Archive for the ‘Being human’ Category

Dumb intuitions

Friday, January 18th, 2008

Thinking about what it means to be human is like weaving a vast tapestry. My mind is full of so many strands, a great skein of different ideas, and I cannot see how to weave them together. The key is the material/spiritual interface – the human mind. Many deny that there is a spiritual dimension. Reality is what can be detected and measured. Others are dualists and hold that the two dimensions are different orders of being. For them the problem is the interface – how is it possible for the two to interact? Others are monists and hold that the two dimensions are two aspects of the same order of being. For monists and dualists empirical investigation is confined to the material dimension. Perception of the spiritual is a purely subjective experience and not open to objective verification. Such is the grip that science has on our minds that, although subjective experience has been accepted as valid basis for belief for practically the whole of human history, only objective verification can carry the weight of certainty – it is said. This in spite of anomalies – religious experience, ESP, OBE, NDE, premonitions, etc. Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance falls into the same category. Those who try to explain the mind purely in terms of brain activity do so out of context. It is like trying to explain the dramas that appear on the TV screen in terms of electronics alone. Both exist in a social context and owe their origin and function to this context. We need to take account of the reciprocal relationship between self and others which shapes and is shaped by the mind. Although this relationship may be mediated by photons, sound (words), physical contact, pheromones, etc., the relationship itself is not a physical entity open to empirical examination. 

Perhaps, the scientist might say, I am being too hypothetical, by adding an unnecessary, abstract (non-physical) complication. The physical links are the relationship, they might say. Any changes in the two poles of the relationship are due to this physical link between them. I remain unconvinced, partly for the reasons James spelled out in his critique of Rationalism

… if we look on man’s whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial.  It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words.  But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions.  If you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits.  Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely KNOWS that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it.  This inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding belief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it argues against it. [James W.; The Varieties of Religious Experience, Longman, Green and Co., London, 1916  p. 73]

Silence

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

I am groping about here trying to conceptualise a very vague idea, but one that I believe is fundamentally important. There seems to be a deeply ingrained feeling that human nature is fundamentally flawed – with Christians it is the Original Sin syndrome, for Hindus and Buddhists it is due to ignorance of the true nature of things. There is something wrong – with me, with others, with life in general. Happiness, equanimity, peace are attainable only for fleeting hours or days. Good times are constructed on the thin ice of an impersonal and indifferent reality. The three brute facts of existence are an ever-present backdrop to everything we do but they do not fully explain the negative bent of our existence. They do not explain, for example, why relatively poor people are often happier and more content than those who are wealthy with their greater ability to insulate themselves from the three brute facts. Our expectations always exceed our grasp and what we do manage to grab hold of never lives up to expectations. This almost permanent state of discontent is not helped by our living in a consumer oriented environment awash with advertising. 

The trouble is we are too complex. Unlike animals, who have no choice but to be what they are, we come with no blueprint other than that imposed by the culture into which we are born, a culture which no longer has a firm grip on us, living as we do in a pluralist global village with instant communication. The various cultures vie with one another, seeking the political and economic advantages which dominance brings. We are besieged by self-appointed gurus marketing their recipes for personal happiness and fulfilment – hedonism, enneagrams, aroma therapy, meditation, magic, born again fundamentalism, crystals, pyramids, tarot cards, etc., etc. The list is endless. How is one to choose? What guides are there? 

The comforting religious worldview has been superseded by that of science. The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business.  He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.  The bubbles on the foam which coats a stormy sea are floating episodes, made and unmade by the forces of the wind and water.  Our private selves are like those bubbles—epiphenomena … their destinies weigh nothing and determine nothing in the world’s irremediable currents of events.” William James 

 

The response to all this, I think, is not to be found in books, or in rational arguments, but within. We need to stop. We need to be still. We need to listen to the silence. As Thomas Merton put it –

Be still

Listen to the stones of the wall

Be silent, they try

To speak your

Name.

Listen

To the living walls.

Who are you?

Who

Are you?  Whose

Silence are you?

Life on the ski slope

Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

To understand what it means to be human we need to understand how the process begins, how it develops and where it leads. The beginning is important. There is a life process – call it élan vital, or something else, it doesn’t matter – constantly giving rise to new life. Often, and I suppose ideally this always ought to be the case, this beginning is the result of the love of two people for each other. Love begets love. Even if love is not involved, but lust say, the burgeoning of life (and this includes all life, not just human) is the result of a powerful and irresistible process. The loving generation of life particularises and personalises this process. This is the apex of the pyramid of life. (I must try to avoid the use of static metaphors when talking about life.) It is the blossoming of the process. The tree of life grows, diversifies into a myriad branches and then flowers. In us the cosmological process becomes self-conscious. For us the most profound depths of meaning, significance, salience are experienced through love. There is an intuition, sometimes explicitly realised in religious experience, that love is the source from which everything flows.

