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A Hamlet On The Ganges

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Preface: An Aesthetics of Analysis

Is the unconscious an amorphous mass of thoughts, of signifiers sliding above what is signified? Or is the current of discourse an aesthetic mood, an aromatic affect that tastes its own speech in the crafting of syllables? If the unconscious is structured like a language, then the edifice of its hand and foot is a metered lyric, a loose thread that spins an architecture of being, a rhetorical anatomy of lyrical flow.

In India, the field of linguistics (along with its associated disciplines of grammar and poetics) has been placed in the category of “aesthetics” since antiquity. Long before the Freudian discovery of the unconscious, Indian sages elaborated the literary structure of the human psyche and the structural nature of language. The Rig Veda, for example, is one of the oldest surviving written texts and is composed entirely in metrical verse. This is because Indian aestheticians revered poetry as the highest form of art, and thus cast their philosophical and spiritual treatises in poetic forms.

In Sanskrit, the study of linguistics and grammar is referred to as vyākarana,1 a term that means “analysis”, “explanation”, “prediction”, and “the sound of a bow-string”. The prefix vyā means “analysis” and kārana means “to effectuate”. Thus, vyākarana is the process of analysis. Vyākarana is also consonant with vāk (“speech”) and vākya (utterance). Here, the Sanskrit signifier has already laid bare the very meaning of psychoanalysis and language: an enigmantic art of discourse that divines an oracular speech, or what we may declare an “analytic discourse”.

A similar meaning is discovered in the Sanskrit term, upanishad. “Upa” means “near”, “ni” means “down”, and “sad” means “to sit”. Thus, Upanishad is commonly translated as “to sit near [a master]”, suggesting a primal circumstance of oral transmission where the disciple hears and receives the teachings from a master, typically in a forested setting. However, the eighth-century sage, Shankara, derives the meaning of upanishad from the substantive sad, meaning “to loosen”. According to Radhakrishnan, “If this derivation is accepted, upanisad means brahma-knowledge by which ignorance is loosened or destroyed”.2 This is an acceptable rendering given the philosophical context of the Upanishads. Yet, I wish to take Shankara’s derivation further, in order to point out the semantic resonance between upanishad and analysis.

The English term analysis is derived from the Greek analuein, meaning “to loosen”. If analysis and upanishad render the connotations of “loosening” in two distinct tongues, then the linguistic link between psychoanalysis and Upanishadic thought is already tied together. The influence of Upanishadic Advaitism on Greek philosophy is an anthropological inquiry we will leave aside, except to note that scholars have posited the influence of the Upanishads on Plato, Socrates, and Pythagoras. In addition to their philosophical similarities, the Indians and Greeks both employ a dialectical method of discourse as a format of philosophical inquiry, a structure which the Upanishads are an early example of. The discourse of the Upanishads is thus an analytic discourse—in its structure and its pedagogy.

What is analytic discourse? In Seminar XIX, Lacan asks, “What is the function of speech? The discourse of the analyst is formed in such a way as to make this question emerge. The function and field of speech and language—that’s how I introduced what would lead us to the present point of defining a new discourse”.3 Lacan is referring to his topological paradigm of the four discourses, a quadration that begins with the “discourse of the master” and concludes with the “discourse of the analyst”. Lacan continues to introduce his notion of analytic discourse by citing linguistics:

To introduce what is involved in the analytic discourse, I had no qualms about helping myself . . . to the facilitation provided by what is called linguistics. To quell the ardour that might have been too quickly aroused in my vicinity . . . I reminded you that this something that is worthy of the title linguistics as a science, which seems to have language and even speech as its object, was supposed only on the condition that the linguists swear amongst themselves never—or never again, because this is what people had been doing for centuries—even remotely, to allude to the origin of language. This was one, among others, of the watchwords I gave to the form of introduction that was articulated in my formula the unconscious is structured like a language.

