If John Moriarty’s Words only Touch your Head you Have Gained Little (Part 7)

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This is part 7 of the Irlandnews series on John Moriarty
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In today’s part of the series about Irish philosopher and writer, poet and mystic John Moriarty, Kerrywoman Amanda Carmody continues to share her memories of the great philosopher who was her uncle. We asked Amanda to write about John Moriarty for Irlandnews to intoduce this deep thinker to a wider German speaking audience. Today Amanda explains how to best approach John´s work, which 18 years after his death is more relevant than ever. John Moriarty saw the state of our planet and our current multi-crises as mapped and present in all of us. His credo: We are all related to each other, humans, animals, plants and rocks and shall live peacefully together accordingly. Our beautiful planet Earth is the true paradise – we just have to learn to recognise it. Read Amanda’s advise on how to best access John Moriarty’s work.

Amanda Carmody and her mother Phyllis, sister of John Moriarty. Amanda is a niece of John Moriarty, a daughter of his youngest sister, Phyllis. She spent the first few years of her life living at the Moriarty home place at Leitrim Hill. Her connection with John began on his visits home and deepened in later years when he returned to live on the side of Mangerton mountain, near Killarney. Since his death she has immersed herself in his writing. Amanda runs a very active Facebook Community Group dedicated to the wisdom teachings of John Moriarty.

Amanda, reading John Moriarty’s books helped you through challenging times yourself . . .

I have been through some very difficult times in my own life. Some of these were when John was alive and that meant I could go to Killarney and chat with him and get his advice and support. I did so when my marriage broke up, when my youngest daughter was diagnosed with autism and intellectual disability, when my father was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour.

It was not until after John’s death that I started properly reading his books. I thought I would give it a year, little did I know that 20 years later I would not only be still reading but still making new discoveries and revelations. The books and recordings are a new way to access John’s wisdom, in this way John still guides me and inspires me. I am challenged to dig deeper and live fully in spite of challenges. In the past few years my family and I have suffered great loss and I speak about it in this clip from the launch of John Moriarty Grounded in Story last year (see video below).

It helps to believe that ordinary happenings in our ordinary lives are not insignificant and in the grand scheme of things our stories matter. Perhaps it is my humble attempt to become a great story, to become a sacred story. It has helped me to see that life and death are a mystery, that our purpose here is a mystery and who we are between the hall doors of conception and death is not the whole story. To listen to John affirming to us that who we sociologically are is not the whole story either, that maybe there is something right royal in each of us. I believe John Moriarty because he himself faced struggles and he is speaking out of the depths of his own experience and not just from the level of intellect. How reassuring it helps to realise that we are constantly growing and outgrowing and how inspiring to realise that like rivers and mountains we are naturally and magnificently crooked. And though it may not always feel like it, we are constantly flowing towards re-immersion in the great ocean.

It helps to realise that at the deepest level there is no separation, at the deepest level the ocean is in the wave. It also helps to know that it is natural to feel the need for shelter and it is nourishing at times to seek shelter in prayer, in meditation and in community. This of course does not mean that we do not suffer trauma, grief, loss, pain and sadness along the way, it means that beneath the surface, at the level of soul, in the present moment there is no separation. Call it faith, call it surrender I do not know, I only know that labels don’t really matter so much. Accumulation of knowledge is far less important than being open and receptive to the source of all knowing, the beginners mind. I love the idea that if we drop our conditioning and open ourselves to new possibility then we can awaken to the wonder child that is in each of us, we awaken to wonder and soul in the world around us. John says:

“What a poverty of mind and heart it is to have explanations for everything. What a poverty of mind and heart it is to never stand before things in their eternal unexplainableness.”

Perhaps we could also conclude, what a poverty to never stand before life experience in its eternal unexplainableness. During difficult times in life we need the inspiration of great wisdom teachers who can tell us: “There is news of the macrocosm in us it’s microcosm.” The richer we are in ourselves the richer our sense of the universe. What we come home to in ourselves we come home to in the universe. When we come home to soul in ourselves we come home to soul in the universe.” Trusting the wisdom of the universe can we dream with mountains and rivers, can we evolve with the evolving Earth. “The question, therefore, is and it is a question I put to you” John says: “Can you change with the quest as it changes, can you grow with the quest as it grows?”

Amanda, what gives you hope that humans may still find the way back to healing our beautiful planet?

