Journal of a Soul 28

My Eulogy for My Mother, Mary Quinlan, 1917 - 2013

Preamble

This short eulogy fits in here in this blog because it is very much written from the soul.  My brothers and I sat by her bedside from 05:30 until 00:05, that is for her last eighteen hours and thirty five minutes of earthly existence. She seemed to have "given up the ghost" when her breathing stopped at 22:05 on Monday 15th July. However, when the Doctor in attendance arrived she declared, having examined her, that she could not pronounce her dead as her heart was still strongly beating. In the end, she was declared dead at 00:05 on Tuesday16th July.  A deeply devout Catholic friend declared that he was in no way surprised at this, adding that my mother obviously wished to die on the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.  Now, as you will read in the tribute below, my mother had spent some15 years leading the Rosary in her local church which at that stage had been run by Carmelite priests - O. Carm.  If one is a Catholic believer one would call thing providence; if an agnostic, a coincidence, or a New Age believer a God-incidence.  Be that as it may, here follows my eulogy for my mother in full, together with a poem I wrote for her:

Mother’s Eulogy

1  Words of thanks must come first.  On behalf of the Quinlan family and the extended larger Brophy family I would like to take this opportunity to say a heart-felt “thank you” to all the medical, nursing, caring and ancillary staff in St Mary’s Hospital, Phoenix Park.  Anyone with any connection to that wonderful “home from home” will know the excellent standards of care and attention available there.  Mary was in four or five different wards during her long stay there, but her last port of call was Beibhinn Ward in Teach Cara where she spent three happy and content years.  To the wonderful staff of Beibhinn, thank you for your care and love for our mother – it was simply second to none.

2.  I would also like to thank Fr Gerry for his gentle, sensitive and prayerful handling of the whole funeral service.  Thanks, as well, to the choir for the lovely fitting music.

3.  I would also like to invite everyone, back to Parnell’s Club, now called The Chanel for a light meal.  My mother would have wished that her life would be fittingly celebrated with old memories and fun shared over a meal!

4.  Mary had a long and happy life of 96 years and three months.  While not an English scholar at all she liked to say that she was born on Shakespeare’s birthday, the 23 rd of April.  In her case the year was 1917.  If Mary’s life were a book it would contain three chapters:

5.  The First chapter would be entitled: “The Crumlin Years: Hard Work and Music.”  My mother was the second eldest of 12 siblings, and as the eldest girl she performed the role of mother to many of her younger brothers and sisters.  In those days much responsibility fell to the eldest girl in any family, more so in one so large.  A committed and diligent work regime was instilled into her from her earliest years, and caring was the core of her very existence from the beginning – this was never to change.  She was a wonderful home-keeper, organiser, cook, carer, dress-maker, knitter – all the usual skills and competencies associated with the traditional Irish woman of that era.  In hindsight she would have been imbued with all these values and skills by her own mother, Phoebe St Ledger, who was a convert from the Church of Ireland.  The Brophy home was a happy and caring home where Irish traditional Irish music was part of its very fabric with all the notables of traditional music, like Seamus Ennis visiting there because her father was a well-regarded exponent of the uilleann pipes and a marvellous reed maker.  I remember her telling me that when she was very young she and her siblings would follow my grandfather in line around the fields as he played the bag and chanter of his uilleann pipes.  This is chapter one, and it ends in 1954, I think, when all her siblings were reared and married and she herself married my father Thomas Quinlan.

6.  And so chapter 2 may be called “Roscrea and Dublin.”  In 1954 at the age of 36/7 she moved to Roscrea, the hometown of my father where we were all born.  Crises were never far away, but in her case they were all grist to the mill.  The first house was burned down, I believe, but luckily the alarm was raised and no harm done.  Then in the early sixties my father Tom got polio in the then countrywide polio epidemic. Luckily he came through that with just the loss of the use of one arm and was happily able to work for the rest of his life.  However, Mary never lamented any misfortune ever as troubles were simply something you dealt with, and never ever given into.  My father’s convalescence and his new work necessitated a move back to Dublin in 1964.  All these years, which were hard at times, were in general happy ones for her and her family.  Typical of her, she found herself a job to supplement the family income as the housekeeper for an old gentleman in Ballsbridge, which she continued with until she was a young 70.  Hard work was always part of her nature. Having retired, she became a daily mass-goer in this Church which became the hub of her daily existence as she proudly led the rosary here every morning for the last fifteen or so years of her active life, and during this time was a loyal member of the over-fifties group.