. . . On no account is it a matter of speculating about any origin of language. I said that it’s a question of formulating the function of speech.4

Months before he delivered his essay, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” in Rome, Lacan gave a prefatory talk titled, “The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real”. Here, speaking to the existence rather than the origins of language, Lacan says, “Language exists. It is something that has emerged, we shall never know either when or how it began, or how things were before it came into being”.5

Lacan is clear that the question at hand is not one of historical or evolutionary linguistics. Rather, the question is a structural inquiry into the function of speech, which he regards “to be the only form of action that posits itself as truth”.6 Speech functions as truth because of its autonomous activity—“Not only do I speak, do you speak, and even ça parle, it speaks, as I said, but this carries on all by itself . . . A word that founds a fact is a fact of saying, but speech functions even when it doesn’t found any fact. When it gives a command, when it prays, when it insults, or when it voices a wish, it doesn’t found any fact”.7

In other words, the function of speech is the truth of its enunciation, of its incarnation in the letter that speaks in revolutionary tongues. It is from here that Lacan continues his discussion with references to Plato, the Stoics, and Saussure, asking, “Where does meaning arise? It is in this respect that it’s very important to have made the division . . . that Saussure made between the signifier and the signified . . . Moreover, this was something Saussure inherited from the Stoics . . .”.8 To complete Lacan’s thought, I will suppose that this was something the Stoics inherited from the Indians.

Indeed, Lacan ultimately concludes that the question of meaning is an enigmatic riddle (the likes of which we will soon encounter in the poetic verses of the Rig Veda): “When all is said and done, this meaning is an enigmatic riddle, and it’s an enigmatic riddle precisely because it is meaning”.9

In his introduction to The Principal Upanisads, Radhakrishnan positions the Vedic concept of speech (vāk) as analogous to the Greek logos. He writes:

For Plato, the Logos was an archetypal idea. For the Stoics, it is the principle of reason which quickens and informs matter. Philo speaks of the Logos as the ‘first born son’, ‘archetypal man’, ‘image of God’, ‘through whom the world was created’. Logos, the Reason, ‘the Word was in the beginning and the Word became flesh’. The Greek term, Logos, means both Reason and Word. The latter indicates an act of divine will. Word is the active expression of character. The difference between the conception of Divine Intelligence or Reason and the Word of God is that the latter represents the will of the Supreme. Vāc is Brahman. Vāc, word, wisdom, is treated in the Rig Veda as the all-knowing. The first-born of Rta is Vāc: yāvad brahma tisthati tāvatī vāk. The Logos is conceived as personal like Hiranya-garbha. ‘The Light was the light of men’. ‘The Logos became flesh’.10

Hiranyagarbha means “golden womb” and refers to the primeval source of the universe. In the Rig Veda, hiranyagarbha is associated with the deity Prajāpati, the lord of all creation. In the Yajur Veda, Prajāpati self-emerges from Brahman and co-creates the world with Vāc, the lord of speech. (In section III, we will return to Prajāpati’s prominence in the Upanishads, as the one whose utterance bestows the gift of speech).

The Vedas and Upanishads thus pose the function of speech as the process of incarnation, a scriptless verse of vowels and consonants, a speaking body become avatar in enunciation. Thus, in Indian thought, speech is seen as the intersection of psyche and soma, where the breath of life makes itself known in free associations.

This brings us to the foot upon which the speaking body of this essay has erected its structure: the radical essay, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”, where Lacan articulates a poetics of psychoanalysis. Lacan accomplishes this noble task not only by returning to Freud but by tracing the field of the unconscious to its roots in Indian poetics. My task in this essay is to trace the links between Indian linguistics and Lacanian psychoanalysis, so as to map the aesthetic topography of the psychoanalytic art as an East-West dialectic, not only to return to a past but to chart a future of its practice.

