Fundación Mezquita de Sevilla Fundación Mezquita de Sevilla y Centro Cultural Islámico de Sevilla®
(This lecture was delivered in Mértola, Portugal, on May 21, 2022, at the XI Islamic Festival of that city).
Assalam mualeykum. Good afternoon.
Before I begin, I would like to thank the city council of Mértola and local authorities, the organizers of this Islamic Festival and the Seville Mosque Foundation for their invitation to share an afternoon of joint reflection and, especially, to provide a space where people can still listen openly to talk about Allah. I would like to accept my apologies because, literally, I will not be able to fulfill the title of the conference: “Spiritual and Social Health”. The best I can do, given my background, is to give a psychic interpretation of the human experience, which I hope will meet my spiritual trembling and your expectations. I may be arrogant in the attempt to put words to spiritual experience, a realm of human experience – by all accounts – always ineffable and where words become clumsy, if not empty.
Let us begin. We will make a tour on the essence of the human being, on the condition of his true nature. Given the length of the subject, the journey will be long, but we will try to outline it and insert it in our present time.
To this end, we shall begin by speaking of the Real, with a capital letter.
The Real, of which I intend to speak, is obviously not the reality before which we find ourselves.
Any tradition has given a name, a synonym, that articulates the sense, ultimately illusory, of the reality in which we live, whose elementary means of access is the sensory perception: this has been named dunia, maya, etc.
In short: the world of illusion.
No, in our case we refer to the Real: “that which pushes unfailingly to its manifestation, passing over all consciousness or rebellion of any creature”.
A Real is manifested, for example, in the tendency of the newborn kitten to suckle at its mother’s teat. Once it crosses the birth canal, it starts its first breaths, stimulated by the mother’s licks. It immediately starts searching for its supply, smelling its mother’s teat, which is engraved in its raison d’être. It has to eat. This is an unfailing push from the Real.
A Real is expressed when the herd of wildebeest in the Serengeti, after the rains, migrate to the valleys of fertile land. There, surrounded by abundance, they will be able to procreate again. To do this, they will first cross the river in herds, where, as every year, huge numbers of crocodiles await them. The wildebeests cross the river driven by what they will beget in the near future. Without individual ego, some of the wildebeest will be devoured by the crocodiles, while the rest will survive to fulfill their decree. The same Real that pushes them is the one that forces the crocodiles to wait patiently for this annual event, also in consonance with the rains. By the way, isn’t a drought also a Royal that is imposed?
An example of a major Real, the one recently experienced in the Canary Islands, which appeared in the form of tongues of lava. Twenty meters high it advances until it engulfs the house that someone had built with all his effort for another twenty years. You have considered that only depends on you the failure or success of having your own house and one day, overnight, at a speed of one meter every eight hours, you witness helplessly how your house disappears, engulfed. You can’t put your hand in front, you can’t ask science or technology to stop this advance. Nothing resists the Real, because, even by interposing scientific and technical advances, even believing to have prevented the course of the Real, it always ends up manifesting itself. Put another way: ultimately, we are always going to die.
But, the fundamental thing that concerns us in this conference is that the Real is characterized by coming back -italways comes back- ,to tear the imaginary reality that opposes it, with the fissures it needs. The human being may be self-deceived, believing to control something that comes to him and he does not want, but ultimately, the Real imposes itself and the human being is always engulfed by the Real; showing itself in all its splendor, in all its majesty and power and, sometimes, even with beauty.
At this point, let us allow ourselves certain licenses to better understand the lecture: Let us keep in mind that “the Real is that which always returns to the same place”. This is an experience for the human subject and also for all humanity. It is pure experience, beyond our prejudices, considerations and interests. Beyond the cultural belief of the historical moment, the Real in one way or another, returns and manifests itself.
