF IT is not for the faint-hearted.  It is very much for the courageous.  To live in the now requires courage and, indeed, great courage.  It requires a togther-ness and holism which can only be acquired through what today we call MINDFULNESS. If I were to recommend any single book to read with respect to courage it would be Paul Tillich's wonderfully enlightening little book The Courage To Be, wherein our author sees the courage to be, or what I call the "aude essere," as the only antidote to all the myriad theses of meaninglessness handed out to us today as easily as those advertisement leaflets in the high street.

Let's give some practical examples:

(i) I recall having to sit for hours on end in the casualty department of Beaumont Hospital in January 1993 when my father was left lying on a trolley.  He had just had a major stroke and his mind was completely confused.  There was no use being anywhere except in that situation.  Even as I type these words I feel the "nowness" of that situation etched onto my memory.  From the meditation or mindfulness practice I had being doing, I remember saying to myself:  "Be here in the NOW; go with it; stay here; don't run away!"

(ii)  At the dentist:  I have found the same advice applicable to the dentist's chair which many people fear.  There is such a thing as the aesthetics of pain.  Pain can be horrific and sometimes but very rarely sublime.  Now I speak here in a practical and pragmatic sense of real pain and fear experienced by everyone in the street.  I had a tooth next to a wisdom tooth extracted very recently.  The dentist said:  "I won't lie to you, there is a possibility that the wisdom tooth will come out with the bad one.  I'll have some hard work to do here!"  I remember saying to myself practically the same words as in point (1) above: "Be here in the NOW; go with it; stay with the experience; notice all the movements of the instruments!"  Indeed, I felt absolutely no pain though I could feel all the movements of the dentist's instruments:  the expanded openness of my jaw bones, almost locked in place, the movements of the various instruments and the tearing sound as the tooth broke loose from the jaw bone leaving two shards behind which he then told me he needed to extract.  I felt an instrument lever those two shards from the jaw bone.  Staying with it in the Now of It lessened the crisis.  

Schooll boys doing their house exams

(iii) Taking a rough class.  I am a Resource Teacher these recent years which requires me to listen to, help, counsel and teach autistic adolescents - all boys.  However, I also teach one or two mainstream classes in the school to which our Autism Unit is attached. Generally, I take the more troublesome classes there.  This year, I was asked to take a sixth form class of 26 for the Leaving Certificate in Irish.  There are five pupils in that group who have ADHD, two of whom have SNAs (special needs assistants).  Needless to say, they can be very disruptive.  However, it's the being able to remain in the NOW of the situation, without desiring any immediate, rash or instant solution to the problem that helps me relax into the situation, to go with it.  In learning to go with it, my blood pressure does not hit the roof, I'm less likely to shout - actually, shouting only increases the disruption with the guys I'm teaching.  In fact, by being relaxed, living in the now, learning to with the flow, not seeking instant solutions helps me very much to survive and to be able to deliver some form of a coherent lesson.

(iv) Going to the Gym:  Now, I need to go to the gym more often.  In fact, I was there this morning  for the first time in two weeks and I enjoyed it immensely.  Now, I should go at least three times weekly as I need to shed a half stone.  The last time I shed that amount my blood pressure and blood sugar levels both dramatically decreased.  Unfortunately, I put that weight back on in the past three or four months with the resultant raising of blood pressure and blood sugar levels.  Anyway, my point about going to the gym is that bodily exercise really helps to root us in the NOW: the now of my breathing, my muscular movements etc.  I find going to the gym a marvellous way of being MINDFUL.  Indeed, any physical activity roots us in the NOW.  The body, indeed, is an essential physical representation of the self.  To be clued into the body is to be clued into the self and essentially to live in the now!  This is one of the most powerful reasons I know to counter the old lie of the Cartesian split between Body and Soul/Self.  That's why I like the compound expression BODY-SOUL rather than the opposition Body and Soul.  There is a unity not a duality!