My approach revolves around a close and chronological reading of Lacan’s “Function and Field”:

In section I (From Sanskrit to the Signifier), I trace the influence of Indian grammarians on Ferdinand de Saussure and the eventual influence of Saussure on Lacan’s conception of psychoanalysis. I introduce Lacan’s notion of the “field of language” and the “function of speech” as operative in the unconscious and in the analytic frame.

In section II (The Gift of Speech, or the Prosody of Prasad), I focus on Lacan’s references to Indian linguistics via Abhinavagupta and the concepts of dhvani and laksanalaksanā. I add essential context to Lacan’s discussion by quoting from a text on Indian aesthetics that he references.

This commentary culminates in section III (What the Thunder Spoke), where I place the convergence of Indian poetics and European psychoanalysis in Lacan’s concluding reference to the Upanishads.

My writing mirrors my practice—I punctuate threads of association with lucid intervals of interpretation. For if psychoanalysis offers us anything, it must be the realization of an inimitable style of symptom. If anything, I hope that I have not only illustrated the influence of Indian linguistics on Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory but have also crafted a key that unlocks an aesthetic force in the navel of the unconscious—a rasa that colors and tones the speaking body with its gifts.

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I. From Sanskrit to the Signifier

In 1953, Lacan delivered one of his most seminal discourses to the Rome Congress at the University of Rome—“The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”. Also known as the “Rome Discourse”, this essay was first published in Lacan’s Écrits in 1966.

As an essay, “Function and Field” is a remarkable written text—not only substantial but literary, oratory, and even oracular. Lacan illustrates the function and field of speech and language in his own rhetoric, as he declares in the Preface, “If, then, my talk was to be nothing more than a newborn’s cry, at least it would seize the auspicious moment to revamp the foundations our discipline derives from language”.11

Lacan’s title is a parallel structure—the function of speech and the field of language. As he says in the Introduction, “My task shall be to demonstrate that these concepts take on their full meaning only when oriented in a field of language and ordered in relation to the function of speech”.12 For Lacan, the field of language extends into the very roots of Proto-Indo-European—the Sanskrit language. On this basis, Lacan articulates the function of speech as a discourse of poetics, especially the poetics of Abhinavagupta.13 In the course of the essay, Lacan ties the knots of Indian poetics and his psychoanalysis by citing the linguistic concept of dhvani to illustrate the function of speech. But the link between Indian linguistics and Lacanian psychoanalysis was first transferred in the influence of Ferdinand de Saussure on the core of Lacan’s teaching—that “the unconscious is structured like a language”.

Saussure taught Sanskrit and Indo-European languages at the University of Geneva. He was significantly influenced by Indian linguistics, especially Pānini,14 the “father of linguistics”, whose Astādhyāyī had reached European scholars in the early nineteenth century. Saussure’s interest in Sanskrit was foundational to the development of his linguistic theory, a fact that is especially evident in his earlier works—Memoir on the Primitive System of Vowels in Indo-European Languages (1878) and his doctoral thesis, On the Use of Genitive Absolute in Sanskrit (1881). According to Ananta Shukla, who translated Saussure’s thesis into English, Saussure

did not simply take up the subject [of Sanskrit] at random; but worked on this topic deliberately as it taught him two foundational aspects of his general linguistics (1) the synchronic system of language (that is actually spoken) is a system of relations (sambandha) and (2) it is use rather than any imposition of preconceived system of rules that constitutes a language either living or dead.15

In “The Function and Field”, Lacan implies a connection between Indian linguistics and European psychoanalysis as the core thread woven in a poetics of psychoanalysis. As Saussure asks, “But what is language? It is not to be confused with human speech, of which it is only a definite part, though certainly an essential one. It is both a social product of the faculty of speech and a collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted by a social body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty”.16

We already hear the echoes of Lacan’s structural distinction between language and speech: language exists in a field of signifiers, speech exists as the function of enunciation. Lacan thus opens the first section of the essay by saying, “Whether it wishes to be an agent of healing, training, or sounding the depths, psychoanalysis has but one medium: the patient’s speech”.17 In putting this remark forward, Lacan establishes the relevant ground of his exploration, that psychoanalysis is not only concerned with speech but with the function of speech.