The second consideration in this regard is that the Real reappears the more it is pushed into a corner, the more it isthe more we try to cover it up. I remember a few months ago, before the pandemic, the image of Everest crowded with people, as in a bus stop, waiting to crown it, each one with his ticket in hand. The commodification of the adventure of life, the payment for the control of what was always unpredictable. Mercantilism applied to the adventure of life, making impossible the emergence of the hero, the one who must face adversity in pursuit of the elevation of the spirit with the serious possibility of dying in the attempt. Dozens of people, oblivious to the cold, the danger and the scarcity of oxygen, depending on and, at the same time, with plenty of technical tools that made the ascent infallible and successful. All those people there, with the faces of office workers, forming a “queue for Everest”, made me think that “something was going to happen”. Reality is often interpreted simplistically if we only look for the linearity of cause and effect. We often observe how events happen in synchrony with other events that occur in parallel, as if a fine cloth trembles in its entirety when one of the knots of thread that weaves it moves. Those people on the roof of the world could well express an extreme sign: the expression of a pressurized valve about to burst.
Throughout history, there is often a correlation between demographic pressure and technical advances (e.g., the inordinate ability to travel, which was available to every citizen of the world until before the pandemic). There is also often a concomitant coincidence of the search for new rebalances in the microbiological world. This happened during the bubonic plague epidemics in Europe in line with the acquisition of new ways of land exploitation, changes in trade routes and emigration from the fiefdoms to the cities. Seemingly insignificant details such as the extermination of voles (ecological competition of the common rat) in the fields led to the proliferation of the rat, vector of the flea that carried Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of plague . Although with an anecdotal nuance, let us mention the persecution of witches in some cities, who were accompanied to the scaffold with their cats and, without them, the rats spread.
At this point, let us make a brief reflection on how the Real has manifested itself in these times of civilizational transition.
We are witnessing the collapse -already a fact- of an empire and the emergence of a new one. In short: a new exercise of power of a Master over the citizens, and around this power the establishment of a model of social and cultural life.
For centuries, from the Enlightenment to its end, with neoliberal Capitalism, the empire strove to make its peculiar model of the exercise of power remain: the scenario of illusion provoked by usury, debt. Through debt it created the fiction with which to cover up the unbearable of the Real. It created the socioeconomic fiction of equality and freedom in consumption. He created an artifice of psychological engineering that managed to exonerate the common man of his condition of slave, creating imaginaries of affordable wealth with only the presence of digits in the current account. A society in which children were born in debt, feelings and relationships in the bedrooms dozed on the mattress of debt. Usury determined family dynamics and even the forms of enjoyment of the subjects. However, with the arrival of the economic crises of capitalism, it became increasingly difficult to conceal the real poverty of human beings, in which they were trapped by the clutches of usury. Plain and simple, this is where the crises of the system come from: the system becomes incapable of sustaining the concealment of its model of slavery. This is what manifested the great financial crashes: 1929, 1978, 2008…2019. Given the cyclical nature of Empires (and of human hegemonic power) that which conceals it, is what collapses it. This is what we had the opportunity to witness with the attempted solution to the 2008 crisis: creation of more debt. The collapse thus became imminent. The “solutions” (in quotation marks) of 2008 led to the great crisis of 2019, which was skillfully concealed by a “new setback” of the Real: the pandemic was declared and the attitude of making the signs of the Real digestible with an imaginary version of technical-biological progress, translated into the express manufacture of a vaccine of chimerical characteristics, was adopted once again. The veil was falling. Faced with a pandemic Real, first an atrocious fear was inoculated, and then the blind belief in medical biotechnology, which definitively broke the scheme of medical science rigorously adhering to rational reflection and ethical supervision (first do no harm, respect for patient autonomy, etc.). Those of us physicians who still reflected without the entrapment of excruciating fear or without conflicts of interest, knew that it was impossible to create herd immunity with a vaccine for coronavirus. (Just so you understand me: what about seasonal flu?). Today, everyone knows this, even those who are determined not to think. One only has to refer to the observation of reality.
Thus, it hides the 2019 crisis with the pandemic veil.1As the Real is that which always returns to the same place, the war breaks out, undoubtedly another chapter of the great transition.
We now come to a crucial point in our exposition; if the Real shows itself when and how it wants in an unappealable way, is man free?
Thus, we discover that, at each act of his life, the human being practices funambulism on the razor’s edge of a vital question, which philosophy tried to soften with reason: are we free, enjoying free will, or are we determined – a question that does not cease, and that each philosophical movement ends up raising it in its corpus.
