Candlelight, and the Caution of Woo Woo

In his book “Anam Cara”, the Irish Poet, John O’Donohue, made an astutely aesthetic observation that I simply must mention here. Truth be told, the book is full of such observations and would require that I spill a lot of ink to mention them all. The audio version of the book is quite an experience as well, being read by O’Donohue himself in his deeply Irish accent. At many points along his narration, I found myself entirely mesmerized by the poetic flourishes of his thought. Anam Cara, which translates to “soul friend” in Gaelic, was his attempt to articulate the depth of what an authentic life could encompass when lived through the prism of Celtic spiritual wisdom. The man was utterly unique in the way he saw the world (he died in 2008) and the book is quite breathtaking on that point alone.

But before I begin, I should stake a flag right up front to acknowledge that O’Donohue has provided a valuable service for me here, which has been the reintroduction of an aesthetic, almost mystical language back into my life, which I should have seen coming. Over the past few years in particular, I’ve seen a peak in my interest of philosophy and neuroscience, so I’ve spent far more time reading about the workings of the mind, the nature of consciousness, the limits of our free will, and the illusion of the Self, and all the other digressions found in that arena. In other words, I’ve spent far too much time thinking like a grad-student and framing all those inner discussions within the adopted language of those writers. But in listening to O’Donohue, I’ve been captivated by the sheer beauty of his poetic thought, and with this reminder, I realize that a limit has been reached regarding how much aesthetic real estate that I am willing to concede to science.

The issue may seem merely sematic to most since both poet and scientist alike are ultimately attempting to describe, in their own language, of course, the same mysteries of it all. But to group them together too casually would only serve to marginalize their true dialectic differences and would likely end up doing injury to both.

Not so sure about that suggestion? Then take a moment and consider this analogy; imagine yourself being truly swayed by a stunning vocal from a favorite singer, for example, with eyes closed, allowing voice and melody to carry you far away into what feels primal to your whole being and feeling the hair on the back of your neck tingle with sweet emotion. Then read that emotional experiences like that are simply the end product of a specific configuration of neurons firing in a unique configuration of synaptic pathways in your brain tissue that triggers a dopamine release into our bloodstream that makes your skin tingle. Clearly, the scientific explanation, as biologically accurate as it is, doesn’t track with the life we experience head-on, and it is precisely this chasm of language that I find myself.

Of course, the fault falls on neither since there is a natural dichotomy that exists between the two. A strict empiricist, for example, would no doubt offer an irreverent eyeroll to the poet who internalizes a summer storm with existential reverence, while the poet would surely return serve with smug disdain at the neuroscientist who would claim the experience was fundamentally nothing more than a byproduct of brain chemistry.

In considering that dichotomy, please tell me where is there to stand for someone like myself who deeply values the purity of scientific logic and reason while also identifying with, and fully committed to living an aesthetic life. They each represent vastly different ways of considering our place in the world and seem to be irreconcilably opposed, if not entirely antagonistic to one another. But I strive to resist the easy temptations of seeing the world in absolutes, so I don’t view the two as in competition for my favor, but rather they both exist as expressions of their own epistemologies. At the conclusion of each of their own calculous, one concerns itself with causes while the other wrestles with their implications. The best analogy that I can offer is that of an owner’s manual for some major house appliance. The manual is clearly important to fully understand how the unit functions, and the necessary maintenance and upkeep of the thing, but once the operation is understood, the manual can be put away. At some point our attention should be focused on enjoying the appliance.

Now before I draw O’Donohue back into this, there is a term that must be brought out of the scientific dustbin if this conversation is to move forward in any meaningful way, and that word is “soul”. O’Donohue uses the word freely and often, which I take no real issue with, but scientists will not use that word. It’s use is taboo. And again, that is not a criticism. Science can only deal with observable and testable evidence, and the soul is not an observable and testable thing. We don’t even know if we possess one, let alone how to define it. The best evidence we can offer is that it “feels” like we have one, whatever “it” is. So, whether an eternal soul exists independently of our body or is simply a psychological construct fabricated from our feelings of selfhood, we have no way to objectively confirm it, although the evidence points overwhelmingly on the latter. But regardless, I believe “soul”, however we choose define it, is an important term to use here, as a placeholder, if nothing else. My own definition considers it as being the deepest intuitions we hold regarding our individual existence, or perhaps to put it a bit more poetically, soul is the sparkling, intoxicating wine of our most intimate self.

So, with all of that out of the way, let’s talk ‘Candlelight’.

