Life After Death | A Liturgy of Lack

[00:00:00]Hello there. Good morning. I'm in a beautiful little uh area in the backyard of my friends Maggie and Jim. It's a little meditative space and it's early morning here in LA. You might be able to hear a helicopter above our heads. Uh hopefully you can hear me clearly. Um, I just wanted to jump on and let you know a little bit about what we were doing on Sunday night for Secon. Uh, which uh happened in a warehouse in downtown LA.

[00:00:30]Uh, we did have some technical difficulties. It was our first one and so if you were there, thank you for bearing with us. It meant we started later and we had to ditch some of the musical elements of the night. Uh but what I was able to do was take some time to introduce the concept of seccon of what it's attempting to do and I thought I would share a little bit about what I was saying that night. I might do a few videos on that actually uh in the next few days. So I started off with the question is there life after death? And uh you know there's various ways of understanding that term. Uh one of them of course is after we die biologically is there any continuation of consciousness in some kind of way. Uh but also there's a more existential notion of the idea of is there life after death which is when we experience the death of someone that we love or the death of a project uh a fundamental loss in our lives. Is there a way for us to live after that or do we die to some extent? And a way to understand that by the way is to think about uh one way of thinking of depression. Depression is a term that's a catchall. uh it's often not used in psychoanalysis really because uh different people's depressions are so different and what's important is kind of trying to get to the core of your individual depression and what's going on in that. But one thing you can say about depression is it is a type of loss of desire that you find not that you lost something that you desire. Oh, my apologies. I'll wait for that helicopter to pass by. Um, it's going right overhead. I missed the helicopters. Actually, in LA, it was one of the things I love to do. There was always planes and helicopters in the sky. Um, but there we go. It's passed.

[00:02:37]So, where was I? Oh, yes. Depression is not that you lose something that you desire. So in the world for example you might have 100 a thousand 10,000 whatever you have things that you desire uh you might like to like something I do in the mornings I like to make coffee got my coffee machine and I go through the various steps to and I've really got it dialed in so if you ever come to wake or come to Belfast look me up and I will make you a coffee because uh I've really got it down to a fine art right so that's something I desire I enjoy doing but if I lost that uh it wouldn't affect me that much.

[00:03:18]The you know the machine did break down about 6 months ago. Didn't bother me that much. But then there is something in our life that is called the object cause of desire. And that's something that if you lose you don't just lose something that you desire, you lose in a way the ability to desire anything. The whole world becomes gray. Um I've seen this actually with dogs. My friends have dogs and you notice that they'll often when they're about to explore the world, they look back to see uh their owner and when their owner is there, that gives them confidence to look back and kind of greet people or go into the world. So, they have this little look back to kind of anchor themselves with this safety and then they're able to have uh play and they're able to explore. And you know, it's it's not a great analogy, but it's kind of similar that that the object cause of desire is what enables you to go into the world and enjoy things, go for walks, enjoy coffee, all of that. But when you lose the object cause of desire, you no longer really care about the coffee or food or walking or sunsets. There's a sense in which the object cause of desire is fundamental to desire as such. So I say all of that to say that when at a more existential level uh someone asks is there life after death the death of someone we love that's the question is there a way to desire to be in the world and it's interesting that the analogy is there life after death which by the way there's a series um I don't think it's his best series I think there's some great episodes but it's called life after death uh Ricky Jervia series but that's what it's about the series starts It's really I think it's after the event of the loss of his wife and then the series is uh asking the question can he embrace life after the death of his of his wife and that's what mourning is. Morning is this slow uh reflecting and mourning crying over a loss that gradually allows you to uh devest a certain libidal attachment so that you can continue to be attached to them and you can continue to remember them but you can begin to desire and live again which is you know what the desire of the person would be after they've gone um uh you So there's that thing where when someone's dying, they often say to their partner like, "I want you to go and find another life. I want you to to enjoy. I don't want you to die." Right? That's more [snorts] close to what I was exploring in church of the contradiction as a way of introducing it. But I took it in a third sense that uh there is life after death. Not the death of you know after we biologically die. not simply the question of the death of someone else but that you have died. Uh that there is something fundamentally jarring and destructive and sacrificial about coming into the world becoming a subject. You feel that you have been pulled from some singularity from pure being and now you're separate. Now you're um disconnected and you're wounded by a death, wounded by a loss.

