Healing Philosophy

The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost

2009-07-06T18:54:00.000-07:00

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost

The Story of Stuff, with Annie Leonard

2009-07-03T12:53:00.000-07:00

Today I discovered the following video ‘The Story of Stuff’ with Annie Leonard. Here you have the malaise and yes, the tragedy of our time in a simple yet powerful 21-minute media message. Since the 1950’s we have increasingly been brainwashed into accepting as normal a consumer-driven culture and since the 1950’s, strangely enough, personal happiness has been in decline. We live in a world where to live frugally and simply is to be a maverick and something of an eccentric. We spend money we don’t have, to buy things we don’t need, to impress people we don’t like.
I have a cellular phone that I bought about 5 years ago. I don’t use it much and it still looks like new. No one I know (or don’t know) still has one like it. Everyone else seems to have a new thin flip phone or Blackberry-type. I find myself thinking I should buy a new one. But only for a moment. I suppose I am becoming eccentric in my old age.
Watch the video, see through the brainwashing and get off the consumer merry-go-round.

Gentlemen, gentleness and greatness

2009-06-27T21:32:00.000-07:00

I received an interesting comment today on my post On being a gentleman which I thought it would be a good idea to share with you:

I read all your posts on this subject, and it's a topic I have a deep interest in, as I was always taught that this was something to aspire to.
A few of the quotes you have mention the behaviour of great men. But while some great men were gentlemen, I would argue that few gentlemen were great men. Gentleness and great accomplishment rarely go hand in hand.
Along the same vein, a certain moral righteousness is associated with the term of gentleman. But I've come to meet many men, especially in my time in the military who are "good" men, living by their own Spartan code, but could not be called "gentlemen" in the most liberal interpretation of the term.
I associate the term now mostly as a white-collar social affectation. It may be a sign of "good breeding", but not the standard by which I judge myself or others. Personally I've always admired Kipling's view on manhood as expressed in "If". But that's just my 2 cents. Dave Oaks

Well, Dave, good comment, and you are absolutely right to have a deep interest in this subject because it is in my opinion the most important subject you could possibly think about and what you decide about it will have important consequences for you and all those around you.

Up until a few years ago, I thought I knew what a gentleman was. I also had associated the term as an upper-class social title referring to someone from the right family, well-educated, cultivated and acquainted with all rules of etiquette and letter-writing etc. Added to this, I vaguely saw my gentleman as a moral animal, who knew right from wrong and had the courage to defend his moral principles. That was about it.
I think this pretty well sums up most people’s idea of a gentleman and it is this limited definition that most people wish to refer to when they use the term. It is the limited definition that comes down to us from the Victorian era, when the term was most in use.
Then I read A Gentleman’s Code, a compilation of quotes from the East (and some from the West) edited by Philip Chew Kheng, and I saw that my previous definition of a gentleman was too narrow and above all, too culturally narrow. I say gentleman, you say wise man, he says holy man and they say good man. All cultures know the ‘gentleman’, they just don’t name him the same way. And they are not talking about a chap with a bowler hat and an umbrella. All cultures look up to the ‘gentleman’, as an ideal, as an example and even as a moral obligation.
Now, Dave says ‘Few gentlemen were great men’. I would disagree and say, within a wider definition of the gentleman, all great men were gentlemen. Of course, what do you mean by great? Noteworthy? Admirable? I would say that all gentlemen are by definition great men even if the world does not know about them. And I would say that men who were not gentlemen are by definition not great men even if everyone knows them.
‘Gentleness and great accomplishment rarely go hand in hand’. I would absolutely disagree. You need to read the Tao Te Ching. The example that immediately comes to mind is the gentleness of Ghandi in the peaceful overthrow of the British Empire in India. Then again, what do we mean by gentleness? We don’t mean spinelessness, but gentleness as in love and respect. And you can’t achieve anything without that. Not anything worthwhile. Nothing good or worthwhile was ever acheived without gentleness, in this wider sense.

The quote that really made the penny drop for me about what it means to be a gentleman is this one by Oscar Wilde:

If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.

Being a gentleman is not about knowing things, manners, etiquette. Nor has it anything to do with breeding. It is a moral attitude, a philosophy of life that can be practiced by people from any country and any social stratum. It is a being, not a knowing.

What do you think? I would welcome a discussion here. Anyone agree or disagree passionately?

'The White Company'

2009-06-24T17:20:00.000-07:00

I have been reading an absolutely wonderful little story today - ‘The White Company’ by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. (You can find an online text here at Gutenberg.org). It is the tale of the adventures of a young man raised in a monastery in fourteenth century England who must go out into the world for one year before deciding whether to become a monk or stay in the world. The White Company refers to a company of English longbowmen who wage war on the French.
I have for some time been mulling the idea of writing a novel and this tale is very much of the essence and of the period that I would like to write about. It also has the kind of humour and zest for life that I admire in a writer. Barely a page goes by that I don’t burst out laughing in delight. I thought you would like this example because it centres on a philosophical discussion.