The patient free associates and thus enunciates a transcript of their unconscious scripture, to which the analyst functions as a scribe who transcribes and punctuates the spoken word. Here, the analyst is less concerned with what the patient says as the fact that the patient says it. As Lacan elucidates, “. . . Speech, even when almost completely worn out, retains its value as a tessera. Even if it communicates nothing, discourse represents the existence of communication; even if it denies the obvious, it affirms that speech constitutes truth; even if it is destined to deceive, it relies on faith in testimony”.18 The analytic art is thus not a symbolic interpretation but a carefully placed mark in the grammar of the real, for “it is . . . a propitious punctuation that gives meaning to the subject’s discourse”.19

Speech as tessera is speech as word-fragments in an obscured mosaic of meaning. A tessera is a portion of the real, a phonetic fragment that enunciates in the gift of speech, whether it knows yet what it says. This leads Lacan to his famous admonition to a young psychoanalyst, “Do crossword puzzles”, placed as an epigraph to the second section of his essay.

In section two, Lacan continues to develop the textual implications of speech. Lacan returns to Freud’s comment that the “dream is a rebus”, which he interprets to mean that “a dream has the structure of a sentence or, rather, to keep to the letter of the work, of a rebus—that is, of a form of writing, of which children’s dreams are supposed to represent the primordial ideography, and which reproduces, in adults’ dreams, the simultaneously phonetic and symbolic use of signifying elements found in the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt and in the characters still used in China”.20 Lacan’s reference to hieroglyphs is notable, as twenty pages later he compares Freud to Champollion, the French philologist who famously deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs. Here, Lacan is emphasizing the nature of the dream as a coded message, but a message that is nonetheless written even in its delivery. For “what is important is the version of the text”, Lacan declares, “and that, Freud tells us, is given in the telling of the dream—that is, in its rhetoric”.21

“Rhetoric” is the art of speaking and writing that makes use of compositional or stylistic techniques. Lacan follows his remark with a list of the rhetorical devices that the analyst must listen for: “Ellipsis and pleonasm, hyperbaton or syllepsis, regression, repetition, apposition—these are the syntactical displacements; metaphor, catachresis, antonomasia, allegory, metonymy, and synecdoche—these are the semantic condensations . . .”.22 Lacan’s list includes a combination of grammatical, orthographic, and poetic techniques, the reading of which he proposes as the basis of analytic interpretation.

Analytic listening thus requires a sensitivity to the poetics of speech—its puzzling and enigmatic nature. This esoteric mode of rhetoric is well-established in the riddling hymns of the Vedas, the puzzling inquiries of the Upanishads, and the paradoxical utterances of Zen koans. The register of poetic discourse is spoken with an esoteric intent, or concealed meaning, that differs from the exoteric intent, or obvious meaning, of everyday speech. Commenting on the poetic rhetoric of the Rig Veda, Jamison and Brereton explain that

[m]uch of the Rigveda is enigmatic, not only because of our distance from the time of its creation, but also because the poets meant it to be enigmatic. They valued knowledge, especially the knowledge of the hidden connections . . . between the visible world, the divine world, and the realm of ritual. They embedded that knowledge in hymns that were stylistically tight and elliptical, expressively oblique, and lexically resonant.23

Lacan’s emphasis on poetic rhetoric is innovative. His attention for the patient’s speech is rooted in Freud’s observations, but Lacan articulates this insight with an incisive clarity on the relationship between speech, language, and symptom:

. . . [I]f [Freud] teaches us to follow the ascending ramification of the symbolic lineage in the text of the patient’s free associations, in order to detect the nodal points of its structure at the places where its verbal forms intersect, then it is already quite clear that symptoms can be entirely resolved in an analysis of language, because a symptom is itself structured like a language: a symptom is language from which speech must be delivered.24

Speech is given an elevated power, bearing the function of deliverance from the symptomatic syntax in which language has been ciphered. Since the symptom is structured like a language, speech has a curative diction. Lacan ultimately develops this emphasis as the “gift of speech”, a notion we can trace to the Vedic and Vedāntic understanding of speech.