Extrapolating it to the most immediate present: Do we believe we exercise free will by creating the imaginary of being able to manipulate our own genetics and thus make death impossible at all costs? Will we extend life at will and thus dream of the fantasy of eternal youth? However, the weight of the Real of death always ends up slipping through any of the cracks in the imaginary invented by human beings.
The philosophers’ question – free will versus determinism – contextualized in the purely rational environment, seems puerile, even with the appearance of a childish riddle, when we appreciate the real power that this question imprints on the unconscious. The same question is also formulated in a magna form in the Koran. Allah asks a question that is answered by its very formulation, because it is a question addressed to a being created by Him, according to His divine design, with a well-defined pattern that shows itself in the very expression of life, beyond any philosophical reflection. In life, phenomena cry out and proclaim the question: “Am I not your Lord?
(“Perhaps this was the moment to end the conference”-something like this I commented, during the conference, at this point-. The full awareness of this question, to say the least, produces a rapture that invites us to wait: to see how the spirit reacts. However, I continued with the rational argumentation. Nevertheless, I trust that the mere mention of the possible interruption of the lecture would have made an impression on some of the listeners and in the following minutes they would have stopped listening to the rest of the speech).
I continue, then.
You look at the history of mankind and from the beginning of time man has been pierced by the question. It is engraved in his medulla oblongata. 2The neocortex, which helps him to discern with a plus: the tempting plus of feeling that he is the architect of the tree of science and, therefore, of discerning up to the point of answering “No” to the following: “No” to the “No” to the “No” to the “No” to the “No” to the “No” to the “No” to the “No”. the question. However, it is still a question of oceanic depths: Don’t you see that among all the imaginable lords, you know -or don’t you?- that you will not find a real Lord but Him? Here any philosophical approach to free will and determination collapses. And what is astonishing is that any vital experience, which crosses and engraves its imprint in the medulla oblongata, midbrain and neocortex, ends up being conclusive. The experience of life itself, the signs that it wastes, paves the way for the affirmation: “I am not a man, I am a woman.Yes, You are our Lord“. (I remember: I had a master psychiatrist who every time, during a conversation, heard someone who proclaimed himself to be “free”, he did not hesitate to advise him to make an appointment for a consultation). And the fact is that even if you do not come to the understanding that you have a Lord, in spite of everything you will worship Him without knowing it, even if it is by entertaining yourself with psychic mechanisms that avoid facing that abominable part of reality, that Real that is unbearable for each one of us. Then, given your natural condition as a slave-remember that this Koranic question is engraved in our human essence-you will end up prostrating yourself before an imaginary Master, created by you-whom you ate from the Tree of Science-and he will make you believe that you are still the one in control. Ultimately, the excruciating fear of the Real of death is the maker of pocket Masters. How many people subjugated to the Master-Science, the Master-Technology, thus believing they are in control of every move of their lives! But, we are witnessing a peculiarity of this era, with the creation of an even more sophisticated mechanism: the human being believes to be the Master of himself.
Beautiful, but dangerous.
Well, up to now, our reflection has brought to light the design of the human essence, a state of natural submission before a Real that imposes itself. Under this premise, the constitution of the being of the individual, social relations and, above all, this submission connatural to the human being will show its widest dimension in the construction of civilizations: with the exercise of power.
Faced with the drives of life and death in the human being, there are only two options: to exercise power, or to accept it in exchange for protection, with the payment of a toll of submission. However, in the face of the obligatory vital transfer between the human exercise of power/submission and the Real Power that, as we see, never ceases to happen, there is a nuance that will bifurcate existence between living it with savor, as an enjoyment, or as a real hell. We will see that, ultimately, it depends on the answer to our immemorial question “Am I not your Lord?