Alleyne, the young adventurer (trained as a clerk by the monks), stumbles upon a couple of arguing students sheltering from the rain under a holly tree at the side of the road. They invite him to partake of their food...

"But I pray you, good youth, to tell us whether you are a learned clerk, and, if so, whether you have studied at Oxenford or at Paris."
"I have some small stock of learning," Alleyne answered, picking at his herring, "but I have been at neither of these places. I was bred amongst the Cistercian monks at Beaulieu Abbey."
"Pooh, pooh!" they cried both together. "What sort of an upbringing is that?"
"_Non cuivis contingit adire Corinthum_," quoth Alleyne. (_It is not every man’s lot to go to Corinth_.)
"Come, brother Stephen, he hath some tincture of letters," said the melancholy man more hopefully. "He may be the better judge, since he hath no call to side with either of us. Now, attention, friend, and let your ears work as well as your nether jaw. _Judex damnatur_--you know the old saw. Here am I upholding the good fame of the learned Duns Scotus against the foolish quibblings and poor silly reasonings of Willie Ockham."
"While I," quoth the other loudly, "do maintain the good sense and extraordinary wisdom of that most learned William against the crack-brained fantasies of the muddy Scotchman, who hath hid such little wit as he has under so vast a pile of words, that it is like one drop of Gascony in a firkin of ditch-water. Solomon his wisdom would not suffice to say what the rogue means."
"Certes, Stephen Hapgood, his wisdom doth not suffice," cried the other. "It is as though a mole cried out against the morning star, because he could not see it. But our dispute, friend, is concerning the nature of that subtle essence which we call thought. For I hold with the learned Scotus that thought is in very truth a thing, even as vapor or fumes, or many other substances which our gross bodily eyes are blind to. For, look you, that which produces a thing must be itself a thing, and if a man's thought may produce a written book, then must thought itself be a material thing, even as the book is. Have I expressed it? Do I make it plain?"
"Whereas I hold," shouted the other, "with my revered preceptor, _doctor, praeclarus et excellentissimus_, that all things are but thought; for when thought is gone I prythee where are the things then? Here are trees about us, and I see them because I think I see them, but if I have swooned, or sleep, or am in wine, then, my thought having gone forth from me, lo the trees go forth also. How now, coz, have I touched thee on the raw?"
Alleyne sat between them munching his bread, while the twain disputed across his knees, leaning forward with flushed faces and darting hands, in all the heat of argument. Never had he heard such jargon of scholastic philosophy, such fine-drawn distinctions, such cross-fire of major and minor, proposition, syllogism, attack and refutation. Question clattered upon answer like a sword on a buckler. The ancients, the fathers of the Church, the moderns, the Scriptures, the Arabians, were each sent hurtling against the other, while the rain still dripped and the dark holly-leaves glistened with the moisture. At last the fat man seemed to weary of it, for he set to work quietly upon his meal, while his opponent, as proud as the rooster who is left unchallenged upon the midden, crowed away in a last long burst of quotation and deduction. Suddenly, however, his eyes dropped upon his food, and he gave a howl of dismay.
"You double thief!" he cried, "you have eaten my herrings, and I without bite or sup since morning."
"That," quoth the other complacently, "was my final argument, my crowning effort, or _peroratio_, as the orators have it. For, coz, since all thoughts are things, you have but to think a pair of herrings, and then conjure up a pottle of milk wherewith to wash them down."

Twitter and The Iranian Presidential Election

2009-06-19T10:32:00.000-07:00

It is not the role of this blog to discuss politics, although you will find references to Obama and sincerity, the new era of responsibility and moral hazard, where politics is intertwined with philosophy as it should be. But Loaded Web has come up with an interesting way to help support the struggle of the Iranians to have their voice heard in the Iranian Presidential election. As of today, and until it is no longer necessary, you can see Loaded Web’s green triangle in the top left corner of the screen. It links to blogs and news carriers covering events in Iran and you can also get the code to put a similar green triangle on your own blog if you have one. It’s a small gesture of encouragement for the Iranian people who voted for a reformist president in their country and are protesting the alleged rigging of the ballots.
The Iranian people are using the web and Twitter on hand-held devices to communicate and organize their protests. I am sure the inventors of Twitter never imagined that they would one day be at the centre of a people’s struggle for reform and democracy. As barriers to communication fall, people widen their horizons and become harder to mislead. Let us hope that the truth prevails in Iran, sooner than later, because the writing is on the wall. Or rather, on Twitter.