7.  Chapter 3 may be termed “The Long Good Bye.”  At 84, while still active, she had a mild stroke which unfortunately was the beginnings of dementia which she would live with for the last 12 and half years, with 11 or so of those spent in the care of the wonderful staff of St Mary’s hospital.  The first several years had their funny moments with Mary thinking the other patients were her brothers and sisters – indeed she called them by their names – and used to tuck them in at night before she went to bed herself.  However, dementia is no kind friend, and it diminishes the memory bit by inevitable bit, but thankfully she was always very happy in her surroundings and was constantly smiling, an ability she retained to the very end when speech was no longer possible.  She was able to smile for us before her passing.

8.  Her two most prominent characteristics were her gentleness and her total non-judgement of others.

9.  I’ll finish with a poem which may sum her up better than these above  more prosaic words:

A Poem for Mother

Your love was the shade of a tree on a scorching day,

A summer shower refreshing our parched clay,

A strong hand that lifted child from harm’s way,

Your face a sun that warmed our every day.

And yet not much was said

For all was done and every child was fed

And every plant was nurtured to its flower

As years rolled by beyond our power.

And now there are no words that we can say,

No rhymes to capture life’s decay,

The fall of leaf, the burden of dismay,

And yet there is a solace in the season’s turn:

Ripe fruit must fall to earth

To bring new life to birth

And so inevitable it must be,

The parting wave, the final smile, the stinging tear,

The mystery of the turn in every year.

And now we dwell in the comfort of your great love,

Your long life’s work, no task left undone –

Let us celebrate its length of years

And the joys that far outnumbered all our tears.

RIP, Mary and may the light of the heavens shine upon you!

Journal of a Soul 27

Facing Death

Ireland's Eye from Baldoyle

Those who live close to nature learn its mysteries with a certain ease that is always foreign to us city dwellers.  That is why I love travelling back to the county where my father was born and lived for more than half his life.  He truly shared in that country wisdom.   Likewise, do the simple country people of Calabria where I have been holidaying for some recent summers.  Tribes and more primitive peoples also share in such simple wisdom.  Modern sophisticated humankind, which works so much from the neo-cortex, has almost forgotten what it is like to live close to nature and its cycles. Often, alas, we moderns only meet nature when it interrupts our plans through the natural evils of tornadoes, snow blizzards, floods and so on.  Indeed, we have learned of late that much of the natural disasters are caused by man-made pollution to our atmosphere.  Alas, we moderns have done so much learned thinking about the world that we have quite forgotten that we are part of it, too.  We are creatures, albeit self-conscious, but creatures nonetheless of the world, in which we live, move and have our being.

Be that as it may, what I want to write about here is the last few hours of my mother’s life.  That frail life is slowly but surely leaking away now at the grand old age of 96. My brother Pat and I have been called home from holiday to await her passing from this world.  And yet, with all the knowledge we have gained about what it means to be human, we have never really bettered the ways of coping and dealing with dying and death than the many religious traditions of the world have put at our disposal.  The community comes around and ritualises the passing of this person from our presence.  As a philosopher, I would like to believe that I am open enough to allow all creeds the dignity of their individual beliefs.  Dying and death, and indeed how we deal with them, are not matters of pure science that can rule as to what is the true and right way to celebrate the meaning of a life that has passed or indeed rule upon the belief of a life to come.  Comforting ourselves in our lonely grief is quite fittingly the province of faith, religion and indeed of the imagination, and it is my considered conviction that both faith and religion belong firmly within the ambit of the intricate mystery of the imagination.  It is not, therefore, a question of whether the next life exists or not or of whether it can be proved one way or another. It is simply not a question that falls within the province of science at all.  It is one that falls within the ambit of the psychology and sociology of religion and within humanity’s many learnt ways of coping with its crises.  These are the factors that such trenchant atheists like Hitchens, Dawkins and Denneth leave out of the picture.  Their arguments are good and valid, but only good and valid within the narrow parameters of a delimiting and dehumanising science, in effect within the confines of a sheer scientism.