[00:06:51]So I started off with that idea of going there is life after death and you are the evidence of it. Your life is what is happening after that death. It is the result of it.

[00:07:05]And I then said that the question is not then is there life after death but is it possible to bear the life that we are after death. Uh that's a way of saying that there is a wound that we all carry. Uh with this is obviously stuff we've discussed before but in the context of secon I wanted to start with that and go we are all wounded. We are all wounded by a sense of loss and the evidence of it is desire. Desire at a that insatiable desire which is called drive.

[00:07:44]This insatiable desire for something that arises because we feel we're missing something that something isn't there something is lost something we want to get back.

[00:07:56]Uh and then I introduced uh Saurin Kerkagore at this point because Kerkagore is one of the greatest thinkers of this loss of this wound of this death that we are. And he is one of the founders of existentialism along with Nietz. And interestingly they were both uh really thinking and writing at similar times but they never met each other and they were largely unaware of each other. But Kierore is one of the founders of existentialism and he used Christianity but explored it at a very deep level to kind of universalize it to discover this deep dimension in it that's not about what you believe but about a way of being in the world. And what he described as faith is something that has two movements. It's a dance with two steps.

[00:08:54]And the first step is acknowledging this loss, recognizing this fundamental wound. Uh now Kierore used Abraham and Isaac as an example of this of Abraham giving up Isaac and then Isaac returning. So he uses that as a type of double movement. The first movement is Abraham is willing to give up and really does give up psychologically gives up Isaac his object cause of desire. Um that's what Kugore calls the knight of infinite resignation. It's the person who is able to not avoid confronting this wound but is able to um is able to acknowledge it in some way. But he calls that person the knight of infinite resignation because it's a deeply painful position. Uh this is a type of enlightenment but it's not the enlightenment in which your life becomes better and you think everything is wonderful and whole. It's a subjective destitution. It's this crucifixion experience. It's an experience of fundamental loss.

[00:10:04]Uh but Kerugore's wager is that this is the first movement in faith and the second movement and he calls this absurd. He loves this idea that it's completely mad counterintuitive but his idea is that you can embrace this death and in embracing the death uh you rob it of its sting. You can embrace the despair of being and in going into that darkness you can find the light.

[00:10:36]It's like you wound that darkness. You cut into it and it bleeds life. And that second movement is called the night of faith. And what's interesting about this is that it's obviously not naive optimism. It's not looking in the mirror every day and saying everything's great, everything's wonderful or anything like that. But it's also not nihilistic despair where you just give up. Kirar is making this counterintuitive claim initially that you can bring these together. You can fundamentally embrace the loss of meaning and purpose and yet fundamentally find a new meaning and purpose and joy through that embrace that the death becomes the path to life.

[00:11:26]darkness becomes the path to light, you know. So that kind of dialectic move and I set up uh secon and that event by describing that um in order to describe what the liturgy is. What the the idea is that once a week or once a month you go to this space and for maybe an hour or an hour and a half through music and poetry and spoken word you confront that wound, that pain, that difficulty. Not so that you despair, but so that you can move into it deeply and find its opposite. And that is a very courageous thing to do. It's something that we all find very very difficult to do. Uh it's something that we naturally pull away from that I naturally pull away from even though I've dedicated my entire life to trying to do this double movement. Um and you know, of course, why have I dedicated my own personal life to to this double movement? Well, it's precisely because I find it so difficult. Um, it's not because I find it so easy. Uh, it's something that I have to come back to again and again.

[00:12:47]This courage to look at the wound and then this wager that in looking at, embracing that wound, the wound becomes the cure. It becomes uh the healing place.

[00:13:03]Uh, I'll tell you one other thing that I talked about on Sunday. Um I talked about how this woundedness manifests itself in you can say four different ways in our lives and all of these we can relate to to some extent but if you reflect on this and maybe this is the bit that I'm asking you to reflect on uh after watching this is you might find that one of them is in particular the uh the one that that you're most drawn to and I call them the four impossibilities.