In Dreamtime John quotes Victor Hugo: “There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world and that is an idea whose time has come.” This is hopeful because it means that a shift in perspective when it takes root can change everything. The problem as I see it is that this shift seems to be happening incredibly slowly. The mindset of economic growth, consumerism and commodification is still the prevailing mindset in Western cultural.

If as John says humanity is out of tune with nature and to be out of tune is a great illness then becoming aware of this is a vital first step towards discovering how we can be resonant with nature. This begins a journey that is a homecoming. When we are at home with nature within ourselves, we can be at home with nature in the world. This is a shift in how we hear, see and perceive, we might call it an awakening, an opening, or even Silver Branch Perception.

I feel that this is still possible, it is always possible John tells us:

“Our beginnings we carry always with us…We must breathe the Beginning. We must walk with the very first stirrings of the human and universal imagination.”

“Though we live in a world that dreams of ending that always seems about to give in something that will not acknowledge conclusion insists that we forever begin.’ – Brendan Kennelly.

Like John Moriarty I hope that our species has not already gone too far. This is why John named the Earth Buddh Gaia and called on us to be active participants by taking a stand as Buddh Gaian’s. This sounds radical but in fact it echoes the perspective of many indigenous cultures who regarded the earth as sacred and treated her accordingly.

JOHN MORIARTY – BACKGROUND INFO

John Moriarty was an Irish writer and philosopher acknowledged for his profound insights and mystical perspective on modern life. He was born on February 2, 1938 in County Kerry and died there on June 1, 2007.

More information about John Moriarty and his complete works in English can be found here:

* Amanda Carmody runs a very active Facebook community group with daily posts on John Moriarty. Because it’s for a good cause, here’s – as an exception to our policy – a link from Irlandnews to the John Moriarty Facebook-Group. Click.
* The website of the John Moriarty Institute: www.johnmoriarty.ie. The website informs about John´s life and work.
* The Lilliput Press: John Moriarty’s books (so far all in English) are published by the Irish publishing house The Lilliput Press in Dublin. You get a good overview of John’s books and audio books on the publisher’s website. Website: Click.

Amanda, can we imagine John Moriarty as a happy person?

An unusual question that makes me wonder how he is perceived by those who did not know him. I experienced John as a happy, humorous and hopeful person. In his talks he was energetic and upbeat for the most part. Yes, certainly John felt deeply concerned and hurt by the path humanity was taking and for the welfare of life on Earth and this was a source of sadness and anguish for him.

Is it not true that if we do not feel this sadness, hurt and anger it is likely nothing will change in us, that we will continue doing what we are doing without stopping to think or feel. John felt compelled to do something, to step forward and sound the alarm and in that he was ever hopeful that change was possible, that healing was possible. John had great faith and trust in people but not so much in systems. He believed that hope lay in the hands of small, dedicated communities not organisations, certainly not industries.

“So, what we now need on Earth is that a critical number of people would leave the bubonic noise of our time and go aside to live in small monastic communities, each with its own bell calling then to con-son-ance with star and stone, calling them to con-son-ance in plainsong and silence. Given that, our planet might still have a chance.”

I understand that happiness was not John’s aspiration. Whatever he was he was and sometimes that was happy, sometimes anguish, sometimes elation, sometimes despair and often when I visited him it was also laughter.

John tells of a parable:

“And there’s the story of the man who despaired of the West. Going to the East he lived in a Zen monastery for years. In the airport coming home his teacher, who was a great master, gave him a present. In the plane waiting for take-off, the young man unwrapped the gift and to his great surprise and annoyance it was a copy, very beautifully bound, of the Bible. The master telling him, find it in your own tradition.”

The message from the story being that whatever you seek abroad you can find it where you are in your own tradition. There was a time in John’s life when he sought to completely baptise himself out of Christianity. Certainly, many people can now identify with John in this regard, many of us who have been baptised into Christianity in our infancy have felt this urge to opt out of the religion that they were born into. John Moriarty came to Connemara seeking his bush soul, he felt an overwhelming need to be free of his constraints of the conditioned worldview that no longer nourished him in the quest he was on.

The story he had grown up in and been educated in no longer gave him direction in his search for deeper meaning. One day out in the bogs, laying himself down into a hare’s form he sought to have his European education sucked out of him, as a poultice might do for an infected wound. In this John was hoping to cleanse the doors of perception and look upon the world with eyes of childlike wonder and potentiality. John also started to ritually baptise himself out of Christianity, but something happened that stopped him from completing the final part of the ritual.

