Slavoj Zizek - The Abyss Of Spirituality 

Vishal Maraj Great contribution. Thanks for that.

Hinduism is not exactly harmless either. With a religion one of whose core tenet is Untouchability, you really don’t need to work hard to “distort” it to enable your harmful deeds.

@@spikespiegel5740 elaborate how ‘hinduism’ has Untouchability at its core.

@@spacewad8745 Everything revolves around concepts Karma, purity, rebirth which is ditectly related to untouchability. It goes very deep, you'll have to study the basic form of Hinduism which maybe didn't even start in or around India and it's interactions with the tribalistic religions and how it greated caste divisions and who were the beneficiaries.

@@benthebenevolent1001 Unpin this comment. That Dude in the video is a Right Wing Moron, who says Irrational things.

He was like Peterson when he was young, full of hope. But as he got older... the world is becoming the new trilogy, a real tragedy.

Stop Wars

Lol spot on

Anogoya Dagaati is this guy for real

I agree. It doesn't matter if he rambles, Anogoya Dagaati because he has such original compelling insights.

@@coreycox2345 you're joking .he dances around his words way too much .

@@holadonkey I know how it looks. Often, I listen to one of his lectures and after reflect on how I haven't a clue what Slavoj Zizek just said; even though he held my attention for the entire hour. Then, I find myself thinking about something he said two weeks later.

Plato, actually.

whatever. you use poets, and poetry to lie to yourself.

why the totally misunderstands what he has read.

This is why he gets so much shit.He always has amazing insights but the examples he uses are ugly.Reality is sometimes ugly though and people shouldn't complain about those who expose it.

@@omercakmak3099 You are correct. Also, being a psychoanalyst, he has a mandate to try to delve into the darker aspects of the psyche. Since most people have an inherent resistance to the dark and unsavoury manifestations of the psyche [which exist in all of us], they resist anyone who tries to point it out.

Drumpf's bed-time reading.

sometimes (most times actually) the best examples come from the most "evil" circumstances. They teach what can manifest from truth manifested from subjective interpretation

@@voidisyinyangvoidisyinyang885 epic own

he's made some more historically dubious statements but hey we dare not say so because then the axis of evil is exposed

+MrKataklysm I Dont think he would appreciate your participation in twenty century fox spirituality.

LOL man! I am just joking... and by the way, I don't give a damn about what he would appreciate or not! Geez...

+MrKataklysm kindness is important, watching starwars doesnt make you kind, im only joking a little.

Marcus Briheim Have humor my friend. I'm just joking, Anyway: I think Slavoj wouldn't take it personal but would laugh about it!

Actually, Zizek is a character played by Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker)

+PapaWilk with due credit to Steven Weinberg.

+PapaWilk Hear, hear

Pretty much islamic extremists...

Industrialisation, romanticism, and reason were more justifications for mass murder and war than poetry itself. Or even religion. But now it’s been pseudo spiritualised into myth.

@@RaHeadD10 Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong were responsible for the biggest mass murdering in history, where Mao outdone those two psychopaths when during his Great Leap Forward policy up to 45 million people died. I’d add that to find ANY reason in their ideology executed by propaganda is impossible and non-existent. Their narratives were a complete and utter inhuman nonsense.

Same as a kick to the balls

I generally agree with your point, although I am male and therefore can't have that experience. Does that spiritual experience consistently illuminate a truth outside of love for your child? And as a potential corollary, how would you explain post-partum depression?

@@psychologienerd7546 😁.. true, indescribable, but probably light years away from a spiritual experience :))

@@EarlofSedgewick About the post-partum depression I cannot comment. I never had one. On contrary, I was a bit depressed before I had my first child. With it everything changed, my life became a one big light and happiness and it still is. With my second child it all became even squared, and up to this time I cannot put words on it. I was the only child who always wanted a lots of kids, even though I stopped after two, to be able to support them to the maximum. That unconditional love also broadened my consciousness towards a lots of things I didn’t even see before, and also sorrow was, and is, always present since the time I had my first child. It was very new strong emotion, and I think it’s one of the most important emotions to appreciate the beauty of life and get a sense of common humanity.