My mother and I about five years ago

The imagination is a wonderful faculty which leads us individually and collectively into mysteries which the rational or cognitive faculties of the mind cannot fathom – great works of music, wonderful pieces of art, marvellous buildings and bridges and so on.  Over 100 years ago the great John Henry Cardinal Newman pointed out that even scientists had to use their imagination as well as their cognitive or rational faculties in bringing their discoveries and inventions into the world. The imagination of a culture is a rich world that cannot be reduced to the parameters of any science.  We meaning-making creatures need our beliefs, no matter what their standing in a purely cognitive or logical sense. The brain, and the mind which resides principally though perhaps not entirely there, and even the soul which some believe lives mysteriously there, too, are all more than just firings on and off of various neurons.  Yes, they may be that, but not just that.  We humans are more.  And it is in the quest to find out what the “more” in us is that all true inquiry lies.

And so, as my mother’s life leaks out, I am in many ways diminished.  The womb that begot me is no more.  That was the human animal womb.  Was there or is there, as the great psalmist David put it, a womb before the dawn that begot us all?  Our questions are legion, our feelings confused, perhaps numbed.  The existentialists are right.  Death makes dust of both our individual achievements and dreams.  However, it cannot reduce to ashes the memory of the collectivity, the shared emotions and feelings of the race, the drive to meaning within any culture. In times like this, all I can do is take refuge in the wisdom of the culture which begot me.  Rest in peace, Mary Quinlan.  I hope I will live the remainder of my life with the courage and determination to see no task left undone as you did! Your task is finished – a job well done!    Consummatus est! I will miss you sorely!

Journal of a Soul 26

Order versus Disorder

Clouds over Baldoyle recently

Somewhere, sometime, long ago at the dawn of consciousness, which, I should imagine, roughly corresponded to the emergence of civilisation around the great rivers of the world from Mesopotamia to Egypt to China and so forth, there was a first great push for order among humans.  Humankind had begun to order itself, to create systems to help itself better survive in a hostile world.  Together, human beings could create and invent ever easier and better ways of surviving.  And so, progress was now possible with these first steps of co-operation. And so, indeed, prehistory gave way to history as civilisation after civilisation sought to record all their efforts at self-betterment, both successful and unsuccessful.

And today, we are the rich inheritors of multifarious cultures and we possess a sheer abundance of ever-expanding knowledge which has its foundations in those early cultures we described above.  Having been born in a relatively poor and young nation, namely Ireland, in 1958, I was, like my contemporaries exposed to very little new knowledge as it were – most of it was then contained in the written media and in the school books from which we learned our traditional school subjects. I recall well the arrival of the first television set into our little town of Roscrea, Co Tipperary in 1962 when I was only four years old. The National Television Service, RTE, was founded on January 1 that year.

And so as I grew up, the world became simultaneously and paradoxically both larger and smaller.  Larger, insofar as we would gradually come of age by learning through the medium of the TV how bigger and richer nations lived.  We would also desire the goods they had and to do the activities they engaged in.  We would want to travel more and experience and learn at firsthand what it was like to live elsewhere.  It became a smaller world, too, insofar as we are now beneficiaries of what Alvin Toffler long ago so aptly described as “the acceleration of change” in the early 1970s – so much so, indeed, that we can now call up any amount of relevant (and irrelevant) information at our fingertips through modern technologies such as smart phones and i-pads etc.

Obsessed with Information and with organising it

The Public Library, Baldoyle

In short, we are still obsessed with information – indeed, we might truly describe it as information overload – and we are equally obsessed with ordering that information into all its relevant categories and classes, subcategories and subclasses.  The web of knowledge gets evermore intricate as the world seemingly progresses.  Note the adverb here, as human progress is surely a matter of philosophical importance, and questions can indeed be raised as to what exactly progress consists in – thoughts for another post there, I should think. The internationally famous contemporary British professor of philosophy, A.C. Grayling puts it thus, and many are wont to agree with the learned professor:

“The development of science and technology shows us that, as a species, we have grown clever; their misuse for war and oppression shows us that we have not yet grown wise.  Moral heroism is required for us to teach ourselves wisdom” (The Choice of Hercules, Phoenix, Orion: London, 2007, p.68)

Disorder breaks in

If you own a property you will realise how much maintenance is required and much if not all of it on-going.  Things naturally break down – The Second Law of Thermodynamics and all that.  As soon as a house is unlived in, nature begins to have its way all too quickly with grasses and weeds growing from every available crack and crevice.  In other words, we have to constantly labour to bring about order, and also to keep order in place lest it suddenly descend into disorder and chaos.