See a good overview of the situation at Wikipedia: The Iranian Presidential Election

HMS Victory - Britain's 'Ship of Theseus'

2009-06-10T10:42:00.000-07:00

I remember as a youth reading about the legend of Theseus. As a young boy, the future King of Athens volunteered to be one of the seven youths sent as a sacrifice every seven years to King Minos of Crete to be devoured by the Minotaur that lived there in the labyrinth. Theseus hides a sword in his tunic and slays the beast. On the return journey to Athens he forgets to change the black sail of his ship to a white one as agreed with his father to signify his success. His father Aegeus believes his son dead and commits suicide by throwing himself into the sea, giving his name to the Aegean.

According to Plutarch’s Life of Theseus, the ship Theseus used on his return to Athens was kept in the Athenian harbor as a memorial for several centuries.

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place...

The ship had to be maintained in a seaworthy state, for it annually carried the Athenian envoys to the festival of Apollo at Delos.
As the wood of the ship wore out or rotted and was replaced, it was unclear to philosophers how much of the original ship actually remained, giving rise to the philosophical question whether it should be considered "the same" ship or not. Such philosophical questions about the nature of identity are sometimes referred to as the Ship of Theseus Paradox.

For Athenians, the preserved ship kept fresh their understanding that Theseus had been an actual, historic figure, which none then doubted.

From Wikipedia

Reading about the ship of Theseus brought to mind my trip to England in 2005 and my visit to HMS Victory. The Victory was the flagship of Admiral Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 where the British Fleet virtually destroyed an equivalent French fleet thus eliminating the threat of invasion of Britain by Napoleon.
My visit to this ship merits a post or ten of itself. Over 6,000 trees went to build it, all by hand. The photo does not do justice to the size of the ship. This was at the time the largest man-made moveable object ever made. Going aboard you feel small, insignificant, humbled. Some of the ropes are so thick you probably couldn’t get your arms around them. The masts are about 4 feet in diameter at deck level. The ship, like the ship of Theseus, has been restored and inevitably some parts have been replaced by ‘new and stronger timber’, mainly on the upper decks. The lower decks are largely original and you can walk the same planks that Nelson and his crew walked 200 years ago.
The Victory is all that remains of the Royal Navy of the Age of Fighting Sail and we would not have even that but for the pleadings of a wife of a First Lord (of the Admiralty) that it should be preserved. (The Admiralty of the period had no sentimental qualms about sending famous ships to the breaker’s yard).

Like the ship of Theseus for the Athenians, Britain’s Victory ‘keeps fresh their understanding’ of Nelson and his navy and what they did at Trafalgar and in other battles in that critical and historic period. Personally, it makes no difference to me that only 30% of the ship is ‘original’. Like the Gold Pavilion, the spirit and intention of the original builders is what survives and that is what we want to see.

Seeing the essence of things

2009-06-06T19:57:00.000-07:00

I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn't weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century.

"So it isn't the original building?" I had asked my Japanese guide.

"But yes, of course it is," he insisted, rather surprised at my question.

"But it's burnt down?"

"Yes."

"Twice."

"Many times."

"And rebuilt."

"Of course. It is an important and historic building."

"With completely new materials."

"But of course. It was burnt down."

"So how can it be the same building?"

"It is always the same building."

I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.

From the book ‘Last Chance to See’, by Douglas Adams

See The Ship of Theseus Paradox at Wikipedia, where I found this passage, for more about the essence of things whose parts have been replaced.

Photo from that breathtaking site, The Tale of Genji

To understand all is to forgive all

2009-06-02T19:07:00.000-07:00

When you lose in love, things are very confusing. The joke about being the last to know is based on truth. We see what we want to see, we ignore the rest. We project our feelings of love onto our beloved and we believe that they are experiencing the same thing. Of course they are not. We don’t see the end coming. And when it hits us we are not ready. When it hit me I had to understand.
I pulled out my agenda and reconstructed the play: Act 1, Act 2 and the devastating Act 3. I had to understand what happened and how it happened. In hindsight I revisited the conversations, the scenes and the places and I had to admit to myself that the signs were there, I just refused to see them. Eventually, I understood pretty much what happened and this allowed me to gain a modicum of peace of mind.
Anger remained and remains still a little, if I give it any thought, in my heart if not in my head. Strange how love can turn to anger. Over time, with the help of the philosophy of Anthony de Mello and others, I understood more. Until one day I read this quote from Spinoza.

To understand all is to forgive all.

This was a powerful insight for me. I saw that the only reason I still harboured anger and hatred was because of my incomplete understanding. I saw that even if I did not have the power to understand all yet, still forgiveness would be correct. I should not deprive myself of peace of mind and the liberation of forgiveness because of my incomplete understanding.

Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.

Because when you understand you can accept, and you can forgive. Marcus Aurelius helped me further along this path of understanding:

Whatever man thou meetest with, immediately say to thyself:
What opinions has this man about good and bad? For if with respect to pleasure and pain and the causes of each, and with respect to fame and ignominy, death and life he has such and such opinions, it will seem nothing wonderful or strange to me, if he does such and such things; and I shall bear in mind that he is compelled to do so.