Photo I took in Mayo, May 2011

(v)  I have also mentioned many times here and elsewhere in my writings the fact that I suffer from clinical depression which was diagnosed by one of the best psychiatrists it has been my privilege to come across in my lifetime, one Dr Anthony O'Flaherty, now happily retired.  Looking back on the episodes of depression I then suffered, I can only say that I would not wish them on my worst enemy.  However, I remember, yet again that it was my determination to stay in the NOW OF DESPERATION that was often my salvation.  Let me explain.  When one is lost in a bout of depression, there seems to be absolutely no way out.  One cannot sleep for nights on end.  The more one desires to sleep and escape the nowness of the desperation, the less one is likely to sleep.  After many a sleepless night, I changed my attitude and said to myself:  "I'm not going to try to go to sleep at all, I'm going to hang on for dear life onto the coat tails of those never-ending and spiralling thoughts that chase each other round my brain interminably!"  Ironically, it was only when I abandoned myself to the inevitability of not going to sleep that I, in fact, eventually fell asleep.  Another way of putting this, is to say simply that THE NUB OF IT IS THE NOW OF IT!

I'm sure that there are many examples that you, dear reader, can add to the ones I have described above.  In finishing here, may I wish you a surfeit of living in the NOW!

Journal of a Soul 17

Memories

O'connell School, mid 1950s

A few minutes ago I was happily and nostalgically surfing a site for past pupils of my old alma mater - O'Connell School, North Richmond Street, Dublin, 1.  Old memories came flooding back when I was viewing some old pictures thereon.  As I sit here typing these thoughts, I am caught in a web of nostalgia, literally being "brought home" ("nostos") or back to a place that contains many happy memories for me. The second Greek word from which the compound "nostalgia" derives its origin is "algos" which means pain or ache.   And when we remember this or that person, this or that event, long since past, we are both happy and sad at one and the same time, hence the sense of ache or pain. 

I recall many years ago my Uncle John Saunders from San Francisco and my father Tom sitting at the kitchen table way back in the early 1970s polishing off a bottle of good Irish whiskey and their both weeping into their drinks with nostalgia for the old days when they were boys growing up in Roscrea, County Tipperary.  We all have such moments, because memory makes us who and what we are.  Without our memories, who or what are we at all?  That is why Alzheimer's and Dementia are such curses to humankind as they begin to wipe away our memories bit by bit.  Another way of putting this is that these dreadful diseases begin to wipe out inexorably the personality or true identity of the individual.

In fact, we could argue that memory makes us who we are.  It gives us our hold on life; defines us; identifies us; gives us a strong sense of our selfhood and roots us in a certain place, in a certain country, with certain people and particular events and so on.  We mull over ideas in the present with our short-term or working memory - all the things we are able to do and keep in our mind to perform our everyday functioning. However, we store past events and learned meanings in our long-term or episodic (or semantic) memory.  Moreover, the psychologists inform us that memory is malleable - and it tends to decay with age. Indeed, often our imaginations add in little extra details and colourings that were not part of the original remembered event or happening.

I have just resumed this post some twelve hours after I last wrote the preceding paragraphs.  At this juncture, I have just returned from visiting my 96 year old severely demented mother.  In fact she is physically quite good, but her memory has been almost wiped 100% clean, except for a few random words and a lot of garbled sounds of words and non-words crashing into one another.  And yet she smiles and seems happy.  In fact she ate two small yogurts for me and drank a half glass of orange juice. Other than that, I sat by her side reading my latest copy of Philosophy Now.

The nineteenth century theologian and Catholic apologist, John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) used say that how we believe is a s much a s mystery as how we remember.  Cognitive scientists would most likely say that our memories are sparked off by some image or word or feeling we associate with something or someone we encounter, and that the whole thing is as simple as cause and effect or stimulus and response.  And yet it is more.  I am very much a Gestaltian in tendency and see things in wholes and patterns and overall shapes.  For me, and I am sure that for most of you reading this blog entry, the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts.  Whatever moves us is deeply rooted in who we are, in our identity as a person, in our very self or soul.  We simply believe (perhaps just like to believe) that we are more than a random collocation of atoms, or organs or whatever.

O'Connell School today

And life, what is it at all?  Just a small question that never ceases to cause us to ponder deeply on our human condition.  As I type these few words I remember back to 1980, some 33 years ago.  My memory carries me back to the staffroom in O'Connell School where I had just become a teacher.  I was teaching Religious Education and Mathematics at the time, though my timetable was made up of most of the former.  One winter's morning I arrived in somewhat early and found Gerard Smith sitting beside the electric fire.  He greeted me and asked me "What is it all about at all, at all?"  I replied that this was a very heavy question to be asking me at that hour of the morning.  I deliberately did not answer him, as I simply couldn't. However, I knew that that question had come from the depths of Gerard's being.  To make a long story short, Gerard, unknown to any of us his colleagues, had a congenital heart disease from which he was to die sadly some years later.  Another one of his great friends on the staff, Gerard Donnelly, who joined us in 1982 as a Science and Maths teacher died all too young two years ago from cancer at the young age of fifty. I remember this second colleague of mine being very upset at the other man's demise.  And so these memories come.  They are not random memories but extremely focused ones.

