Journal of a Soul 23

Humpty Dumpty Has A Great Fall

Sunset, Malahide, Co Dublin, June 2013

When we are stressed, things begin to shatter and scatter all over the place.  It is as if the windscreen of our view on the world has shattered into a million pieces.  We might even recall the apt words from W.B. Yeats' poem The Second Coming: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."  Yeats was, of course, referring to a global crisis or disintegration of civilization in the wake of the First World War. The next line, which most people do not quote, strongly confirms  this truth: "mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." However, perhaps the idea of personal disintegration is as horrible an experience or fear as that of the more global disintegration of the outer world.  Yeats had summed up wonderfully in these first quoted words the experience of either inner (micro or personal) or outer (macro or global) disintegration.  One thing is sure, disintegration is a horrifying experience as anyone who has experienced any form of break down or falling apart will aver.

Putting Humpty Dumpty Together Again

We humans are at base a contradictory and paradoxical sort.  We are, on the one hand driven by greed, envy, anger or ego to conquer, desecrate, rip apart and destroy both things and other sentient beings, and, on the other hand, we are inspired by justice, generosity, pity or love to help, consecrate, embrace, lift up and bind together both things and other sentient beings.  Those of us who are by nature optimists believe that the second human impulse to the good vastly outweighs the former, the impulse to evil.  In other words we are here brought back to the inevitable mystery of squaring good with evil.  Freud spoke about these in terms of The Desire to Live: Eros and The Desire to Die: Thanatos.  Indeed, in speaking so, he was commenting on the basic paradoxical nature of the human condition.

Meditation Helps Put Humpty Together

I better begin this paragraph with a caveat which I will write is capitals here: THERE SIMPLY IS NO EASY ANSWER: THERE IS NO PANACEA.  Meditation is no panacea, no instant quick fix.  Rather it is a help, a sort of brush to help us clean up the breakages of our life - excuse the rather awkward metaphor here.  There is a centre of agency, a Still Point, a Seat where the Observer or Witness sits and from which we calmly review the scattered and broken pieces of our life.  As one who tries his best to pull himself together, I find that time spent in meditation helps me to "get my act together,"  a very common metaphor indeed, but nonetheless very true.  Meditation has to be practised on an on-going and regular basis to give one equanimity and peace of mind where things somehow hold together or cohere for us as we go through our daily tasks.  One won't feel 100% most of the time, if ever, but certainly  you will not be in the failure or no grade stakes where everything shatters completely.

My shadow, June 2013

Michael A. Singer in The Untethered Soul (See last post for details of this book and a link to his home page) suggests that we must move from "an outer solution consciousness" to "an inner solution consciousness" (p. 16).  He goes on to stress that there is a part in all of us that can "actually abstract from your own melodrama.  You can watch yourself be jealous or angry..." (p.16)  I admit that this is far easier said than done.  If one has fallen apart there is no amount of meditating that will bring you back together.  You may have to have medical intervention first, as I did, before I had gained enough stability to sail alone and embrace meditation as a repaired yacht might sail anew into the wind.  I have dealt with students with ASD and OCD where CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy) had not a hope of being deployed until the lads had been brought to stability by psychiatric intervention.  Hence,  my caveat in the first few lines of this paragraph.  However, once this caveat has been accepted, reality and commonsense being equally embraced, meditation, then and then only can and does work wonders.

Pointed Questions on the Road to the Still Point or Observer's Seat

Singer refers to one of his teachers Romana Maharshi (1879-1950) who used to recommend that the way to attain inner freedom was to "continuously and sincerely" ask the question "who am I" as you meditate. (p. 23)  In this way, I believe, that such questioning will bring one ever nearer the Still Point of Being or the Observer's Seat (my metaphor for SP).  To finish this post I'm going to use the questions I will use for my meditation session immediately after writing this post:

• Who am I that sits here?
• Who is the thinker of these thoughts?
• Who is the feeler of these feelings?
• Who is feeling this sadness that now inhabits my soul?
• Who is experiencing this confusion?
• Who is feeling this fear?
• Who is feeling this love?
• Who is the one who asks these questions?
• Who, O who is this "I"?

And so on, ever inward to the Still Point... ah but the journey is so long and so slow... caveat, caveat... caveat...

Journal of a Soul 22

The Real Me?

Malahide, Co Dublin just after sunset, June 2013

I ended my last post with a host of questions as regards who the real me is:  "Is the real me or true self the angry me, the selfish me, the happy me, the compassionate me, the helpful me, the moody me, the joyful me, the suffering me, the moaning me, the selfless me, the generous me, the mean me etc?" 