II. The Free Gift of Speech, or the Prosody of Prasad

Lacan initiates his argument with a reference to the Yijing:

Through the word—which is already a presence made of absence—absence itself comes to be named in an original moment . . . . And from this articulated couple of presence and absence—also sufficiently constituted by the drawing in the sand of a simple line and broken line of the koua [gua] mantics of China—a language’s world of meaning is born, in which the world of things will situate itself.25

The solid and broken lines referred to here are the six lines that compose one of the sixty-four hexagrams of the Yijing, or Book of Changes. The solid line represents the yang principle, the broken line represents the yin principle. In Daoism, it is the ceaseless alternation of yin and yang that is said to give birth to the ten thousand things. Or, as Lacan says, “It is the world of words that creates the world of things”.26

Lacan also draws on the Greek concept of logos—he places the Word as the creative origin of the world and thus bestows upon speech its primordial function. This leads directly to Lacan’s articulation of the “name of the father” as the dawn of the signifier of the symbolic pact in which language derives its law. He comments on Levi-Strauss’s notion of the elementary structures of kinship to further ground the relation between the name of the father and the symbolic register of language and social communication: “Isn’t it striking that Lévi-Strauss—in suggesting in myths of language structures and of those social laws that regulate marriage ties and kinship—is already conquering the very terrain in which Freud situations the unconscious?”27 Speech thus becomes the very basis for psychoanalysis, since it holds within its Oedipal tongue the matrimonial ties of paternity and maternity. Therefore, Lacan holds that psychoanalysis must concern itself with poetics.

Lacan now ties the thread of poetics and psychoanalysis with pedagogical intent. After noting the “list of disciplines Freud considered important sister sciences for an ideal Department of Psychoanalysis”,28 Lacan proposes the addition of “rhetoric, dialectic . . . grammar, and poetics—the supreme pinnacle of the aesthetics of language—which would include the neglected technique of witticisms”.29

Now, we come to the third section of Lacan’s opus, where he makes the first direct reference to Indian linguistics. Lacan is discussing what he calls “primary language”, that is the language of the subject’s desire, which “he is already speaking to us unbeknown to himself . . . in the symbols of his symptoms”.30 It is these symbols in the symptom that analytic technique evokes “in a calculated fashion in the semantic resonances of his remarks”.31 This amounts to a commentary on interpretation as a semantical evocation, an analytic discourse whereby the analyst delivers the patient’s speech from the language of its symptom.

Lacan concludes his discussion of analytic technique saying, “This is surely the path by which a return to the use of symbolic effects can proceed in a renewed technique of interpretation”,32 and then proceeds to introduce the Indian concept of dhvani—“We could adopt as a reference here what the Hindu tradition teaches about dhvani, defining it as the property of speech by which it conveys what it does not say”.33

Lacan defines dhvani as a property of speech by which it conveys what it does not say. Dhvani is, in fact, an intrinsic feature of speech, where a meaning is evoked without being explicitly stated. Before going further, Lacan gives us an illustration of the notion in the form of a parable:

This is illustrated by a little tale whose näiveté, which appears to be required in such examples, proves funny enough to induce us to penetrate to the truth it conceals.