We are left with the mystery of who we are, of what the whole point about life really is, of how does it add up at all.  Then there is that wonderful question which runs: Why is there something rather than nothing?  What is nothing?  Can nothing exist?  What does it mean to be conscious anyway - what is consciousness?  If a tree falls in the wood and there is no one there to hear it does it make a sound? What is knowledge?  How should we act towards others?  What is right and wrong? Why is there Evil in the world?  Why do we die?  Why do we suffer?  Why do we live at all in the first place?  Why do we exist? and so on and so forth.  There are, of course, philosophers who declare such questions meaningless as they see such questions as essentially ones based on bad logic and very poor reason.  Such metaphysical questions are beyond the scope of their type of philosophy.  And yet, we experience ourselves as persons who search for patterns and meanings, who are enthralled by the mystery and wonder of the universe of which we are such a minuscule part.  We can rightly wonder at our small role in that one great mystery.  After all, philosophy, and all good art and all good science, begin exactly there - in wonder!!

And so whether I am weeping nostalgically into a shared drink with another human being, perusing a past pupil website of my Alma Mater, discussing a crisis or problem with a friend or spouse, writing a poem, singing a song, remembering my school days, visiting the graves of relatives and friends, reading a good novel or poem, viewing old photographs, reading old letters, visiting old haunts, I am doing things that essentially make me human, that confirm me in my identity as of such and such a family, as coming from this or that town or county or country or continent, as being really the stuff "on which dreams are made" as Shakespeare so sublimely puts it.

It's time to go an have a nightcap - a nice glass of Irish whiskey - A Jameson preferably.  Good night and sleep well.

Journal of a Soul 16

Aridity and a Note on Tradition

The word "aridity" is one beloved of monks, nuns and mystics.  I recently read some excerpts from the works of Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), Counter Reformation mystic and one of the foremost Spanish Renaissance writers, and she refers to having to suffer through those long desert periods, those long dry patches when the soul is thirsting for a little libation in the form of inspiration or wisdom or, at least, a little sustenance for the journey that is life (which is indeed, essentially and existentially, a camino.)  Apparently, the mystics look on such desert experiences as important periods which test our perseverance when seemingly God (or Truth or the Ultimate Good, or whatever term you wish to use for that power of life greater than us that seemingly sustains the universe) is experienced in absence. 

Ballintubber Abbey, Co. Mayo, May, 2011

The Peruvian, Gustava Gutiérrez, Dominican priest and theologian, who is generally regarded as the founder of Liberation Theology, once wrote a wonderful book called We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People which I read in the early 1980s.  It was a wonderful read, and it is a book to which I must return.  The reason I called this particular blog by the title Wellsprings  was because of that book.  Truly, we must drink from our own wells.  

What, in God's name, I hear you ask, has the aridity of the first paragraph got to do with the seemingly abundantly well watered pastures of the second?  Well the second modern spiritual classic (it dates from 1983) argues that the Spirit of Liberation is alive and well in the lives of the poor as they search for the inner resources of their identity as a struggling people and to gain real and true liberation from both their material and spiritual oppressors.

What has all this got to do with the one who types these words here in virtual reality?  Well, when I arrive at the inevitable aridity, described above, in my personal spiritual quest I have no other option than to return to those personal and educational experiences that have made me the unique individual that I am.  In short, we are forced to fall back on our own roots, culturally and spiritually.

Last evening, I had the pleasure of attending a  concert, at which some 30 or 40 Irish traditional musicians played.  All these musicians spoke of person X, Y or Z from whom they got this, that or the other tune.  They realise all too clearly that they live, move and have their musical being, to coin a phrase, in and through a specific musical tradition.

