The Perfect Way to Cope With Information Overload
Let’s start by going deeper into The One-Way Mirror Stage—the stage that Lacan did not map out. Whether he reached it, I won’t speculate, but he certainly didn’t theorize it, and it’s frankly the only stage that counts.
Are you waving at me? OK, hello. Ah, hello to you too. It’s a friendly group tonight. When they start throwing things I’ll worry—and I’ll go to the other side of the mirror.
OK, we got this far last night: you’re in a room, as a Bodily Self, full of BS, and you’re being bombarded by interpersonal messages, cultural messages, and intra-mental messages. And on the other side, you see a mirror, but the mirror doesn’t really tell you who you are—and what you discover is that none of the messages you’re getting do the job either. Right?
You keep looking for the message that will finally decipher the enigma of who you are and what you’re supposed to do with your life, and what you mean in the larger scheme of things, etc.—right? You want to make sense of yourself, and because you can’t do it, and because, second reason, you were told who you are and what is your purpose and what is your life to be about, by the big Other—you were given a niche in a family system, you were given an identity. But somehow you realized that identity: A) doesn’t work, it’s not satisfying, and it keeps you in a state of suffering, but also, B) it’s not real, it’s a fabrication. It’s based on other people’s fantasies, and desires, and demands, and their own lack, and they want to live vicariously through you, and they want you to be their trophy and their fulfillment and their justification for their lives, right? And so you become an object—an object of other people’s and the system’s desire for you to play a role to serve them.
You can relate to this so far? OK. So, at some point in adulthood it becomes imperative to somehow find a selfhood that is more whole, more complete, more coherent, more free of your enslavement to the messages and demands of the other, to imitate, to carry their symptoms in your body, to make the same mistakes as they made, to organize your life along the same lines that they have told you is the way you must live, to be a what—Catholic, or a good American, or a good Costa Rican, or a good European, or a good Muslim or a whatever, right? And you have to play the game by the rules that you’re taught, even if those are criminal rules in a particular subculture, if you’re brought into a mafia family, for example, you might have a different kind of set of rules, but it’s the same situation, right?
And so, there’s a sense of not fitting in, and not daring to admit it, to fully rebel, to break away from the attachments to those messages, both external and internal, because of loyalty to them, and because of fear of abandonment and rejection if you’re not loyal to them. And thirdly, of not knowing who you are, if you’re not what they all told you that you were.
But the problem is you can’t believe your BS anymore and your life starts to SKID. OK? So you get these skid marks in your life.
(Student asks what it means to skid)
What does it mean to skid? It means you slide on the road, if you’re driving your car, skids on say wet pavement and you’re out of control—that’s the basic idea, right?
And your life gets out of control through Symptoms, Karma, Inconsolability, and Dysregulation. So that’s what SKID stands for.
First you start to recognize that you’ve got symptoms that aren’t—they’re physical, they’re somatized, but you know that they’re psychosomatic—you understand that they’re coming from a subconscious level of identification that starts to create suffering in a bodily and a mental way—this will include anxiety attacks and panic attacks, and maybe a bipolarity, a kind of a formula of manic-depression alternating, or some other neurotic or obsessive kind of symptom of phobias, or whatever—you know all of the psychopathologies out there, there’s hundreds of them to choose from, and people enjoy different ones the way they enjoy chocolates coming from different kinds of confectionaries, but all of them produce an enjoyment because you get to focus your identity around the symptom.
You see, and people will be very proud of their symptom, and they’ll organize their life around it, and it enables them to make demands of other people suddenly. Right? “Oh I’m sorry, I can’t go to your place unless you offer me a certain kind of diet,” because of this, so now, suddenly, you’re in control of the kitchen there. Or “I have to have certain freedom to do this or that, because otherwise I can’t go, and I need to take pills and, you know, I have a condition that forces me to not be able to get up at 4am to meditate,” or whatever it is, your own symptoms can get out of a lot of things. “Oh, I can’t lift those heavy things. I’m sorry. I can’t do this. I have attention disorder, I’m sorry I can’t really do anything that would require me to pay attention for more than five minutes!” That’s a great one, you know?
So, your symptoms tend to serve your freeing yourself of those demands of the other and those demands of the system, and hopefully you become totally an invalid and you’re in-valid for the system, and then you’re out. It’s one way to get out. You know other people choose psychosis as a way out, or autism to get out. But none of them are satisfying, I don’t recommend them, but it doesn’t stop people from choosing them because they feel they have no other choice.
But eventually the symptoms, too, get a little boring and old and makes their life unmanageable, and so then what starts to happen—even if their symptoms lessen, the karma increases. You know, bad things start to happen to this good person, you know, and things just start to go wrong—connections get missed, crashes of different kinds happen that are external, and that you can’t blame directly on your body-mind unconscious conflicts, but they are projected out, and they come back at you like a boomerang.
And then what you find is that all of the consolation prizes that you got in order to feel good about yourself—and that was that list I went through yesterday, right? You try to control your diet and exercise, and you’ve got a body without an ounce of fat on it, and you can wear the bikini or whatever, and you can be proud of this BS (body self) that is all you’ve got, and maybe you even get cosmetic surgery to improve it here and there, or whatever else—but you do all of these things, and of course you make money and you get therapy and you’re proud of how long you’ve been in psychoanalysis, and you have all these achievements and diplomas on the wall showing all the years you wasted in various schools and all of that.
But, eventually, all of these consolation prizes don’t work anymore, and you become inconsolable, and nothing will make you feel good. And that’s when things start to shake in a way that you can’t control—and that’s when dysregulation begins to happen—you get out of control, and now you can’t regulate your behavior so well—you get a kind of sort of emotional Tourette’s syndrome attitude, and you start saying things you shouldn’t and doing things you shouldn’t, you start eating too much or too little, but now your diet is out of control, and you can’t manage it anymore, and your exercise—either you’re running ten miles a day and starting to have knee problems and other things, or you can’t get out of bed. But you can’t regulate your emotional or your behavioral aspects of life anymore.