That I would lose my love was plain for others to see. I blinded myself to the possibilities. If I had been able to keep my wits about me as Marcus Aurelius suggests, I would have understood the situation as it was happening. As it was, I had to understand in hindsight, whilst sorting through my negative emotions.

Now keep looking at this unpleasant situation or person until you realize that it isn’t they that are causing the negative emotions. They are just going their way, being themselves, doing their thing whether right or wrong, good or bad. It is your computer that, thanks to your programming, insists on your reacting with negative emotions. Anthony de Mello

My love was compelled to act in the way she did. I was compelled to act in the way I did. That’s life.

To understand is to transform what is. Krishnamurti

Ship's Log - June 2009

2009-06-01T22:05:00.000-07:00

I always read the quotes on the top left-hand column of the blog every time I load the page. Some make me laugh out loud with pleasure. I think that we should take note of the quotes that do this for us as they surely reveal something about ourselves. These three quotes I copied to my desktop. Maybe they will give you pleasure too.

An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he for some reason thinks it would be a good idea to give them. Andy Warhol

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better. André Gide

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book. Edward Gibbon

Every breath you take - Emi Fujita

2009-05-30T21:28:00.000-07:00

Love - the Prologue of 'The Alchemist'

2009-05-26T10:12:00.000-07:00

In my first post about love, Love (lost), I shared with you the insight that the love we feel for someone, the beauty we see in them, is our own creation: it is all in our head. It is a bit like the famous zen koan: if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? If a woman enters the room and nobody gives her a second glance, is she beautiful? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Besides finding our love beautiful, we are linked to our love by the way our love makes us feel about ourselves. We see in our love qualities that we admire, qualities that thrill us, qualities that we possess also perhaps, but to a lesser degree; or that we would like to possess. Our love has a way of making us feel that we too possess these qualities. Being with our love is, in a way, the next best thing we can do to actually being our love. (See this post for a technique about imagining being our love). So being in love has a component of ‘reflected glory’ in it, which makes us feel good about ourselves.
‘Beauty is truth’s smile when she beholds her own face in a perfect mirror’ said Rabindranath Tagore. Perhaps this quote was the inspiration for Paulo Coelho’s prologue to ‘The Alchemist’.

The Alchemist picked up a book that someone in the caravan had brought. Leafing through the pages, he found a story about Narcissus. The Alchemist knew the legend of Narcissus, a youth who daily knelt beside a lake to contemplate his own beauty. He was so fascinated by himself that, one morning, he fell into the lake and drowned. At the spot where he fell, a flower was born, which was called the narcissus.
But this was not how the author of the book ended the story. He said that when Narcissus died, the Goddesses of the Forest appeared and found the lake, which had been fresh water, transformed into a lake of salty tears.
"Why do you weep?" the Goddesses asked.
"I weep for Narcissus," the lake replied.
"Ah, it is no surprise that you weep for Narcissus," they said, "for though we always pursued him in the forest, you alone could contemplate his beauty close at hand."
"But..... was Narcissus beautiful?" the lake asked.
"Who better than you to know that?" the Goddesses said in wonder, "After all, it was by your banks that he knelt each day to contemplate himself!"
The lake was silent for some time. Finally it said:
"I weep for Narcissus, but I never noticed that Narcissus was beautiful. I weep because, each time he knelt beside my banks, I could see, in the depths of his eyes, my own beauty reflected."
"What a lovely story," the Alchemist thought.

Love and the Tao

2009-05-20T22:06:00.000-07:00

Ask yourself this: do you want to be loved for who you are or because of all the efforts you made to win your love? Sooner or later, your love will find out who you really are, and then what?
If you have to try hard all the time to fascinate and beguile, you are playing a losing hand. You can’t fascinate and beguile forever. When you run out of ideas, then what?
A woman who is not in love will not be happy with a bed of silk sheets and rose petals. A woman who is in love will happily sleep on a board to be with her man.

To keep full what will overflow, better not to try. A blade too sharp cannot keep its edge. A room full of gold and precious stones cannot be guarded. Tao Te King (9)

He who walks on tiptoe cannot stay upright very long. Tao Te King (24)

He who knows how to guard well closes without a lock, and no one can open; he who knows how to tie up well uses no ties, and no one can untie. Tao Te King (27)

Be your authentic self. Sincere, natural, and real. Then if love comes along, it really is meant for you.

Love, no risk free trial

2009-05-14T14:54:00.000-07:00

If you have been following my posts on love, you will know that love and non-desire are not contradictions in terms. Love, as opposed to attachment, is a free, independent choice or it is nothing. Don’t take my word for it. You will find this theme in all philosophies and all religions.

