Journal of a Soul 49

The Validity of Experience 4

Introduction:

Our winning Debating Science Issues team: The Desire to Know More!!

There is much in our experience that cannot simply be reduced to information garnered from our senses.  The preceding posts have all attempted to come at what human experience is from as many directions as possible.  Reducing our experiences to merely those perceptions that are registered on our human brains by empirical data accessed through the senses is very delimiting of what human experience is or may be in its totality. (And it is  the "totality" of experience at which I am aiming to describe in these posts).

In mystical theology there was a way of approaching the divine through what was termed "the via negativa" ("the negative way") which contended that the divine was so far beyond our human knowing that the only way of approach for us human beings to make any sense of that great mystery was to advance towards it by saying what it was not - hence its appellation as being a "negative way."  Another term for this type of mystical theology was Apophatic theology. *  The WIKI sums up this approach thus:

In negative theology, it is accepted that experience of the Divine is ineffable, an experience of the holy that can only be recognized or remembered abstractly. That is, human beings cannot describe in words the essence of the perfect good that is unique to the individual, nor can they define the Divine, in its immense complexity, related to the entire field of reality. As a result, all descriptions if attempted will be ultimately false and conceptualization should be avoided. In effect, divine experience eludes definition by definition. (see HERE)

I shall discuss mystical theology later in these posts, but the point I want to emphasize here is that even on a human level we can learn from this humble approach.  Indeed, even if we are somewhat agnostic, or even atheistic, we can still learn something from the "via negativa" or "via negationis."  In other words, I am arguing here that if we are to proceed in the task of finding out what we humans really are in and through our experiences, it is surely better for us to proceed by being open-minded.  That is, it is better for us to allow  human experience to be all that it can be by keeping as many doors open to the mystery of truth, rather than by shutting certain doors of our perception because they cannot be contained within a narrow understanding of epistemology that reduces knowledge to those facts seen only through the doors of the five senses. 

And so, at this stage in this Journal of a Soul, I want to attempt a sort of summary position, or a sort of personal statement of what I believe, or what the great Victorian theologian John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) called an "Apologia Pro Vita Sua."

(1) I am a creature of Desire

Autumn Scene, Fairview Park, 2013

As what I am attempting to do here is very personal, I must use the first personal pronoun a lot, though in academic writing one tries to avoid such a use in order to be as objective as possible.  However, it is also acceptable, especially in the social sciences to use qualitative as well as quantitative research.  These types of research methods involve describing in detail specific situations using research tools like interviews, surveys, and observations.  Self-research would fall under this heading, and it is a legitimate form of research if done methodically and with as much objectivity one can marshal. 

And so my experience of "myself" or of my "self" is that I am a sentient creature with desires and as I experience them these desires are (a) my animal desires, (b) my desire to know and (c) my desire to love and (d) my desire to be loved.  Let me briefly look at each of these subheadings: 

(a) My Animal Desires

This undoubtedly is, perhaps, the easiest to describe.  One needs to be no biologist to list our animal desires.  The obvious one is the desire for food and drink that is obvious from our very first moments of existence.  As a little child we have all cried to be fed and to have our thirst slaked.  After that the sexual nature of our bodies eventually kicks in, especially at adolescence where basically we experience our desire to mate with another of our species and so procreate or reproduce our species.

(b) My Desire to Know

Frank with the Debating Team before their victory!

This is, perhaps, the one desire, that distinguishes us most from our fellow sentient creatures.  I find as I age that this is the one of the  greatest desires that inspires me from day to day.  I am constantly desiring to know more and more. In The Metaphysics, Aristotle states: “All men by nature desire understanding.” ** This statement has also been translated as "All men by nature desire to know." Now, that statement appeals to me, but one could obviously argue that all men do not so desire and point to this or that person whose life showed that they did not desire to know because their actions showed otherwise or that they were cognitively deficient in some way.  However, Aristotle's phrase "by nature" is a qualification that retrieves his generalization somewhat as it refers to the potentiality of each individual person, irrespective of whether they achieve knowledge or not. 

Therefore, even if Aristotle's formulation is a broad generalization, we have here an insightful statement about the nature of human beings. Everyone of us desires to know or to understand something on a daily basis, no matter how small or insignificant.  "Where is room 202A?" for instance or "Could you tell me where the Post Office is, please?" and so on and so forth would be good examples of our daily desire to know small things.  We might also wonder what it would be like to travel to Athens or Corfu or Cagliari or New York and decide to go there to find out.  At a deeper level we might wonder what a "Black Hole" or "Dark Matter" is or whether the universe is really expanding. In other words we can surely say that in all the senses listed above and in many more instances, all humankind is involved in the world of ideas and reflection: Everyone is searching for some rational explanation of something, no matter how trivial on the one hand, or how important on the other. Everyone, then, contemplates the issues that are foremost in their minds.  In a deeper existential sense, each person, in his/her own right, asks the ultimate questions concerning his/her own existence. As I sit here, I experience the desire to know who I am?  Who is this creature that types these words, forms these sentences upon this virtual page out there in cyberspace. You may be wondering what it means to be you in your particular circumstances, what it means when you have to suffer X or Y or Z, or perhaps you are asking a question like, "Why did God allow my wife/husband/partner to die so painfully?" And so on.  These questions are truly unlimited, perhaps even infinite.

