I spoke of the wheel

"... We need to confront the basic enigma of Buddhism, its blind spot: how did the fall into samsara, the Wheel of Life, occur? This enigma is the exact opposite of the main Buddhist concern: how can we break out of the Wheel of Life and attain nirvana? The nature and origin of the impetus by means of which desire (deception) emerged out of the Void is the big unknown in 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 (as in quantum physics with its notion of symmetry‐breaking). The Freudian answer is the drive: what Freud calls the “drive” is not, as it may appear, the Buddhist Wheel of Life, the craving that enslaves us to the world of illusions. The drive, on the contrary, goes on even when the subject has “traversed the fantasy” and broken out of its illusory craving for the (lost) object of desire. And therein lies the difference between Buddhism and psychoanalysis, reduced to its formal minimum: for Buddhism, after Enlightenment (or “traversing the fantasy”), the Wheel no longer turns, the subject de‐subjectivizes itself and finds peace; for psychoanalysis, on the other hand, the wheel continues to turn, and this continued turning‐of‐the‐wheel is the drive (as Lacan put it in the last pages of Seminar XI: after the subject traverses the fantasy, desire is transformed into drive). What psychoanalysis adds to Buddhism is thus in fact a new version of Galileo’s eppur si muove: imagine a Lacanian being tortured by a New Age Western Buddhist into admitting that inner peace can be achieved; after the forced concession, as he leaves the room, he quietly mumbles: “But nonetheless, it continues to move!”- Slavoj Zizek, Less Than Nothing

And yet, it moves.

Is it not when we give up completely that we find a sign of redemption? It's when I finally admit to myself that I have no idea where to start with something that I have an insight on how resisting the notion that I don't know is actually beginning a process of "knowing", a deeper analysis of this process reveals how failure in our lives acts as a success in some other sense, in that accepting this failure immediately opens up a path that was not seen before in the single-minded struggle to achieve a temporary success. The "light at the end of the tunnel" is not something that appears when one wants it to (especially not then), it appears when we have given up, when we have admitted defeat. That is kind of the way the world works, isn't it? Isn't it? Layers of illusion like an onion leading to nothing behind it all. The harder you look at something as being "there", such as a particular meaning or model for something, the more it dissipates, eludes categorization.

So, beyond my pseudo-intellectual babble, I am in the midst of exploring meaninglessness, meaning, I am coming to terms with the fact that, on my own, I am not some creative generator, 'I' am not 'creating' 'reality' as it is but sequencing illusions in such a way as to transform the nothingness of matter into a symbolic node of advanced patterning, the empty whirlpool of my identity formed by swirling waters of data . In the act of shutting oneself off from interactions with others, one finds that their "self" was in those others, that without a consistent feedback on one's self-produced content (which is actually more of a "remix" of what they've heard other people say) the delocated nothingness of reality becomes all too apparent and we are sent into psychosis. The illusion is necessary and I imagine that the point is not to shed it, but to grasp its ungraspability as our perspectives are inextricably enmeshed in its circuitry.

The Feedback Loop - To be shed/denied completely, or to be realized as essential to experience itself?


"To put it in terms of the Higgs field in quantum physics, “nothingness” (the void, being deprived of all substance) and the lowest level of energy paradoxically no longer coincide; at the lowest level of tension, or in the void, the dissolution of all order, it is “cheaper” (it costs the system less energy) to persist in “something” than to dwell in “nothing.” It is this distance that sustains the death drive (namely, the drive as such, since “every drive is virtually a death drive”).78 Far from being the same as the nirvana principle (the striving towards the dissolution of all tension, the longing for a return to original nothingness), the death drive is the tension which persists and insists beyond and against the nirvana principle." - Zizek