Note: John Moriarty (1938-2007) was one of the greatest writers of his generation, but his work is not as well known outside Ireland as it should be. His knowledge of Western literature and myth was encyclopaedic and eruditely reflected in his work. He lived a simple life as a gardener after resigning a university position in Canada in his 30s. His emphasis on the need for the harrowing of hell is highly relevant to the enmities of our time. I hope that publication of this lecture in WSI will help spread appreciation of his work.
It's a great privilege to be invited to give the inaugural John Moriarty Memorial Lecture here at the Clifden Arts Festival, which I know John supported for so many years. Many of you in the audience will have special memories and associations with John, entranced as you must have been by his extraordinary eloquence, sympathetic intelligence and warmth of personality. It is given to few people in a generation to live their lives so rooted in place, myth, story and literature, plumbing the depths and scaling the heights of human existence and potential. John was such a man.
On another occasion, I arrived at a castle outside Dublin in the torrential rain for a TV programme hosted by John about life, the universe and everything. We sat round a vast fireplace with six-foot logs, drinking Guinness along with our conversation. John's introduction set the scene for a relaxed evening on camera. A few years later, I invited him to speak at a Mystics and Scientists conference on the Sun, where he struck up a friendship with the Indian philosopher and mystic, Ravi Ravindra. John’s title was typically enigmatic: Ancient Egypt: Sun-Day and the Ever-Present Sacred. He spoke about the long and dangerous night journey undertaken by the sun god, who eventually re-emerges into the light. It is a journey that we all make, more or less consciously: the initiation represented by birth and death, death and rebirth, separation and reunion, exile and returning home - Nostos. John draws on the insights and experiences of many literary companions, among them DH Lawrence, William Wordsworth, Sir Thomas Browne, Herman Melville, WB Yeats, Meister Eckhart, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jakob Boehme, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rainer Maria Rilke, St. John of the Cross; but most of all, Jesus, who was for him the pivotal point of human evolution.
So any advance in consciousness has to entail an advance in depth. Elsewhere, John quotes Lawrence as saying that man's consciousness has many layers, with the lowest layers continuing to be crudely active centuries after the cultured consciousness of the nation has passed to higher planes. In reverting to these original levels, we can do so either through degeneration and decadence or, as John would suggest, 'by deliberate return in order to get back to the roots again, for a new start.'2 This is what John himself tried to do.
May who ne’er hung there3.
Lawrence encapsulates in some of his last poems this process of separation or fall and return.
But it is a much more fearful thing to fall out of them7.
to be a creature in the house of the God of life.... 8.
We have an identity crisis in the modern world: we don't know who we are or where we're going. A jet pilot once relayed this message back to base: I'm lost but I'm making record time. We, too, are lost, even if we are making record time. We suffer from an excluded soul, which John regarded as the great calamity of our age. CG Jung, rarely quoted by John, wrote about modern man in search of a soul, remarking that all his patients in the second half of life were searching for this hidden dimension within themselves.
The God of economic growth tells us that to be is to have and to consume. We have consumed the Earth herself – half the resources ever used have been expended in the last 50 years. Yet, as Wordsworth said nearly 200 years ago: ‘The world is too much with us. Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.’ Possessions cannot fill the void within our identity; only the presence of being and love as renewal can.
Or, as John would put it, we have fallen out of our story and need to find a new one. Not only a new story, but also a new way of seeing and being, of relating as a part to the whole, as individuals to society, as cells to the body. The journey of life begins with separation. As John expressed it, 'to exist separately is to have amputated ourselves from the whole. To be is to be amputated.’ 9 This is what Plotinus called the fall from unity into separation. The human journey is a story, and the story a journey in itself. The story that John embraced was much vaster than the terms of reference of his personality. Being human is both dangerous and what he described as a tremendous opportunity, which also happens to be a reflection of Tibetan Buddhism. The human incarnation is a priceless opportunity. John consciously widened his sympathies and excavated his being to participate in the universal process of life and transformation. To be is to have the potential to become something else, a potential that we don't always fulfil, in spite of life’s invitations and initiations.
