From White by Kenya Hara (thanks Jason!) Emptiness. Is there anything more terrifying to the Western psyche? You cram your life full of work, friends, parties, and workout classes to avoid it, and yet on Sunday night, nursing a glass of orange wine in your living room, you hear it like a familiar knock on the door. Five months into a new relationship, you roll over one day and think,
Beautiful indeed, thanks. I added this passage to my notes:
'Emptiness is our sense of what’s missing: the nagging feeling of insufficiency, of anxiety, of a void that can never be filled. It’s the space between us and our lovers, us and our family, that can never be bridged.
What causes it? In psychoanalytic terms, you could say that we spend our lives chasing after an original feeling of perfection, a pre-anxious state of total union with our parents, that we never successfully recreate again. The gap between that desired ideal and the imperfection of all adult relationships is the emptiness we feel. Our attempt to fill the void is what Mark Epstein calls the “desperate longing for inexhaustible abundance.” [...]
When we were toddlers we saw our parents as all-knowing and omniscient. No relationship after that point will ever offer us that level of security.'
emptiness / narcissism
Lovely!
That last line. Fire.
This reflects the teachings of the Tao
Beautiful indeed, thanks. I added this passage to my notes:
'Emptiness is our sense of what’s missing: the nagging feeling of insufficiency, of anxiety, of a void that can never be filled. It’s the space between us and our lovers, us and our family, that can never be bridged.
What causes it? In psychoanalytic terms, you could say that we spend our lives chasing after an original feeling of perfection, a pre-anxious state of total union with our parents, that we never successfully recreate again. The gap between that desired ideal and the imperfection of all adult relationships is the emptiness we feel. Our attempt to fill the void is what Mark Epstein calls the “desperate longing for inexhaustible abundance.” [...]
When we were toddlers we saw our parents as all-knowing and omniscient. No relationship after that point will ever offer us that level of security.'
Beautiful...and Buddhism and the Landmark Forum in a nutshell.