John had early memories of his natural childlike experiences prior to his religious education. He remembered a time when he was four or five years old and he first became aware that a divide existed between the animals in the outhouses and the humans in the dwelling house, he learnt that there was a hierarchy of “us and them” when it came to religion. He writes in Nostos:

“Christmas didn’t happen in the outhouses. Christmas didn’t happen to the animals. The animals were left out. And since the animals were left out, so, inside me somewhere, was I.”

John had some beautiful experiences in church as a young child, he understood the value of praise and sacrament, the value of being part of a parish that came together to worship and pray. There are two calendars in John’s early experience, the natural flow of the seasons and the liturgical calendar. However, a day came when he was seventeen years old that the story he had been thought in church and school clashed with his education. This was a devastating experience for John. It happened after he was given a banned copy of Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin. He uses the language of shipwreck, he writes in Nostos that he fell out of his story, he was lost at sea, and he felt utterly devastated and alone. John was an atheist during his college years but that did not satisfy his yearning. He began to search eastern philosophies, indigenous beliefs, and the world religions and philosophies.

John spent a lot of time meditating in nature when he lived among the mountains and rivers of Connemara. One day he had an experience out on the mountain that literally blew his mind. In Nostos he attempts to explain the nature of the experience:

“I would sometimes be very badly afflicted by. But I coped. I didn’t know that I could cope now. It is one thing to find oneself engulfed in an infinite universe that has neither centre nor circumference, it is something altogether for that universe to disappear, to vanish like a mirage, leaving you in the void.

In my case – it seemed sinful to claim it, it seemed like inverted Luciferean pride to claim it – but I had, I had been let through not to a heaven but to a void that was starless and fatherless.

I was in a no-man’s-land, no, I was in a no-man’s-nothing between a world lost and a God not found . . . ”

Up until now, as a teacher of literature, and as someone who had remained in touch with Christianity through Christian art, I had played with the Christian myth. Played with it as I played with other myths. But now the myth had shown its hand. It had danced itself out of its mollifying veils, leaving me with naked sight of the press and the skull. And I wasn’t big enough. And I didn’t know any prayer that was big enough, none except Christ himself, none except Christ sore amazed in Gethsemane, none except Christ looking down into his own empty skull on Golgotha. The skull is empty, and the Son of Man has no where to lay his head, no where outside it, no where inside it.

Christianity was true, is true, not because Jesus is God – he might well be the one true God incarnate – but it isn’t because of that that Christianity is true, Christianity is true because in Gethsemane and on Golgotha Jesus lived a truth about us and our world, he lived it into shocking visibility, he lived it and it lived him. He walked into the olive press, the mind press, that brings everything out into the open. It brings all that we phylogenetically are out into the open. It brings everything that Nietzsche discovered in himself out into the open . . .

I had learned a lot in a few hours. Only this wasn’t learning.

This was simple seeing. In the mountain today I had been shattered into seeing. And it wasn’t with my eyes that I saw it. It was with whatever was left of me that I saw it. Surprised, almost managing a smile of embarrassment, I was a Christian. Not a Christian again. I was a Christian for the first time.”

So, it was not the Christianity that he was thought growing up in North Kerry that John returned, it was to Christ as pioneer, to Christ as experience. This path was the Christian mystical path, and it was the mystics who now made sense to him and illuminated a way forward for John. I believe that we do not really know if we are religious or not until we are faced with devastation. “Unlike D.H. Lawrence, I believe that the venture hasn’t gone out of Christianity’ he writes in Slí na Fírinne:

“But this is not a reason for complacency. As I see it, it isn’t only the Christian churches that are in trouble. Christianity as a story is in trouble. It is in trouble in its images and in its metaphors. And even though it ravages me to say so, it is, I fear, in trouble in its central ritual, the Eucharist.

If we do not get the diagnosis right, it is unlikely that we will happen upon the right remedy.

Christ who continues to grow and outgrow among us is the remedy. That and our willingness to grow and outgrow with him. Christ’s life among us didn’t come to an end on Ascension Thursday. His thirty-three years on Earth isn’t the biographical whole story.”

For John this is not the end of the Christian adventure but rather it is the beginning. He frequently uses the biblical passage of Jesus crossing the Kedron as a symbol for crossing into the mystical progression as Jesus pioneered it. It is something that we undergo, not something to be preached. John saw it as a natural spiritual progression that happens in its own time like puberty in humans or metamorphosis in insects:

“In September, fully grown, a caterpillar climbs a tree. It spins a cocoon attaching it to the trunk. The colour pattern of the cocoon perfectly matches the colour pattern of the trunk. Not even a hungry blackbird or thrush will detect it. Inside the caterpillar is undergoing a very strange process. It is broken down or should we say it is cannibalised by an intuition of something new, a new growing, within itself. The caterpillar isn’t architect or clerk of works or general overseer of this growing. It doesn’t in any way seek to engineer it or direct it. The growing is its own wisdom and a fine day in June a butterfly opens and closes its wings on a rose-covered cottage wall.”