Except that giving birth is not a miracle at all. It is completely biological and logical. It is not a spiritual experience. It is entirely material. Unless spiritual experience is also material. Which it is.

nevermind. found it. /watch?v=kugiufHh800

@@dierotewand3297 thanks a lot.

Linguistic constructs designed to frame meaning, to interconnect emotional and intellectual experience.

In the context of the video poetry means anything from religious texts to patriotic nationalist works, etc that motivate people to perform ethically questionable(condemnable) acts.

So when did we Indians perform ethnic cleansing on another country?

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-VJZ4LARPMJU.html

That video suggests that the germans took on indian history as their own, because they had none to strengthen their nationalism... but i'm not sure how it relates to this video.

Religion is apart of the capitalist system they both work hand in hand to keep the system working

For the sake or order, there is a place for meme. A place like here.

Qz xjduk

It's taken from this one: The Desert of Post-Ideology ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-y-vW7-Y5Rzw.html

(this isn't an attack just a question) isn't Kantian ethical philosophy the exact opposite? I thought ethical philosophy pre-Kant was stuck in the morality of the objective action and Kant was the first to discuss Maxims(subjective reasoning)- or the understanding that a person's motivation for the action can alter the morality of that action. For instance, two people each take care of their dying grandmother until she passes. Pre-Kant this would be seen as a moral goodly natured event. However, one of those two people takes care of their dying grandmother because they love them dearly and wish to bring them comfort in their last days, The OTHER takes care of their dying grandmother because they want to improve or manipulate their standing in her last will and testament. Thus the problem, remedied by the inclusion of Maxims as an ethical conception. It is not enough to ACT morally, one must THINK and DESIRE morality as well. According to this actions are absolutely not subject to merit unto themselves (or at least not totally) It is the person's motivational reasoning that is the real determinant of the morality of an event. So if i'm interpreting this correctly, wouldn't the statement 'actions are subject to merit unto themselves' be the complete opposite of Kantian ethical philosophy?

I think Sid S was saying that Zizek is being Kantian

Could you elaborate? Why do you feel it is "only natural?"

@@EarlofSedgewick human beings like to have an emotional investment in their views, as a result they usually only communicate one side of the argument well because it's the only side they're passionate about.

@@tellingfoxtales thanks for the response. Makes sense. I am glad that you found his ideas interesting, and have something to compare it against. When you say it is natural, I was concerned that you might be using the term the way other people use the term "inevitable". I don't think this is what you meant, but it was unnerving as it appeared to be a sort of doublethink

Acho que não só isso; isto é, natural! O que tem de natural deixar sob suspeição a espiritualidade pela má utilização política dela? Com isso se che ga a passar que melhor seria, politicame nte falando, que não houvesse espiritualidade alguma de que a politica humana possa se servir. Pelos cabelos ainda escuros nesse vídeo, Zizek era mais jovem do que atualmente. Não sei portanto como atualmente ele convive ou não com o dilema com que encerra esse vídeo. Se de la pra cá vê ou não fora de suas posições consequentes a sua experiência da limpeza étnica pela qual passou seu pais, a dimensão da vida espiritual... Ignora- lá, aliás, ganhou força a partir da Revolução Francesa e Revolução Industrial. Marx, fundamentalmente, redefiniu- a ideologicamente como "o ópio do povo", correto? Povo que, agora, amedrontado pelos avanços mais recentes da tecnologia capitalista, ameaça a democracia em nome de valores religiosos politicamente autoritarios, ou seja, nada espirituais. Mas que isso não nos confunda, parece- me o melhor. Tentar superar o dilema, o impasse entre a política e a espiritualidade, pergunto- me se não é ficar preso dentro da dimensão política, ignorando, no mínimo, que as tradições espirituais historicamente relevantes surgiram contra a insuficiência dela?