If a leader takes power and exercises it in his own name, sooner or later he will incur tyranny. Healthy equilibrium returns only when he explicitly returns power to His Lord, answering: Yes, Thou art. There is no civilization that has not been built subject to the vertex of the answer to our question. At the dawn of Humanity, the human being expressed the incarnation of power through warlords, emperors and pharaohs (all curious and clumsy divine incarnations, in the attempt to resemble the true King). History makes a natural drift. After the warlords, oligarchies follow. Oligarchies, more or less disguised under the cover of increasingly sophisticated political systems. Republican oligarchies, then democratic ones. All of them, at the service of the exercise of Master/slave power, gradually disguised with universal suffrage, liberal democracies and, finally, the neoliberalism of “You can”. But the key is sustained by the end of capitalism, in its drift and decadent conversion towards neoliberalism. From this ideological conception a new human being is designed. A human being prepared to fulfill simultaneously, in the same person, the condition of Master and slave.
Let us see, then, how this type of human being appears, a human being who, while being an individual, is not allowed to be a subject. We will explain the difference and where the difficulty for the new society to be constituted by subjects comes from.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, we witnessed an obscene capitalist expression, now unopposed: the aforementioned version of neoliberal capitalism. Its unbridled and natural drift towards the dead end that leads to debt with no real bottom, was openly expressed with the extortion of the citizen through the socialization of losses. At the same time, technological and digital advances have empowered a new discourse of the individual as the architect and owner of his destiny and distanced him from the symbolic social connection (no nation, no community, no family) and from the valid referent (no authority whatsoever).
The figure that appears is that of a human being devoid of language, with a thought only capable of memetic interpretation (of meme), with politicians satisfied for having written their instant political ideology in two hundred and eighty characters in a twitter; devoid of history, and therefore without place or referential time; devoid of past and even of present, since he lives trapped in a satiating promise of future. He believes in the eternity of this life, since he has been educated for eternal youth and has the conviction that in this life there are no limits for individual enjoyment. At the same time, he believes he knows all the secrets of existence, being a minor god who, as a god, is surplus to any Other before him. The other is simply reified before the individual’s right to unlimited enjoyment. To this human being… What question can be asked of him? Does he have ears? This standard human being will only have eyes… for himself. This is the figure of the Narcissist.
Narcissism is much talked about, as if it were a personality trait, like antisocial disorder, histrionic disorder, or borderline disorder. The term has even been vulgarized, as if it were a synonym for arrogance, vanity, self-importance in everyday life. But no, it is not just a descriptive trait or the tale of a myth. It is, above all, the by-product of the original split that comes as standard in human beings when we carry out our first psychological operations: that which divides the world between Self and Other. And Narcissus, being unable to see an Other, sees only himself.
But for this to happen, the Narcissus is someone devoid of identity, an individual, someone who is not a subject. Why does he not achieve the status of subject? A subject is the possessor of an identity and in the process of conforming it he needs-yes, there is no other synonym: NEEDS-the presence of an Other/Object in front of himself. There is no Subject with identity without an Object in front of it. To clarify, we are not referring here to an object-cosa-some pathologies go that way. No. We refer to an Other, or what is the same, in our argumentation: an object of desire. Do not think of a utilitarian concept. It will be about the presence of an “object of desire” before a “subject”. We are talking about the tandem that mobilizes the energy of Eros. Of love.
The Other functions as a mirror and the Subject, by looking at himself in the mirror of the Other, acquires his own Self, his own identity. Identity with which we manage the affairs of this life, and we carry them out with the least side effects, with the right pathology. As we said before, the encounter of the subject with his own identity takes place in front of the mirror of an Other, this being one of the first physiological-psychological operations for the conformation of identity, and as it is natural, the first mirror in which the human being reflects himself is in his own mother. The hadith says: “the entrance to the Garden is under the feet of your mother”. And it is true, because the mother’s language, with its vocabulary, its silences, its absences (which is not the same as silence), its coherence or incoherence are knotted to the child’s body. Briefly explained, if we remember the formation of the embryo, it is formed from three embryonic layers (ectoderm, mesoderm and endoderm), each of which will form the primordium of the future organic systems. Thus, for example, the nervous system is formed from the ectoderm, the urogenital system will come from the mesoderm and the digestive tract from the endoderm. But what strikes us is the relative confluence of these embryological layers in the openings-the holes-in the body. As if the communication with the exterior had a point of confluence (mouth, anus, urethra…) with the complete organic interior. Thus, while the mother talks, she feeds the child, while the mother talks, she grooms the child’s private parts. While the mother speaks, the child’s nervous system is still in the process of formation. With the primordial interaction of the mother’s mirror in front of the child, the singular and unique interneuronal synapses are being formed, which will shape each subject. While the mother stands in front of the child as a mirror, the mother’s words will be knotted to the child’s body, and that is why, at the beginning, the child’s desire is not the desire of an individualized subject, but the desire of that child is the desire of his mother. Only at another moment of its development, the father-the masculine energy-will bring about “the cut”, which will lead the child to be one, different from the mother. As I said, in a child approximately under two years of age, the child’s desire is the desire of the mother. Thus, when a child under two years of age comes for consultation, exclusively accompanied by the father, I know beforehand that the sick person is not the child, but the mother, and that he is not brought “for the cure”, but to perpetuate the mother’s imbalance, which is expressed by the child’s symptom.