Tulip, Ballintubber Abbey, May, 2011

In that sense, while I feel I have moved away from the central and solid structures of the Roman Catholic Church in all its orthodoxy, yet I am still deeply steeped in its spirituality and its richer practices, ceremonies, insights and more profound wisdom.  No tradition can be written off. In a sense, we can never discard our origins like an old coat cast aside after long wearing, because we have been shaped and formed to a great sense by it.  Of course, we must and we should do new things with that tradition.  

It appears to me at this juncture in my life that my religious upbringing was formative in my life like a great river.  However, I admit that I have now run off on my very own rivulet from it.  I will keep running my own way as I must be loyal to my own sense of self and selfhood.  In other words, as the existential philosophers say, I must be authentic in and to my own lived reality.  I can be nothing if not true to my inner self, call it my core self, or my real self as Carl Ransom Rogers, the great psychotherapist puts it.

And when I have no more to say, I feel exactly like what T.S. Eliot so well puts it in his wonderful poem Gerontion, the first two lines of which run: "Here I am, an old man in a dry month//Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain" and which finishes in similar tenor with this line: "Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season."  Then, I also bring to mind other lines of favourite poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.: "Oh Lord, send my roots rain!"

To finish, then, let us never deny our origins, any little aspect of it even, as it all went to making us who we are.  To be spiritually alive means learning to accept everything that went to make us who and what we are both essentially and existentially.  Where problems emerge in the psyche, that is, where all those legions of neuroses kick in, is exactly where we have denied significant experiences in the previous years of our little lives.  Much of this acknowledgement, of course, may involve forgiveness of self or of others; dealing with anger, regret, pain and loss in all their eruptions into our lives as well as other positive experiences of love and care that are manifested in what Abraham Maslow so rightly calls "peak experiences."  One way or another, all experiences, positive and negative, that went to make us who we are cannot be denied.  

This appreciation of our tradition is, on the one hand, something very natural to us, and on the other, something which T.S. Eliot famously said we must work hard at cultivating.  Admittedly, he was adverting to any specific tradition in which any writer or poet finds himself or herself writing: "It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour." 

Alas, dear reader, nothing of any value is ever gained in the absence of hard work.

Journal of a Soul 15

The Transitoriness of Life

All things are passing.  The twelfth century Persian and Sufi poet, Attar of Nishapur, is reputed to have told his followers the fable of a powerful king who asked the assembled wise men of his court to create a ring that would make him happy when he was sad, and sad when he was happy.  After much deliberation the sages procured for him a simple ring inscribed with the words "This too will pass."  Needless to relate, the ring had the desired effect.

Abraham Lincoln in a speech delivered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on September 30, 1859, a year before he was inaugurated as president of America, ended his speech to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society with the words:

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! -- how consoling in the depths of affliction! "And this, too, shall pass away." And yet let us hope it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.

Pondering on the transitoriness of life is something that chastens us all too well and all too effectively as Abraham Lincoln so wisely points out.  We poor sad souls often try to make the  achievements of this life somewhat permanent.  Indeed, we possibly need to imagine and to hope that there is meaning in our little lives; that some sort of heaven exists; that there is some comfort even in culture and civilisation which we believe will outlive us for many thousands of years to come.  (And yet civilisations and cultures have come and gone, have ascended to the seeming pinnacle of human achievement only to end in disaster of dusty extinction.)

We try to capture the passing moments in this or that picture or video we may choose to take of special occasions as our families grow up; in this or that picture or video we may choose to take on our holidays in this, that or other exotic or less exotic place which we are wont to visit.  Just recently, I ended up for some reason deleting all the photographs of Italy I had painstakingly taken over the past four or five years.  On reflection, I just did something stupid, having uploaded them to Dropbox.  Be that as it may, the lesson was a good one for me.  I simply cannot hang on to the past, whether I record it on digital camera or video or not.  Those shots were mere images, mere dim representations of life as it passes.  Truly we cannot hang onto our experiences.  The past flits away and the future lies ever beyond us.  The now is all we have.  The NOW.  Let us write it in capitals to emphasise the point.   The first century BC Latin poet Horace was surely correct when he declared in one of his famous Odes which some of us learned at school that we should "carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero" or "seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next."    Or again, I think of poor John Keats, that wonderfully talented poet of the English Romantic Era who perished all too young at age 25 and whose epitaph reads somewhat depressingly:  "Here lies one whose name was writ on water."  He understood all too well the transitoriness of life.  Indeed, he knew he was going to die when he began coughing arterial blood on his pillow some few years before his demise.  (He had also studied medicine before becoming a full time poet)   In other words our little lives are inexorably swallowed up by the great maw of passing time.   