Meditation as a Coping Strategy

I remember one of my acquaintances remarking many years ago that no one gets out of life alive.  In spite of all our individual efforts to keep order in our individual lives we grow old and die.  The existentialists were keenly aware of this patently obvious absurdity at the very heart of the human predicament: - the self-project which each individual sets out to accomplish will come to nothing in the dust of our death.  Admittedly, collectively as a culture we amass mounds of information, much art, buildings of great architectural value, languages, the intricacies of mathematics and sciences of all types as well as the more creative stuff of poetry, novels, drama and so forth.  And yet, as individuals we come to nought.  This was at the heart of Irish National Broadcaster, Marion Finucane’s interview with the dying writer Nuala O’Faoláin some two years back.  Nuala was heartbroken, she said, on learning that her death was imminent because all the order and shape she had built up in her individual life would now simply become nothing – all the facts she had learned, all the experiences she had gained, all the insights, the teeming brain, the languages, the literature, the writings, the music she so loved, the art, her three or so apartments, her wonderful friendships, her next writing task – all gone, forever, dissolved into nothing as her individual life, her little selfhood of her own creation, was snuffed inexorably out.  That, indeed, is the human dilemma, the existential condition under which we all live. 

And yet, meditation is only too aware of this. After all, it was Siddhartha Gautama’s (the Buddha) own lived dilemma, too, how to deal with suffering in all its manifestations – mental, spiritual and physical.  For him, the key was to learn to become detached from the concerns of life, to learn to get over clinging to either things or persons – in short, to learn acceptance and detachment.  This is the Buddhist philosophy of life, a way to live serenely and sanely in an all too frenetic and insane world.   

And so, what does living wisely mean? I argue that it means something along the following lines:

To learn that there are no easy answers to life’s big questions and that  those who propose such easy answers are singularly unwise, misled and misleading.

Sometimes we have to learn to accept events in life that we can never ever understand.  Acceptance, of course, here is never blind acceptance which is sheer fatalism.  By acceptance here, I mean that graced place of equanimity where one arrives spiritually, having worked hard at either solving the problem at hand, looking for help from as many quarters as possible, seeking advice, doing one’s best to come up with some partial solution and so on.  There is little or nothing more one can do against the inevitable at that stage.  Hence, acceptance is a wise position because one has expended all the necessary energy and a further expending is nothing short of wasteful and useless.

Knowing one’s strengths and limitations, and playing life’s game in that knowledge.

Forming good relationships and working at them like a gardener cultivates his patch of ground.

Learning the limits of human knowledge.

Being humble in a Socratic way – the admission of ignorance can be the beginning of knowledge and wisdom.

Learning things by doing – the practical knowledge or wisdom (phronesis) advocated by Aristotle.

Learning through meditation to accept whatever order there is in chaos.

Doing things slowly, mindfully and consequently well.

Perfection does not exist – it is an unobtainable ideal.  Everything has slight imperfections somewhere.  Excellence is a different matter.  To excel at something need not mean being perfect at it.  The nearest description I found for “perfection” was in the Bible where one translation described it as being “whole” or complete.

Finally, one must learn the harsh truth of all existence, namely that life is not fair, and by all the logic of statistics could never be.  Mostly, life is a matter of sheer randomness and luck.  How, when, where, to whom and in what medical and monetary circumstances we are born are all matters of varying circumstances.  We are dealt a specific hand of cards and we had better play them as best we can to our advantage if we are to engage positively at all with life!

Journal of a Soul 25

A Note on Repetition

bank of Ireland, College Green, Dublin, June 2013

Good teachers and lecturers often repeat important points in their classes or lectures.  I remember reading somewhere that when T.S. Eliot was asked why he repeated certain themes so often he replied to this effect (obviously I'm paraphrasing his words as I don't recall them exactly), "Ah, but I always repeated them in different ways!"  Thus it is with any good teacher - he or she will repeat their important points in as many ways as possible to hammer them home.  I am  conscious that I may be repeating things here for the same reason, but I am also aware that I may be unconsciously repeating things, too, like a broken record, as my mother used to say.  I hope that when I repeat things that they are in the former manner not the latter here.  Preachers or politicians who speak off the cuff often repeat themselves unawares.  Hopefully these thoughts are not in that fashion either.