The child, then, learns to desire thanks to his mother’s mirror. This way of desiring learned by him is the prelude to his future way of loving, his way of giving meaning, of giving the exact place to the drives of life and death. In short, in order to Be, we look at ourselves in the mirror of an Other, and the First Other is usually the mother. That is why, today, this Muslim who speaks to you about Islam (submission and peace), does so moved by a deep love (an Eros), because I once discovered an identity that I did not know I had. It was in front of the mirror of a community of Muslims that I saw and recognized that dimension of my being whose natural tendency was to worship Allah. I was able to contemplate myself in the mirror of the Muslims, because I had minimally learned to do so since my birth. But do you know which mirror the Narcissus looks into? The mirror of the lake. As the myth says, in his unsuccessful attempt to find his identity, enraptured by his self-contemplation (without Other), Narcissus insists on looking, bends down, loses support from the fragility of a being not yet conformed and drowns. Now we can understand where the Narcissus of this epoch is looking. Here (the speaker shows the screen of his cell phone, in the palm of his hand, in selfie disposition).
However, a peculiarity occurs when Narcissists, individuals without an Other, enter the multiple forms of the virtual world deployed today. In a virtual community, the individual is subjected to the continuous recreation of a phantasmatic image of himself. It would be something like the experience of the Narcissus already completely submerged in the lake, drowning. The image he always wanted to have of himself appears, something that the algorithm takes advantage of, with its self-learning capacity, to insist on reinforcing even more the phantasmatic image of the individual. And it does so at the evanescent speed of the data, because the individual enjoys this too, he learns to enjoy in an evanescent way. He desires something and the algorithm offers it, he enjoys instantly and desires again. Thus to infinity, but reaching a point where the apparatus of desire – that which was supposedly designed in front of our mother’s mirror – is obliterated. The individual can no longer be a subject due to his incapacity to desire, or what is the same: to love. He will enjoy without limits, without the presence of an Other, that is to say, being incapable of loving. Let us be attentive, because this enjoyment without limits will reflect the gold-standard pathology of this new civilization: ordinary psychosis. It feels the control and the immediate access to all jouissance, without limits and without cut, which leads to a unique experience and in an unshared reality, together with the deification of oneself: I am unique and without another: in these circumstances, if you are not God, you are crazy: psychosis.
At this point, we have to consider the cure. We have had to make a tortuous and detailed journey to understand how the subject is constituted, by virtue of the essential pattern with which it was created. How the human being desires and acts in the right measure when he accepts the Real that is imposed on him – beyond his own desire – and that this acceptance of the Real confers a beautiful constitution of the being in virtue of the love and dedication of the mother and the symbolic cut provoked by the father (the masculine, in short), capable of propitiating a just and balanced delimitation in the encounter with reality (the Other). We have concluded by explaining how this era has forced a destructuring of the natural formation of the identity of the Ego, towards an absence of identity, with which individuals have become accustomed to live as normal the abnormality of living in a virtual world, the natural habitat of the Narcissus, where, to his regret, he will also have to assume -once again- a Real that is imposed on him: the individual without an Other is doomed to the condemnation of the illness of himself and his society: psychotic individuals and societies.