Arranmore cliffs, July 2010 - there from the beginning...

And yet the Easterns are right.  It is our attachments to the things and, indeed, the people of this world that ensnares us, that captivates us, that enchants us, that tricks us into believing in their seeming permanence and imperishability. This was the essential teaching of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, that all our suffering in this world is caused by our attachments to the impermanence or temporariness of everything and everybody around us.  Hence we suffer much and indeed grievously when we lose them to either misfortune or inevitable death.  The Buddhists teach us that meditation on our own dying and death is very effective as it teaches us to value our very living; to value every breath we breathe; to seize the day as Horace so poetically puts it; to live in the freedom of the NOW and not to be enslaved by regrets from the past or fears of the future.

THIS, TOO, WILL PASS!!  

SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI!!                                                                               

Journal of a Soul 14

We identify people by their different characteristics: the contours of their body, the shape of their face, the colour of the hair or the sound of their voice or even of their laugh. Their selfhood or character is summoned up by the powerful blending of all these characteristics.  I wish to concentrate on only one of these qualities here, namely the last listed one - the sound of the human voice.

Some years back, I remember viewing a TV programme on those poor lost souls - the homeless or those of our number who live on our streets.  The most haunting thing about the whole programme was, in fact, a short recording of one of their number - some old tramp - singing a song or a hymn - I can't remember which at this point in time.  One heard snatches of this song judiciously placed at various emotionally moving points in the programme and at the end as the credits rolled.  Effectively, the voice of this anonymous tramp brought a tear to my eye, and, I'm sure, to many more viewers.

Arranmore lighthouse - July 2010

Some days ago I was teaching/helping/counselling a teenager who has been through some very rough times in his short life.  Another two students were due to attend this social education/personal development class but were absent on this occasion.  There were two other adults - a teacher and an SNA -  in the room.  I didn't wish to do anything too deep or too personal with the young teenager (16), but I knew he was a brilliant guitarist and singer who wrote some of his own songs.  I duly invited him to get a guitar from the music room and play some music for us.  What we ended up with was a 30 minute performance where the young man sang his heart/soul out literally through his music.  One song, he told us, was written for one of his best friends who had ended his own life, and the lyrics mentioned how this poor lost soul used cut himself with a knife.  We three adults were moved by the sound of the young man's voice, by the passion in it, by the soulful, tender and healing nature of the music.

How true it is, then, as the dramatist William Congrieve (1670 – 1729) declared that "Music has charms to soothe a savage breast."  This young man in my story has learned the lesson well that he can heal himself through his creativity.  It is one of the main contentions of  the  Existential School of Psychotherapy that all forms of creativity are avenues to healing the human soul.  The great American Existential therapist Rollo May always underscored this seminal point.

And so, as this young man sang his words, he weaved his musical magic which brought tears to other eyes.  Music in general, and the singing voice, which is also a wonderful instrument, are both means of great healing.

And as to what music may be, we are all at a loss to explain in the philosophical sense.  And yet, we know how real it is when we hear it and are emotionally and aesthetically moved by it.  And somewhere in its depths and heights, widths and breadths, we meet something powerfully healing and renewing.  It is something deeply connected with our true humanity.

Also, when people write poems or songs, they put a certain passion into what they compose and this passion is for a perceived beauty or value or truth which they have somehow apprehended, that "something understood" which the lyrical poet George Herbert (1593 - 1633) mentions as one of the results of the power of prayer.

There is also something natural and beautiful about good music, an inevitability of phrasing and sound in harmony with the heart and soul.  Like the first few posts in this particular blog, finishing with the soulful sound of a human voice may be the most appropriate way of ending this brief post. 

I'll put a link here to a group of lads called The Original Rudeboys as I taught one of their number and a brother of another of them.

Check out some others of their numbers, too.

Enjoy!

The Original Rude Boys

Journal of a Soul 13

Let's get Some Perspective on Things

There is a word I particularly love and that is "perspective."  It is one much loved by philosophers among others.  A phrase I especially love, too, and perhaps, that is because I use it quite often myself, is "It all depends."  Or again, an answer  I always liked from one of my erstwhile lecturers from the mid nineteen seventies to a thorny question:  "Well, the answer is yes and no; yes in so far as ... and no in so far as..."  One could cynically say that this erudite professor was hedging his bets.  On the other hand, one might also say that he was being particularly careful with the use of language.  And, dear reader, care with language is not often the concern of many communicating with us (and hopefully with one another) in today's media.  Oftentimes most of us can be talking at cross purposes as we are not really talking about the same thing at all.

