Potemkin wrote:I am reminded here of the incident which occurred following Pompey the Great’s capture of Jerusalem, when he violated the Holy of Holies in the Temple, to see what ‘secret knowledge’ the Jews were ‘hiding’ from the world. He drew aside the curtain and found… an empty room. There is no secret knowledge behind the veil of appearances, which we can ‘extract’ like squeezing the juice out of an orange, in order to gain something. It is precisely the emptiness of the Holy of Holies which constitutes the presence of the Divine.
Or for pop culture, I often think of Zizek’s mention of Kung Fu Panda how the scroll that is covered as having knowledge to become the ultimate martial artist warrior is blank and the Panda realizes from his father that it is kind of “special because you believe it’s special”, and he finally accepts himself. XD
Knowledge avails us nothing. As Lacan pointed out, analysis ends (is ‘successful’) precisely when the analysand finally recognises that the analyst does not possess any secret knowledge they are withholding from the analysand - that there is nothing behind the veil of appearances. Only then, when the compulsive search for knowledge has ended, can true understanding begin.
It’s the sort of anticlimatic outcome like finding out that no adults really understand the world in some grand sense and are just as stumbling as myself. It changes everything, yet also somehow nothing has changed but one stops presuming that secret knowledge is held by others.
I keep finding in discussions of this sort that desire is an illusion with Buddhism, and how Christian sin is about resisting narcissism and giving into true love. They seem to intersect possibly in some kind of grief of accepting one’s pains and being able to accept others, even the cruel in their blindness and attachments to illusions.
A sort of love your brother although he is a sinner. But such work is painful because
reality hurts and not to be controlled.
I sense in my own self a kind of difficulty between what I imagine is a kind of modernist affinity for mastering the world through rational understanding, that everything can be articulated and made sense of and a point of irrationalism, mystics, and the idea that there is an unspeakable gap between the Real and the Symbolic of language.
https://www.guidetopsychology.com/ucs.htm As humans, we cannot communicate directly mind-to-mind or soul-to-soul. We have to rely on symbolic communication. Consequently, the Realm of the Symbolic is the realm of language. Language, however, cannot express the fullness of reality, and so much of our experience goes unspoken. No matter how much we say, and no matter how eloquently we may say it, some aspect of our reality fails to get communicated. Therefore, although it might seem, on the surface, that our lives are structured simply by conscious thought and speech, we are actually more influenced by that gap between the real and the symbolic—or, in other words, by what is “missing” from our lives simply because we must filter all our raw experience (the Realm of the Real) through our social dependence on the imperfection of language (the Realm of the Symbolic).
Therefore, the unconscious is a side-effect, so to speak, of our separation from raw reality because our use of language fails to adequately express our reality. Lacan saw clearly that, because separation and lack lead to desire, the unconscious is primarily governed by “the desire of the Other”—that is, by the social world (the “Other”) around us that is lost in its incomplete expression of reality. Consequently, desire can be described as the unspoken—and hidden—aspect of our speaking lives.
Now, as I said earlier, “How in the world can we talk about something hidden and unknown?” Well, what is missing—or hidden in desire—can be “mapped out,” so to speak, through a keen analysis of how a person speaks about his or her life and problems.
When, under the guidance of someone trained to interpret the unconscious, you learn to voice your pain openly and honestly in language, you enter into a psychotherapeutic aspect of the Realm of the Symbolic, and horror can be given containment. Learning to speak about pain and terror provides a sense of safety through a compassionate acceptance and “taming,” as it were, of your “wild” unspoken—and secret—thoughts and feelings.
Thus it truly becomes possible to draw wisdom from pain and tragedy. For example, as a result of talking about dreams, or of exploring mental associations of one thing to another, an image can be formed of the hidden desires that may be motivating your self-defeating behavior.
A struggle with my own desires for control and then oscillating to a partial acceptance and lack of desire.
When I am in a mindset of not being so attached I am compassionate and understanding of others, but under stress, I lose all semblance and revert back to old defenses due to dee attatchments and desires. Such work is hard because it is terrifying and hard to articulate, guess its cause for a psychoanalysis.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics