The Lack

The motivation for wholeness and what it means for the spiritual journey

My Gurus

Over my life I have looked to certain luminaries for answers. Maybe a real person, like a pastor or professor, maybe an imagined person like the character in a book. They offered something enticing. An explanation, a sense of order in the apparent chaos. They seemed to have grasped “it,” or achieved enlightenment, or made peace with themselves. They were elders, guides, truth tellers.

I confess to a certain adoration of them. They were the kinder than kindness, warmer than sunshine, humans. This author or that professor was very man of very man, very woman of very woman, unbound and self made. They represented the triumph of the individual over their circumstances, the excellent ones, scalers of mountains, graspers of complex ideas. The ones who rise, triumph, overcome.

I remember someone writing that everywhere they journeyed they found C.S. Lewis coming back. C.S. Lewis, the man I wanted to be, the intellectual who wrote children’s books, common sense scholar, rooted in relationships, reveling in walking tours with his brother, the very essence of tweedy British clarity.

Then I found Thomas Merton. Deeply poetic, a visionary for engagement with the world from the beauty of the monastery, I longed to be as deep as he was. His openness to beauty, to Buddhism, the universal nature of contemplation across religions and traditions.

Moving on to one after another, I collected heroic writers like hockey cards. The mesmerizing writer Frederick Buechner convinced me that the writing life was the ideal life for me, later hearing Anne Lamott say the same thing, these meaning makers making a life out of literary endeavors. I loved the Shipping News more than any other book, the way the language wove characters into life, the way the story focused on an anti-hero. In Quoyle I found a kindred spirit. The ache of finding a man who encapsulated what I knew as the truth of humility, the beauty of deprecation.

I moved on. New thinkers like Ken Wilber, new feelers like Elizabeth Gilbert, but also new technology, new software, new schools of thought and new interests too. I started investing, started trying to understand politics and economics.

Then one day I heard about object A.

Object A

There is a lack that is fundamental to the human experience. We have a sense that something is missing, that there is an emptiness inside us. C.S. Lewis called it a hole that only God can fill. Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst and philosopher who reinterpreted Freud’s work through the lens of structuralist linguistics called it "objet petit a" or “object little a” in English, or just “object a.”

Lacan said, "What we desire is not what we think we desire." We think we desire things, experiences, states, status, power, relationships, understanding, or wisdom. We go on a quest to get these objects of our desire, either by working hard, thinking hard, exposing ourselves to different experiences, or studying under experts and masters to hone our skills so that we can possess what we desire. The elite athlete, the talented surgeon, the master artist, the successful business person, all are following an inner motivation, a drive to achieve something significant. But while there can be much satisfaction in working towards a goal like this, the achievement or mastery of a skill brings a variety of feelings. There is satisfaction to some degree, there is pleasure in “being good at it,” but almost always, there is a disappointment too because the satisfaction we expected was not something that was reasonable to expect from such accomplishments. Why do we do this?

Lacan believed that as children, we experience a sense of unity with our mother (or primary caregiver), but as we grow and enter the world of language and social structures we lose that wholeness. This loss is one of the hard realities of life. Yet without recognizing this we can easily project that feeling of loss or lack onto certain people, ideas, or objects. We think that if we can have these things, or achieve certain things we can experience that wholeness again.

For Lacan we construct our identity in relation to this lack, especially after the “Mirror Stage,” of child development where we first form a coherent image of ourselves from outside, and begin a lifetime of chasing an imaginary sense of unity we never truly possessed.

So object a is not something we can ever integrate into our life, it forever remains ungraspable, and it causes all our striving. Lacan would say: “Don’t try to eliminate the lack — learn to desire through it.”

While Lacan didn’t offer a method for healing or personal integration, he did offer a way to recognize and live with our fractures. It was to realize the fantasy of wholeness.

"There is no such thing as a complete [person.] We are split, divided, lacking — and it is precisely in this lack that desire lives."

Pete Rollins in conversation with Rob Bell talk about how this plays out in our lives. You set your desire on something, “…and when then you finally get the thing that you want, you're left with a fossil, and the fossil makes you think, oh my goodness, that almost got it… but you're always just left with a fossil, never with the thing, because object a doesn't kind of exist.”

This is because object a, that goal you had your sight set on, the thing you thought would make you happy or fix the problem you had, doesn’t actually exist because the one you imagine, the goal you plan to achieve is in your imagination and is a stand-in for the wholeness you really want.