[00:13:40]The four impossibilities are we want an object, a commodity uh that will satisfy us. So we look for full satisfaction. We hope for full satisfaction and it might be in some job, it might be in health, it might be in wealth, it might be in owning certain things. uh but we might desire satisfaction because we feel dissatisfaction. So we live in this polarity between satisfaction and dissatisfaction. And the first impossibility then is the impossibility of an object that fully satisfies.

[00:14:17]We want it but it always seems to slip between our fingers. We uh we might get something that momentarily feels satisfying but the sheen wears off very quickly. And often it can be instantaneous. I don't know if you've ever had the experience of of getting something that you thought would satisfy. Maybe it was a job, maybe it was a promotion, maybe it was a product and the sheen comes off at instantly.

[00:14:44]You don't even get uh a small amount of uh time to enjoy it. You suddenly almost walk out of the shop and feel oh the you know buyer's regret. So that's the first impossibility.

[00:14:56]The second impossibility can be described as a non-antagonistic relationship with others and with the other. So a non-toxic relationship with others. We often find that we have difficult relationships with our family, with our friends, with partners. And we fantasize a type of relationship with friends, family, partners that doesn't have the toxicity, doesn't have the antagonism that we experience. And this is the second impossibility because we live between these two things. And in a way, all relationships have toxicity and antagonism. Any relationship that is a relationship, right? that's not just a colleague. Um that's not just something that is superficial but that has depth.

[00:15:46]So that's the second impossibility.

[00:15:48]The third impossibility is transparent speech. We can desire to speak who we are uh with someone who we trust and to see them to be able to say what we want and what we mean and what's going on in our lives in such a way that is heard that people bear witness to it and we want to bear witness to the other. So there's a fantasy of transparent speech, of being able to communicate clearly.

[00:16:19]And yet the impossibility is when we're in communication, there's always a sense in which we also miscommunicate. There's failures. We can't seem to fully say who we are, what we want, what we desire even to ourselves, and we cannot fully bear witness to the other. So that's the next impossibility.

[00:16:38]And the last impossibility is called the gaze. And in a way to describe it, you could say this that what we often like to do is surround ourselves with people who when they look at us, they see us in the way that we see ourselves, they reflect our political, our religious, our cultural views back to us. So the the gaze of the other uh it's a comforting gaze. We're surrounded by the same. We're surrounded, as I say, by our cultural, religious, and political ideas.

[00:17:14]But the impossibility here is that there are those who look at us and at first we think that they're strange, they're monstrous, they're weird, they have strange political, religious, cultural views that we don't like, that we find monstrous and foreign.

[00:17:31]But if we get to know them, we start to glimpse ourselves through their eyes and we start to see that maybe our political, cultural and religious views are strange, foreign, even monstrous at times. We see in the other a dimension of otherness within ourselves. We see in the other's eyes something within us that is foreign. And often it's terrifying. What we want is to get rid of that to surround ourselves with people who don't expose that foreigness, that strangeness, that neighborliness that is within us. Um because it is a type of neighbor. It's a type of other that we are. And uh we don't love that neighbor. And uh so that's another impossibility. So those are the four impossibilities. is an object that satisfies a relationship with the other that is not antagonistic.

[00:18:23]A type of speech that is transparent and a type of gaze that doesn't in uh draw out our own monstrosity.

[00:18:34]Now this is where I defined what I mean by God and not just me but in existentialism what the word god of the religious God often means the first god.

[00:18:46]uh you see this in Nietze and Kakora and others and it is for Nichza the god that we all believe in initially even if we say that we don't whenever Nichza talks about atheism he's not talking about not believing in a god in the sky what he means by the religious god is whatever promises to get rid of the impossibility to bring wholeness completeness unity to give satisfaction ction to give non-toxic relation to give transparent speech to have a gaze that is not desentering and destabilizing that is God that's the religious God and when Nze talks about the death of God he's talking about the experience of losing that fantasy now the I'm so sorry this is longer than I was expecting uh but I'll just keep going Um so that's the religious god is the god that um as I say is a promise that we can overcome the impossibility the wound the death that we are marked by in life that's what kerkagore is saying is the first step in this double movement of faith where faith is not as I said about belief in god or the gods it's not about dogmas and doctrines it's about a way of being it's about a double movement and the first movement is acknowledging those impossibilities.