In Taoism for example:

There is no greater mistake than wishing to satisfy one’s desires;
there is no greater unhappiness than not being self-sufficient.
There is no greater calamity than the desire to possess.
Tao Te Ching 46 (my translation from Tao Te King)

In Zen:

One major obstacle in living a life of love is the tendency to hold on. We grasp and cling to each other, preventing the freedom of love from rising on its own. Zen asks us to let go.
When someone comes into your life, let him come. Welcome the person, whoever he is. Enjoy what it is he brings, even if it's only for a short time.
When it is time for a person to go away, let him go. Do not turn the person's leaving into an experience of rejection, loss or abandonment. Realize that his leaving has nothing to do with you. It is simply time for him to go.
Do this with yourself as well. Let yourself come and go freely in life, and don't get caught in unnecessary chains. The more you free yourself and others, the more easily you fall in love.
From an article by Brenda Shoshana, author of Zen and the Art of Falling in Love

In the Bhagavad Gita:

The liberated man receives what the Divine Will brings him, he does not long for anything, is jealous of no one: what comes to him, he accepts without repulsion nor attachment; what goes away, he lets go, to rejoin the whirlpool of existence, without regret, nor affliction, nor feeling of loss.
Sri Aurobindo, The Bhagavad Gita and its message (my translation from Tao Te King)

In the Christian tradition:

Nothing renders man more like God than this implacable detachment. For what makes God God is his implacable detachment: from this springs forth his purity, his simplicity and his immutability… This resemblance must be achieved by the grace that elevates man above the temporal and purifies him of everything that is impermanent.
Master Eckhart (my translation from Tao Te King)

Love from a position of detachment allows us to enjoy and appreciate what comes into our life and saves us from the pain and feeling of loss for what goes out of our life. Not only that, but good things and people are more likely to come into our life if they are free to come and go as they please. And, once here, they will likely stick around longer.

The Samurai of Love

2009-05-10T20:16:00.000-07:00

By the Way of the warrior is meant death. The Way of the warrior is death. This means choosing death whenever there is a choice between life and death. It means nothing more than this. It means to see things through, being resolved. Yamamoto Tsunetomo

There comes a time in a budding love relationship when our partner will test us. A careless remark. A certain lack of response. Or something more blatant. I’m not even sure if they do it consciously or not. But what it boils down to is seeing what you will put up with. If you go along then it will eventually get worse as they realise you are hopelessly in love and they can pretty much get away with anything and you will still be around. From there it is not far to their losing interest in you and finally they leave you.
Of course I am talking about my own experience but perhaps you can relate to it.
So there comes a time when you have to be able to stand the test by standing your ground, walking away, saying no or whatever it is that your love does not think you will have the guts to do. You have to be able to ‘kill your love’ or ‘die the death of love’ like a samurai.
We have seen in my posts on love that ‘you can’t love someone you can’t live without’. That is merely attachment, infatuation. Real love can only come from a position of strength and independence. You have to be able to choose to love. This means you have to be able to walk away.
Ironically, it is your ability to walk away which gives you the better chance to win your love.

Those who cling to life, die; those who defy death, live. Uyesugi Kenshin

You have surely been in the situation where someone is in love with you and trying too hard. Or at least you have known people who try too hard to be loved, to be liked, to impress. And it always backfires on them. Trying too hard is unattractive. Clinging is unattractive. We just want to run away.
So when our love turns cooler on us, the answer is not to cling more but to cling less, and, like a samurai of love, prepare our soul to face ‘death’. And defying the death of love, perhaps we may see it live.

Photo from Wikimedia: Yamana Tokoyuni

Thousand-Hand Guan Yin

2009-05-07T21:29:00.001-07:00

Sit on top of the world

2009-05-06T22:13:00.000-07:00

Touch my skin and tell me what you’re thinking,
take my hand and show me where we’re going.
Lie down next to me, look into my eyes
and tell me, oh tell me what you’re seeing.
So sit on top of the world and tell me how you’re feeling,
what you feel is what I feel for you.
Take my hand and if I’m lying to you,
I’ll always be alone if I’m lying to you.

These words are the lyrics of a song that for me most completely embodies the feeling of a person in love (who is uncertain of the feelings of the beloved). They come from the song ‘Take my hand’ from Dido’s album ‘No Angel’. I will not try to comment on the beautiful musical score or the flawless voice and execution of Dido. But the words… listen to the words.
Here you have the attention, the complete attention of the person in love. The need for information, the need to know the heart of the beloved. Here you have sincerity and the grace and poetry born of sincerity. Sit on top of the world, she says – that’s how I feel about you. If only she could make you understand how she feels. She is not exaggerating - here you have the solemn invocation and vow of truth – she’ll always be alone if she’s lying to you. Later she adds ‘Take your time’. Love is patient. Take your time. Have you ever said that to someone?

From what we have seen about love thus far, we know this person is ‘in deep’. She has a beautiful love, in her head. Perhaps it will be alright. Sometimes love is reciprocated and the magic happens. We hope it works. We believe in the singer’s hope and earnestness. Sometimes we need to believe.
(If it doesn’t work, we hope a friend tells her about Anthony de Mello, and Healing Philosophy).