These thoughts come to my mind as I have recently flown home from Italy.  The Italian perspective on life is different to the Irish perspective.  They are, in general, a happier people than we, and that is the result, I believe, mainly of climate.  After all, the strong presence of the sun not alone illumines the landscape, but it also uplifts the soul.  There are so many more colours in Italy under the influence of the sun.  Here in Ireland our colour range is diminished greatly by the weather - when the rain or mists descend, we are reduced to almost a monochrome world.  It is no wonder that we Irish suffer from depression of all kinds as our moods often mirror this sad lack of light on our landscape.

A Place to Meditate - Under a tree in Sant' Andrea

Again, flying high above the earth gives more perspective.  What are huge objects on the ground become mere objects of toy proportions even when a little above the surface of the earth.  In other words a different perspective is immediately forced upon the attention of the alert air traveller.

A younger colleague of mine, Christy Oonan, now sadly passed away, RIP, had an appreciation for perspective. Once when in New York he told the tour group of students he was leading to "look up!" On another occasion, I remember standing with him in a funeral home beside the coffin of his late brother Liam and his saying to me, "there's no time, Tim, to waste in this life.  It's too short.  We must really learn to live it!"  And that Christy did in the last four years of his long and painful illness.  He was travelling places right up until the last.

Or again, the comments of a learned philosopher acquaintance of mine on the tragic demise of his brother-in-law:  "This death has really put things in perspective for me!" And that from a brilliant philosopher who has a wider perspective on things than many of us simpler folk.

The late great Victorian theologian, writer and scholar, John Henry Newman used be fond of saying that to gain perspective we must climb a hill or a mountain so that we can see the overall terrain.  The metaphor is a good one, is it not?  (As humour is another way of gaining perspective, I do believe the words he used were somewhat like"we must mount upon an eminence!"  Now, coupling "mounting" with "eminences" (Victorian speak for heights) is funny, given the sexual connotation of the first word today and the fact that he ended up an "eminence" or cardinal in the Holy Roman Church. I'm not so sure if Newman had a great sense of humour, and certainly he wouldn't appreciate this joke!)

Out of Perspective

When people have problems, it is because they have got things out of perspective.  They, as often as not, are using a magnifying glass rather than a telescope.  I owe this metaphor to Professor Michael Paul Gallagher S.J., now teaching in the Gregorian University, Rome, but then teaching in U.C.D. here in Ireland.  Now this is not to reduce the significance of the problem for the person or client involved.  It is, rather, to give them the chance of gaining another optic on the situation.

Offering perspective to people is never something that should be done early or in the immediate wake of a specific crisis.  It most likely should or will come anyway with the passing of time.  However, therein "lies the rub" as Shakespeare puts it, as often inappropriate timing or prolonged delay can result in failure to deal with the problem or in achieving some important healing for the suffering person.

However, all of us must be taught to avail of the skill of being able to broaden the perspective, zoom out on the problem we are in, get a sort of a bird's eye view, even if it is only from a low-hanging branch of a tree.  Perspective training and practice should be done on a daily basis when we are not enduring huge problems.  In that way, when crises do come, as indeed assuredly they will, we will be so much better equipped to deal with them

As I was flying over the mountains of England and Wales this morning I noticed a lot of snow on the higher peaks and much frost on the lower lying fields.  The sun was just after coming up, somewhere around 6 A.M. and one could sense that the frost on the lower lying plains, roads, lanes and houses would shortly melt away.  All in all, I had the feeling of getting an eagle's eye view if I might strain the previously overworked metaphorical bird. We are such small creatures on such a marvellously wonderful spaceship called Earth, or on a marvellously wonderful organism called Gaia - depending on your preferred metaphor or indeed, perspective.