A girl, it is said, is awaiting her lover on the bank of a river when she sees a Brahmin coming along. She approaches him and exclaims in the most amiable tones: “What a lucky day this is for you! The dog whose barking used to frighten you will not be on this river again, for it was just devoured by a lion that roams around here . . .”.34

Initially, the story appears nonsensical. A girl sees a Brahmin and exclaims to him that the dog he fears was eaten by a lion. Readers who are puzzled by Lacan’s recounting of this story should also not fear, as Lacan has not left us in opacity. Rather, the clue to deciphering this illustration and the concept it signifies is given in Lacan’s footnote to dhvani, which reads: “I am referring here to the teaching of Abhinavagupta in the tenth century. See Dr. Kanti Chandra Pandey, “Indian Aesthetics,” Chowkamba Sanskrit Series, Studies, II (Benares: 1950)”.35

Lacan gives us the reference to the English translation of Pandey’s doctoral thesis on Indian aesthetics, which features a substantial chapter on Abhinavagupta’s interpretation of dhvani. Indeed, in this very chapter, we find the original story of the Brahmin at the river in a section titled “An Illustration of Dhvani”:

There is a garden on the bank of [the] river Godāvari. It is far from public haunt. A pair of lovers fixes it for a secret meeting at a particular time. One of the pair comes to this place a little before the fixed time. She sees a religious minded man going about here to collect flowers for worship. His sight is not quite welcome. She wants to drive him away without letting him know her intention.

A ferocious dog used to be kept here. She knew that the man was very much afraid of it. This dog, for some reason, is away from this place. She cleverly tries to explain the absence so as to scare him away and says:—

“O religious minded man! You can now roam freely over this place. For, the dog, of whom you were so afraid has been killed to-day by the proud lion, who, as you know very well, lives in the impervious thicket on the bank of Godāvari.”36

The original passage gives us essential background: the girl has ordained a meeting with her lover at a river away from the world, when she encounters a Brahmin whom she wants to drive away from the place. The story is an illustration of dhvani because the girl never explicitly says to the Brahmin that she would like him to leave. She conceals the truth in order to communicate what she wishes to evoke. Pandey gives his commentary:

It is not difficult to understand what meaning such a statement will have to such a person, as above described. Will the man, who fears a dog, freely move about at a place, where a lion, which has given a positive proof of his ferocious nature by killing the dog, is abroad? Will he, after hearing the above statement, stay on in the garden, or will he run away as quickly as possible? If the latter, is it not because of the negative meaning understood by him in a positive statement? And if so, the question arises: “Why does a positive statement have a negative meaning?” The exponents of the fourth power of the language maintain that the negative meaning, which the hearer gets, is due to Dhvani.37

In other words, the secondary meaning of the girl’s speech, while not stated as such, was heard by the Brahmin. Therefore, there is a function in speech that is primarily evocative, and this invocation is not itself said but heard.

Lacan interprets the story in the frame of absence/presence, which he remarked upon before as the source of meaning in language. Here, he says, “The absence of the lion may thus have as many effects as his spring—which, were he present, would only come once . . .”.38 There is an absence of the explicitly stated intent of the communication—the girl does not simply tell the Brahmin she wants him to leave. But amidst this absence of statement, the real intent of her message is present in the fact of her enunciation, however concealed its truth appears to be—“For the function of language in speech is not to inform but to evoke”.39

If speech can convey a coded message, then it functions on the basis of something given. Therefore, Lacan declares, “Speech is in fact a gift of language, and language is not immaterial. It is a subtle body, but body it is”.40 He then applies this to the analytic frame, suggesting that the patient pays the analyst a gift of money in exchange for the gift of speech as the “link between speech and the gift that constitutes primitive exchange”.41 This means that the patient does not merely pay the analyst for the rendering of professional services but engages in a symbolic exchange of gifts.

The symbolic exchange of gifts between two parties is what is known in Sanskrit as daksina, which means “a present or gift to Brahmanas (at the completion of a religious rite, such as a sacrifice)”, or simply a sacrament of universal sacrifice. The term is often applied in the context of the guru-disciple pedagogy or in sacramental rites. As a primitive exchange, daksina implies an economy of desire, where what is given is offered on the basis of one’s desire, and what is received is an excess that constitutes jouissance in its reception. In Indian rituals, this principle is illustrated in the devotee’s offering of daksina (whether in the form of money, fruit, or flowers) and the teacher or priest’s subsequent offering of prasād, a blessed object, often the return of what was offered by the devotee to the devotee. Prasād is defined as “that which is propitious”, or an object intended to convey blessing by virtue of having been consecrated and given. A return of the repressed in the real of the blessed.