But usually we do not see life like this – neither as emerging from, nor integrated with a dynamic process. Instead of seeing life like the fluid movement of a movie we see it as a slide-show, each frame succeeding the next. Some frames flash by quickly, some slowly. We want to prolong the happy, beautiful frames. If we could sometimes we would hold back movement on to the next and when the next frame does come we look back regretfully at the past. Sartre had a point when he distinguished between authentic and inauthentic existence. Inauthentic is like tobogganing downhill. You sit back and let gravity and the shape of the land determine your course. Authentic is like skiing. Balanced on the cusp of the present moment you project yourself forward, able to speed up, slow down swerve, jump and change direction. Attention is focused, not on the static this-moment-now but on directing this moment to the next. When people like de Caussade talk about the sacrament of the present moment they mean seeing the present moment as a skier sees a ski – a dynamic point of contact with reality, a springboard, a fulcrum. The present is not something passively to be endured.

Our problem is that unlike good skiers we tend either to be blindfolded or very short-sighted. Usually we cannot see what lies ahead so that instead of moving gracefully we grope our way forward hesitantly and reluctantly; we cling to the good moments and fear the unknown ahead. This is as far as the skiing analogy gets us for we will never be able to see the whole ski slope, much less the surrounding mountains and forests. We know, if we pause to work it out, that we are caught up in a process but we do not understand what it is, or why it is, or where it leads. This is why for Sartre life seemed absurd. To drift, to allow oneself to be carried along by life’s flow, inauthentic existence, was a betrayal of one’s humanity because as autonomous individuals we have the power, by acting decisively in the present moment, to shape the direction of our lives. On the other hand what was the use of this power if there is no where to go, no goal, no purpose. Sooner or later the stream of life will be reduced to a trickle and run into the sand.

This, of course, is where the religious intuition comes in. Gerard Manley Hopkins has put it better than I ever could.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; 

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil 

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? 

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; 

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; 

And wears man’s smudge & shares man’s smell: the soil 

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent; 

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; 

And though the last lights off the black West went 

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs — 

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast & with ah! bright wings.

Who am I?

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

A starting point.

1. Take the perspective of approaching death and a retrospective look back on ones life – many incidents, which at the time seemed so important, so necessary for happiness, or success, or whatever, are not now important. You come to realise that only now is important. They were important then, but time has diminished them, given them a new perspective. If they have any importance now it is only because their effects have carried through to this now. 

This is a vast topic. From one point of view only the now is real. The past does not exist, nor does the future. Then again the past is all around us and shapes and structures our lives by the buildings, towns, cities, laws and customs previous generations have left us. The future is real in the sense that our actions and decisions of today shape it and will determine the lives of future generations. But generally we do not think too much about the past – it is accepted unquestioned, nor do we concern ourselves with anything other than the immediate future -– the next few days or weeks. The now is what is important. If it is good we want time to stand and will resist change. If it is bad we want to change it. I remember finding an old photo in a book. It was of a strikingly beautiful young woman. Judging by the clothes she was wearing it must have been taken in the 1920’s. She was smiling, her eyes bright and alive. I wondered who she was looking at and what her life had been like. I realised with a pang how ephemeral youth and beauty are. By now if she is not dead she is very old, haggard and bent, her life painful and the future dark. Life is a process but we do not look at it as such. We tend to see it as a series of frames – good times and bad times. Looking at old photos is always a slightly painful experience because those particular good times are over and will never come again. We want the good times to stand still. We want the bad times to change into good. If we had control over our lives like a video we would slow down or freeze the good times and fast-forward the bad. We moan that youth is wasted on the young.

So looking back on life from the perspective of the ‘crabbit old lady’ in the poem we ask what is the point of living, striving, achieving goals which seem so important, so all-encompassing at the time but which quickly fade, lose their lustre and are superseded by other equally transitory goals – panta rei, as the Greek philosopher said. Everything flows, nothing is fixed, or determined, or permanent.