[00:20:16]So the first movement is the death of God. The night of infinite resignation is the one who experiences the death of God, an existential atheism, not an intellectual atheism. They may still believe in God in their minds, but an existential atheism.

[00:20:31]And then this allows for the second movement.

[00:20:36]And in a way we can approach the second movement by uh this is what I'm I'm about to tell you the idea but the idea is not the living of it right but at least the idea can give us some grip of this movement.

[00:20:55]The idea is that having an object that would fully satisfy nonagonistic relationships, fully transparent speech and um and a gaze that doesn't show us to ourselves uh would actually be awful.

[00:21:09]That the fun, enjoyable, meaningful dimension of life is finding an object that is dissatisfied in a satisfying way. And so, for example, uh let's imagine it's a vocation. um you give yourself to a certain job and the job is difficult and at times you're bad at it. Things go wrong, at times things go well, but you find a vocation that is dissatisfying in a satisfying way. It doesn't fully complete you. Uh but it's it's what evokes your desire. It's what gets you desired. And that might be a hobby. It might be uh you know certain kind of like uh you know you you enjoy cooking, you enjoy uh interior design, you enjoy um uh cars, whatever it is, I don't know, you find something that that that is a type of commodity but that is dissatisfying in the right way. The same is about a relationship is a relationship what what's interesting is if you can find the right type of antagonism. A relationship that doesn't work in a way that works where there's there is difficulty and that's where iron sharpens iron. That's where there's sparks. That's where there's interest.

[00:22:25]That's where there's desire. Again, it's not saying if the so often the opposites are very connected. The more you think an object will completely satisfy you, the more you experience its complete dissatisfaction.

[00:22:38]The more you think that there is a relationship that is non- antagonistic and pure, the more you'll experience relationships as destructively antagonistic and toxic. But there's this notion of, oh, what does it look like to have a relationship, as I say, that doesn't work in a way that works? This is the same with speech. The idea is that somebody might become a poet or a writer because they want to say everything clearly and yet they can't and so they have to find new ways of saying it. Uh I I find myself in that category a lot because I'm a speaker and I was a writer. What I'm doing even now is I'm trying to be as clear as possible about these ideas and yet I'll come away from this video and I'll feel oh there's a better way of saying it. I should have said it differently. I should have paused more there. I should have drawn that out. I should have given an example. And so there's something about my speech that is always a failure. But that's what generates the next video, the next uh talk, right? The next thing that's is my my desire to to say it again and say it differently. And this inability to speak completely purely, completely transparently is sublimated into the the work that I do. So that there's now thousands and thousands of hours of me talking about these these things because of a type of failure that's enjoyable.

[00:24:05]And fourthly, the gaze of the other. Uh that if you're able to exercise the muscle where you're able to encounter otherness, people who are different from you, not to convince them to be like you or vice versa, you can do that. But more fundamentally, that they become a way for you to see aspects of yourself, to be destabilized, to allow the other to be an instrument of your further transformation.

[00:24:32]Which also, by the way, if you can do that genuinely, others often lower their defenses and engage naturally in that that with you. That might bring you into politics. politics proper, not the political wars that we see online, but politics proper where you're engaging with radical difference uh in a way that is an attempt to build civilization knowing that there's no fundamental thing that you're all going to agree on and that actually say for say for example you this is a I've read this years ago but it was somebody I think was a missionary and they went out to some country I don't know where it was and they had the view of the nuclear family the certain way of bringing up children uh that reflected their background. And at first when they went to this other country where they had a very different way of raising the kids, the kids were part of the larger community. The kid would run off and be with other people and it was just it was just much more communal. It was less of a nuclear type of family. At first they found that monstrous and weird. And then they started to see themselves through the eyes of the other and they were like, "Oh, maybe what the way we do it is monstrous and strange." Right? And that can be a really fun experience.