As I walked from the Dart Station at Sydney Parade with a group of some twenty sixteen and seventeen year old pupils over to UCD some days ago we talked about, among other trivia, different theories of the formation of the universe.  At some stage I asked a group around me how many times bigger would they think the universe was in size proportionally to the size of one little thinking human being like ourselves.  The answer of one very intelligent boy took me by surprise and got me thinking.  He replied that it would be a figure something like the reciprocal of Planck's constant that might fit the bill.  In other words, the number one over what is perhaps the smallest number known in atomic physics.  Lovely answer.  Wish I could have come up with it.  My question was not looking for a mathematical answer at all, though I appreciated the wonderful response.  It was merely asked to provoke wonderment at mystery, quite like the Biblical question of God asking Abraham how many grains of sand were on the seashore.  In other words, even as we walk here or there many questions cross our little minds by way of desiring to know.  Then, there is that wonderful philosophical question that hits me almost existentially as well as cognitively from time to time, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" ***

(c) My Desire to Love

This is also a complex desire.  There is much written on the topic of love from poems to songs to novels to learned prose essays, not to mention all the philosophical and psychological works this subject has inspired.  Our desire to procreate or our animal desires can to a little extent participate in what love is.  A materialist would perhaps have to say that his desire to love is just that, his desire to physically copulate with another.  Yet, we humans are more than a little outraged by such a reduction in what we consider ourselves to be.  Culturally, we have conceived ourselves to be so much more than our animalness or animality.  We are outraged, and rightly so, when the actions of some humans against others of our species reduce us to the actions of unthinking animals, e.g., rape, incest and legions of other horrific actions.  Indeed, oftentimes the crimes committed by humans are worse even than animalistic as even animals never drop so low.  The nature of such evil is beyond our purposes here, but it can be horrifying and troubling to a great and deep extent.

I desire to love my mother, father, brothers, sisters, cousins etc.  Indeed, we culturally desire to love even our enemies.  Those of us who might be sincere and peaceful Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics and indeed atheists and so on desire to love even our enemies as we sincerely believe in loving all of humankind.  On a human level, I desire to love my friends and even my work colleagues insofar as is humanly possible. However, we certainly cannot like everyone we meet, but we can certainly desire to love them in the sense of treating them justly.  Further, on a daily level I try to show my love for my pupils by the way I teach, how I treat them as individuals deserving of respect as other unique human beings and especially by  how I teach them to love and care for themselves as show real compassion for themselves as well as for others. In this context I should like to refer to an entry in my other blog on Book Reviews.  See Passion for Justice. 

(d) My desire To Be loved

With some friends, enjoying myself:  Quest for identity there, too!

I suppose, to use a fitting metaphor, to love and be loved are two sides of the one coin.  I remember my English lecturer at college, the great late John Devitt of Mater Dei Institute arguing that as a senior examiner in Leaving Certificate English he had insisted on one of his subordinate examiners increasing the essay marks of one candidate who had written with great insight on the dual nature of loving, i.e., to love and be loved.  Without a doubt, I am nothing if I am not loved.  My personhood and selfhood is reduced to a mere suffering entity which feels lost, rejected and scorned.  If Lady Macbeth could speak of being "unsexed" by her crimes, we could surely speak of being "unselfed" by not being loved.  To be loved is to be invited in from the cold, to be accepted as part of the group.  In short, to be loved means to belong somewhere.  When we don't belong, we are in fact outsiders, out in the cold, left one side, marginalized, forgotten, overlooked, discriminated against and so on.  You, dear reader, can add your own description of being unloved to my attempts here.

My desires, in my opinion, which I have outlined and explicated to the best of my ability above, push me to an identity which is, as it were, a being or a self who is so much more.  I have attempted to come to grips with what this more may be.  I see myself or my "self" as being a project, which while firmly rooted in the now, is like some strange plant that has been mysteriously sown in this body but which is striving daily to grow more and more.  Our personhood or our selfhood is a project that is always on-going.  We are reaching out to embrace that more all the time both individually and culturally.  Perhaps it is somehow in this quest for selfhood that the Divine enters in.  While I experience myself as very much finite in this all-too-human and animal body, I also simultaneously experience my desires to be of an infinite quality, that is desire belongs to the infinite, to the divine spark in me. Perhaps, I would not be so desiring, unless there is a more... unless there is a more somewhere ever ahead of me.  Or am I merely delusional?  I think not, I know not. I desire not.  All, I can proclaim, like Socrates is my ignorance seeking knowledge.  But why such seeking?  I'll leave the answer, or perhaps more accurately, the quest to you, dear read. Buon viaggio!

*Apophatic Theology: In the apophatic strand of Christian mysticism God is understood as “the One” who is way beyond words and images, the one who transcends every category in a radical simplicity beyond all human thought and idea.  God’s uniqueness and grandeur so ovewhelm our senses and minds that God is described as solitary, radically simple; even as hidden, invisible, or “dark”.  Thus, Henry Vaughan’s famous poem The Night: There is in God (some say)//A deep, but dazzling darkness; As men here//Say it is late and dusky, because they//See not all clear//O for that night! where I in him//Might live invisible and dim.//

Hence, all apophatic theology can do, in one sense, is declare what God is not in terms of human words.  However, it can declare God's utter transcendence in terms that are actually ironically quite clear like that of dark mystery, of hiddenness and otherness, uniqueness and grandeur.  One might wonder here at the marvelling of our astrophysicists at the Black Holes and the Dark Matter of the Universe.  Maybe, just maybe, there could be some parallels here with The Dark Night of the Soul of St John of the Cross.  After all, there are some great parallels between mysticism and astrophysics, not to mention quantum physics. See the Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra.