The Way to Love (3) – The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello (part three)

2009-05-04T22:26:00.000-07:00

You see persons and things not as they are but as you are. If you wish to see them as they are you must attend to your attachments and the fears that your attachments generate. Because when you look at life it is these attachments and fears that will decide what you will notice and what you block out.

When we are in love we are seeing the beloved not as they are but as we are. We are projecting our own qualities into this person. Rabindranath Tagore said it so well:

Beauty is truth’s smile when she beholds her own face in a perfect mirror.

We are seeing an idealized projection of our own self, magnified to a perceived perfection in this person. They are a beautiful creation, a work of art, in our head. This reminds me of a technique for helping one get over a lost love (I forget the source) that consists in meditating and imagining oneself to be the person one loves. The power of the technique resides in showing us through the meditation that we have the same qualities as the person we love, because we see them, we feel them, we know them. Thus we need not miss the person, for we ‘contain’ all the qualities that we loved.
Getting back to de Mello, we see through attachment-coloured glasses. Love is not blind, it is attachment that is blind. Love sees clearly because love encompasses everyone and everything, whereas attachment encompasses very little: it excludes everyone and everything except the object of its attachment.

You were in love and you felt rejected or jealous; suddenly all your mind and heart became focused on this one thing, and the banquet of life turned to ashes in your mouth.

I remember when I was going through my ‘attachment’ how it killed my enjoyment of everything else. I could hardly concentrate on the karate instructor, I could hardly read three paragraphs of a book, I could hardly enjoy the presence of my children. This is not love: it is slavery.

How can you love someone whom you are a slave to? How can you love someone whom you cannot live without? …Love is to be found only in fearlessness and freedom.

De Mello shows us the path out of slavery: awareness of the folly of our dependence, our addiction to this person or to anyone. The path to freedom comes from cultivating activities that we love, activities that we engage in without regard to society or the opinions of other people, activities that are our true passion.

The royal road to mysticism and to Reality does not pass through the world of people. It passes through the world of actions that are engaged in for themselves without an eye to success or to gain – or profit actions. Contrary to popular beliefs, the cure for lovelessness and loneliness is not company but contact with Reality. The moment you touch this Reality you will know what freedom and love are. Freedom from people – and so the ability to love them.

Announcing Healinks.com - the links page of Healing Philosophy

2009-05-04T08:09:00.000-07:00

Where did all the links go? They went to a special links page I have created at http://www.healinks.com/. I have also moved all the ‘Virtue’ photos and quotes from the sidebars to Healinks.
As I mentioned in the ship’s log, I found the blog takes longer and longer to load once you have clicked on a few links and come back. I would like you to be able to peruse all the posts easily. So we are now back to basics, back to the essential. On the other hand I think the links are important too, so now they have their own page at Healinks.
Let me know what you think of the changes.

The Way to Love (2) - The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello (part two)

2009-05-03T08:54:00.000-07:00

In my post Love (lost) I told you that the love I knew was all in my head. It must be so otherwise everyone my love meets would fall in love with her. In fact, my friends would have varying reactions to her from ‘She’s bad news’ to ‘I don’t know what you see in her’ to ‘She’s kinda cute’. When things were going ‘well’ and I was sitting on top of the world, it was all in my head. And when things broke down and I was filled with negative emotions, they were all in my head too. Feelings of anger, betrayal, jealousy, revenge rose and fell in me like a stormy sea. But reading de Mello I found, if not immediate peace and calm, then at least the direction to and the sight of peace and calm. And that is a lot when you are emotionally cast adrift on that cruel sea.

Now keep looking at this unpleasant situation or person until you realize that it isn’t they who are causing the negative emotions. They are just going their way, being themselves, doing their thing whether right or wrong, good or bad. It is your computer that, thanks to your programming, insists on your reacting with negative emotions.

And the clinching argument:

You will see this better if you realize that someone with a different programming when faced with this same situation or person or event would react quite calmly, even happily… The way to be in charge of this situation is to be in charge of yourself, which you are not. How does one achieve this mastery? All you have to do is to understand there are people in the world who, if they were in your place, would not be negatively affected by this person. They would be in charge of the situation, above it, not subject to it as you are. Therefore your negative feelings are caused, not by this person, as you mistakenly think, but by your programming.

Yes, someone with better relationship skills, someone with more clarity, someone with better self-control, someone with better understanding, someone who loves from a position of independence and non-attachment, someone who loves truly – such a person would react very differently than I did.
Thus there are no excuses – the answer lies within. We must change the programming. Our pain is the light showing us the way we need to change. We must become that person who is master of himself and the situation. Then, one day, we will know the way to love.

More to come in part three

Awareness

2009-05-02T11:21:00.000-07:00

Regular reader Jaliya has left some interesting comments about Anthony de Mello which can be found on my post The Way of Love. She provides some quotes from his book ‘Awareness’ which I thought it would be good to share with you. Thanks Jaliya.

