"...I wonder why the perfection of Ultimate Unity ...

2007-11-19T19:25:00.000-08:00

"...I wonder why the perfection of Ultimate Unity would EVER consciously--i.e., intentionally--become a messy and chaotic multiplicity wracked by suffering."

This is very similar to the question Zizek has about Buddhism and origins. In "Why Hegel is a Lacanian," the afterword to his Interrogating the Real, Zizek takes up the similarities (and ultimately, as he argues, differences) between Nietzschean, Lacanian and Buddhist ethics. Of Buddhism he says:

"In what, then, does the gap that forever separates psychoanalysis from Buddhism consist? In order to answer this question, we should confront the basic enigma of Buddhism, its blindspot: how did the fall into samsara, the Wheel of Life, occur? This question is, of course, the exact opposite of the standard Buddhist concern: how can we break out of the Wheel of Life and attain nirvana? (This shift is homologous to Hegel's reversal of the classical metaphysical question, how can we penetrate through false appearances to their underlying essential reality? For Hegel, thequestion is, on the contrary, how has appearance emerged out of reality?) The nature and origin of the impetus by means of which desire, its deception, emerged from the Void, is the great unknown at the heart of the Buddhist edifice: it points towards an act that 'breaks the symmetry' within nirvana itself and thus makes something appear out of nothing (another analogy to quantum physics, with its notion of break the symmetry). The Freudian answer is drive: what Freud calls Trieb is not, as it may appear, the Buddhist Wheel of Life, the craving that enslaves us to the world of illusions. Drive, on the contrary, goes on even when the subject has 'traversed the fantasy' and broken out of the illusory craving for the (lost) object of desire" (336).

I used to take exception with his assessment about drive and tanha. That was before I had a better grasp of Jacques Lacan's distinction between demand, need and desire. I now think more along the lines of Robert Morrison when he describes bhava-tanha as a kind of primal force in the Buddhist universe (here analogous to the Will of Schopenhauer and later Nietzsche's writing, and perhaps Emerson's "Genius" too). To that end, I see a connection to be made between the Freudian drive and this primal force. From there, a better explanation is possible for how things seem to have gone out of whack, but I'm not in a position to spell it out here.

Initially, and I guess still somewhat, I see Zizek's problem as kind of a non-problem. The issue of how samsara started seems implicated in understanding its ending, per a Right Understanding concerning co-dependent arising.

Comments on Thoughts Chase Thoughts: Myth As Fact?

"...I wonder why the perfection of Ultimate Unity ...