** Aristotle's most famous book is perhaps his Metaphysics.  The parts of it still in existence span fourteen books. The early books give background information and survey the field before Aristotle's time. Therein, he describes the nature of wisdom as well as criticizing the theories of Plato which he deemed as too ideal and far too poetic: it begins with sense perceptions, which must be translated into scientific expertise. Such knowledge requires the understanding of both facts and causes, and wisdom comes only with an understanding of the universal principles and primary causes built on this science. Aristotle's work in metaphysics is therefore motivated by this desire for wisdom, which requires the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. What is known to us as metaphysics is what Aristotle called "first philosophy." Metaphysics involves a study of the universal principles of being, the abstract qualities of existence itself. The starting point of Aristotle's metaphysics is his rejection of Plato's Theory of Forms. In Plato's theory, material objects are changeable and not real in themselves; rather, they correspond to an ideal, eternal, and immutable Form by a common name, and this Form can be perceived only by the intellect. Thus a thing perceived to be beautiful in this world is in fact an imperfect manifestation of the Form of Beauty. Aristotle's arguments against this theory were numerous. Ultimately he rejected Plato's ideas as poetic but empty language; as a scientist and empiricist he preferred to focus on the reality of the material world.

***This question appears in Martin Heidegger's An Introduction to Metaphysics, Yale University Press, New Haven and London (1959), pp. 7-8  See here for the philosopher Arthur Witherall's short essay on this topic. 

Journal of a Soul 48

The Validity of Experience 3

Swan on the river Liffey, March 17th, 2014

Gerard Hall,* a well known and well respected Catholic theologian from Australia speaks about three turns in modern Catholic systematic theology, viz., (i) the anthropocentric turn, (ii) the turn to political theology and (iii) the embracing of liberation theology in Latin America and further afield.  All these three concerns are inextricably linked with the human experience element of belief. Green theology or ecological concerns in theology can also be brought in under this major direction in modern theology, as indeed can feminist theology. Prior to the early twentieth century, and most especially prior to Vatican II in Catholic circles, theology was almost completely done from a theo-centric or God-centred viewpoint. Faith was seen as the answer or response to divine revelation solely, with little human input. However, the more modern concerns with human experiences in theology take human beings as central to the whole enterprise and allow the more religious or divine dimension to come in after that, or perhaps, more conservatively, simultaneously with that.  In more theological terms, one could say that in more traditionalist theological circles the emphasis was particularly on the transcendence of God, while in more modern theological thinking the emphasis lies squarely on the immanence of the divine godhead in humanity.  This latter type of thinking could actually be construed as a return to an early Christian understanding of humanity that emphasized the fact that there was "a spark of the divine in man." ( This idea, most common to Gnosticism but also present in most Western Mystical Traditions such as Kabbalah and Sufism argues that all of mankind contains within itself the Divine Spark of God which is contained or imprisoned in the body.)

A Brief Account of Phenomenology

Edmund Husserl

Like all things that are studied, the resultant terminology is often confounding, and more often than not, leads the beginner to lose heart.  However, for my purposes here, there is no great complexity involved with this term, though any good philosopher will have to wrestle much with this subject if he is studying it academically.  That task, thankfully, is beyond our purposes here.  Briefly, phenomenology refers to a philosophical movement founded by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938) that concentrated on the reflection upon and the study of the structures of consciousness and those phenomena that appear in such acts of consciousness.  The empiricists had argued strongly that knowledge comes from sensory experience only, that is through the five senses solely, while phenomenology would see knowledge as coming through the total and fuller experience of consciousness itself. In other words, our experience is simply a broader phenomenon than our individual and even collective senses might allow.  Somehow, consciousness, then, is more.  Here, I return to what I particularly like to describe our humanity as, namely a phenomenon that is more than the sum of its parts.  My philosophical anthropology may be simply put as attempting to delineate "the more" that is humanity.

What impresses this writer here is that Husserl was a brilliant mathematician, who after achieving his Ph.D. in mathematics, turned to philosophy. (Indeed many mathematicians were to turn to philosophy, as did also the famous Bertrand Russell in England).  What further impresses me is that Husserl never ruled out religious experiences, quite simply because his phenomenology was broad enough to embrace all experiences, including the religious.  The following quotation from Prof. Herbert Spiegelberg is especially significant for this writer: "While outward religious practice never entered his life any more than it did that of most academic scholars of the time, his mind remained open for the religious phenomenon as for any other genuine experience." (See this link Here)

To cut a history of a very complex philosophy short, for our purposes here, Husserl influenced his friend and pupil Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), on whose existential phenomenology, the great Catholic Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner (1904-1984) was to base his transcendental phenomenology.  Rahner's approach, consequently, highlights the transcendental qualities of human experience, those qualities that open experience ever outwards, that is, in my words, to the more.  We are, according to Rahner, first and foremost a question to ourselves.  We live within mystery as fish live within the sea.  All our human longing and knowing do not dint or curb or lessen the deepest human transcendental questioning: Who are we? Why do we exist rather than not exist? What is it that we are called to be? Who or what does this calling to human beings in the world?