As I alluded to earlier, O’Donohue offers a few phenomenal insights, particularly with the paragraph below, for as soon as his words reached my ears, I felt bathed in an aesthetic shower of contemplation. The sensation was ‘soul expanding’, and I will use that phrase with deliberate intent. Here is O’Donohue making his point (emphasis mine).

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“The soul is never meant to be seen completely, with a brightness or with too much clarity. The soul is always more at home in a light which has a hospitality to shadow……. the lovely thing about the light of a candle is that it makes wonderful openings in the darkness. Now in modern life, we have a neon kind of conscious and much of the spiritual world is completely invaded with the language of psychology and too often the language of psychology has a neon kind of clarity to it and is not able to retrieve or open up the depth and density of the world of soul.”

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Please step back to appreciate the stunning sentiment on offer here. It is precisely his exquisite phrasing to suggest the aesthetic repose we ‘feel’ from a simple flicker of candlelight has the magic to expose “wonderful openings in the (our) darkness”. Consider this for a moment. His choice to use opposing examples of ‘light’ as a metaphor is quite clever, as each elicits profoundly diverging aesthetics. In short, the deepest and most intimate feelings we possess will always withdraw from the “neon” clarity that psychological explanations will shine on us, while the soft, mesmerizing flicker of candlelight will invite the soul to step out from the darkness to reveal itself. To make my point more explicit, consider the intrusive, soul crushing overhead lighting while sitting in your Dentist’s chair, then contrast that against sitting around a nighttime campfire with its mesmerizing flames dancing seductively across the glowing wood. Both are defined as light, but each will inspire drastically divergent degrees of soulfulness.

That perfectly captures the language gap that I’m attempting to recover here, while also hoping to avoid the “woo-woo” that can easily sneak into “soul” talk. Make no mistake, I find soul talk as warm and inviting as anyone, but in that space, there is an implicit caution for me. The reason being is that I attempt to hold myself to a ‘master value’ of sorts, to a standard of thought that demands that I maintain a healthy level of intellectual honesty, and that honesty necessarily begins from a simple precept; to be skeptical of all unprovable and unfalsifiable claims, or in other words, the mystical and supernatural. The goal is to be fully untethered from the soft comforts of squishy thinking. I will face reality head on, thank you very much. So, it is due to that principle that I tend to keep woo-woo talk on a tight leash.

To make my point, allow me to include another paragraph from Anam Cara. As I hope to have conveyed so far, O’Donohue is quite an original thinker, certainly within this ephemeral world of spiritual mysticism, which was inspired by his intellectual mentor, Meister Eckhart, the 13^th century theologian/philosopher. Whether through his formal writings or through various interviews, O’Donohue laced his language with incredible flourishes of insight that sends the soul into the stratosphere. It’s an intoxicating language, and has a fragrance that many people, myself included, finds incredibly moving, but with it comes some ideas and phrases that flirt dangerously close to the “woo-woo” talk that I find untenable. Here is a quick example.

“To be born is to be chosen. No one is here by accident. Each of us was sent here for a special destiny…. you were not consulted in the major factors that shape your destiny; where you would be born, to whom you would be born…..your identity was not offered for your choosing. In other words, a special destiny was prepared for you.”

As you can see, O’Donohue artfully chooses his words to brush up ever so close to the woo-woo line, and does to great effect, such as implying that being born is to be “chosen”, and we were “sent” here, complete with a “prepared” destiny, which are all inspiring ideals that speak directly to our deep psychological need for belonging and purpose, but it is also straight-up mysticism. I should note here that O’Donohue was a Catholic Priest for nearly twenty years before leaving the Priesthood to become a poet and philosopher, so the fact that his instincts remained bound to mystical thinking should be factored in. Yet, even with this caution, “soul-talk” has a place at the table here, for there simply isn’t a viable alternative when covering this terrain. Science can offer us little here.

To circle back to his earlier comment for a moment, one of the first things you may have noticed is that although O’Donohue gave a clear analogy to his ‘neon’ light metaphor by linking it to our focus on Psychology and neuroscience, he failed to supply an analogy to what constitutes ‘candlelight’, other than his beautiful abstraction that “it makes wonderful openings in the darkness.” It is precisely this door he left ajar that I want to step through here. That he failed to provide an example presents no obstacle to this pilgrim, since I fully understand the metaphoric language at play and can readily provide a multitude examples on demand. But to his point, what exactly does “candlelight” represent in O’Donohue’s lexicon of soul talk? More importantly, what does it mean to me?