You must link it to his discourse on poetry. One can agree or not about the role of poetry, but the "scandal" he refers to makes sense within his paradigm.

That was the whole point of the example.

These apparently beautiful ballads are nothing but a composition of other Persian poets glued together in a nonsensical and very poor/stupid way. That guy was just a UK puppet who didn't know anything but killing and fucking. Go read some history before like anything you see.

@@benthebenevolent1001 Please remove this comment if you may. This is a very very big and non-sense lie.

@@mythraashura7945 I have deleted my previously complimentary comment on this poem, but I have not deleted the poem itself, as I do not know enough to see if you are correct or not. Nonetheless, a politician making up BS to appear holy isn't exactly a surprise.

Within this "poem" I found not The rhyme or meter which i sought And truth be told, I found it fraught With discordant cadence and sloppy thought Upon every line, a jagged flaw I bit my tongue, began to gnaw Such a Cain-ish offering to the muse of awe, This tactless poet has some chutzpah!

Not exactly. The supervillain is no less a soldier of God than the superhero... Without the enemy, there can be no plot. And Nietzsche would say: "the noble soul does not accept as its enemy anyone less admirable than itself."

@@shaygahweh you are making his point. The spiritual experience is not about "oh i am so fucking pure or good". Have you tried a psychedelic like lsd or psilocybin?

Without psychedelics smart people would be doing smart things, and stupid people - stupid things. You need something like psychedelics to make smart people do stupid things. I know what I’m talking about. If your spirituality is just a particular material brain-chemical interaction - it’s garbage.

@@user-xz6cb3iz8s lol this was perfect

statism doesn't exist, is just a bonus word like totalitarianism and every absurdity liberals want to yell at people with common sense

Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang (Gucci gang!) Spend ten racks on a new chain My bitch love do cocaine, ooh I fuck a bitch, I forgot her name I can't buy a bitch no wedding ring Rather go and buy Balmains Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang (Gucci gang!) Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang (Gucci gang

don't trust anyone who infers there's a correlation between musical taste & trustworthiness

Sometimes I listen to Ligeti or Wagner

Ligeti or Wagner sometimes listen to me

No he's just from the FYR.

No smart demagogue espouses an ideology without cherry picking.

the point is not that either, its that people need to outsource guilt, they need some kind of hanger to take off their humanity and go about doing what they do, whether it be spirituality or poetry

Yeah let's forget the many attempts peace in Mahabharata that failed the context which the Gita was written Krsna never gave commands just gave advice and it was up to Arjuna to make the choice to go to war to uphold justice or run away to the forest to become an ascetic. He outlines the advantages and disadvantages of all paths that Arjuna attempts to choose.

Please note that it's the fact that a Nazi took inspiration from the text, not the text itself, which Zizek intends to reference as an example.

I’m sure that the Hindu nationalists massacring Muslims in Kashmir were also devout.

so much cocaine right? :P

To say spirituality and morality do not go hand in hand doesn't mean anything? Of course one can always play the spiritual nihilist card to stump any line of though. You can't prove anything, it's just an illusion, nothing has inherent meaning, nothing has anything to do with anything........ Why comment, though?

To critique others' spiritual experience is presumptuous and suggests his personal inexperience in this area. Zizek has a lot of good points on other topics (most, in fact) but in this area, he loses credibility. He is an intellectual. He can't get out of his head. That's all.

T Wells Hmm. Somehow I didn't perceive any critique of anyone's spiritual experience. Just observations on the relations between things. Yes, he's a completely cerebral individual, quite openly so.