I remember struggling with Rahner's last great work The Foundations of Christian Faith, way back in the late 1970s.  One way or another, it seemed to me at the time, and still does, that this great work saw human experiences as foundational to christian experience, or, if you like, to faith.  Let me, therefore, finish this section with the words of Rev. Dr. Gerard Hall:

The Christian message is addressed to the totality of the human person--what Rahner calls the "experience of subjectivity" or the "original experience" of being human. This is the experience of mystery and radical self-questioning through which we transcend the limitations of the self and confront the whole. This radical self-questioning is what makes us who we are: we ask if death is final, if there is a purpose to life, if there is ultimate meaning to our existence? The searching human person experiences him/herself as "self-transcending being": one's self is revealed as 'more' than one's self. There is this fundamental relationship to mystery, God, Being or Holy Truth. To be human is to be called to be something 'other' than what we know ourselves to be at any moment of our earthly, human lives. (See HERE)

It seems to me that the human person is a mystery to himself or herself, a mystery that asks deep and ultimate questions of the human mind and heart.  Philosophy, if it is worth its salt at all, is that subject matter, or that method of thinking that teaches the human person much humility.  The human mind is indeed finite and yet is filled with a desire to ask a veritable infinity of questions.  We desire to know more and more and more.  And yet, no matter what amount of knowledge we amass, and no matter what amount of love we experience, we are fated to be extinguished just like a weak candle flame that can be blown out by the weakest of breaths.  It is sobering, indeed, to be a true philosopher of life.  The words that Shakespeare puts in his hero Hamlet's mouth, words issued to his friend Horatio, come to my mind here: "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy..." (Act 1, Sc 5) And these are sobering words that all of us should take to heart. They are, indeed, Socratic in temper, and justly so.  Socrates, after all, had advised any good philosopher to first admit his ignorance and thence proceed.

It is in generalizing from all too particular and limited viewpoints that much untruth and falsity emerge.  In this regard, the fallacy of reductionism blurs all truth.  And so it is that the turn to experience in its wholeness, in its sheer fullness, through a phenomenology that reaches for the more, appeals so much to this writer here.  I conclude, this rather strained post with the reflection that we encounter life in its mystery rather like a pool (or ocean) into which we dive than as a problem that presents itself like a wall against which we might vainly and meaninglessly bang our heads.  And the more, the more, the more... it opens out into so much wonder, so much mystery, so much that is beyond us, and it draws us ever onward into the more, the more, the more...

* Rev. Gerard Hall, sm is the Head of the School of Theology at McAuley Campus, Banyo, Brisbane -Australian Catholic University. His home page can be accessed HERE

Journal of a Soul 47

The Validity of Experience 2

1. Psychology and Psychotherapy: 

Self recently in Santry Wood

If modernity (or post-modernity even)  means anything, then the quest for personal identity is at its heart.  One could argue that this quest lies at the very core of Western philosophy, and indeed Western religions.  In that modern search for self, psychology and psychotherapy are foundational.  I discussed psychotherapy in the immediately preceding post to this one. Psychology, which chronologically preceded psychotherapy, is commonly defined as the science of behaviour and the mental processes which instigate that behaviour.  The year 1879 is commonly seen as the start of psychology as an independent field of study, because in that year German scientist Wilhelm Wundt founded the first laboratory dedicated exclusively to psychological research in Leipzig, Germany.

Wundt combined philosophical introspection with techniques and laboratory apparatuses brought over from his earlier physiological studies as well as many of his own design. This experimental introspection was in contrast to what had been called psychology until then, a branch of philosophy where people introspected themselves.  In other words, Wundt was taking human experience seriously, or using empirical data, and was, then and only then, reflecting upon those experiences through introspection.  Before this psychology was a a mere branch of philosophy where people examined their minds through introspection, or through looking within.  This process, while legitimate, was merely speculative and not based on concrete empirical or experiential data.

2. Religion and Theology

The problem with reason or rationality is that it is just that, the working out in a methodical or logically rigorous way our thoughts on X, Y or Z subject, oftentimes with little reference to the whole gamut of human experience in its broadest sense.  We are not merely rational beings - we are human beings with all that incorporates: social, ethical, moral, religious/spiritual, musical and artistic dimensions and so on.  Here, one could say, that we are talking about human beings as essentially cultural beings.  I quite like the WIKI definition of culture, which is worth reproducing in its entirety here:

In the 20th century, "culture" emerged as a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of human phenomena that cannot be directly attributed to genetic inheritance. Specifically, the term "culture" in American anthropology had two meanings:

1. the evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to act imaginatively and creatively; and
2. the distinct ways that people, who live differently, classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively. (See HERE)

Within that broader cultural context outlined above lies everything that marks out human beings as different from their animal brothers and sisters (to use terminology much loved by St Francis). Here I wish particularly to talk about the human experience of the numinous or the divine or the spiritual in the lives of human beings.  It is simply incontrovertible that human beings have religious experiences.  One would want to be living in a cocoon not to be aware of that.  What is this phenomenon anyway? What are religious experiences? Here, one can study the anthropology of religion, the sociology of religion, comparative religions, philosophy of religion and indeed theology itself to explore what this may be.