So now you know you’re really on a SKID. How many people can relate to any of these skid marks? OK, so that’s probably what brought you here you see, people don’t come here unless they’ve been in SKID row for a while.
So what goes along with the SKID, is a beginning of the loss of the body self identity, because, in a certain way, you can’t hold on to the belief that you know who you are anymore. Once your life is out of control, and you realize you don’t have free will, as Kuber was talking the other day, it’s not just because your hand went up before you said bring it up, no, it’s because you can’t control your behavior. You can’t control your impulses, whether they’re sexual impulses or they’re depressive drives—death drive activities; you can’t control your emotions; your affects are suddenly just coming out of nowhere; and you cannot keep your life in order any longer.
This is what makes you realize you don’t know who you are, and you don’t know how to steer your life. Where’s the brake? Where’s the gas pedal? You don’t know how to drive, nobody taught you how to manage your life, and that’s because you don’t know who you are, and you don’t have any control of either your mind or your body.
Well, this begins to create a certain kind of traumatic residue, and what begins to form outside of that system is what I’ll refer to as LSD, which creates an altered state of consciousness.
Now, the LSD goes through four different stages: The first stage is that it’s a Lacking Self-Definition. OK? You begin to have a self-definition in which you’re lacking the power of mastery and you’re starting to shudder and to feel uncertain and insecure about anything. And then it hardens into a sense of lack as a self-identity, and you begin to really feel that you’re not only a nobody but you’re even a negative somebody, and the lack then begins to hit very hard on your self-esteem. But then that morphs into a Lack of a Self-Definition, OK? And now you reach a state where there’s a conscious recognition that you don’t know who you are—the BS doesn’t function any longer as an identity, nor do the master signifiers you were getting from all the interpersonal messages, and that you got originally from the messages of the family system and all of that—it starts to disintegrate, and you— literally, your self-definition—disintegrates.
And then finally, not only does your self-definition disintegrate, but then at the last stage there’s a Lack of Self or Definition. OK? Now you can not only define yourself, but you feel that you have actually lost any sense of self—this is what’s called a meltdown, OK? Or a depersonalization—this is when it starts to get serious you know, and people will actually pay a therapist to help them or something even more extreme like coming to an ashram. But the point is that when that starts to melt down and you can’t any more conjure up a self or a definition to represent yourself to other people then you have no more messages to send, and you can’t even decipher the messages that are coming in—the whole thing is now just an incoherent mass of confusion, and it gets very scary when you’re in that situation.
OK, so now is the time when you really start looking into the mirror, because you’re now getting desperate to discover who you are, and is there any help for you? Because the therapist isn’t going to help you, you know? And the therapist probably has as many problems as you have, and lacked the self-definition so they had to define themselves as a therapist. So, you know, you are in a situation where you start to feel like you’re all alone and isolated and alienated in a situation that’s hopeless.
It’s that very desperation that causes the ego that is now melting down to need to look through the looking glass, it’s got to find something in there. Or it has to find someone who can look into your eyes and find the self that you cannot find. If you don’t have that, you’re going to fall into the death drive, you’re going to be suicidal, because the dread of what’s happening to you is overwhelming. So this is the fate of the ego, if we want to take it to the extreme.
But something happens—we can call it grace—there is something beyond the mirror. There is something beyond the mirror that you realize is there—you recognize is there—(I don’t want to use the word realize here) but you recognize that it’s there. We’ll call it the Real Self Enigma—RSE, which will later on stand for those three stittis of rulership, surrender, and emptiness, but those are also completely unattainable at this point. So all you have is an enigma. You believe that there must be something real in here, because “I suffer therefore I am.” Right? or “I must be! There has to be something in here that is real, even though everything I thought I was is false.”
This Post Has 4 Comments
Sandra
4 Feb 2021Good to find “sintonia” in your thoughts about psychopathologies, although I am priviledged to say that it is not the first time I grasp them. In the work I develop I see dis-ease as a sign, and look at psychopatology as a symptom, serving well the principle of correspondence. Thank you for the inspirations and Teachings along the years!
Paula
5 Feb 2021Hi
I’ve signed up but not sure if I’m a member yet. Could you check please.
Kind Regards
Paula Clifton.
Purusha Aum
5 Feb 2021Dear Paula, you have signed up for a free trial, which lasts until February 11th. If you’d like to sign up for a 3-month or 1-year membership, please use one of the following:
3-month: https://www.satyoga.org/payment-members-quarterly-60/
1 year: https://www.satyoga.org/payment-members-yearly-180/
Danielle Blanc-Potard
5 Feb 2021Namaste Shunyamurti,
Namaste everyone,
Thanks so much for this video of such depth and value. Each time I listen to one of the many excerpt, it hits something deep inside dispite the great terror it inspires to my body/mind structure….
Shunyamurti ‘s teaching is so vast, huge then speaks so intimely to my heart/soul/spirit and on the other hand “I” as a personality is completely frozen and frightened beczuse somewhere this I is shaken to its “fondation”.
I wish to receiving the courage to jump and make a step further to commit, something is to ripe soon.
Once again, thank you to dispend such a real work for the times we’re facing, for the invitation to be part of your community to spread Light, Love and Truth. My heart is still so closed and fearful and somehow craving for a larger welcome…..
Please forgive my pusalinity and help me to forgive me not “doing” this step ahead today.
I send you all of Sat Yoga Institute my blessings.
NAMASTE
Danielle