When you get the car or relationship or job or attention, there is an inevitable deflation. The grass is always greener before you have to cut it to keep it looking good. This imagined reality which never quite manifests in the actual world, is object a. It is the thing we imagine will bring us what we want. The trouble is we were motivated by the absence of the thing we imagine. The absence is that hole, something missing, a gap between what we are and what we long to be - which is to be whole.

Rollins takes this concept and maps it to our modern spiritual yearning, showing how our chase for gurus, systems, or solutions is related to the mechanism of object a.

"It is not that we desire something, but that desire itself is the object. We are animated by lack." – Paraphrasing Lacan

There is something deeply attractive about desire itself, our own desires and the desires of others. In a strange way we desire desire as much as we desire objects, relationships, experience, and so on.

Rollins proposes that what we need is a Guru who understands this, who steps in to represent object a, but then shows us his or her imperfection, limitations, true self. Such a guru very gradually exposes that they don't have the secret. They are not a savior, or some deep reflection of wisdom or love or belonging. They are just a human being, driven by the same lack we too feel.

The “Last Guru” as Rollins calls this person resists the appeal to an ultimate truth, or an organic whole, or a mystery that can be revealed. The Last Guru is the one who understands that our quest for answers can in fact be a source of suffering, and that the quest is important none the less. As contradictory as this sounds, it is our lot in life. We lose a sense of wholeness that drives us to fill the hole left by that loss. This lack we feel drives us to seek satisfaction that we never full can feel, because we never fully can be whole. The truth of this is hard to grasp, hence the last Guru must understand that accepting the lack, the hole, and realizing that it can not be filled, is integral to human existence and flourishing.

The Scapegoat Mechanism

Rollins says that when you scapegoat a person or group as wrong or evil or ‘the problem’, “you haven't reconciled yourself to contradiction, you're still reducing it to opposition and you're still trying to then cut it out like like a cancer.”

What is the contradiction? Simply that another human can see things differently than us, hold different values, act on different beliefs while living in the same world we live in. We can not be one with them.

Or maybe we operate on the idea that people are doing the best they can, which is a popular way of making sense of other’s shortcomings. But then we encounter a psychopath who has no desire to do good or be kind. It is a shock to realize this. Or a political leader tells us what we want to hear in order to get elected, then acts very differently once in office. We feel betrayed.

Our discomfort with such realizations tells us something about ourselves. Our discomfort with differentness, with two contradictory things being true at the same time, or with a nonsense situation that we can’t tolerate, shows that we lack something, a better understanding, or a better explanation, or an adequate perspective. We are far from whole or enlightened. It is another reminder that wholeness is not only missing, but impossible.

Light is a particle and a wave at the same time. When this doesn’t make sense it is evidence that our thinking is not enough, we have not done the work to see how this is possible. The person who doesn’t care that much, who isn’t that interested in the contradiction yawns and moves on, content in his ignorance. But the curious one, the philosopher or scientist or poet sits with that contradiction, asks questions of the physicists, comes to realize that light is both, depending on the observer, depending on how light is observed. This new insight causes a tingle all down the nervous system and that tingle is realization, what we call an ‘aha moment.’

And that aha feeling tells us something, it tells us that the lack is a good motivator, the lack drives us towards aha. But that is not enough either, because there is not always an aha. This is dukkha, the un-satisfactoriness of existence. Life if full of intractability and quandaries.

Rollins again says, “…there's some truth to the the popular view, which is the idea that the very contradictions that are happening right now in your life, actually open up to express wider contradictions that you're only dimly aware of, and then those are going to widen out even deeper.”

Rollins talks about how therapists identify contradictions in a person’s life. The client wants intimacy but then run from relationships when they get too intimate, for example.

“They [the therapist] talks about the problems that are in your history and your life, the traumas that have happened to you, but those connect with the universal trauma that is life and how we live in the world.” - Pete Rollins

I was struck by that phrase, “the universal trauma that is life…”

If there is something to shy away from it is the contradiction that life is trauma, and life is never the less worth living. By sitting with this contradiction, we come to see that, in a certain sense it is contradictions all the way down. Or up, depending how you are tracing the logic.

In Rilke’s Duino Elegies, the cry is not for resolution (aha) but for presence within the lack, for awareness as tribute to existence:

"Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window… to say them, you must understand, to say them more intensely than the Things themselves ever dreamed of existing."
(The Ninth Elegy, tr. Edward Snow)

And in The Book of Hours:

“I live my life in widening circles / that reach out across the world. / I may not complete this last one / but I give myself to it.” (Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, tr. Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy)

These words echo the idea that the self is an ever becoming, not a being already formed.