The chances that you will wake up are in direct proportion to the amount of truth you can take without running away.You want freedom? Here it is: Drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them.

I'm going to write a book someday and the title will be ‘I'm an Ass, You're an Ass’. That's the most liberating, wonderful thing in the world, when you openly admit you're an ass. It's wonderful. When people tell me, 'You're wrong,' I say, 'What can you expect of an ass?'

When your illusions drop, you're in touch with reality at last, and believe me, you will never again be lonely ... Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality.

Ship's Log - May 2009

2009-05-01T09:48:00.000-07:00

I am working on a plan to simplify the blog by moving the links to another page. I have noticed the blog takes longer and longer to load the more you click on the post links. So I want to get to having only one post showing at any time and very few links. A less cluttered, less fattening, more zen-like page that always loads quickly. I am also working on a plan to simplify everything else in my life, but that’s another story…

The Way to Love (1) - The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello

2009-04-30T20:44:00.000-07:00

The title of this little book has at least two meanings: the way to love in the sense of how we should love, and the Way to love in the sense of the spiritual path to love. They are the same.
The lessons of this little book are not easy to swallow when we are reeling from the loss of a love. But they are the necessary lessons that we need to learn in order to heal and to pass to the next level of love. My copy is dog-eared and many passages are underlined. I think I had a lot of lessons to learn.
De Mello’s message is that love is basically a nightmare. Or rather attachment is a nightmare, which in many of our cases is the same thing because we don’t know what love really is.

If you wish to attain lasting happiness, you must be ready to hate father, mother, even your own life and to take leave of all your possessions. Not by renouncing them or giving them up because what you give up violently you are forever bound to. But rather by seeing them for the nightmare they are; and then, whether you keep them or not, they will have lost their grip over you, their power to hurt you, and you will be out of your dream at last, out of your darkness, your fear, your unhappiness.

De Mello shows us that we are programmed by our upbringing and by society to believe we cannot be happy without certain things – money, power, love etc. We exhaust our energies trying to rearrange reality around us to conform to our programming. Sometimes we succeed briefly, but not for long. It is an impossible task. We must change the programming instead. This reminds me of the Buddhist saying: we cannot cover the world with leather, but if we cover our feet with leather it will be the same as covering the world with leather.

On the contrary, getting rid of attachments is a perfectly delightful task if the instrument you use to rid yourself of them is not willpower or renunciation but sight. All you need to do is open your eyes and see that you do not really need the object of your attachment at all…

Attachment is a false belief, a fantasy in your head. Think of your previous loves that you thought you could never live without, says De Mello, and how you got over them. De Mello suggests this affirmation to ‘give the order’ to your subconscious to change the programming:

I am not really attached to you at all. I am merely deluding myself into the belief that without you I will not be happy.

De Mello is pitiless in hammering the message home that the ‘battle of attachments’ can never be won. If we don’t get what we want we are unhappy, but if we get what we want, the minds dwells on the one thing we didn’t get. This reminds me of what we saw in my posts on gratitude: if we are not grateful for what we already have, we are unlikely to be grateful for what we will have. When we get what we want, without gratitude we soon become bored and start wanting something else and the battle of attachments wages on. De Mello enjoins us to enjoy things without becoming attached to them, without clinging to them, without believing that we can’t live without them (because we can and do live without them).

If you learn to enjoy the scent of a thousand flowers you will not cling to one or suffer when you cannot get it.

This brings us in fact to the right way to love: loving in a non-attached way, with no strings ‘attached’, loving from a position of independence. This goes against the way we normally love: we in effect say to the person ‘if you want to be especial to me you must meet my conditions’. Likewise, if we want to be ‘especial’ to someone we must ‘pay a price in lost freedom’.

Again these are hard lessons, when you are hurting, when you would willingly pay any price to get your lost love back. But our lost love is not coming back and usually it is better that way. And our path to healing passes through the realisation that it is better that way and why. De Mello gives us a striking way to see clearly through our pain by saying to the object of our attachment:

I leave you free to be yourself, to think your thoughts, to indulge your tastes, follow your inclinations, behave in any way that you decide is to your liking.

Once we say those words, we will either disagree with them and reveal our clinging, exploiting, deluded self or agree with them, sincerely, in which case we will feel all our attachment and dependence drop. It is likely we will not agree, in which case those words will serve as an affirmation to lead us to that place where they will become true.

I used these affirmations and I can say they help. It is a cruel medicine and it doesn’t work overnight, but it is what the doctor ordered.

More to come in part two

The Way of Love

2009-04-28T22:00:00.000-07:00

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13

Some translations have ‘Love never fails’ instead of ‘Love never ends’. 'Love never ends' would seem better, because sometimes love does fail, doesn’t it? But then we might ask, was it love that failed or was it something other than love? Attachment maybe? Infatuation? Perhaps love never does fail. For if it is really love, it ‘insists not on its own way’, but merely is. In that sense love can never fail. Like sincerity, love is never wrong.