Like everyBODY has a cerebrum

​@@268TERIhis point was that spirituality allows people to get out of reality by recontextualizing events and reasons. In doing so he passes no moral judgement on the experience itself. When he criticizes Himmler's use of the Bhagvata Gita, he is using that to illuminate the unintentional side-effects of such recontextualization. Namely that the ontological feeling of having found truth (having a spiritual experience) does not imply moral behaviour. He doesn't condemn spiritual experience though, nor music and poetry. He laments that Beethoven's music was played and genuinely enjoyed by a mass murderer, perhaps as an exercise in spiritual rejuvenation for Himmler. This implies that the spiritual experience is indeed rich, but the wellspring can clearly feed our worst moral actions. Broadly speaking, and this is also based on his work outside of this lecture, Zizek is critical of the 2010s Leftists for essentially believing pure reason is possible and going down this rabbit hole of an ever-growing list of identities, while rejecting the identity of anyone who doesn't believe them. Simultaneously, he is quite adamantly opposed to the idea that ran its violent course in Nazi Germany - that there is one, perfect identity set, and that everyone is either perfectable (Aryans who need molding) or inherently corrupt (handicapped persons initially, then sexually "deviant" people, then by ideology and race, and finally by anyone who disagrees with them). Zizek is a critic of ideology, and he calls himself a Marxist because Marxism is the richest tradition of critical analysis of ideology in the Western tradition (this isn't based on close reading, so correct me if there's a stronger tradition out there). It seems he is critical of spirituality in the sense that it can be fed to the masses to indoctrinate them by hijacking the most profound and compelling experiences a person can have. "Poetry, genuine poetry, comes from the island of oneself." That is where poetry is beautiful. Oddly, I don't think Zizek would condemn Hitler for genuinely producing his art (tongue-in-cheek a bit, but he was also a commensurate inspirational speaker and film lover); rather I think he condemns his followers for not coming up with their own.

+Ben Zzz So you remain a high flying digital entity.

+Ben Zzz tomato tomato

I don't understand

coz your stupid

How so?

+Nicolas de la Forge I really agree with your point. The fact is, evil DOES participate in beauty. It's disturbing but not a contradiction. I'm reminded of a phrase, ''Even the devil can quote the bible perfectly''. Yet that doesn't mean he stands for the higher message. You could well imagine the devil claiming that the bible is about HIM and his struggle against god. But in this case he is not ''attaining'' to the higher aspirations (as you say) of what the bible stands for. If he resonated with the higher message of love, then he would no longer be the devil. Evil is defined by an absence of love, not by an absence of feeling. In recent years there have been numerous sexual predators working at U.K classical music Conservatories, some of them very vicious. These teachers were all skilled musicians. Their appreciation of beauty didn't make them ethical. How do we know what their inner experience is toward their music? It may well be a self-centred one, an intensity of feeling that does not include empathy for others. Often when we listen to music we relate with: ''MY story, MY tragedy, MY suffering''. There are plenty of human minds where the musical note for COMPASSION is not heard at all! Kierkegaard was careful to distinguish between a man's action toward the 'aesthetic' and their action toward the 'ethical'. They are separate, and although they CAN be combined, often they are not.

+pinion mole thank you for helping me to see more into it - I will study your statement in the days to come. I like what you're saying about evil - I've heard it before but you are saying it better than anybody else.

I'd like to know what your argument points at. What are the conclusions from it in relation to Zizek's argument?