“The Journey itself is home,” - Basho

The discussion between Rob and Pete moves towards the idea that each of us has access to what we need to make sense of the contradictions we can make sense of, and allow the contradictions we can’t make sense of to deepen our sense of peace.

They talk about God as the one who lacks the lack. They end by discussing a religion-less religion in which we can stop looking to priests or gurus or teachers or pastors or leaders, and instead sit in grace with the great contradictions we face.

Sitting with contradiction in grace makes the contradiction a good, or at least a necessity. The job for those of us at this level of relationship to the trauma of the universe, is not to resolve all the issues we face in life, but to create a container that almost makes the contradictions sacred. Because sitting with contradictions and accepting them, rather than trying to change them, brings peace.

They refer to this as, “the move from the lack of the secret to the secret of the lack.”

I believe what they are doing is taking this idea of the lack and expanding it to refer to more than the lack of wholeness. The lack drives us to see our separateness, we are not one with our mother. That wound, creates a desire for “oneness” or “at oneness.” This is the desire for atonement, for being united with God, the reality beyond lack.

Acknowledging the lack is in some ways the big deal, the big aha, because acknowledging the lack of wholeness, answers, solutions, explanations, etc. both motivates us to examine the contradictions, and also gives us a sense of peace when contradictions can not be resolved. We are contradictions, we move through contradictions, we live with contradictions. Contradiction are part of life and part of us. We are fractured, but that is the way it is.

It is like a hole in a shoe that lets in water. We want the hole to cease to exist, we want the lack to cease, but we can’t get rid of a lack. “That's what creates all of the violence, all of the destructive power, the scapegoating. It's our inability to embrace the lack,” say’s Rollins.

How do I embrace the lack?

To embrace the lack is to move away from oppositional thinking and into contradictory thinking. This involves seeing contradictions and treating them like opportunities for learning and growth. We embrace the contradictions in our own lives, and sit with others as they face their contradictions.

Rollins often frames this process as a kind of healing, not by integration or resolution in the conventional sense, but by liberation from the fantasy of integration and resolution.

The desire for unity, harmony, and belonging can create an image or idol that holds out hope for something that is fleeting at best. We can experience these things, and we can advocate for them, but we should not expect that they will ultimately replace division and isolation.

An important corollary of this is that we can let go of the illusion that wholeness is even possible and learn to live fully in our separate parts. Wholeness may not be possible, but we may become more whole.

There is a phrase that, “Suffering is wanting things to be other than they are.” We want our wounds to be healed, we want tensions to be eased, mysteries to be revealed, and problems solved. We want not to suffer. But this is very unlikely, so Instead of blaming others for our wounds and problems (scapegoating), or blaming God or the Universe, or blaming ourselves, we can simply re-focus on what is real and what is within our control.

For instance, how do we reconcile the contradiction that God exists but does not end suffering. If we sit long enough with this contradiction unresolved, we come to see that we want an end to suffering, for ourselves and others, and that is a good thing, to want that. We can begin to see that while suffering is part of life (not optional as some suggest) so is the learning that comes from it. Does this mean that the learning justifies the suffering? No. Both exist, and to deny that both exist is to cause ourselves further suffering.

Here is a mantra from Kristen Neff we can say in times of suffering:

"This is a moment of suffering. Suffering is part of life. May I be kind to myself in this moment. May I give myself the compassion I need."

I try to say the following to myself when I experience pain or suffering:

“I let go of my desire for things to be different. I open my mind to learn what this suffering has to teach me. I let go of the desire to blame myself or others and I let go of my desire for resolutions, solutions, or distractions. May I take the actions that I can to reduce suffering, may I ask for and accept help from others, and may I experience the peace that comes from acknowledging the contradictions and losses of life.”

Final Thoughts

This topic was challenging for me, coming as I do at the world from both a Christian and Buddhist perspective. In Christianity there is the idea of being part of the body of Christ, being purified and made in the likeness of Christ. And in Buddhism there is the idea of letting go of the ego enough to realize that the self is not as important or permanent as we think. The cliche of becoming one with everything may not necessarily be help by all Buddhists, but it is certainly a popular view of what Buddhists believe.

These hopes of transcending into some greater reality are, most likely, something like the desire for wholeness that Lacan identified. What this exercise in sitting with contradiction and suffering brings us is something a little different, the acceptance of a path towards wholeness/unity/atonement without the belief of every arriving.

For me it is deeply satisfying to know that others are thinking about this, and that awareness or enlightenment may very well include the realization that lack is integral to the spiritual path.