It has far more to do with how the story of Jesus impacts our lives in the present moment and how it impacts the world that we live in. If we can challenge ourselves to stay awake and aware through the stages of spiritual puberty, stages called Gethsemane, Golgotha and the Garden of the Sepulchre. The mystical experience that lies at the core of all spiritual traditions and at the core of Christianity as John experienced it, a Christ who was not fenced into any particular religion, institution or organisation. In Nostos John writes:

“I was holding my not so important head in my etymologically self-remembering hands, and, quietly overcome into a state of silent surprise, I saw that I would spend the rest of my life attempting to tell the Christian story.

Even if Christianity ceased from the earth and no Christian was left, I must still attempt to tell it.”

This is the last verse of a poem which John called In Buddha’s Footsteps:

“But I could tell Death
I have loved you and so
I am deeper than scythes.
I could even tell Christ,
Although I am all body,
All second-hand head,
I’m Christian again,
But I’ve opened my mind
I have opened my gates,
Long ago, to God’s horses.”

The mystical path is open to people of all persuasions and none. He even says that is possible that the Upanishads and Sutras sometimes communicate this path more clearly than the gospels do.

John saw Black Elk as a good example of a holy man. He was a Lakota and a Christian and John held him in high regard. In What the Curlew Said: Nostos Continued  John Moriarty writes about him:

“I think of him as a new kind of Christian. A Christian who, as his name suggests, is ecumenical with elk, that meaning all animals, living and extinct. A Christian who is ecumenical with lightning.

A Christian who, before he converted to Christianity, concluded the rituals he performed with the words mitakuye oyasin, meaning all my relatives, in other words, everything that exists, and it might well be that a ritual is effective only when it is pan-ecumenical, only when it is in and from and with and through all things.

Mitakuye oyasin.

Two words that must transform Christianity ecologically, cleansing it of anthropocentrism.”

And finally this passage from his book Anaconda Canoe:

“I sometimes imagine a Moses or a Jesus, a tremendous, strong Jesus, a Pleistocene Jesus, a tall tough customer who has walked alone, has spent long nights unknowing and alone, in the Altamiras and Lascauxes of his own unconscious.

A tall, tough customer, he will not be turned aside from what he has set his heart on. He has been in the open, has slept and has dreamed downwind from bison and wild horses. I imagine him, no lobe of his mind or cave of his heart fenced in by ancient or modern empires, a Pleistocene Jesus, showing up without warning in the modern world, walking across modern Christendom, walking down into Rome, into the Pope in his audience hall, saying, let my people go.”

John Moriarty saw Jesus as a happening, a story that we participate and grow in and therefore a fountain of wisdom that can vitalise how we evolve with the evolving Earth. Like Franciscans we can awaken to realise our fraternity with brother sun and sister moon. And our very existence can be an everlasting hymn of praise.

“Since Christ crossed the Torrent, Earthrise is no longer a merely illusory event seen from a spaceship circling the moon. It is a real event, to be celebrated most sacredly and with exceeding great joy.

The challenge to us is to rise with Earthrise.

To rise with it morally and spiritually. This calls for a radically new culture.”

This is something John experienced for himself. And his writing in its own way is a testimony that illuminates and invites us to be open to the miraculous in the everyday. In the end “the capacity for ordinariness is our final sanctity.”  John Moriarty lived a simple and ordinary life.

In conclusion reading John Moriarty is a pilgrimage that can change how we perceive and relate with reality, and I feel it nourishes forgotten parts of us that are calling out to be recognised and integrated. I strongly feel that if John Moriarty only touches the head, if you only gain an intellectual understanding of his work then you have gained little. The words need to resonate at a deeper level and when this happens, you may find yourself on a trail of self discovery that brings you to great depths and great heights. My experience and your experience may be vastly different.

To be continued.

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Photo credits: Top collage: Eliane Zimmermann;  Photos 2 from top and bottom with friendly permission of Amanda Carmody; more footage is available on the website www.johnmoriarty.ie. Photos 3 and 4 from top: Markus Bäuchle

This story / page is available in: German