Is this the meaning of transference? Is it prasad that the analyst offers when he propitiously punctuates the gift of the analysand’s speech? Is it the gift of speech which offers itself to be heard, so as to be given the jouissance that lingers in the speaking body, in the presence and the absence of words?

The hymns of the Vedas are crafted for the enunciation of a sacrificial rite, a genre of poetry known as dānastuti, the “praise of the gift”:

The [Rig Vedic] poet’s reward comes as a second-hand or indirect benefit of the success of his verbal labors: the patron should receive from the gods what he asked for, and he provides some portion of that bounty to the poet in recompense. This payment from his patron is sometimes celebrated by the poet at the end of his hymn, in a genre known as the dānastuti, literally “praise of the gift,” . . . .42

Dāna literally means “gift”—the daksina offered to the priest, the poet, or the analyst—and the discourse which celebrates its excesses. The Vedic poet may sing the praises of his patronage, but the analyst speaks to the free gift of the patient’s associations. What is given in the analytic exchange is no longer what the subject does not have, but the giving speech that constitutes the translation of consciousness. Therefore, the end of analysis is the completion of a ritual, or a prayer of changes, where the last word is a somatic syllable, an essential renunciation and realization.

The gift of speech is a prasād of prosody, a sound that leaves an echo of its truth to be heard at the water’s edge, where Narcissus loses face in the resonance of the real.

III. What the Thunder Spoke

The final pages of Lacan’s opus are climactic, an epic moment of concluding that resounds with what the thunder said. Before we come to Prajāpati’s discourse, Lacan draws a parallel between psychoanalysis and Zen before making further inroads into Indian linguistics.

Commenting on the function of time in analysis, Lacan describes his earlier practice of “short sessions”, noting “that it bears a certain resemblance to the technique known as Zen, which is applied to bring about the subject’s revelation in the traditional ascesis of certain Far Eastern schools”.43 Lacan is likely referring to the Zen practice of sudden awakening (or satori) in which a disciple is spontaneously awakened through contemplation of a koan or hearing their Master’s paradoxical words. The techniques of sudden awakening are forms of crazy wisdom that provoke the subject’s enlightenment through an evocative use of speech that cuts through the barriers of the conventional mind.

A similar technique is found in the Dzogchen school of Tibetan Buddhism, where a Master points out the nature of the mind to the disciple through an oral transmission that, upon being heard, awakens the disciple to the truth of what was said. In the Vedantic tradition, the Master similarly speaks a great utterance (or mahāvākya)44 that either suddenly awakens the disciple who hears it or eventually awakens the disciple who chants its recitation.

For Lacan, the Eastern techniques are notable because they utilize speech in order to effect awakening, not at the level of didactic teaching but with the deepest pedagogical intent of an oral transmission of truth, receivable in the instant of being heard. They also function as examples of punctuation, the absence of which is a “source of ambiguity”45, as Lacan notes in regards to the lack of punctuation in Chinese canonical texts.

From here, Lacan returns to a discussion of Indian linguistics via the “classical problem posed to semantics in the determinative statement, ‘a hamlet on the Ganges,’ by which Hindu aesthetics illustrates the second form of the resonances of language”.46 Lacan’s footnote to this sentence reads, “This is the form called laksanalaksana”. The phrase appears mysterious: what is meant by a hamlet on the Ganges, and from where does Lacan derive this example? Our answer is, once again, in Pandey’s volume on Indian Aesthetics.

