Lack and Transcendence 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.”
― David R. Loy, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“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.”
― David R. Loy, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“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.”
― David R. Loy, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“the sense of self is more like the surface of the sea: dependent on depths it cannot grasp because it is a manifestation of them.”
― David R. Loy, Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“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.”
― David R. Loy, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“Then growing up is not a matter of discovering who or what one really is, but joining the general amnesia whereby each of us pretends to be an autonomous person and learns how to play the social game of constantly reassuring each other that, yes, you are a person, just like me, and I’m okay, you’re okay.”
― David R. Loy, Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“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.”
― David R. Loy, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“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.”
― David R. Loy, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“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”
― David R. Loy, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“Buddhism does not provide a metaphysical system to account for reality but shows how to deconstruct the socially conditioned metaphysical system we know as everyday reality.”
― David R. Loy, Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“the ego-self is the center of a web spun to hide the void,”
― David R. Loy, Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“the path of integration is an awareness that does not flee anxiety but endures it, in order to recuperate those parts of the psyche that split off and return to haunt us in projected, symbolic form.”
― David R. Loy, Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“In the now that does not come or go there is no security and no hope of filling up our lack but a groundlessness that, because it mocks the ambitions of the sense of self, is the source of our anxiety. The now gives us nothing to cling to, for when we cling we are not (in) the now.”
― David R. Loy, Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“If there is no past or future, then the present is refuted also, and we are (in) Boehme’s eternity-that-is-the-same-as-time. Without an objective past or future to contrast itself with, the no longer fleeting now cannot be grasped or retained, and I myself can never become aware of that now because I am not other than it.”
― David R. Loy, Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“growing up is not a matter of discovering who or what one really is, but joining the general amnesia whereby each of us pretends to be an autonomous person and learns how to play the social game of constantly reassuring each other that, yes, you are a person, just like me, and I’m okay, you’re okay.”
― David R. Loy, Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“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.”
― David R. Loy, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“Once we realize we are time, however, we experience something that sounds paradoxical when we try to express it: the now does not change (it is always now) but flows (that now never ceases to transform). While the now is immutable in the sense that it is always the same now, rather than a series of fleeting nows, nevertheless there is transformation, although experienced differently once one is the transformation rather than an observer of it.”
― David R. Loy, Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“You may suppose that time is only passing-away, and do not understand that time never arrives. . . . People only see time’s coming and going, and do not thoroughly understand that being-time abides in each moment. Being-time has the quality of flowing. . . . Because flowing is a quality of time, moments of past and present do not overlap or line up side by side.”
― David R. Loy, Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“Time does not really exist without unrest, wrote Kierkegaard; it does not exist for dumb animals, who are absolutely without anxiety. The basic problem is that our grasping at the future rejects the present; we reach for what could be because we feel something lacking in what is. Brown summarizes the matter brilliantly: Time is “a schema for the expiation of guilt,”65 which in Buddhist terms becomes: time originates from our sense of lack and our projects to fill in that lack. Pascal put it most bluntly: we are not; we hope to be. This tends to develop into a vicious circle. Uncomfortable with our sense of lack today, we look forward to that day in the future when we will feel truly alive.”
― David R. Loy, Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“Buddhism. Blake’s claim is central to the Buddhist tradition. “Why was I born if it wasn’t forever?” cried Ionesco. The answer is in the anātman “no self” doctrine: I cannot die because I was never born. Anātman is thus a middle way between the extremes of eternalism (the self survives death) and annihilationism (the self is destroyed at death). Buddhism resolves the problem of life and death by deconstructing it. The evaporation of this dualistic way of thinking reveals what is prior to it. There are many names for this prior, but it is significant that one of the most common is the unborn.”
― David R. Loy, Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“If there is no difference between nirvāṇa and the everyday world, the sacred can be nothing other than the true nature of the secular. To realize this is to experience our phenomenal world as holy: not because it is God’s creation or śūnyatā’s form, not because it recurs again and again, not as symbolic or symptomatic of something else, but as what it is. The question, finally, is not whether the world can be resacralized but whether we will sacralize it fetishistically, because unconsciously, or wholeheartedly, because awake.”
― David R. Loy, Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“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.”
― David R. Loy, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“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.”
― David R. Loy, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism