The Big Other - 09.24.09

“So if we psychoanalyze not the conscious mind and not the unconscious phantasies but the censor itself, we’ll find that there are two complexes that exist side by side in the censor and they’re completely contradictory. One is that of solipsism: the ego doesn’t believe that there really is anyone else, or at least that all the rest are robots, or they don’t matter. . . . And then at the other side of it is the belief in the big Other to which the ego grovels and submits, and it cannot oppose.” This, as Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute, explains, is actually the opposite of the enlightened state in which one recognizes that there are many other sentient others, but there is no big Other “because there is God, and God is one without a second. .  . . And so when the enlightened being sees human others, he or she sees only the Self.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 24, 2009.