That is why we have to think about the cure.
There is a necessary concept, inherent to the gregarious being that is the human being. We refer to the concept of assabiya, a term coined by Ibn Khaldun in the 14th century, a Muslim historian and thinker recognized by the world academic community as one of the founders of modern historiography and sociology. Today, his concept of assabiya is once again of great value, particularly with regard to reflection on the future and historical prediction. The biologist and multifaceted historian Peter Turchin, current authority in History and Artificial Intelligence, has designed a Big Data of global history, introducing several items that have been determinant in historical changes, such as economic factors, military capacity, importance of the family, the tribe (by itself), ethnicity, power and market hierarchy, orography by zones, etc. Aware of Ibn Khaldun’s theories, he introduced the item assabiya in the algorithms and after redefining the algorithm according to historical retrospective events, he came to determine assabiya as the first order value, the fundamental one, above the others, to predict civilizational changes. A concomitant sub-value of assabiya is that it takes place on the borderline.
For those who are not familiar with the term, assabiya condenses the idea of the union of a human group in pursuit of a common goal, capable of transcending traditional ethnic and blood ties, through an intense cultural and/or religious social cohesion. And I repeat: the closer to the limits of the empire in degradation, the greater the degree of assabiya. To point out, as an anecdote, that its effects are completed between 100 and 200 years after the establishment of a strong assabiya in a community. So patience and detachment.
While Turchin recognizes the primordiality of the assabiya as it introduces historical data for the algorithm; we, from our peculiar reading of reality, based on trust in the Other, acknowledge the primordiality of the assabiya as a catalyst for social health for two reasons, inherent to our condition as Muslims (and to those who are not, I invite you to reflect on this): one, because it is the social form of recognition of the other -thanks to the presence of the Other, then I am-; and two, because it may be that with the presence of the Other, I am a Muslim. assabiya a society of high status is created, based on the premise that the unifying factor of society, that which is shared by the subjects of society, is the unwavering adherence that provides the answer to the question that answers the essence, the true status, of the human being: “…”.Am I not your Lord?“. An assabiya that unites the hearts as one Heart around this question, exposes to the light a society that does not allow itself to be enslaved by anyone other than Him. It will not even allow the Ego to enslave itself. Such an assabiya will allow each human being to realize himself in the confidence of looking into the mirror of an Other. We would walk towards the Other-any Other in our society-, with the confidence of those who really know how to love and walk together, with an overflowing capacity of Eros up to the right limit: where oblivion appears, the oblivion of man to assume his Lord.
And to conclude, remember that, as Ibn Khaldun said, the strong assabiya becomes more and more intense at the limits of the empire.
We are now ready, if we have understood the entire lecture, to venture together into the creation and living of a real life on the other side of the virtual world border (world of matricides and fatherless children).
I ask Allah to take us to the border and make us travel, as Sidi Khalid said yesterday, as the Shaykhk said, to make us travel through its limits. May our conscience grow in this journey of women and men, and may we understand our differences: the ones to love, to give language to our children and invite them to the conquest of life, and the others, to limit with sweetness the memory that we are not really gods. That the only lord is Allah.
Thank you for your patience. Assalam mualeykum.
1 There is a pandemic situation which, like any situation of alarm in the face of uncertainty – epidemic, State terrorism, war – incites the positioning of two mutually and fiercely exclusive poles. Thus, the population’s capacity for reflection is paralyzed. During this pandemic, this extreme polarity was quickly stimulated by the system, with the two positions, denialist and terrified, respectively, being posted on the social networks. There was no space, however, for reflection from an authority of knowledge and, even less, for contemplating the meaning of an emerging Real.
2 The medulla oblongata, midbrain and neocortex constitute three morphological and functional aspects of the brain. It could be said that different qualities of experiences are processed and managed by each of these organic structures. Undoubtedly, this explanation is simplistic, not least because the three parts of the brain are interrelated. Nevertheless, the author intends an approach in metaphorical terms, to make us understand that, in an indirect way, where “the question” is really based is in the human unconscious.
