Shines, Speaks and Darshan

Here, a brief summary of our findings: where, in yoga, the darshan, the gaze-image, the ‘astral form’ (SHINES) of the master produces a certain establishment, or strengthening for the follower, the involvement in psychoanalysis deals with the SHINES of the ‘floating, suspended attention’ of the analyst and the relaxed mind of the patient (he mostly lies on a couch).

Where, in analysis, the SPEAKS originates from a patient’s ‘free associations’ and from the analyst’s interpretations, including the structured theory of drives (symbolic phallus), in Surat Shabd Yoga, we again find Sanskrit names and the guru’s generally strict ethical teachings.

The SHINES / SPEAKS remains being a simple formula for both processes. Hereby, the slash or fractional stroke (/) is to demonstrate uprightedness, symbolic erection, strength, firmness, or basic-erotic strive ‘upwards’ (the ‘causal’ of yoga, the psychic real of psychoanalysis).

This trinity of SHINES, SPEAKS and the slash, fractional stroke shows us the way from the individual to the subject, from eros to the super-eros of conjectural science. We no longer need the inaccurate term ‘soul’. We have an Ego, each individual’s Ego, and what Kirpal Singh calls ‘soul’ is the subject itself. After all, ‘the collective’ – says Lacan – ‘is the individual’s subject.’ The collective is not only family, people, race or cultural society. It is mankind insofar as it encompasses our SHINES / SPEAKS, and we, for this cause, establish a subject of the human collective raised from the individual.1

 

1 My argumentation here reflects W. Benjamin’s standpoint, who never wanted to be understood in a political or in a purely academic way. He was in search of spirituality, creativity without politics and without a university career as a 'Gemeinschaft der Geistigen' (Witte, B., W. Benjamin, Rowohlt (2004) p. 24

 

Anmerkung der Redaktion: Dieser Artikel stammt aus einer Beitragsreihe zum Thema: Analytische Psychocatharsis.