The Void, The Body of Christ, and Lacan

...but first a note about process

Long hiatus here, friends, I apologize for my absence in this venue. No, I have not died and gone to meet my Maker. Once during a trip to Europe Mark Twain had to correct a rumor going about in the American newspapers back home that he had expired en route. Ever the wit, he amused himself by telegraphing back that the accounts of his passing had been greatly exaggerated! Thus it is with me. On the other hand, there is a death in every moment, the Buddhists tell us, and a two week retreat with a great spiritual mentor who knows me well, in the company of twenty or so relatively experienced practitioners, and this during a hugely consequential presidential election that may seal the passing of a certain world-order, can definitely entail the kind of ego-abrasion, shake up, and challenge that feels a lot like dying.

To summarize that retreat experience briefly, I was brought to understand during it the need in my personal spiritual practice to work beyond the mind and beyond my sometimes frantic efforts to ‘correct’ what I see as the sea of emptiness ignorance around me, both educational and political. I tend to do this by lecturing my family and friends at inappropriate moments, by lapsing too quickly into ‘fixing’ their supposed ignorance, and, when feeling lazy, by putting forward this or that book or essay or podcast, like a sort of bibliophilic petit object a, to fill up the void that makes me so anxious and that I have taken such trouble to fill up with learning and knowledge. Gertrude Stein once called Ezra Pound a village schoolmaster, “which is all very well,”she tartly remarked, “if you are a village.” My people would sympathize. Undergirding this vexing anxiety is a drive to instruct, inform and even at times to hector. I was, for instance, inappropriately sharp and dismissive, even contemptuous, in a recent comment at Theory Underground about those who chose not to vote in the election, and this toward people I respect, though I think they are misguided. I regret the animus and the tone, though not the sentiment.

Bu given the extent and length of this void-anxiety and the intellectual defense system I have long constructed, and fought for the right to express, how to proceed? How can I continue to read, think, argue and if necessary intervene without falling right back into precisely the vasana I am trying to shift???? (A vasana in Vedantic spiritual psychology is a habit of character that has become an obstacle to practice.) How to do it without once again leading and forcing through the mind??? I can feel it now, that frantic sense of “but, but, but, don’t you see? don’t you know? haven’t you read?” It’s some version of “let me set the record straight here, buddy-roe, because you have gotten the wrong end of the stick, no doubt because you have never read Plato, much less Moses and the prophets or Dante, not to mention Marx.”

But my desire to move beyond this arrogant defensiveness leaves me in a pickle. What is the alternative to this alienated and driven way of speaking and writing? I am really not sure. Let me give an example of my dilemma. I listened yesterday, as I very much enjoy doing, to one of Cadell Last’s dialogues at his Philosophy Portal around the topic of what has come to be known, in spite of the obvious oxymoron, as Christian atheism. It was a very frank and very moving conversation with the Lacanian theologian Mark Gerard Murphy about the latter’s experience of a psychic break of the kind he himself identified as what in eastern traditions would be called a kundalini awakening.

In the interview, Murphy brought to this experience not only an awareness of Christian reflection on the passion of Christ and its tragedy, but a deep understanding of Lacanian analysis, particularly with regard to what Lacan called the sinthome and to the importance of the body, physical and astral, in both Catholic and Lacanian discourses. (I’m not even going to try to summarize that conversation here. Do listen: in my view it’s an extremely important one. Here is the link:)

Now I have a lot to say here speaking from the purely mind-based point of view. First of all, I have some credentials, at least of a sort. I have witnessed at first hand several minor and one major kundalini awakening, though none of them were my own. (For an account of the major one, see the relevant chapter in Jan Birchfield Wing of Effort, Wing of Grace, available at antarataos.com). I have also witnessed the bringing to bear on these experiences of a very high level of psychotherapeutic training and clinical experience, a considerable and well-schooled set of shamanic techniques, and an a long-standing practice of spiritual discipline and personal devotion to a serious avatar. I have also myself written and published extensively about the theological implications of Lacan and about Lacanian-inflected or mystical spirituality.

So I could — and perhaps ‘should’- weigh in critically, not just about the importance of Murphy’s raising of this issue of kundalini events (which might be described in western terms as kinds of intense mystical breakthrough), but about what I think are some of dangers of the way in which they are discussed here and some of the challenges to the views expressed that might be made. Among these would be a caution about too much emphasis on third chakra ‘control’ of these experiences (which, don’t get me wrong, do indeed require modulation, mediation and skillful handling); a tendency in the secular west to discount external guidance, sacred community, ritual, and even constellated deity in dealing with them; and the difficult issue of distinguishing between them and a straight forward psychotic break. For while kundalini and psychotic experiences may be on a continuum, and may manifest similarly, they are not the same, either in etiology or in effect, and the right medicine for one may not at all be appropriate for the other. (By the way, I think, as does I gather Murphy, that Lacan was struggling with this distinction in his later work.)

But how to get the right stance and tone for whatever intervention I might want to make here? how to quell this itchy intellectual addiction to ‘setting the record straight?” how to speak here from the heart as well as the head, and from a humility that is certainly called for, and called for perhaps especially in my case, over-invested as I am in the capacity of mind to take me all the way into realization. Silence, surely, is one way; it was certainly Pound’s, whose errors along similar lines were public and frightening but for whom recantation was ethically debarred — he thought poets should not disavow their own past work, which was at least some kind of testament however faulty — and it may well have been Aquinas’s as well, when late in life he declared his philosophical and theological writing to be as straw vis-a-vis the divine reality he was experiencing and apparently did not write or speak publicly or professionally ever again.

I give fair warning that it may come to that choice of silence. But I am not sure, driving around this beautiful Vermont mountain landscape in the gathering darkness and pondering hard, that it is the only or the best solution. Let me hasten to say that I am not seeking an answer to this question here, because it doesn’t arise from this domain and cannot really be addressed effectively in this venue. So no need to leap either to my defense or to my attack! In fact, I beg y’all not to do that. But I want to put my struggle and my concern on record here, if only to continue to remind myself to work on this problem. In brief, I am seeking a new, more generous, less driven, and more deeply heart-attuned way of communicating, which I hope to reflect even in these alienated, incorporeal, and hugely compromised pages. What that way is, I’m not sure. It might not even look on the surface all that different from what I have been writing. I don’t know. But I do know that I am committed to finding it, however awkwardly. And I ask for your good wishes for me — for what in my quaint religious construct we refer to as your prayers — in doing so.