2. This scenario is bearable if you are a classical dualist – if you believe that to be human is to have a body and a soul, that the body belongs to the material world of constant change and impermanency and that the soul is immortal. The soul perdures through all the changes of the body and, when the body dies, leaves this material domain and ascends to Heaven where it will be united with a spiritual body on the last day. This bodily existence now can be seen as a temporary inconvenience which has to be endured before we can enjoy eternal bliss.

The problem with this scenario is that it does not fit my experience. I am not normally aware of being two – a body and a soul. Where will I be when my body is in the grave and my soul is in Heaven? I cannot say, ‘I have a body and I have a soul.’ I am a living body. My body hurts, I hurt – my body experiences pleasure, I enjoy. And yet, I am not just my body. I am more than my body. I can imagine losing an arm, a leg, another arm, hair, eyes, teeth but the ‘I’ which does the imagining is undiminished. In fact I can imagine being bodiless. Out of the body experiences are not uncommon. In Near Death Experiences people have looked down on their bodies as though they had become detached from them. Is this then what ‘soul’ means? Is the soul the ‘I’, the person which experiences. I am a living body and yet I am more than my body. Is the soul this ‘more’, this detachable-from-the-body ‘I’?

3. Let’s have a look at this ‘I’. There are two possible questions. ‘What am I?’ and ‘Who am I?’ The ‘what’ is a general question and applies to all, the ‘who’ is a particular question and applies only to me. Mead distinguishes between ‘I’ and ‘me’. He distinguishes between the social self – ‘me’ and the subjective self – ‘I’. Whitehead does likewise and sees the self as a process continually projecting itself into the future.

There are no fixed, stable, permanent entities. Whatever exists is a nexus of relationships – from the cosmos itself to elementary particles. That goes for us humans too. Our bodies are a relationship of a variety of cells, which in turn are composed of molecules, etc. My identity, my sense of self is determined by the relationships which make me who I am – husband, father, colleague, consumer etc. Contrary to appearances there is nothing which exists in and of itself. All these relationships are dynamic, not static, reciprocal, not one sided. They are in process. Looking back we can see that this process has been evolutionary. Life has evolved from the elements expelled from exploding stars. Sentience emerged, then consciousness and finally self-awareness. In us the cosmos is aware of itself. All this is awe-inspiring stuff. We can see where we have come from but we do not know where the process is leading – if it is leading anywhere. Some would suggest that all is simply the result of random flux within chaos; that there is no destiny, eternal or otherwise, apart from extinction according to the law of entropy. If this is true then life is absurd and there is no meaning, no value. However, this does not reflect our deepest feelings, nor our sense of order and what ought to be.

So far we have been dealing with ‘What am I?’, the easier question to answer. What I am is a sentient organism, aware of itself, an agent with a certain amount of autonomy. ‘What’ is a pragmatic question answered by showing how I fit various categories. ‘Who’ can also be answered in a pragmatic way but the
n it really becomes a ‘which’ question. Which person am I? Which town, country etc. do I come from? ‘Who’ as a personal question is much more difficult. ‘Who’ is asked by a person of another person. It is often answered in a ‘what’, or a ‘which’ way. To seek a personal answer is to go right to the heart of what it means to be human. This is clearly seen on that occasion in the Gospels when people asked who Jesus was. ‘Is not this the carpenter’s son, etc. These are ‘which’ answers and do not touch the mystery of which they had become aware and which led them to ask the question.

‘Who’ is asked from within a relationship, person to person.

‘Who’ is a recognition of the multiple relationships of the other.

‘Who’ is a query about one’s relationship to the other. ‘Who are you for me?’

‘Who’ is a question about meaning and significance. It probes the future. What will be the impact of you on me, of I on you?

Ultimately, ‘Who am I?’ must be asked in the face of the death of self – either actual physical death, or spiritual. Who remains when all relationships are on the point of termination and the solitary ‘I’ faces absolute darkness? Whether this is the darkness of oblivion and dissolution, or of transcendence and resurrection is not known. Ultimately ‘Who am I?’ must be shouted out in the vast, dark silence where there are no human echoes, only emptiness. All I possess in the empty darkness is hope. I am reminded of a poem by R. S. THomas which says it all much better than I ever could.

 

Why no! I never thought other than 

That God is that great absence

In our lives, the empty silence

Within, the place where we go

Seeking, not in hope to 

Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices

In our knowledge, the darkness

Between stars. His are the echoes

We follow, the footprints he has just

Left. We put our hands in

His side hoping to find

It warm. We look at people

And places as though he had looked

At them, too; but miss the reflection.