Perhaps, I'll finish this post with quoting in full one of my all time favourite poems by the Elizabethan poet and conspirator Chidiock Tichborne who paid with his life for conspiring to hatch a plot to assassinate Elizabeth I.  He went to the gallows at the young age of 24.  His words give great perspective on the transience of our little lives.  Meditate on this words, dear friends, and I guarantee you'll gain not a little perspective:

Elegy

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,

My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,

My crop of corn is but a field of tares,

And all my good is but vain hope of gain;

The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,

And now I live, and now my life is done.

My tale was heard and yet it was not told,

My fruit is fallen, and yet my leaves are green,

My youth is spent and yet I am not old,

I saw the world and yet I was not seen;

My thread is cut and yet it is not spun,

And now I live, and now my life is done.

I sought my death and found it in my womb,

I looked for life and saw it was a shade,

I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb,

And now I die, and now I was but made;

My glass is full, and now my glass is run,

And now I live, and now my life is done.

Journal of a Soul 12

Self on Caulonia Beach, this Easter season!!

Many years ago when I was a first year student at college I remember reading several of Saul Bellow’s novels.  The one that sticks out in my memory is Henderson The Rain King.  The protagonist, Henderson, is middle aged and somewhat confused as to his identity.  Not alone is he confused about his selfhood, but he simply does not know what he wants from life at all.  Then, throughout the novel we meet with his often repeated chorus: “I want.  I want!”  I think many of us modern and postmodern humans could sing the same chorus as we, too, simply don’t know what we want.  At base, what we want is some direction in our lives, some meaning.  Then the inevitable questions arise:”Who will give us this direction?  Where does that elusive meaning lie?”  These questions are not surprising at all – for, as the famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustave Jung puts it, the second half of any person’s life is always about the search for meaning.  After all, the first half is necessarily about getting qualifications, marrying, rearing a family and then, and then and then etc.  And then, what?

As I type these reflections I am sitting in Calabria, South Italy, awaiting my return home to Ireland tomorrow.  Life is also about that, too, waiting. The American poet and critic, Randal Jarrell wrote a famous poem about waiting in line while he was a soldier in Korea, if I remember correctly.  He saw waiting as one of the key conditions of modern humankind, not alone that of the lonely GI.  If you have ever lived in Italy you will know that things work very, very, very slowly indeed here.  Everything is literally drowned or drowning in paperwork at all times.  So much so that any non-native is liable to wonder how anything gets done at all in this wonderfully eccentric and endearing country. However, things do gradually and eventually get done. And then, one will say, albeit much time later - It was all worth the wait!!

And Waiting, then, can be good for the soul.  Let's contemplate that so...

We Westerners don’t like to wait.  We live in a fast world.   It is decades since Alvin Toffler spoke so learnedly about the acceleration of change, never mind the speed of it.  His classic book, in which he proposed this thesis, was called Future Shock.   We want fast food, instant results, instant contact with others, instant service and so on.  As a teacher I find that the concentration of young people today is getting ever and ever poorer.  It is a very hard task to keep the attention of modern teenagers as they are used to instant gratification and stimulation from the virtual world of computer games.  A class dealing with a poem or a period in history can never really be that interesting or gripping no matter how hard the teacher tries to use modern technology to enliven his/her presentation. All knowledge, like wisdom, has to be earned through the blood, sweat and tears of study.  Sure, we can use technology to enhance our presentation of data and even our learning of it, but much spade work still needs to be done by the learner. 

As this is a journal about the soul, I wish to highlight the importance of patience, the learning to sit with the situation we find ourselves in.  Okay, so I cannot get X, Y or Z object now, or resolve A, B or C situation immediately, or earn D, E or F amounts of money!  So what?  Does it make an appreciable difference to me now at this moment? Obviously, I’m mostly talking about people in Henderson’s or Jarrell’s existential situation, not someone dying of starvation or otherwise in extremis.

If I meditate on my situation in a spiritual or soul-building sense I might ponder the following:

What is happiness for me and my loved ones?

Is the price – in terms of health, mental and physical - worth paying for what I/we earn?

Are our children really happy?

Is my job worth it in terms of the human price I’m paying?

Am I really flourishing?  Incidentally “flourishing” or “eudaimonia” was the word Aristotle used for happiness.  In other words, he did not equate happiness with any fleeting feeling.  It was, rather, a sense of flourishing, or of living life to the full in a more wholesome and holistic sense.

As I sit and wait with the realisation of all the things I cannot have now, immediately, this minute, what is at the base of my desire for them?  Is it simply my own delusions?  Do I need to tackle my own self-deceptions?  One step is surely to attempt to become aware of them in the first palce!