Here is a passage from Benedictus, the last book by the late John O'Donohue, a fellow Irish writer.
To live the life that I would love.
We too easily retreat into fear, we batten down the hatches in the name of security, which is the mere shadow of peace. Peace is something much more profound that can only emerge from our inner resources, from the very essence of our being rooted as it is in the Divine Ground.
Helen Keller wrote that 'life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.' This quotation appears on our Learning for Life website11 and is often cited by young people working on the values poster project. When they discover the nature of Helen Keller's challenges in life, they are amazed and realise how much they take for granted. Their lives are by and large blessed by comparison, but they have few deeper criteria against which to measure their situation. Anne Frank, author of the famous Diary, is another such model, and is often written about as an inspirational figure. We need these external reference points in order better to understand and appreciate our own situation. How can we remain open to life? Children are fully engaged, fully open as they grow and unfold. The primordial movement of life can be seen in plants and trees. The daffodil emerges in the spring from the dark earth, just as we come out of the darkness of the womb. It pushes up, breaks ground, and unfolds the beauty of its flower as a gesture of life - like this, the first movement of the paneurhythmy. 12 The tree performs the same gesture, but on a larger scale: beech, oak, ash, cherry with its exquisite blossom, a symbol of transience celebrated in Japanese culture every year.
The storms of life can take their toll. Recently, two of our oak trees shed very large branches. Detached from the source of life, they die, but the tree lives on and the logs are consumed. Part of us may die, but our essence lives on. Moreover, if a tree loses a particularly large branch, it puts out new branches and leaves on that side, especially if facing the sun. Can we heal the wounds left by the amputation of a branch? Are we able to put out new branches? I once saw a chestnut tree in Sweden in May, just a stump, but it had one 12-foot branch jutting out horizontally. This was full of the leaves of new life, with its white candles pointing to heaven.
Closer to home, in our park, there is an ancient cherry tree propped up by a sturdy telegraph post as if by a walking stick. It has needed support for as long as I can remember. However, just like the other tree, it blossoms in springtime and shows the first autumn leaves. My mother died over the summer, and it was her wish that half of her ashes be scattered beneath this venerable tree where she had found refuge. Her wishes were written down 31 years ago, and I found them on a sheet of paper in a drawer on the exact anniversary - September 21, the day of the equinox.
I trust that God is in me.
Ernest Hemingway, on the other hand, once ruefully suggested that as we grow older, we do not grow wiser, only more so. There is always a danger that we become caricatures of ourselves instead of engaging in a continuous transformative process that is life itself.
Goethe once said that once you have understood the cyclical nature of the universe, you will encounter it everywhere.
John spent much of his life working in gardens, being in silent solitude in these beautiful temples. This enabled him to enter into the rhythms and language of nature, to arrive at a new way of seeing which got the rational mind out of the way. As Proust suggested, to see a new world we need new eyes. John arrived at an important insight about the nature of sympathetic knowing. To know sympathetically is to know by identity, by becoming one with the thing that is known; this is the knowledge of the mystics rather than knowledge of the scientists. The mystic knows by union, the scientist by detachment and mathematical or philosophical abstraction. Darwin and Descartes knew nothing of this sympathetic knowing. Darwin described his mind as a machine grinding out the facts, regretting the loss of his aesthetic sensitivity. Descartes was one of the fathers of mechanical outlook that reduced everything to the workings of a machine, first clockwork, then telegraph exchanges and now computers. Eventually, the human being is also understood merely as a machine. However, the machine has no depth dimension. The machine can be measured, while the human being is unfathomable.
For the next year, we will hear a great deal about Darwin, but much less about his more interesting contemporary Alfred Russel Wallace. 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. He and Wallace (1823-1913) presented a joint paper to the Linnean Society in July 1858. Part of the reason that we hear so little of Wallace is that he was also a spiritualist interested in the evolution of consciousness and the hidden dimensions of the human mind. Most other scientists around him were materialists, like TH Huxley, who derided his interest. However, there were other open-minded scientists like Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge were among the founders of the Society for Psychical Research.