Holiness

Monday, December 31st, 2007

Brought up in a non-critical Catholic atmosphere, as I was, does not foster objectivity. Most of us felt repugnance at the ascetic excesses of many saints and the agere contra attitude of Ignation piety but felt that saints were not ordinary people and that the normal standards did not apply. Such was the Absolute Majesty of the Transcendent God that were he to demand extraordinary ascetic practices and total devotion to the exclusion of all else – even natural ties and duties – who was to question it. And so Francis de Sales’ protégé, Jeanne de Chantal, steps over the pleading body of her young son to enter a contemplative convent. Similar examples abound. Such people were to be revered. In them, somehow, the unbridgeable gulf between us and the Transcendent God had been transcended. In them God had come close. If they were impelled by God to live apart, fast and scourge themselves who were we to question them. God was an unfathomable mystery and, like Job, it was not for us to assume that He should fit in with our expectations. 

Today all has changed. The exemplary saint is Mother Teresa, famous for her compassion for the poor and the dying and not for her austerities, nor for her mystical experiences. Formerly holiness had numinous connotations. A holy person was someone who had about them an aura of mystery, someone close to God, in touch with God, a person apart, not concerned with, or fitting in with, this world; a person who evoked awe, living on the threshold of the supernatural. The holiness of saints like Mother Teresa, Archbishop Romero and John XXIII is of a different order. The thing that strikes you is their selflessness, their warmth, but above all the humanity of their love for all they encounter. Holiness is expressed by love, as John pointed out all those years ago in his letters.

On prayer

Friday, December 14th, 2007

Hick on prayer (p. 18f) asserts that ‘we are all linked at deep unconscious levels in a universal network in which our thoughts, and even our emotions, are all the time affecting others as others are in turn affecting us.’ This is simply an assertion, an article of faith, and he admits that there is no evidence to support it. He gives the impression that the good wrought by prayer is simply the result of this human solidarity, unconscious and unfelt. No mention is made of God. Perhaps this last is an oversight and he does not intend to exclude divine influence.

Prayer is very mysterious and I think it does work in something like the way Hick describes. Although there is no empirical evidence for it, there does appear to be a network linking, not only we sentient humans, but also everything in the cosmos. Rupert Sheldrake, with his morphic fields, is quite convincing. There is also a wealth of anecdotal evidence of a bond between people, usually where there is an intimate relationship, such that when something significant or tragic happens to one the other is immediately aware that something has happened to the other even though they may be widely separated. This is the sort of thing to which Hick is referring. But prayer goes much deeper than what may simply be a natural bonding.

There is, first of all, the urge to pray. This is universal and has always been a factor in our religious behaviour. This is so deep rooted that even those who have never previously shown any religious commitment or belief often turn to prayer in life threatening situations. The cynic might say that here is an example of someone making Pascal’s wager. But I do not think so. This is no calculated gesture based on a rational assessment of the odds but a deep-seated emotional response to a limit situation. Prayer springs from the deepest roots of the self, from that zone in the affective system which straddles the conscious and the unconscious mind. Here situations, events and actions initiate emotions, feelings and moods, which are evaluated as meaningful and significant. Here we touch the foundations of our being. None of this is in the rational mind. It is not something we can conceptualise or argue with. It is a given, with the numinous quality of an ancient memory.

Here we sense not just the interlinking network which binds us all, although that is sensed. Here, obscurely and tentatively, we sense the Presence within. This is what prayer does. It brings this Presence to the surface of our minds. It opens the channels which link us and which have been narrowed and constricted by egotism and self-interest. God is active, not as a puppet master manipulating the strings of cause and effect. God acts in and through us. This I believe to be true, though I am not aware of it in any concrete sense, nor is there any empirical evidence of it. I will never forget one day when I was in the Little Brothers. Dominic Voillaume had come to make his annual retreat and had spent a week in a hermitage on San Capracio, the mountain above the village. I walked into the room where he was bent over a table reading the paper. He turned to greet me and his face was – transfigured, is the only word for it. There was joy, peace, beauty – impossible to describe. It was almost embarrassing to look him in the eye his face was so naked. The story of Moses coming down from Mount Sinai and having to hide his face behind a veil came to mind. Dominic had just come down from the mountain and his face reflected what he had experienced.

