Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism
David R. Loy
Top 10 Best Quotes
“All of us react to our anxiety by “partializing” our world, by restricting our consciousness within narrow bounds, to areas that we can more or less control which provide us a sense of self-confidence.”
“Our problem today is that we no longer believe in things but in symbols, hence our life has passed over into these symbols and their manipulation— only to find ourselves manipulated by the symbols we take so seriously, objectified in our objectifications.”
“For Becker, this is literally true: Normality is our collective, protective madness, in which we repress the truth of the human condition, and those who have difficulty playing this game are the ones we call mentally ill.”
“our most problematic dualism is not life fearing death but a fragile sense-of-self dreading its own groundlessness, according to Buddhism. By accepting and yielding to that groundlessness, I can discover that I have always been grounded in Indra’s Net, not as a self-enclosed being but as one manifestation of a web of relationships which encompasses everything.”
“Uncomfortable with our sense-of-lack today, we look forward to that day in the future when we will feel truly alive; we use that hope to rationalize the way we have to live now, a sacrifice which then increases our demands of the future.”
“The evolution of Homo Sapiens into self-consciousness alienated the human species from the rest of the world, which became objectified for us as we became subjects looking out at it. This original sin is passed down to every generation as a linguistically conditioned and socially maintained illusion that each of us is a consciousness existing separately from the world.”
“Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net that has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each “eye” of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in all dimensions, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring…. [I]t symbolizes a cosmos in which there is an infinitely repeated interrelationship among all the members of the cosmos. This relationship is said to be one of simultaneous mutual identity and mutual inter-causality. (Francis Cook)56”
“life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation.”
“Take stock of those around you and you will... hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyze those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions, the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his "ideas" are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defence of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality. The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from those fantastic "ideas" and looks life in the face, realizes that everything in it is problematic, and feels himself lost. And this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost - he who accepts it has already begun to find himself to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. He who does not really feel himself lost is without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, never comes up against his own reality.”
“According to my interpretation of Buddhism, our dissatisfaction with life derives from a repression even more immediate than death-terror: the suspicion ‘ that “I” am not real. The sense-of-self is not self-existing but a mental construction which experiences its groundlessness as a lack. We have seen that this sense-of-lack is consistent with what psychotherapy has discovered about ontological guilt and basic anxiety. We cope with this lack by objectifying it in various ways and try to resolve it through projects which cannot succeed because they do not address the fundamental issue.”
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Book Keywords:
symbols, future, existential-guilt, object, idealism, lack, subject, ortega-y-gasset-quote, anxiety