One of the results of the Enlightenment with its deification of Reason was the loss of a symbolic understanding of nature or what other thinkers call the desacralisation of nature. Emanuel Swedenborg was perhaps one of the last thinkers in the 18th century to espouse a doctrine of correspondences between the inner and outer meaning of things. This literal interpretation of nature corresponds to an analogous fundamentalist interpretation of scripture. The symbolic depth of sayings in St John's Gospel such as 'I am the Way, the truth, and the life' is lost in favour of a literal interpretation that encourages an exclusive attitude to salvation and therefore an intolerance of other spiritual paths. It is a tragedy that the mystical gospel is interpreted literally in this way.
The loss of sympathetic knowing is also a loss of soul, an eclipse of the feminine, a repudiation of intuition. John's diagnosis is that we will have to go beyond cognition and the Kantian categories of our understanding. The next big revolution in science, he insists, will be epistemological. That is, it will entail the very notion of knowledge itself, of how we know. As John puts it: “Our efforts towards full comprehension frustrated we will be forced to return from the object to the subject, from the things, including the universe that we have been enquiring into, to the enquiring mind.” 24 This is a monumental step. For the last three centuries in the West, we have been looking outwards, analysing everything objectively, indeed, in the case of behaviourism, removing the subject altogether. There is a story about two behaviourist psychologists, man and wife, who have just made love. One says to the other: that was all right for you, how was it for me? This sounds like the theatre of the absurd. However, there is a serious underlying point, namely that consciousness and mind are prior to science, the subject is prior to the object. In the last 15 years, the study of consciousness has become central, and there is a growing realisation that we need to look inwards as well as outwards, situating science within consciousness and not consciousness within science.
Perception not mastered by conception.
Perception not distorted by a conception.
The Western mind is cumulative, acquisitive. This is the opposite of the Taoist mentality, which encourages us to subtract rather than add until we have reached the stillness of inactivity where, it is said, “by this very inactivity everything can be activated.” This includes the subtraction of the self and of desire, getting out of one's own way and, as John expressed it “out of God's way, and God's way is the way of the lily of the field, doing in not doing.” 28 The nearest many of us get to this is the experience of flow or effortless activity where we find that trying harder makes things worse. Timing is of the essence as those of you who frequently split logs or hit golf or tennis balls will know.
This is echoed by John, quoting Meister Eckhart: God expects but one thing of you and that is, that you should empty yourself in so far as you are a created human being so that God can be God in you. The personal gives way to the impersonal, or rather to the transpersonal (even universal), or what Emerson called the Oversoul. The individual and collective are two poles of our being, neither of which is complete in itself. We are both individuals and integral parts of the collective. What happens in the one is reflected in the other, so that even our own personal experiences are in a sense collective.
Our natural state is one of self-centeredness but, as the Buddha realised 2500 years ago, this leads to suffering, dukkha. We need to move our centre to what the Indians call the Self, but this is not a comfortable process and is one often brought about by suffering, an experience that John describes as being “cataclysmed into no-thing-ness that I didn't recognise yet to be divine, to be the Divine Urgrund that grounds all things.” 30 Equally, it can be brought about by love, as the historian Arnold Toynbee observed: on the one hand, “self-centredness is just another name for being alive, and power is one of the consequences of self-centredness, because all living creatures are competing with each other for exploiting the universe; and this competition is a conflict of power.” All this is only too evident on the world stage today. This striving for power is counterbalanced by love. Toynbee again: “love, as we know it by direct experience in living creatures on this planet, is also present as a spiritual presence behind the Universe. Love is the only spiritual power that can overcome the self-centredness that is inherent in being alive. This love that is a form of self-denial is also the only true self-fulfilment.” 31 In losing ourselves, we find ourselves.