I think when people talk about prayer they concentrate too much on the knowing and rational activity and not enough on the emotive and feeling side. It is relatively easy to come quite quickly to the existential limit of the senses and to sit simply aware that one is sitting. If there are thoughts and images they run in the background like an unattended television screen. Emotionally one feels calm and at peace. There may have been emotional turbulence but that, like the thoughts, has been put to one side. One still has not reached the limits of being; knowing – yes, perhaps, being – no. One is still ensconced in the affective self. We are like the child who, when the events of the day become too much, sucks his thumb and hugs his comforter. These, insignificant in themselves, are the psychological substitute for the warmth and security of his mother’s breast. As long as we can snuggle into the comfort of withdrawing into ourselves we have not reached the limits of being. We have reached, perhaps, the foot of the mountain and before us is a long, hard climb into the obscurity and darkness of the clouds at the top. 

Religious awareness

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

Reading John Hick – Religious awareness –

Hick’s thesis is that awareness of the transcendent is not easily apparent but has to be cultivated. This stems from the fact that we are free to make choices. I agree that personal freedom is a factor but it is not the whole story. Being human means that we are not determined from birth by instincts and environment in the way that a mouse or a lobster is. Our genetic endowment and social environment, though vitally important, are not wholly determinative, not even, once a certain level of development has been achieved, in extreme situations such as famine or war, cf. the countless stories of altruism, self-sacrifice, heroism and the ability of many individuals to transcend a destructive environment. Self-consciousness gives us the ability to step back from the physical, moral and social inputs and cancel instinctive reactions. This allows us to be creative in our responses, to be proactive, taking into consideration other factors than those immediately apparent.

Some, relatively few, are born with a profound sense of religious awareness, cf. Bernadette Roberts and examples in the findings of The Religious Experience Research Unit at Lampeter. Some seem to have little or none. For the majority it is something that needs to be cultivated. Sooner or later we all encounter limit situations where existential questions are thrust on us.

The meaning one attaches to life, to being human, has to take into account our present situation. The meaning/purpose of life is not clear because we do not possess the whole picture. Hick is not rigorous enough (p. 50). True, our dispositional structure affects the way we live, but equally, the way we live, the worldview in which we are immersed, affects our dispositional structure. It may be almost impossible for an individual in an antipathetic social milieu to ‘experience as’ in a religious sense even though all the clues may be there. Marx’s insight that the social being of man determines his consciousness is apposite here. That said, finding oneself in a limit situation which brings into question the belief structures and hidden assumptions, hitherto unexamined, and shows them up as relative can be the stimulus which brings about a new way of seeing/experiencing.

The question of meaning cannot be answered in spatio-temporal terms. This is why the question is often seen to be meaningless, or unanswerable. Any possible answer must be relative and conditional. ‘What is the meaning of life?’ without any qualifying words such as ‘now’, or ‘for me’ demands a definitive answer. Since the human situation is always provisional and in process such an answer cannot be given. One has to get beyond the conditional and the relative to the essence of humanity. And this is the problem – what is the essence of humanity? Some would say we are simply intelligent animals. If this is all we are the question of meaning can be answered in material terms. Others, perhaps the majority, would say that there is something in us which transcends our psychosomatic limitations. What is this ‘something’ and in what way does it transcend the spatio-temporal dimensions of experience? It could be said that this transcendence consists in the fact that as self-conscious and self-determining beings we have the power to transcend many of the physical and social constraints of our environment. This is why we have been able to progress from a primitive existence to our form of life today, able, at least in prospect, to manipulate the genes that determine our bodily existence – a fact that fills many with horror because we are tinkering with our humanity, a humanity we do not fully understand. 

Others would say that the transcendent element in us is the fact that our being opens out into the being of God. What does that mean? We are not self-sufficient. Physically we need food, clothing and shelter to survive. Socially we need others in order to become persons and, having become persons, to achieve a certain level of happiness and fulfilment in loving and being loved. Intellectually we need others to learn language, not only to communicate with them, but also to think, process ideas, arrive at conclusions and make decisions planning for the future. When all our physical, social, emotional and intellectual needs are met we still find that life is not satisfactory. Something in us remains unsatisfied. On the one hand the three brute facts of existence, powerlessness, contingency and scarcity gnaw at the mind’s complacency. On the other hand there comes from time to time the feeling that the walls of our existence are translucent and behind them we catch glimpses of a Presence.