Am I really happy in my own skin?  Can I really live with myself?  Do I sleep easily?

As I sit here and meditate on the rhythm of my breath, can I not simply learn to be, to exist, to let the “real” me surface gently?

As I sit here, can I not gently learn to accept myself as I am, to be more patient with my “self” and with significant others in my life?

As I sit here, can I not let my breathing work in unison with the very planet on which I am a miniscule creature?

As I sit here, can I not stop repeating Henderson’s mantra, “I want, I want!”and replace it simply with “I am, I am”  Say it over and over.  Surely Being is more important than Having as Erich Fromm used to emphasise so perspicaciously?  Surely Being beats Wanting any day?

Journal of a Soul 11

The Makers of Meaning

A book I am currently reading.

We are makers of meaning.  Without meaning, life is shallow and hollow. Without it, we become heartless and soulless automata.  Eventually, we literally dry up, wilt and die like an uncared for plant.  Immediately here, we have the makings of a good metaphor – living a good life is, in a certain sense, gardening for the soul.  This is a metaphor suggested by Carl Ransom Rogers in his Person-Centred Therapy (PCT).

In a major sense, too, our opening metaphor here, namely gardening for the soul, suggests a firm connection with nature.   And, further, this is one of modern and post-modern humanity’s greatest faults.  Not alone do we lack a real connection or relationship with the earth and its goods, but we destroy them with impunity.  Even worse, the acquisitive and capitalist cultures we are born into allow us to be virtually indifferent to the earth and its bounty.  Sadly, we meet many people who are unaware of the destruction we are doing to the bountiful planet on which we live. 

Maybe at this juncture in the history of humankind, when we are in the midst of the worst economic crisis we have ever witnessed, we are ready for a wake-up call.  Perhaps, greed and rapacity have shown us their worst results – corruption, bankruptcy, selfishness, and a sheer lack of appreciation for things of the spirit or the soul, for values other than those linked to financial profit at all costs.

But, any of us who are idealists, who believe that something else is needed over and above rapacious capitalism for the redemption of humankind, are often left totally disillusioned.  In this side of the developed world – Europe – it would seem to this economically ignorant commentator that the powers that be, namely Germany and France don’t really want to help the rest of Europe in solidarity.  Rather, they prefer to self-righteously preach about unfettered over-spending by smaller countries and lack of regulation, and not a word about their own unfettered over-lending.  There is not much solidarity in squeezing the last penny from some of the poorest nations who in turn are squeezing their own poorest citizens.

This is no political qua political post, dear reader.  It is, perhaps, political qua spiritual, as all spiritual stances have political and financial consequences.  Humankind has lost its way as all spiritual values are being lessened and eroded in the name of the mighty euro or indeed the mighty dollar or whatever the ascendant currency might be. What, then, are these values, the decrease of which, I lament here?  Let me try to list them in no specific order:

1. Connection with the earth.  Call her Mother Earth or Gaia – see James Lovelock’s notion of Earth as one great organism.  Notice the connection of all simple religions and spiritualities with the Earth as Mother or provider.  In this regard reading the spirituality of the American Native Indians is very enriching.  (Note to self: I must read more here.)
2. Fostering creativity in all its incarnations: drawing, painting, writing, sculpting, composing music, singing, dancing, acting and so on and so forth.  What do they tell us about humanity?
3. The moral call – the call to fight for justice on our own doorstep as well as further afield.
4. Asking questions like: Where does this moral call come from?  Why behave in a just way? Where or who is the source of this moral call?  Is there a source of Good, i.e., God?  The present writer believes this is a very important question to discuss, though he is agnostic about the answer.  He certainly has very few answers.  But in the tradition of Socrates all questions, especially the hard ones must be put.
5. What is friendship? What is love?  Or again, in reference to the current financial crisis: What is SOLIDARITY? What is the common goal of humanity?  In how far am I my brother’s keeper?
6. What lessons have we learnt from the current worldwide DEPRESSION?
7. What, essentially, have the traditions of the great world religions to teach us about our values as humans?

If we as humans are the makers of meaning, and the makers of values, then we had best be up and at it, and not leave the way clear for the empty philosophies of bureaucrats and capitalists, who, in the words of the great Irish litterateur Oscar Wilde, “know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”