In the above paragraph, I referred to what is termed the numinous. Quite simply this impressive word is an English adjective, taken from the Latin word "numen", and is used by some to describe the power or presence of a divinity or a God or a Spirit or a Power that is both beyond and within us, a reality that sustains us and everything in the universe.  The Latin word "numen" means a "divine presence."

The word was popularised in the early twentieth century by the German theologian Rudolf Otto in his influential book Das Heilige (1917; translated into English as The Idea of the Holy, 1923).  The phrase from this book which this writer remembers from his theological studies in the late 1970s are the Latin words: "Mysterium tremendum et fascinans" that translates as "terrifying and fascinating Mystery."  In other words, that is a mystery before which we both tremble and are fascinated; before which we are both repelled and attracted. Thus, God can appear both as wrathful or awe inspiring.

Interestingly, and quite appropriately for my purposes in this post, the numinous experience as described by Rudolf Otto also has a personal quality, insofar as the person experiences a closeness to, or a communion with the wholly other. That people constantly report that they have personal experiences of such closeness to the divine is also a given in most if not all cultures.  As a phenomenon, religious experiences simply cannot be written off as delusions, though there are many who would do so from a narrow rationalist viewpoint.  However, it is the adjective "narrow" that I underscore here.  Our rationality is merely a small, albeit significant, part of our wider experiences as human beings.

3. Discovering Shared Reality as a Ground for Religious Experience

In this section, here, dear readers, I am going to use some of my teaching experiences with adolescent boys with Asperger's Syndrome. These boys lie on what is termed the ASD spectrum where ASD stands for Autistic Syndrome Disorder.  Put in its simplest terms (at the risk of oversimplifying things, admittedly) let's say that these boys live to varying degrees in their own world.  The more autistic of them are, shall we say, more lost in their own worlds than the less autistic.  When I am teaching them (always in small groups of about 4 to 6 students) social education and communication skills I draw a simple diagram on the board of a series of little circles around a round table (my table in my classroom is actually circular) where each circle with the individual pupil's initials represents the individuals in the room.  I include my own initials in one of the circles and also that of the Special Needs Assistant in another.  The middle circle or table I tell them is common shared reality. Reality, I tell them is the commonly shared experiences of all of the individuals present.  All the while, when the students are sharing their experiences on whatever topic we are discussing, I as teacher or facilitator constantly challenge them to stay in "the world of shared reality" and attempt in as far as possible to prevent them from escaping into the more surreal landscape of their own isolated minds.  I have several students who, no matter what we are discussing, will reduce any and every conversation to their own narrow interests.  In other words, in common parlance, the teacher's task is actually to "keep it real!"

Link with Religious Experiences

The wonder of the simple Honey Bee!

It has long been my considered opinion that religions do tend to attract the "lunatic fringe." Now, I am casting no judgement here - this is a mere objective statement.  These people have one psychiatric or neurological complaint or another.  And the world (or church), in the words of St Augustine, must, at its best, be a hospital which offers healing to all.  Now, this is where we come to "shared reality."  When you or I have a "religious experience" we must check that experience against the shared reality of the believing community.  This has always been a sound theological principle, that is, that individuals must confirm their personal experiences with those of others, especially with those of others in their community. Otherwise, they run the risk of being looked on as belonging to the "lunatic fringe", or, at least, being somewhat deluded. (At its most extreme, unchecked and non-validated religious experiences end up being cult-like and a grave distortion of the truth.)

There is much that I want to write about religious experience in these posts, but because it is such an almost indescribable reality, I am singularly lost for words.  So, please excuse the lack of overall structure in what I am writing here.  I am, dear readers, struggling here to get across what I have experienced as "real," as "spiritual" or "religious," having checked them out through reading, research, and discussion with others.  The biggest thing I have learnt ever is not to rush to judgement, to take a Socratic approach of admitting one's ignorance before searching for the truth of the question in discussion.  In other words be open-minded and broaden the picture out.

Tentative Conclusion

As this post is about the validity of experience, let me finish with one or two of my own spiritual experiences. In the Easter period of 2002 I went to visit my cousin P. in Boston.  P. was always (and still is) one of my dearest friends.  He is now an addiction counsellor employed by the State and has a beautiful wife and a lovely little daughter.  He himself suffers from two addictions - gambling and alcoholism.  Obviously, he is more than coping with this double-addiction, allied to a third complaint of being Bipolar, as he is a very successful and much sought-after addiction counsellor.  P. is a living example of "the wounded healer" and is carrying three heavy crosses to use a religious metaphor. As a boy he was a wonderful young lad with a great sensitivity in his soul.  Anyway, P. invited me to an A.A. meeting, which he was chairing, as his guest.  That evening I was deeply moved.  I sat and listened to what could only be called the deep truths issuing forth from the souls of other human beings.  The A.A. is such a super organization, the first and foremost self-help group ever.  There were so many wounded souls there healing and supporting each other. The experience of that meeting was a deep and profoundly moving experience for me.  I can safely and most assuredly call it a spiritual experience.  Here we had individuals sharing a common spiritual reality.  All recovering alcoholics speak about having to admit that they are not in control of their lives and of having to hand over control to a greater and higher power who alone can lead them onward through their own personal wilderness.  I know, I went home a changed and more chastened man that evening. Now psychologists or social psychologists might describe this experience in different, more objective terms, but, but, but... and, dear readers, it is a big but and a long but... we always have to return to what the experience is for the individual.  Standing outside an experience and trying to objectify it may, in fact, be somewhat distorting of the truth of the experience.  Here, is perhaps, where the principles of phenomenology come in - I hope to discuss in more detail the phenomenological basis of religious experiences in upcoming posts if I can get my mind around this great and mysterious subject. 