[John Hick; The Fifth Dimension, One world, Oxford, 1999]

Self

Thursday, December 6th, 2007

I have been doing very little of this writing. My mind does not seem to be as sharp, or as able to hold a range of ideas and develop them. Whereas before I used to be able to devour books now I find them heavy going. Holding concentration is more and more difficult and I battle with drowsiness. So I may have missed the moment and age is threatening to put a stop to my efforts. It also occurs to me that all this may be part of a gradual process of stripping away the egoistic self. Meditation too has almost become a thing of the past. Gone are the days when forty minutes passed effortlessly. Now I struggle to manage fifteen. Yesterday I was digging round a tree. It was blowing half a gale and the air was filled with the sound of the wind. At one time this would have filled me with a sort of ecstasy. To be immersed in the sound and feel of rushing wind, or the waves of the sea, was to feel at one with Nature, with the Spirit. Yesterday it was just a pleasant noise. It is as though my senses – those that filled me with awe and a sense of presence – have been dulled. No longer do I feel. I came across a passage this morning in Raymond Bailey’s, Thomas Merton on Mysticism – 

God does not intend that he should have a place reserved for him to work in since true poverty of spirit requires that man shall be emptied of god and all his works so that if God wants to act in the soul he himself must be the place in which he acts…[God takes then] responsibility for his own action and is himself the scene of the action, for God is the one who acts within himself. (Meister Eckhart, Sermon, ‘Blessed are the Poor’.)

One has read all this sort of thing before, especially in St. John of the Cross. You can see the logic of it. In another quotation from the same book Aelred Graham says – 

The earnest seeker after truth has usually decided in advance what kind of truth he is looking for… His views are dictated in advance by the needs of the illusory image he has constructed of himself.

And so all the false concepts and illusions have to be stripped away if one is to arrive at the truth. It is tempting to think that there are no false conceptions, that one’s ideas about God (partial and inadequate though they may be) reflect the reality. This is especially the case when one has had mystical experiences. God is love. God is Subject, not an object. 

But the moments of high emotion engendered by such experiences do not last. In time they become a fading memory. Meanwhile life continues to be lived at full thrust, fuelled by various feelings and emotions – love, longing, loneliness, anger, frustration, alienation, suffering and, sometimes, joy. Each of these induces a pragmatic response with physiological as well as psychological affects. All this is entirely natural and easy to understand, but the point is the responses also build up a pragmatic self. It is this self which is the problem. The pragmatic self is self-centred – however much it may think itself other-centred and want to be so, nevertheless when its comfort and well-being are threatened it can think only of its own predicament. The pragmatic self is grasping. It may pride itself on being warm-hearted and generous but its underlying concern is always about its own advantage – if only that IT may go on being loving and generous. The pragmatic self is an isolated individual. It may be surrounded by loved ones and friends and have a rich social life but in the dark hours its sense of being different, of isolation and alienation, rises and haunts its waking dreams. The pragmatic self knows that death will bring about its end and so it fears death. There may be a resurrection and an after life, but it will not rise. It will die, perhaps even before the death of the body should it get Alzheimer’s disease or something similar. 

This was the Buddha’s insight. As long as we are the prisoners of this individual, grasping self we are condemned to suffer. As long as the narrow, egotistical self is the centre about which our life revolves we shall not be able to discover the true centre, the still point, from which everything emerges and to which everything returns.

Egoism consists in this: absolute opposition, an impassable gulf is fixed between one’s own self and other beings.  I am everything to myself and must be everything to others, but others are nothing in themselves and become something only as a means for me.  My life and welfare is an end in itself, the life and welfare of others are only a means for my ends, the necessary environment for my self assertion.  I am the centre and the world only a circumference.  (Soloviev, V., The Justification of the Good, Constable, London 1918)

 That self is the towering, windowless keep within which cowers the fragile worm that is the ego. The keep must be destroyed so that the worm might shrivel and die in the consuming fire of unconditional love. Then the self will die so that the soul may live. It will die anyway at death, but better that it should die before death. Better it should discover the consuming fire so that it can tell others and draw them out from the cold walls of their prisons. 

This is why monasteries are so structured. The common life which forbids the ownership, even of one’s clothes, gnaws at the root of avarice and possessiveness. The prohibition of particular friendships disallows the consolation of an exclusive love. The abdication of individual personal advancement, the poverty, austerity, the lack of sleep, the lack of privacy, the plain food, all deprive the self of the relationships,
the emotions and situations which originally formed it. The pragmatic self is aware of its insubstantiality. This is why it needs to clothe itself with possessions and surround itself with relationships which support it. These must be stripped away. Only then, as Eckhart says, when the ego and all its supporting trappings have been emptied out, can God find a place to work.

