I thought of Nietzsche the whole time I was reading. I wanted to read it again. In 2022, I read one chapter with people every week. Every time, I felt a great sense of exaltation. I want to have that conversation again.
A pendulum is a field of energy in which humans are obsessed. Pendulum is a condition of human existence. Humans live according to the reality track of the pendulum they are obsessed with. Although humans cannot completely liberate themselves from pendulums, they can choose specific pendulums. Most pendulums steal human energy by stimulating and reacting to human thoughts. Schopenhauer said, ‘Life swings back and forth between pain and boredom like a pendulum.’ This is a sentence that accurately explains how the destructive pendulum works.
The book says:
“Get out of the destructive pendulum. Don’t be seduced by ‘importance’. Whether you defend or deny ‘importance’, the emotions, thoughts and actions triggered by it all strengthen the pendulum. Don’t fight it, don’t react to it. , let it pass. If you can’t change right away, let go of your desires and obsessions and just act with intention, and choose to let the pendulum open itself to release your soul’s personality.”
Ordinary humans lose themselves by conforming to the energy created by customs and culture. It is similar to the slave morality that Nietzsche talks about. A slave’s behavior is fundamentally a reaction. In the logic of slave morality, weakness becomes an advantage, incompetence becomes morality, fear becomes a deficit, helplessness becomes patience, and revenge becomes justice.
On the contrary, monarchical morality is about creating one’s own life by enhancing the will to power. Great people inevitably have doubts about everything. Skepticism can lead to emptiness, but powerful people are aware of the chaotic and wild energy within themselves and endure that state. I don’t care if it brings pain. Rather, free from resentment and remorse, they forget and become children.
Those who create monarchical morality do not doubt themselves after making a decision. The speed of decision-making is increased by allowing the morals one has established to completely melt into the unconscious, that is, by embodying knowledge and making it into instinct. So how can we make monarchical morality melt into the unconscious? Wouldn’t psychoanalysis be one of those methods?
The current era is the era of ‘Hamlets’. His father’s law, which contained God’s doctrine, has become a ghost, and Hamlet is ‘a man who cannot believe in anything’ in the void where he cannot choose between life and death. Modern people are beings in a splendid pendulum who move around and consume the shadow of God because they cannot believe in anything. They are subjects of desire who diligently forget the pain of futility using shallow knowledge and shallow discipline as painkillers.
What is needed in the age of futility is a new faith created independently, that is, the truth. While the ego psychology school aims to overcome symptoms with the power of the ego, Lacan aims to find the truth in the web of the unconscious, a language woven by the desires of others. The net is a masculine custom that functions as the authority of the father, and the truth is a feminine mystery hidden within it. The truth is half told, leaving a void. Truth as a void is not a matter of understanding, but a matter of rootless belief, or ‘fascination.’
Those who believe in the truth have no inner conflict. At first glance, narcissists seem to have no conflicts, but narcissism and the truth are different. There is no space in the mind of a narcissist for the outside world to penetrate. It is divided into the joy that one can take and the external that must be banished. If you are unable to defend yourself and lose control, you will experience mood swings. Truth is not a comfortable feeling that must be stubbornly guarded. To explain it in the same way, truth is a comfortable state enjoyed by the unity of the truth believed by the heart (spirit) and soul.
The truth is hidden in the unconscious. Symptoms reveal unconsciousness. You can get past the symptoms and find the truth that controls your life. Symptoms are holes in the knowledge system. It is a crack in everyday life and an inexplicable pain. If you fall deep into your symptoms and seek the truth, you can become awake. And you can interpret the layers of desire in the pendulum and escape from indiscriminate reactions.
The Tao is inexhaustible no matter how much you try. The truth does not exhaust humans either. Rather, it is a sound before language, telling people to ‘live and dance’ and to be just themselves. Even if the path you find at that time seems useless, economical, or inefficient, it ends up being of the greatest use. Mistakes, failures, and wanderings are all under God’s plan. Inspiration is endless. That is the path the soul desires.