To finish this post let me describe another spiritual experience I shared with my dear friend and cousin P.  One day he said to me: "Let's go down to New York and visit Ground Zero."  I deeply wished to go as I knew that we would be literally going on a pilgrimage.  As we travelled down in P's pick up truck we talked of old times growing up in the small town of Roscrea, Co.Tipperary, Ireland.  When we got to Ground Zero, we knew, as all knew, that we were standing on sacred ground where thousands of wonderful human beings had perished. We spent hours reading all the various posters and tributes to the dead and perusing with tearful eyes their pictures.  This experience still remains etched on my heart and soul.  I have to call this a religious or spiritual experience because, literally, it was so.  No amount of analysis can pin point the depths of that experience.

And so the turn to experience is very important indeed in all areas of human endeavour.  It is my hope that I will be able to trace its deep undercurrents in forthcoming posts.

Journal of a Soul 46

The Validity of our Experience 1

John Keats by William Hilton

In my last post I mentioned that I have always been captivated by John Keats's remark that "axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses."   This was essentially the philosophy of the Romantic Movement in English literature, a philosophy espoused by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and, of course, John Keats.  It was simply no good thinking something, they argued, one had to feel it as well.  Of course, the Romantic Movement was very much a reaction to the extreme rationalism spawned by the Enlightenment. 

Thoughts are just that, thoughts, while human experience is something more.  Here we come to the "something more" that we humans experience ourselves as being.  What that "more" might be is the subject of much debate, both oral and written.  I have already mentioned that there are those who subscribe to the thesis that we humans are somewhat "less." That "less" is more easily defined as it sets limits to human possibility in a way - what I am referring to here is the whole thrust to the delimiting of humanity by reducing the human phenomenon to mere rationality, or even to matter (materialism) in some extreme cases.

We are a thinking, feeling, intuiting, believing and behaving unity.  To reduce that dynamic unity that we are to any one of its constituent parts is to do gross injustice to the mystery of the complexity of the human entity.  Over the years one understanding of the human brain, from which the human mind springs, is the three-layered model, or what scholars call the Triune Brain. * In the most fundamental of terms, and I realize that I am running the risk of over-simplifying things here, the first first layer of brain to emerge developmentally over millions of years of evolution was that of the reptile brain from which all our basic instincts and drives spring, that section of the brain that would parallel or correspond to the id of Freud's structural model of the psyche.  Next to emerge in that history of evolution was the central layer or mammalian brain where all our emotions and feelings live.  Then, over the millions of years of further evolution the cortical brain emerged literally to cap the entire brain with its fissures and folds that increase its surface area - the central processor of our thoughts as it were - so that it can be contained within the cranium, the bone helmet that protects the whole organ.

The More rather than the Less

A recent wintery skyline over Howth, County Dublin

It is the more rather than the less that we humans essentially are that fascinates this writer, and whether we can explain and explicate its (that is, the more) workings as I have attempted above is really irrelevant in a sense.  Why? Well, every human being is an expert insofar as he or she has their own personal experiences that are really rich.  Such experiences when shared within the community of all human experiences are thereby validated or even invalidated,  It is in this sharing that reality as we know and understand it emerges as something co-validated by all humans. This is important because in this way all abnormalities are consigned to the periphery.

The Turn to Experience in Psychotherapy 

These days we are inundated with the plethora of therapies that are available to modern well-off human beings to help them in their self-development.  In these therapies their experiences are validated, listened to and affirmed.  Prior to the development of such therapies various cultures with their specific traditions offered religions, rites of passage, stories, music, dance, drama and so on as vehicles of such healing. 

In all of the panorama of human existence since its emergence, it is surely the validation of human experience - in its extraordinary highs and in its dreadful lows - that is the most important aspect of any culture worth its salt.

Let me finish with the following short quotation from  Plotinus (205 - 270 A.D.): "The Human race is poised midway between the Gods and the Beasts."

Somehow, for me, this quotation captures the struggle in humankind to be  more rather than less.

* This theory or model of the evolution of the human brain was proposed was the American physician and neuroscientist,  Paul D. McClean. (See Here and Here )  This model of the evolution of the brain is very useful in psychiatry and psychothery as it lends itself well to a holistic philosophical psychology of the mind or to a humane theory of the mind.

Journal of a Soul 45

Wooden sculpture, Botanic Gardens, Belfast

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

The above rather long quotation with which I begin this post this evening is the third stanza of W. B. Yeats's masterful poem Sailing to Byzantium.  This poem recounts the Nobel Laureate's frustration with the body as he grows old.  The first stanza talks about Byzantium's being "no country for old men," stanza two that "(a)n aged man is but a paltry thing", and then in the above quoted stanza we read that the poet's heart or soul is "sick with desire//And fastened to a dying animal//It knows not what it is."  In other words, Yeats is cursing the body in a way, or at least writing it off as a very frail vessel for the soul/heart. Now, these poetic sentiments are all very much in the tradition of Western Philosophy and Western Theology, firmly reinforced by the Cartesian dualism inaugurated in the seventeenth century and almost fully swallowed whole by more unquestioning scholars in the centuries thereafter.  What I am speaking about here is what the modern English philosopher Gilbert Ryle decried as the "ghost in the machine," a severe criticism of Descartes' mind-body dualism or mainline Christianity's  soul-body dualism.