A short book, entitled The Untethered Soul: A Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael A. Singer (New Harbinger Publications, 2007) suggests that there is an "inner voice" or even "voices" inside our heads that are constantly in conversation with us.  Now I readily admit here that there are authors, too, like R Carter (and unlike Singer) who argue that there are multiple selves as well as multiple voices.  (See Multiplicity: The New Science of Personality that argues the case for multiple selves, not just multiple voices. London: Little, Brown, 2008).  Now, without going into any lengthy arguments, I will dismiss the second proposal here by saying solely that it is extremely counter-intuitive and very much lacking in common sense.  

Let me quote Singer more fully here, and then make some comments on his fundamental proposal or principle on which his whole approach to self and spirituality is built:

There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind - you are the one who hears it.  If you don't understand this, you will try to figure out which of the many things the voice says is really you.  People go through changes in the name of "trying to find myself".  They want to discover which of these voices, which of these aspects of their personality, is who they really are.  The answer is simple:  None of them.  (Op.cit., p.10)

Singer is a Yoga Master and Meditation Leader acknowledged worldwide. What he is saying here is that in meditation the "I" (The Real Self, not the Ego!!) becomes the Observer, the Seer, or what Ken Wilber calls the Witness or what the Jesuit Anthony de Mello calls the Centre Point of Awareness and others the Still Point.  In that Still Point, the great monk meditator Thomas Keating says we sit like underwater observers looking up at the bottom of the surface of the river as boats (thoughts and distractions) float by above our heads.  We do not get distracted by any of these thoughts and feelings - those many, many boats.  No, we just observe them, and in observing them we acknowledge them and just let them drift off down the stream in such a way that we never become obsessed with them.  We just let them go.  Singer says that we are the One (the Real Inner Me) who hears whatever voice comes up from our preconscious or unconscious; the One who acknowledges it; observes it; lets it go.  If images come up, we are the One who sees them; visualizes them; acknowledges them; lets them go.  Again, let us finish this post by listening once again to the wise and practical words of this great teacher, Michael Singer.  As we enter any period of meditation, no matter how long or how short, we might do well to momentarily recall the substance of the following words:

You are the one inside [your head] that notices the voice [or voices] talking... That is the way out.  The one inside, who is aware that you are always talking to yourself about yourself, is always silent.  It is a doorway to the depths of your being to be aware that you are watching [or listening]. (Ibid., p. 13)

My meditation Candle

The thing that appeals to me here is the principle of the Observer or Witness who is very much a centre of Unity, a one-pointedness, always a singularity, never a plurality.  It is the singular vision or the singular hearing of the Witness that gives unity to the Self.  Hence my introduction above that insists that any psychology which proposes a plurality of selves is destined to end up not alone in sheer confusion cognitively for the poor searcher (or patient or client) but also in sheer mental disintegration or schizophrenia for the same poor soul.

Meditation or mindfulness, coming as it does from that one-pointedness of awareness, is, from my reading and  from my practical experience, the key, not alone to healing the myriad manifestations of anxiety we experience in our modern world,  but is also the main avenue in providing us with no little meaning in our lives.

You may read about Michael Singer and, indeed, read about and perhaps even buy or get a loan of his small but powerful book:  Singer. 

Journal of a Soul 21

The Elusive or Illusive Self.

There have always been sceptics in philosophy and, indeed, in all branches of knowledge.  We may trace scepticism back as far as the dawn of consciousness, I would suggest.  The most famous ancient sceptic was Sextus Empiricus (roughly 100 to 200 A.D.), the very English translation of whose surname would lead us to believe that he needed to be presented with the evidence of his senses to justify his believing anything.  Since the knowledge of reality, (whatever that is, though our common sense would have us assuredly accept the world and all its contents as such!) is always mediated by fallible bodily senses there is no way of proving things are one way or another.  This is in keeping with the Pyrrhonian School of Scepticism whose catch cry may be proclaimed simply thus: "No more this than that!" Such early scepticism worked as a sort of therapeutic apostasy which resulted in practice in a kind of docile acceptance of life in all its vicissitudes.  

Many other philosophers through the ages, of course, were very sceptical, and among these we may certainly number the classical Rationalists like Descartes, Arnauld, Spinoza and Leibniz and, indeed, the classical Empiricists like Locke, Hume and Voltaire to name several. 