Love at the edge of doom

2009-04-25T19:57:00.000-07:00

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Shake-speare (De Vere) - Sonnet 116

If you are suffering from the loss of a love, you may have found little solace in my last post Love (lost). Your reasoning mind may have found it mildly interesting but your heart will have dismissed it in an instant with a 'But you don't understand'. I quote this powerful verse from Shake-speare (De Vere) by way of saying that I do understand.
When we are in love, and lose that love, there can be no solace for the heart in the short term. This has been my experience anyway. Perhaps it is a psycho-physiological trick of nature to keep couples together to ensure the survival of the species. In my case, only time (many years) has faded the memory without erasing it completely.
But there is nothing bad but thinking makes it so, the bard also said. And if you are a regular reader you are familiar with the Taoist philosophy of facing up sincerely to the times and learning its lessons. There is also the Taoist philosophy that everything we are living now we created ourselves by our past actions. We are responsible for manifesting everything around us. There is the philosophy that everything we are living now is exactly appropriate for us at this moment and is exactly what we need to experience now in order to grow. There is also the philosophy that we already have everything we need here and now (gratitude) and wishing for things to be exactly the way they are now allows us to appreciate them. These are important ideas for they can help us in changing our viewpoint from that of a victim of other people’s actions to active engineers of our own experience.
To activate that change of viewpoint, one of the best ways is to use affirmations. Yes, I know your heart is groaning ‘Is that all you’ve got?’ But there is untold power in the word as it becomes true for the subconscious. For the subconscious creates for us what we believe to be true and cannot tell the difference between what we experience in reality and what we concentrate on in our mind. Concentrate on sorrow or concentrate on transformation, and your subconscious will create it. Here are some powerful affirmations from ‘Manifesto’ by my favourite modern-day Taoist master, Stephen Russel.

All internal psycho-emotional discomfort evaporates now and I find myself at peace.

I acknowledge myself for having the courage and endurance to carry on.

I am cheerful no matter what.

I determine what kind of life I have – no one and nothing else.

I create my own reality according to which set of beliefs I subscribe to now. I now alter the very foundations of my reality and thus build myself a different and more useful belief structure that even now is producing magnificent results.

I take full responsibility for myself and my moment-by-moment experience of life from this moment on.

I am alive.

Love (lost)

2009-04-23T23:03:00.000-07:00

Love, ah yes. Now we are getting to the nitty gritty. Now we are getting to the subject of how I became interested in philosophy in the first place. The reason I know a thing or two about it, the reason you are reading this blog on healing philosophy right now is because of love. Love lost. Or perhaps I should say love ‘lost’.
There is a lot to say philosophically on the subject and there will be many other posts to come. Much of what I will say may be common sense to many of you. We are all at very different stages in our relationship experience and skills. For example, what I am going to say is very clear to me now, at the level I am at now, but I can tell you that it certainly was not clear to me at the time it was happening and it caused me great pain.
I will share with you those insights that helped me along the path of healing. I hope some of them will help you. For I am here to tell you that for every book you read you may come across one small idea that will ‘hit the spot that hurts’ and help you. And you may not. You may not even come across that one little idea in a dozen books. The ideas that I will share with you are the synthesis of a long search.
So to kick off with, here is a draft of a post that I jotted down a few weeks ago in a rare lucid moment. I was going to ‘polish it up’ a bit but I think it is better as it is, straight from the heart:

The beauty that was, the love that was, the magic that was….was all in my head. I created it. All of it.
How did I do it? I got help from my personal history, my upbringing, my relationship background, my tastes, what was going on in the world, in my world, at the time… In other words a great conflux of events, associations and ideas all came together to create a special feeling … in my head.
Of course this person I loved had beauty, charm and wit or else I could not have loved her. But the degree of it, the particular pitch of it, was in my head. Of course it is so, otherwise everyone who met her would fall in love with her too, which is not the case. And if I were to meet someone like this person today, or if we were to try to ‘get back together again’, I am certain that, being now at a different level, I would no longer be able to see or recreate the magic that was, as I am sure many couples who have tried it will agree.
Therefore it is not her beauty, her charm or her wit that I loved. It was ‘beauty’, ‘charm’ and ‘wit’ that I loved, as perceived in the person of this woman at that time, by the person that I was at that time. Therefore, the love that, at the time, I felt was ‘taken away from me’ by this person, was never actually taken away because it was something that I had created myself and as such belonged to me, is a part of me, and can never be taken away from me. It is something that I can cherish still. Not everyone gets to experience a great love in their life.

Since writing this, I have discovered a quote by Rabindranath Tagore, which expresses in a nutshell the same sentiment:

Beauty is truth’s smile when she beholds her own face in a perfect mirror.

Photo by Flavio Takemoto