Seeing me

Wednesday, December 5th, 2007

Thinking about relationship again in the shower. For some reason this morning it would not get hot and I had to fiddle with the controls a bit before it finally worked properly. What a difference between a cold and a hot shower! Only a minute difference in degrees but what a difference in comfort and a feeling of well being. A few microscopic organisms have just given me a week of suffering and discomfort with a very bad sore throat and a cold. They were responsible for sapping my energy and zest for reading and research. I felt that I wanted only to withdraw from others and cosset myself in my misery. Yesterday I awoke feeling better and feeling, literally, a different person from the one I had been the week before.

We are what we are only in the context of our physical, biological, social, psychological, philosophical and perceptual relationships. If I want to understand ‘me’ I must be aware, not only of each of them, but also that I transcend them. This transcendence is the most mysterious thing of all. The biological ‘me’ can be understood but don’t forget to take into account the influence on it of the psychological ‘me’. The psychological and the gregarious ‘me’s’ are so intertwined that they cannot really be separated. Then there is the egoistic ‘me’, that private person that no one, not even I, I sometimes think, know fully. And then, there is the ‘I’ who transcends all of these. As often as not the ‘I’ is not on stage. His role has been usurped by one of the ‘me’s’. But who is this ‘I’? Is he more fundamental than the ‘me’s’, or is he simply the agent of the currently dominant ‘me’? Are the ‘me’s’ ephemeral psychosocial constructs educed at different times by different environments? Or is the ‘I’ the centre of conscious awareness capable of transcending the empirical ‘me’s’ and the physical sensorium? Just as the ‘me’ as agent is evoked by a specific psychosocial environment and particular physical needs, so too, perhaps is the ‘I’ evoked by an awareness of transcendence.

“I shall never forget what I have never revealed to anyone, the phenomenon which accompanied the birth of my consciousness of self and of which I can specify both the place and the time.  One morning, as a very young child, I was standing in our front door and was looking over the wood pile on the left, when suddenly the inner vision ‘I am me’ shot down before me like a flash of lightening from the sky, and ever since it has remained with me luminously: at that moment my ego had seen itself for the first time and for ever.“

(Jean Paul Richter, quoted in Glover J., I: The Philosophy and Psychology of Personal Identity, (1989) Penguin, London p59)

This is a (rare?) example of what Karl Jaspers called a ‘limiting situation’.  In the awareness of limits one is aware of the transcendent as the negatively comprehended complement of limits.  In other words one is not aware of a limit as limit if one has not somehow seen beyond it.  We are not normally aware of the limits of consciousness just as we are not normally aware of the limits of our vision (this is why the figure of eight sideways, to depict vision through binoculars, on the screen jars our sensibilities.  This is not how we normally see, through binoculars or otherwise.)  Yet we know that both are limited.  It is from this that our difficulty in grasping consciousness arises – and hence the difficulty in defining it, describing it.  We cannot, from within our subjective perspective, perceive our awareness objectively, no more than the eye can see itself seeing.  By reflection the eye can see itself and the consciousness can grasp itself; but just as the eye (through the mirror) sees no more than the outer surface of the organ of sight, so too, analogously, reflective awareness is no more than the surface of the stream of consciousness and sees neither the banks, nor the depths beneath, much less the origin.

Integrity again

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

Thinking again about integrity – the shower in the morning is a great place for thinking. The mind is fresh after the night’s sleep and ideas that have been percolating in the unconscious begin to emerge. To love requires a beloved. In theory everyone we encounter, in fact everyone, should be the beloved. In practice this is not so easy. Being unselfish and putting the other person first comes easily when there are feelings and emotions as a driving force. When this is not the case, especially today in our crowded, impersonal urban society, it is almost impossible to make every encounter of the hundreds each day a personal encounter. Even if it were possible it would not be tolerated by the hurrying crowds who regard their impersonal anonymity as a shield, or defence. And so we, inevitably, slip into the prevailing mode of blind unconcern. Caught in the rush of traffic it would be impractical to stop for the stranded motorist. That is the job of the police. Hurrying to catch the train there is no time to help the harassed mother manoeuvre her pushchair and three toddlers  down the escalator. Apart from those with whom we have a personal relationship we have little or no time for the others we meet.