However, setting the philosophical excursus of the opening paragraphs aside, we normally equate scepticism with general doubt, and more specifically with, say, the questioning of the existence of God.  Then, added to that, there has even been a scepticism as to whether the Self exists, never mind the questionable existence of a metaphysical Being called God.  Indeed, as we search for some self-identity or for some notion of selfhood in this journey we call human existence, we must face these thorny questions.    The more we journey onwards on this earthly pilgrimage (a glaringly religious but apt metaphor), the more we become dissatisfied with too simple, too pat or too trite an answer or answers.  Further, the more we travel onwards (or downwards or upwards, indeed - choose your own metaphor!) the more we come to realise that it must be left to the individual wayfarer to come up with his or her own authentic answer to the problems life throws at us to either comprehend or perhaps simply accept.

My title above uses two similarly sounding but different adjectives to describe the mystery of the Self, which I capitalise in a Jungian fashion here.  The Self is never a finished product.  Rather it is a project ever in the making; a project I take on to make or design or form like a potter with the clay (a Biblical image).  In that sense, it is elusive.  We simply cannot sum it up in precise words or say that it is a totally finished product. However, we know that as creators of a work of art (the Self in this case) we are very much totally involved in the project.  The second adjective "illusive," which I have used above in my title, I reject as being a descriptor of the noun "self" at all because this word means "not real, though seeming to be."  

The Self is very much a real phenomenon as any psychotherapist or psychiatrist will confirm for you if you need to go to such phenomenological or psychological lengths.  I mention the word "illusive" above and here solely because many great philosophers (most notably David Hume) and many scientists over the years have rejected the notion of Self completely and have adjudged it an illusion.  In this regard, the current writer was both drawn to and a little unnerved at the naive and somewhat arrogant certainty of the title of a recent book, written by a scholar and scientist, which runs: The Self Illusion: Why there is no “you” inside your head. [Hood, B (2012)] This book lies firmly in the tradition of scientism.  By scientism I mean the belief in the universal applicability of the scientific method and approach to all phenomena, including the human person, without exception.  It was the rise of scientism, as distinct from science per se that brought about what I term the eclipse of the phenomenon of the Self.

Who am I? Where did I come from?  Where am I going? are age-old questions and are as old as consciousness  is itself.  They are the first self-reflective questions which are the very hallmark of consciousness and belong to the term almost by definition.  As we go through our normal daytime routine we often ask ourselves as regards our fickle emotions, "Which is the real me?  Is the real me or true self the angry me, the selfish me, the happy me, the compassionate me, the helpful me, the moody me, the joyful me, the suffering me, the moaning me, the selfless me, the generous me, the mean me etc?"

The next few posts will be on that topic.  Where is the true Self at all.  

Journal of a Soul 20

Searchers for, or Makers of  Meaning?

It is wonderful to write one's thoughts, give them shape and pattern on a page, and even see them take a virtual form that can be summoned up at the touch of a button or as a random connection to some remotely connected search on Google, initiated by an unknown soul.  Then that those thoughts might be read, that they might even elicit a response only adds to the wonderment.  There are times when I wonder do my thoughts precede my words or do my words precede me thoughts - the hen-egg conundrum in another guise.  And yet, I believe instinctively that it is the interplay of both, that dynamism, or symbiosis even, where one supports the other that is more important.  

As I write these thoughts, I also fully realise that these thoughts write me, that they are, in fact, giving shape to "me", forming my selfhood.  We find our selves (and I deliberately disjoin this word) in doing, in action and in all things that we pursue to give our little lives meaning.  As I have said in these posts so many times before, we are meaning-making creatures, and the greatest meaning we can make is our very own SELF.  Again, we shape our selves in another important way to - by simply learning to be and become the person we were innately meant to be.  In that sense we make ourselves by metaphorically travelling in two directions as it were, by going without (going out and interacting with others and the world) and by going within (through meditation and contemplation, through entering the stillness of not alone one's own being, but discovering in that stillness the unity of all being of which the self is put a drop in the ocean.).

And yet, I don't want to make too much of "making meaning" here.  I wish, rather to comment on the human condition insofar as it relentlessly searches for meaning.  In a sense, this is almost a counter spiritual movement if it is a fraught and lonely search that reveals very little meaning, maybe even frustration and despair.  In this sense, I am writing here about the very heart of existentialism - that lonely search for meaning in a seemingly meaningless world.  Searching for meaning can be both a spiritual and a disillusioned aspiritual (I'm not sure if this word exists, but unspiritual is certainly not what I mean, what I mean is a-spiritual in the way amoral relates to moral!) quest at one and the same time.  Let us not dwell too much on the sheer meaninglessness of life as Camus would have it in his version of the great myth of Sisyphus. 