Immortality, a work I reviewed here.  The exact sentence that elicited this post were: “But it is precisely in this contradiction that I find the crux of the human condition: our heads are full of dreams but our behinds drag us down like an anchor.” (Immortality  by Milan Kunders, Faber and Faber, London, 1992, translated by Peter Kussi, pp. 269-270). 

Body and Mind/Soul/Self

Art on concrete path, Baldoyle, Dublin

Some of the more vexed questions that bother me from time to time, and perhaps sometimes the readers of this rambling journal, are (i) whether the mind equates to the self, (ii) whether the self equates with the soul, (iii) whether the three concepts are really the same and (iv) whether any one of the three survives after death or more specifically whether in my more spiritual moments I really believe that the soul itself continues in another dimension of existence after we have "shuffled off this mortal coil" (Shakespeare) and have left the "dying animal" (Yeats) behind.  These questions bring me into the land of mystery and wonder, rather than into the land of strong belief on the one hand or the land of strong unbelief on the other.  After much reading, study, reflection and discernment I still remain with an open mind, not too sure at all, at all, but that is fine - after all, what is wrong with open-ended-ness?

Where does all the foregoing speculation lead?

Speculation is just that, speculation.  In the end, we humans are left with our experience.  No concepts, no matter how intellectually convincing they may  be, will, in the end, "cut the mustard" or "come up to the mark" when it comes to matters of deep human or existential concern like when we are faced with life or death crises, deep emotional pain or some such human trauma. And so, where does the speculation lead?  In a sense, all speculations only matter as supports for what's deeply held in our experience.  It's hard most times, I believe, to move from speculation or thoughts or theories into deep conviction, though if we are to believe many authors, both theists and atheists, that thoughts and thinking can and do lead to deep confidence in this or that principle.  However, I have always been captivated by John Keats's remark that "axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses." In other words, we will deeply hold philosophical (or theological) axioms only when we have validated them first in our experience.  Hence, the only place we can really turn, then, when we have ceased all our intellectual explorations is to return to the, perhaps not very solid, but nonetheless somewhat firm ground of our own experience.  It is to this ground of personal experience to which I wish to devote the immediately following series of posts.

Journal of a Soul 44

And What or Who Keeps you Going?

That is a good question indeed.  Especially when some people give up on life, while others apparently, no matter how tough life is for them, manage somehow to "keep on keeping on." In case you don't know the provenance of those last several words, they come from a song of Bob Dylan called Tangled Up In Blue.  That song is one of my favourites from the pen of Bob Dylan as it has haunting lyrics which show the deep inner longing of a drifter for love, companionship or meaning in his life.  Interestingly, Dylan mixes past, present and future tenses in this song with consummate ease, with an readiness of transition that is magical. Indeed he changes person, too, from verse to verse, even changing the "I" of the first verse to "he" and "she" in his later concerts.  But that only adds to the magic, wonder and beauty of this wonderful song.  Lest I lose my path in this post, I had better curb my musical passions here, and point out that the phrase "keep on keeping on" is an important one for me that shows the strength, persistence and determination of the traveller or wayfarer in life. Now let me turn my attention to the question posed in the title of this post.  What, indeed, you may ask, keeps me going?  Let me attempt to list those reasons in no particular order.

1. My Job.  

I remember Pat Kenny, one of our foremost broadcasters here in Ireland, remarking that he was lucky as his hobby became his profession.  He was luckier still as he is currently the best paid broadcaster in the country at 66 years of age.  While few of us can boast the contentment Kenny talks about, some of us do get immeasurable satisfaction from our work.  At the moment, I count myself one of those lucky souls.  Not that my job was always that rewarding.  It's just that I was lucky to realize that m  y job was driving me crazy at 48 and I decided to change track.  In all of that, self-awareness is of utmost importance. There is simply no sense in staying in a job that is soul-destroying.  So I retrained as a Resource and Special Education teacher and left the main stream classroom to begin working with autistic boys, mainly those with Asperger's Syndrome in the area of Social Skills and Communications.  I also do learning support in Mathematics for the school at large.  This is all extremely rewarding work as I can see the results of my labour on a daily basis.  I suppose the big thing in this work on a personal level is simply being needed.  That is why being unemployed leads to such depression in the lives of those afflicted with that dreadful problem.

2. My Creative Outlets

Creativity can never be underestimated as it is literally the food of the soul if I may use a metaphor.  Ever since I can remember I have been a writer, and over the years I have had many bits and pieces published here and there.  In these more recent days I have been engaged in blogging.  This latter has been a soul-saver for me as it allows me to instantly publish online the ideas and, more correctly and importantly, my concerns online.  I also write poems in two languages, English obviously, and then, also, in my native tongue, Gaeilge or Gaelic or as it is more commonly called Irish.  By writing, I am engaged in getting to know myself better, and consequently becoming more contented.  If one reads and writes poems as I do, then you will appreciate that poetry does not really sell, that getting published is difficult to say the least.  However, I remind myself often, as one poet wisely counselled me once, that it is more important that a person writes a poem than that many people read it.  If only a few others read it, in a writing group or in some community setting, then that is the reward.