Life Interrupts

What makes life so interesting is its sheer complexity and uncertainty.  No matter what plans we make, the sheer randomness and chaotic nature of life insists on interrupting us.  We think we are in control of our own little lives.  I suppose that is the way we moderns have been brought up - that is with a sense of our own sheer individuality and separateness as an autonomous self.  Those who read history, especially the history of ideas, will know that individuality is a concept that has only loomed large in the last 200 years or so.  We somehow stupidly believe the world revolves around us.  We are stuck in an outmoded concept of selfhood.  Let me call this idea of selfhood the Ptolemaic notion of the self.  However, if we really reflect upon it, any really worthwhile, practical or commonsense (ironically, this is not all that common at all) notion of the self will be what I call a Copernican or Postmodern one which acknowledges that the self is orbitting with many other selves around each other.  Whether we like it or not, reality interrupts our tiny plans, and that's what they are, tiny, though not insignificant for us - indeed very significant for us, but terribly insignificant for others.  Hence we need perspective and not a little humour.  A sense of humour is important so we do not take our "self" too seriously.

Acknowledging Life's Interruptions

O'Connell Bridge, Dublin, June, 2013

I'll finish off this current posts with some reflections in the form of questions as well as in the form of statements as there are no general answers when one speaks about personal development, human development, counselling or meditation that will fit every one's situation precisely.  Of course, like all human sciences, there are general principles and axioms, but they have to be tailored to the individual's situation.  Therefore a mix of both is the best methodology for our purposes here.

• What are my main preoccupations at the moment? (Personal health or that of loved ones; financial worries;professional concerns; personal disagreements; depression etc)
• What are my senses being bombarded with from day to day?
• How stressed am I?
• What do I need to let go of?
• Who do I need to let go of?
• Can I let go of them?
• What do I need to accept in my life?
• Who do I need to accept in my life?
• What does A or B event show me about my self?
• What does Xor Y person and my interaction with them show me about my self?
• How do I deal with a, b, c, d, e, etc interruptions?  Can I just let them come or go in an objective fashion?
• Why should I let my "self" be buffetted about by events and by others rather randomly in the sense that I let them consume me?
• Why can't I accept them objectively and let them go without consuming me?

Erich Fromm, the great social psychologist and psychoanalyst used to say that "nothing human is alien to me!"  I remember a former lecturer in spirituality saying something on similar lines: "Nothing human is foreign to spirituality!"  All is grist to our mill.  In this sense, then, in the sense of all my above paragraphs, there is never a denial of life in all its vicissitudes at play in meditation.  In other words, there is never a denial of good and evil in meditation or any real spirituality because what meditation and spirituality are about is acceptance, recognition and attitude.  We can choose our attitude to life, to all its ups and downs, ins and outs.  In a certain sense meditation, spirituality, and counselling and psychotherapeutic practices have much in common with Stoic philosophy, being able to stand back and observe life from a still point or from an objective place which the author I was discussing in my last post, namely Singer calls "the seat of self!"

I wish whoever reads this wee post as well as my own self a hearty welcome and the persistence in practice to reach that objective seat!

Journal of a Soul 24

Being Aware

Reflection of sun in Compass Monument at Howth Harbour, June 2013

The heart of meditation is being aware.  The great Jesuit spiritual writer, Tony de Mello, sees this as the foundational principle of meditation.  In fact, he has written a superior book on this topic with that very name, Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality. (Image Books: 1992).  In all his writings, he talks about the practice of meditation as being an act of "waking up"  or "becoming aware." 

Consciousness

Another way of stating the substance of my opening paragraph here is to state that when we meditate we get to the heart of things as far as being human goes, namely that we arrive at pure consciousness.  Professor Lavine in From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (New York, Bantam Books, 1984) states that "existentialism says that I am nothing else but my own conscious existence."   Unfortunately, as de Mello points out, very few people go about in a conscious state of awareness - in fact, we do a lot of things rather unconsciously.  Have you ever arrived at work, having driven there to find that you have quite forgotten what you had encountered on the way there? Whatever about existentialism, meditation is certainly about really being fully conscious of one's being, not just at the specific moment of meditation but hopefully at other moments throughout the day also.

Michael A Singer states in the book I have been discussing in the last two posts - The Untethered Soul - "Consciousness is the highest word you will ever use.  There is nothing higher or deeper... Consciousness is pure awareness." (p. 28)  Now the meditator's job is to arrive at that centre of awareness through his or her practice of awareness. This centre of awareness, Singer calls, in a lovely metaphor, "the seat of the self."  There is considerable reflexivity going on here.  Not alone are you aware, but you are also aware that you are aware.

The wonderful thing about Singer's book is that, in true spirit of meditation it cuts sheer through all denominational allegiances or none:

But now you are aware that you are aware.  That is the seat of the Buddhist Self, the Hindu Atman and the Judaeo-Christian soul.  The great mystery begins once you take that seat deep within. (p. 29)

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)