Albert Schweitzer puts it like this: “Whenever my life devotes itself in any way to life, my finite will-to-live experiences union with the infinite will in which all life is one, and I enjoy a feeling of refreshment which prevents me from pining away in the desert of life.” 32 This is what he calls ethical mysticism, union with the Divine through sacrificial service, a process that he himself exemplified in his life.
John quotes a 12th century mystic 33 – another one burned at the stake - that the peace of the soul is to lose herself through God just as the river which has done its work can relax in the arms of the sea. Her work is over and she can lose herself in what she has totally become: Love. The next stage is what she calls 'falling into a trance of a nothingness,” 34 when the soul no longer lives in the life of grace, nor in the life of the spirit, but a glorious life of Divinity. For Christ, this passage involved Gethsemane 'the place or the olive press' where we are karmically pressed, karmically squeezed. The Bulgarian mystic Peter Deunov refers to the outer pressures and inner tensions of life events as means of transformation. John uses the powerful metaphor of karmic canyon Christianity, which Christ dared to cross in his harrowing of hell. One of his points is that this process is not accomplished once and for all, but has to be achieved both individually and collectively anew. Can we be redeemed? John sometimes doubts it, since the hammerhead shark within us will not and cannot be redeemed. However, we have to hope that we can be redeemed and act on that hope, as John himself suggested: 'Christ in the Karmic Canyon is the evolutionary transition from the Earth as Earth to the Earth as Buddh Gaia,’ 35 the Earth as Divine and enlightened. And Jesus has crossed the Torrent into what John calls deinanthropological self-awareness, the next stage of evolutionb .
Buddh Gaia is also Nostos, homecoming, Paradise Regained. The exquisite last movement of Peter Deunov’s Sunbeams is Raia – Paradise, with his nostalgically evocative and sublime music that reminds us of our deepest identity grounded in the Divine . He knew this, Orpheus knew this, Pythagoras knew this, not in a detached way but by identity and union. Nostos is also a journey to the land of the dead, taking leave of the world. As it says on my family headstone: I have seen the works of the Lord, now it is your turn to behold them and rejoice. And here we come back to DH Lawrence.
Sleep is a hint of lovely oblivion.
To God who dwells in deep oblivion.
Only in sheer oblivion are we with God.
Till he knows how not-to-know.
This is not ultimately about a physical death, but rather a mystical death, death to the sense of separation inherent in human existence, removing the obstacle of the self, the “I am” which we think we are. In truth, it is not we who live our lives, but life that lives through us, that same life which we see all around us and most of all in the eyes of our fellow human beings. Not only life, but also light and love; to be, to know, to feel.
See ‘Religion: A Perennial Need?’ in Surviving the Future, and Experiences, pp. 140 ff.
Eliot, T.S., Four Quartets, Faber and Faber, 1944.
Frankl, Viktor, Man’s Search for Meaning, Hodder and Stoughton, 1959.
Heymann, Eva, The Deeper Centre, Darton, Longman and Todd, 2006.
O’Donohue, John, Benedictus, Bantam, 2007.
Lawrence, D.H., The Complete Poems, Volume 2, edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts, Heinemann, 1964.
Moriarty, John, Turtle was Gone a Long Time, Lilliput Press, 1996.
Moriarty, John, Nostos, Lilliput Press, 2001.
Moriarty, John, What the Curlew Said, Lilliput Press, 2007.
Moriarty, John, Serious Sounds, Lilliput Press, 2007.
Needleman, Jacob, Time and the Soul, Berrett-Koehler, 2003.
Ravindra, Ravi (ed), The Inner Journey, Views from the Christian Tradition, Morning Light Press, 2006.
Schweitzer, Albert, The Teaching of Reverence for Life, Peter Owen, 1966.
Toynbee, Arnold, Experiences, Oxford University Press, 1969.
Toynbee, Arnold, Surviving the Future, Oxford University Press, 1971.
Trevelyan, Sir George, Magic Casements, Coventure, 1980.