Ah, dear reader, you are probably wondering where these thoughts are going to at all, at all.  In these posts, I often believe I am feeling my way in the dark, but hopefully with a little more direction than Mulla Nasruddin searching for his lost key under the light of the street lamp simply because there was more light there than in the dark house where he had lost it.  And so let me come to some point in this meandering post.  Last Thursday evening I had the pleasure to view the wonderful film The Great Gatsby.  Indeed, it was to my mind wonderfully loyal to the book, or at least to my memory of it from years ago - having read it for my Leaving Certificate many years ago when I was a young lad of 17 years. What comes across in the film is the sheer feeling of lostness, of being cut adrift on an ocean of multiple, though colourful and alluring experiences; of searching for something of value, almost irretrievably lost in that multiplicity; of tasting excess after excess and finding it all so hollow.  What is it, at all, that can make us humans really happy?  Why do things, which we once desired so much, eventually leave such a rotten taste in the mouth?  

In a sense, this book or film is quintessentially about F. Scott Fitzgerald himself.  After all, all writing is inevitably autobiographical  when pondered and reflected upon and cut back to the bone.  One quotation I placed on the flyleaf of a recent piece of work was a quotation from this wonderful Irish American writer.  That quotation runs:  “Five years have rolled away from me and I can’t decide exactly who I am, if anyone.  (Letter, 1932).  He had written The Great Gatsby in 1925 at the young age of 29, when he was obviously a searcher for meaning in a fraught and intense way.  One can see this search for meaning (let's call it meaning as revealed in love, in human love - yet very much in this case in the form of the classical love for the unobtainable beloved) in the following quotation about Gatsby which we find in the first chapter:

―He stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward – and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far way, that might have been the end of a dock.

           (Scribner's paperback edition, p. 21)

That green light in the darkness marked where his beloved Daisy Buchanan lived with her millionaire husband Tom.  And, indeed, we instinctively know that this love is pretty much unobtainable, and the fog that is not quite as thick as that in Eugene O'Neill's wonderful play Long's Day's Journey into Night, is all too indicative of lostness: "―If it wasn‘t for the mist we could see your home across the bay…You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock." (Ibid., p.92)

And then, there is that very sad expression, which is the very antithesis of all spirituality, that suggests that the only way of steering our barque of self through the choppy waters of life is by living in the past or by the vain attempt to recapture that past in the now..  The quotation I have in mind is given almost verbatim in the movie:

"Can‘t repeat the past?‘ he cried incredulously. Why of course you can!" He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand...  I‘m going to fix everything just the way it was before," he said, nodding determinedly. "She‘ll see."

―He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.  (Ibid., p.110)

In this sense, then, as I have already stated, this could be said to be an aspiritual quest, an illusive and elusive quest.  Those of us who deeply accept the spiritual life believe fervently in living in the now.  Indeed, we could say that Gatsby was living in a spiritual or existential hell, well before Albert Camus gave it philosophical form.

One theme of this novel  or film could be stated as follows: Dwelling in the past can only result in obsession and misfortune. We cannot transplant ourselves into the past again as it is passed and gone forever. The future misfortune can only be prevented by learning from the past.  Gatsby simply had not learned this lesson.  Another theme would be: Some of us drink in and swallow whole the illusion that the rich person's life is perfect.  In other words, we confuse illusion with reality.  After all, is this not one of the main symptoms of mental illness - that the border lines between illusion and reality are very blurred indeed? Another theme, still, would be that when dreams become an obsession they fall out of our reach.  Finally, another theme would be that wealth is not all it's cracked up to be; that the American dream may be linked to wealth, but that it is much, much more, too.

In writing this novel of quest for meaning, F. Scott Fitzgerald penned a classic which has made his name immortal in human culture as he pointed out the sham which life can be.  Deep down as humans we know we want more.  The tragedy may be that this wonderfully gifted writer F. Scott Fitzgerald may not have truly realised how great a writer he was and that his finely crafted words would live on after he had passed into the mist or fog of the past as a person.

Reading the book and viewing the film can only affect us deeply if we are at all human.  Both will push us to want to live in the now with an eye to our future. We can never, for an instant really believe the words of the narrator as we finish the novel or film, because we know, that like Gatsby we, too, will be lost forever in the fog of our own illusion if we do:

―I thought of Gatsby‘s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy‘s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could barely fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night....

―Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that‘s no matter – to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther….And one fine morning...

―So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.(180, 182)

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!!