OK, help me with this. I don't see an 'ontological scandal' because just as people who go to Church every Sunday and seem to be fervently involved in prayer, can go out and lynch someone a minute later, (as they did for 80 years in the South), the thing to note is that the reason they can do it is that they are operating at the level of the 'lexical intrigue' (only). Their 'religiosity' is a lexical intrigue. (Zizek sees this as an ontological scandal). But the one they follow, Christ, operated in 'a moment of being' (not the lexical intrigue). It is the same with that vile priest. We see that while he could commit atrocities, Christ could not. The priest is in some way only a 'copy' of the original, a 'put on'. He believes even; but there is no moment of being. He is 'in God' in the lexical intrigue only. The Nazi musician is acting within the culture that raised him, which is automatic. He is arrogant about it. He is not Beethoven though, whose sensitivity and spirit would not allow him to commit violence. If the Nazi violinist could equal the master in the spirit that allowed him to compose the quartets, he would be transformed and sense the miraculous moment of being. (It is miraculous since we are never in that moment). The best example is in the Vasistha, where Vasistha says to Busunda (who is called the 'second creator', he allows people to be born into the miracle of being): 'even though I am long liberated, this meeting you here is even greater than liberation'. Everything is a lie and not authentic until we are realized, born a second time. The violinist never was. But Beethoven was. He said 'I see things that I cannot even share with anyone.' Its not the transfiguration on the mount that is a scandal; it's not that art is useless; we are useless and a scandal. 'Forgive them lord, they do not understand'.

If you are fortunate enough to experience "moment of being" you also realize that there is nothing to prove.

Even if this authentic spiritual experience is not commodified, does it necessary lead to a flourishing life, openness, ethical perfection? I think his argument is two-fold: 1) even authentic spiritual experience and frameworks supporting them are vulnerable to ideology and propaganda on a macro level and 2) on micro level, spiritual person is not necessarily an ethical or good person. I can attest to both from my personal life and other people's experience. We were sold the idea that you only have to do spiritual exercises and they will cleanse you from your crude egoism and fragile humanity. The reality is apparently something different. Whenever I met "an advanced spiritual soul", a person, I sensed elevated narcissism and disconnection from concrete reality. At best it's benign and can possibly help person cope with his problems of meaning, anxiety or impermanence but at worst it's a way of dopamin rush, and hormonal hedonism and addiction which not only doesn't reveal some hidden reality but it distorts even the only one which is apparent. And this is a criticism coming from a spiritual guy, sort of, roughly speaking. Much of my time went to immersing myself into spiritual, religious and occult studies, and all I found was vanity, unconscious egoism of both myself and other people consuming such "drugs". Much more pernicious than it's obvious from a bird's perspective. More often than not, my experience is that most people consuming spirituality are either consciously deluding themselves to escape their imperfect, messy lives, or those who unconsciously search for genuine perfection not knowing they didn't leave their old selves behind, it's still clings to them and neglect of that fact can be dangerous both for them and wider society. My point is that even if agree somehow that no matter pseudo- tag, spiritual experiences can end up being the exact opposite of their marketed intent. Not to trash, bash or denigrate it completely, I think ethics and spiritual experiences are not derivative one from another, they can exist on parallel planes. One can certainly be a spiritual romantic like those of 19th century nationalist movements and a massive bigot. In a simple, more just world, it would be easier to see those two things as necessary preconditions for each other but in our more messy, complex worlds it doesn't follow this logic. I once naively believed in inherent goodness and moral supremacy of spiritual people, but I changed my mind. But I didn't gave up on spirituality as such, I just redefine it and put it in its proper place and not as a panacea for all ills, personal or social.

The vapidness of people’s ethics from the past also qualifies here, which is why historical examples are required. Whichever way you slice it, many who would qualify as “authentically spiritual” have also at the same time been monsters. This is not an issue of capitalism.

Nah, it's just a tic. He has never done drugs.

He has Tourette’s. It’s a tic.

Sounds more like Jordan Peterson.

You didn’t address a single point he made. You said his thoughts were incoherent, it sounds to me like you just didn’t understand what he’s saying.

@@brandonszpot8948 sure sure. Why don't you bring about a single point he've made so we can inspect it?

@@oioi9372 Why don’t we start with the main point. The notion that the horrific acts we see in history and in the media today are not antithetical to authentic spirituality, but in fact are usually only possible because of it.

@@oioi9372 I really shouldn’t have to make his points easier for you to digest, if you genuinely understood it and disagree with it.