[00:25:47]That's what the some of the desentering practices are about. That the last supper, which you know of uh where we 12 of us meet together, we invite someone who's controversial to speak to us uh to destabilize us, someone who we disagree with, but in a way that we find them compelling. we find that they somehow reveal something about ourselves in uh what they're saying in their critique where you're going like oh yeah that really does hit home right that that can be an enjoyable thing not a frightening thing and then this brings me to the last point uh that I made in this segment I did two short talks this is the this basically the first talk that I've given you here the the last part of it uh is was to say that instead of thinking of God as that which closes the gap, right? Which is the religious notion of God. God that covers over the death, the wound, the four impossibilities, gives us a fantasy that we can have that wholeness and completeness. This is the idea of potentially God as the gap, as the impossible itself and religion is what binds us to the impossible. So religion as a term means to bind to bind to the sacred and the religious um uh this kind of the religious notion of religion I should say um is a binding to that which promises to overcome the the lack whereas this other notion of religion that we're exploring in seccon is about binding ourselves to the lack itself allowing it to do its work but we could only do that by first going through the death of God which is Nietze calls it the death of God. Kerugore calls it the night of infinite resignation to get to some the next movement which Nze calls the overman the the uber munch. Um and and uh Kirkagore calls the knight of faith. in the night of faith is the one who is fully able to touch this uh this darkness and enjoy it, find meaning and purpose within it and realize that this is what joins us one to another. This creates a different form of social bond which is I think really good for us and is really good for other people.

[00:28:08]So that's that was my introduction to SECOM to what the liturgy is and I don't know I don't know what's going to happen in the next few years. Uh in some respects I want to do more of the liturgies. Uh I also would potentially love to be in closer community. I use the word community. I should use the word communion because that's what I'm talking about. Communion as the social bond in which we're we share lack together. It's not about that we share the same political, religious, cultural positions, but that we all acknowledge that we share the same lack. Uh I would like to again be in a place where we have people living in proximity who are attempting to to live in that way. So those are the desires. I have a second CCON that's coming up on Sunday and then a third the week after. So, we're doing three in a row and and then we're going to assess uh where to go next. But then I just wanted to kind of as I say give you the context and the context is to to say as there is life after death you are that life uh you are marked by that death and the question is can you tar with endure and enjoy the life that you are that impossibility that wound manifests itself in four ways in the uh object that cannot satisfy the relationship that is always antagonistic, the speech that is always a little bit muddy, and the gaze that is always destabilizing.

[00:29:46]And the religious God is the one who promises that we can overcome those dissatisfactions, those toxic dimensions, that lack of transparency, that destabilizing of the gaze, and that we have to let that God die in order to do the second movement. The first movement, the death of God, is what Kagar calls the night of infinite resignation. So that we can get to the second movement, the night of faith. The one who realizes, and you can only realize it once you've done it. Once you've gone into the darkness, it's only there that you go there is life. And I actually even can't say that because there's no promise. That's that's why no one can make this journey uh for you. uh I can say that there's a wager that you'll go into that place that you'll embrace that death that you are and if you say to me well what happens once I do that I want to say well there is this this healing this openness this new form of being this new form of life that arises but that's a wager that's that's not something I can promise I can't hold your hand no one can do this for you no one can do this for me but We can help each other. We can be there for each other through it. We can use art and music and spoken word and philosophy and all of that to help. But ultimately, we need to make this move. And then one final thing cuz I saw on Instagram this morning somebody who was talking about gratitude and it was actually was great, you know, talking about how she wakes up every day and and is grateful and it makes it a practice of gratitude. Um uh now the question is why is that not a better way? Instead of kind of like looking at this death, this darkness that we're marked by, this wound, which is a very, you know, painful sounding thing, why not wake up and just be grateful and be happy about life. Well, the wager is uh for Kaggore that he's not trying to make you despair. He's saying that you already are in despair.

[00:31:56]You just don't know it. Despair is an existential condition that is there by dent of being human of being a subject.

[00:32:05]If we could uh get rid of it, if we could get rid of the wound, brilliant.

[00:32:10]But the wound is constitute of who we are. So it is the only way. Uh it's not that you can't be very in fact gratitude and joy and love and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and gentleness and all of those things that are called the fruits of the spirit I think are what will naturally and do naturally arise from this journey. Uh but you can't get to those before you go into the darkness. So anyway, there you go.

[00:32:37]That's a bit of an introduction to why we need this liturgy. uh it's probably why you're part of this uh communion, this gathering that we are online um and why you're watching this video. And the challenge for us is like do we can we work together to help create physical spaces and online spaces where we can uh journey with each other as we go through the night of infinite resignation into hopefully becoming a knight of faith.

[00:33:13]All right, take care. Bye-bye.