Well in a word, ART is what it means to me, or to define it more broadly, aesthetics, for it is only in the aesthetic realm that a soulful vocabulary can be fully brought to bear. To my mind, pure aesthetic pleasure is one of the few tools we possess that has the nimbleness and dexterity to tiptoe around the linear definitions of our intellect in order to enter the silent zones of soul. Joseph Campbell wrote about art being a manifestation of our deepest psychic intuitions for this very reason, suggesting that art and myth share the same vocabulary, the same innate, deeply imbedded themes from our intuitive selves, echoing Jung’s ‘collective unconsciousness” in the process. Campbell considered high art to be on equal footing with mythology, which he termed “affect images”. These affect images can take many different forms, of course, but are usually images that we find deeply moving but without a clear delineation as to why. In a particular sense, an affect image speaks directly to our core being while the analytical mind is stuck trying to figure out what it all means. An easy example of this would be the Cross, which for a Christian imparts its message without the need for words, just as the Chinese Ying/Yang symbol provides the same symbolism. Therefore, Campbell’s ideal of an ‘affect image’ fits seamlessly within O’Donohue’s candlelight analogy, for they both work the same magic by speaking directly to our silent zones.

I would also add that an ‘affect image’ doesn’t require it to be an actual image, it can be a melody, a line of poetry, a scene from a movie or even something tactile, such as a fingertip being gripped from a newborn’s fragile hand. If we find it moving, then it can be used to pry open the door to soulfulness. I could easily offer troves of my own examples that light me up like a Fourth of July celebration, such as Bono’s spiritual yearning throughout “A Sort of Homecoming”, or Eddie Vedder’s desperate plea for deliverance from a lost father in “Release”, or the debilitating pathos heard in Ray LaMontagne’s voice while singing “This Love is Over”. Of course, these are just a few of my own examples of the candlelight, illuminating my own inner sanctuary of soulfulness, but we each have this capacity, the ability to let go and to give ego the night off so that we can experience the thing on its own terms.

To draw this little dialectic jaunt to a close, I want to point out another phrase from “Anam Cara”, one that can easily function as the bookend for this discussion. O’Donohue wrote that the soul has a “shy presence”, and that it must be gently enticed before revealing the “full dimensions of our interiority”, once again exposing the delicacy of his thought.

This ideal of the soul’s ‘shy presence’ underscores the brilliance of O’Donohue’s analogy because he intimately understands how elusive ‘soul’ can be. If, for example, you believe yourself capable to freely communicate with your soul, like it’s connected to your stream of thoughts in some way, then you are mistaken, and confusing it with ego. No, there is no dialog with soul, but as O’Donohue is suggesting, if we can put ourselves in an appropriate setting, quieten down our mental chatter, and bathe our mind in ‘candlelight’, then we can, perhaps, get momentary glimpses of the thing.

Years ago, I came across a RollingStone interview with Neil Young that captures this landscape as well as any that I have come across. During the interview, Young digressed briefly to explain the process of his songwriting, and as you’ll see, it is readily apparent that Young’s songwriting intuitions perfectly parallels “O’Donohue’s “candlelight” analogy, precisely because neither does violence to the moment, which is the unspoken key here. In other words, the soul, however you wish to define it, requires a gentle hand. But let me allow Young to speak for himself and draw this note to a poignant close.

“I look at songwriting like looking for a wild animal, but you’re not trying to kill it. You’re trying to communicate with it, to coax it out of its lair. You don’t go over and set a fire and try to force it from its lair or try to scare it out. When it comes out, you don’t want it to be scared of you. You have to be part of what it sees as it’s looking around, what it takes as natural. So that it doesn’t regard you as a threat. To me, songs are a living thing. It’s not hunting to capture. I just want to get a glimpse of it, so I can record it.”

Special Note: This appearance of Young’s quote had an interesting journey before finding itself here, so I’m adding this little addendum simply to shine a small, but not an inconsequential light on the workings of my mind. In the case of Young’s quote, I recalled reading it years ago and could easily remembered the overall meaning I took from it, but only a few words could be recalled. As hard as I tried, the words just would not come, but I knew his quote matched up beautifully with this theme from O’Donohue, so I simply HAD to find the full quote. So, I began searching the web, but in my search could only find references to the interview, not an on-line version of it. I could not find it anywhere. But after weeks of searching, I finally discovered someone on eBay selling their personal copy of that particular RollingStone issue, so I bought it, received it, then transcribed the paragraph….. solely to help complement an idea ricocheting around in my mind.