This is why integrity might be something more easily put into practice. It begins by being ‘about me’ and self interest always has a flying start. But who am I and what does it mean to have integrity? ‘Who am I?’ is the $64,000 question. One of the reasons why there is no easy answer to it is because as humans we operate on many different levels, often on more than one level at a time. (I am not sure that level is the right word. Mode, or dimension might be better.)

There is a physical-biological dimension of being a body. Much time is devoted to feeding this body, moving it from place to place, washing and grooming it, tending to its wounds and hurts and, finally, just relaxing and resting. Much of this is automatic and does not involve specific mental effort.

There is a feeling-emotional dimension. Here the reciprocity between the physical and mental states is very marked. Physical well-being can produce an emotional high. Illness can cause depression. Mental stress can produce physical effects such as headaches and ulcers. Hormones and psychoactive chemicals can determine mood and mental states. These in turn have a profound effect on the personality. Emotions authenticate meaning. Einstein’s formula E=mc2 may determine the shape of the cosmos but as an abstract concept its meaning is negligible compared to that of a child holding its mother’s hand. Emotions and feelings shape our sense of morality, of what is right and wrong. Traditional Christian spirituality, influenced by Platonic dualism, saw the body as, if not evil, at least an obstacle to spiritual development. Physical urges, feelings and emotions were to be kept in check and, as much as possible, denied. Agere contra was the Jesuit watchword. The body would die eventually but the soul would ascend to heaven. At the general resurrection it would be united with a transformed body, a risen body. More about the spiritual later.

There is a social dimension. We become persons as a result of social interaction. We learn language from others. Language is the major factor in our mental development. We discover our sense of self and of self-worth as a result of being loved. It is in this social dimension where most people find their life has meaning. Life is about loving and being loved, raising a family, enjoying friendships, engaging in interactions with others in work and in projects. Existential  questions such as ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What is the meaning of life?’ only present themselves here in what Jaspers called ‘limit situations’ – times of birth, marriage and death.

There is a mental dimension. This is the dimension of stories, ideas and concepts, of maths, logic and philosophy. It is also the dimension of poetry, music and drama. These last  have strong emotional content but all have some feeling attached. Even the most abstract branches of mathematics have beauty and the feeling of knowing truth. 

There is a spiritual dimension. This exists at all levels. What spiritual means is not easy to explain. Generally it is defined as opposing matter, or the body; to do with the mind and with religion. Etymologically it comes from the Greek pneuma,  breath, and from nous, mind – the principle of order in things. For St. Augustine it was the apex of the mind, the personal and dynamic point of contact and encounter between God and man. St. Thomas Aquinas, taking his ideas from Aristotle, saw the soul as the form of the body, that which gives it individual substance. Descartes held that reality was twofold, matter and mind – res cogitans. This dividing of reality into two, matter and spirit, or matter and mind, is at the root of our difficulty of trying to understand what it means to be human. While mentally I can distinguish myself from my body, this is a mental abstraction. I am not two, a body and a soul. What I am is a living body, yet at the same time I transcend my body. Spirit is a ‘presence’. I am present to myself.*

 I am present to others, as they are to me. I am present to nature, as it is to me. Finally, I am present to the Transcendent (I say Transcendent because He does not have a name. ‘Tell them ‘I am’ sent you.’) – not all the time (though I believe that it is always present to me) but on those luminous occasions when the fabric of reality becomes translucent and I become aware of the infinite depths of being. According to Karl Rahner – ‘Spirit is ‘greater’ than man, as Pascal says, “l’homme passe infiniment l’homme”, not in the sense that it is alien or extrinsic to man, but in the sense that man is only what he is by being thus ‘greater’ than himself. The most essential thing in man is not a self-sufficient subjectivity, but a constant opening out beyond himself, which we call his being ‘there’, the presence of being disclosing itself as mystery.’

This is integrity – being open to the mystery within and to the mystery within the others we encounter and responding accordingly; being present to others as we are present to ourselves.

*[There is the presence of the object to the subject, of the spectacle to the spectator; there is also the presence of the subject to himself, and this is not the presence of another object dividing his attention, of another spectacle distracting the spectator; it is presence in, as it were, another dimension, presence concomitant and correlative and opposite to the presence of the object. Objects are present by being attended to but subjects are present as subjects, not by being attended to, but by attending. As the parade of objects marches by, spectators do not have to slip into the parade to be present to themselves; they have to be present to themselves for anything to be present to them (Lonergan, 1967, p. 226, quoted in McCarthy, Michael H. (1990), The Crisis in Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press). , 1990, p. 234).]