Other creative outlets are reading, listening to music, travelling and going out with friends. Lest this become like a boring list of my hobbies as would appear on a CV, let me proceed onto the next point.

3. My Spirituality or Religion 

In more recent times, religion has become a somewhat sullied word, while spirituality has become a more positive one.  In my young day, I remember the good things about religion: (i) the sense of wonder evoked by what seemed to me as a child to be very colourful and dignified services, (ii) the sense of a mystery or something divine beyond me, (iii) the beauty of the Latin language and of the hymns and (iv) the sense of the unity within the community. I have long ceased to be a practising Catholic, but I can still tap into some of those old feelings when I attend funerals, baptisms, and Christmas and Easter services.  

However, secularization has long since consigned the role of religion in Ireland to the periphery of life.  As well as a more secularized society, there were indeed intrinsic and endemic problems within the Catholic Church itself.  Those problems in short were the corruption of power and the abuse of that power through allowing child abuse by clerics to go unchecked.  One of the most crippling aspects of any organised religion is the abuse of power. It happens in all and every religion, and let none of us forget that.  Such happens in every human organization: there will always be people who hunger for power and control over others, and they will use every doctrine under the sun to hang onto that power so that they can use it and abuse it.  In every human organization, be it church, state, government, medicine, law, or any other one, those who hunger for power will manage to get their way into the top echelons.  It is only now - in the last ten or so years - that we here in Ireland are properly watching and checking all professions. It is a truism that needs repeating that no organization can monitor or check itself Here I recall that old Latin quotation attributed to Juvenal:  "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" "Who will guard the guards?" A question still worth asking 2000 years later.

Like the Dalai Lama, the smile on Pope Francis' face says it all!!

Religion, uncoupled from spirituality, is a mere power structure that aims at controlling people, at least in certain people's hands.  That's why the election of Pope Francis was/is one of the more prophetic things that have happened in the Roman Catholic Church in the past 50 years.  For me, as for many Catholics, Francis is on a par with another prophetic Pope, namely John XXIII who inspired and opened the historic and prophetic Vatican II.   It was not by chance that Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose Francis as his name as pontiff, as St Francis was the apostle of the poor and unfortunate, with a deep commitment to ecology.  It is more than apparent by his actions that Pope Francis is a highly spiritual man who loves ministering to the poor, and all his actions speak of one with a deep conviction and commitment to Christian principles.  In short, he is Christlike, not church-like!  And there lies the difference between him and  his immediate predecessor. Here is an interesting post written by an unusual but firmly believing (non-Catholic) Christian on why he admires Pope Francis:  Boeskool.com.  His comments are really worth reading and I have signed up to be a member of his blog: they boil down to the fact that Pope Francis is Jesus-like, that is he is more interested in spirituality and in acting like Jesus than in the power structures of the Church.  He is an old man of 77, but his spirituality allows him to walk, smile, talk, and obviously think and feel like a far younger man,  Maybe, just maybe, this man can turn the tide for the Roman Catholic Church, but he must be meeting some opposition within its power structures.  Unfortunately, that is why the bigger Churches are losing so many members: they are too petrified literally - "petrified" means stone-like, unmoved and unmoving.  That is where and how power corrupts, and boy does it corrupt no matter where frail human beings belong.  Finally, it is no wonder to this writer at least that Pope Francis is a Jesuit, one of the foremost orders in the Roman Catholic Church who truly believe in discerning the signs of the times, in discerning their own relationship with Christ and with humanity as a whole.

Spirituality for this writer is all about connection or connectedness with all of creation, which obviously includes other humans.  It is about union with whatever power or spirit runs through the heart of this universe and keeps it "together."  It has involved me in community work, in helping others through the Society of St Vincent de Paul and so on.  It inspires me to meditate and do yoga practices with others.  It also inspires me to read spiritual classics from all traditions.  That's what I love about these modern times where pluralism is more important than uniformity.  I remember a scholar once informing me that unity never means uniformity, and I have never forgotten that piece of wisdom.  (Interestingly Pope Francis realizes that as he says that even atheists can get into heaven if they live moral lives. Mind you, he's only repeating the teachings of Vatican II here!) No matter what religion one belongs to, even none, everyone has a spiritual sense.  I will write later in these posts about the spirituality of atheism, and indeed this topic has been written about by a few scholars in more recent years.

And what is it all about?

I will finish this rather meandering post with this question as it was one put to me when I was only 22 and a young teacher beginning my career.  I was so innocent and "green about the gills" back then that it is almost embarrassing to remember the way I was.  However, such is life and such is the cost of experience.  Anyway, one morning a man called Ger Smith asked me that question.  I was too young and too busy to take the man seriously, far too caught up in my own little world.  It was only some three years later when I had learnt that Ger had died from a congenital heart condition that none of us his colleagues ever knew about at the time., that I realized the import of Ger's question both for him and indeed for all thinking and feeling beings.  If you like, that question, along with legions of others over the years, opened up a giant unknown world to me, a world of infinite questions seeking answers or at least seeking better forms of questions as Rev Dr. Patrick Wallace used to put it back in the day.  Really good and deep questions open us up to mystery and never confusion.  And mystery, as they say, is an ocean we dive into, and never ever a wall against which we bash our cognitive heads. And so to Ger, RIP, I owe a debt of gratitude for opening up the vistas of mystery to me all those years ago.  I do hope that someone somewhere holds you in their heart.