In a section titled “The Theory of Meaning Before the Acceptance of the Theory of Dhvani”, Pandey lists laksanāśakti as “the secondary power of words”:

Often we find in the existing literature linguistic constructions which convey a complex of ideas . . . The following illustration will clear the point in hand:—

gangāyām ghosah

(Hamlet on the Ganges)47

Gangāyām means “on the Ganges”, a rather straightforward translation. Pandey translates ghosah as “hamlet” in this context, but ghosah resonates in a signifying field that is relevant to our consideration. Ghosah carries various meanings in different textual contexts: the “thundering of clouds” (Rig Veda), “the whir of a bow-string” (Taittirīya Brāhmana), “a sound of speech” (Chandogya Upanishad), “proclamation” (Lotus Sutra), “a cry or roar of animals” (Rig Veda), and the “the sound of the recitation of prayers” (Mahābhārata). The usage of ghosah meaning “a hamlet; a station of cowherds” is found in the Mahābhārata. The exact origin of the phrase, gangāyām ghosah, is difficult to pinpoint, but it is a classic phrase that appears throughout canonical texts of Indian poetics (kavyashāstra). The example of the hamlet on the Ganges thus invokes the entire field of our discussion—the thunderous sound of speech itself as a resonance of meaning.

Pandey cites the phrase gangāyām ghosah in order to present the concept of laksanāśakti as a secondary power of language and as a concept that precedes Abhinavagupta’s articulation of dhvani. He writes:

. . . [T]he complex would be a meaningless jumble of ideas and not a harmonious whole, because it would stand for what in actual experience is not possible. For, a hamlet cannot exist on a current of water. Such sentences are, however, found in the standard works, not only in Sanskrit but in other languages also. And tradition finds a meaning, and a good one too, in them. For instance, when the aforesaid sentence is used, it is understood to mean that the hamlet is situated on the bank of the Ganges and that it is cool and holy.48

The hamlet on the Ganges illustrates the secondary power of language (laksanāśakti) by evoking what it means even while stating the impossible. Is this how speech approximates the real? The hamlet cannot literally exist on the Ganges, but the phrase “a hamlet on the Ganges” is immediately understood as a dwelling on the banks of the river. Pandey explains how this illustrates laksanāśakti:

To explain this third power of words, the Laksanasakti, is postulated. When some such words are intentionally used as do not arouse a harmonious complex of meanings in the mind of the hearer by means of conventional power of language: on the contrary, the meaning of one opposes that of another; under such circumstances the function of the secondary power of language is to arouse additional ideas as are necessary to put them in harmonious relation and to reveal the purpose of such use by the speaker. Thus the additional idea of the bank, aroused by this power, removes the lack of harmony; and the purpose of the speaker in using such construction is understood to convey the idea of coolness and holiness of the hamlet.49

Now, we must ask in what ways dhvani is distinguished from laksanāśakti? Or should they be considered parallel concepts? The notion of laksanāśakti precedes dhvani, if not anticipates it. However, the necessity for maintaining both concepts is contested in the traditional literature. The primary distinction between dhvani and laksanāśakti is the difference between “suggestiveness” and “secondary meaning”. Pandey summarizes one critical position:

Laksana is defined by some as a power of language, which arouses the consciousness of any meaning that is different from the conventional, but has invariable concomitance with it (abhidheyāvinābhūtapratītih). The followers of this definition deny the difference of the suggestible meaning from the secondary . . . The opponents, therefore, maintain that in the case of the so called suggestible meaning, in the arousal of which the different stages from the conventional to the contextual and from that to the secondary are not noticeable, is really the secondary meaning; because the so called suggestible meaning also is one that has invariable concomitance with the conventional.50

This position holds that dhvani is an unnecessary concept, since its implication is already subsumed in the earlier concept of laksanā. In other words, the connotative and suggestive aspect of language is an inherent power, not a distinct property of suggestibility itself. A variant of this position proposes laksanalaksanā as a substitute for dhvani. Until now, Pandey has referenced the term laksanāśakti (“secondary power of language”) and has used this interchangeably with laksanā. Here, he introduces laksanalaksanā as a “variety of laksanā” and a “secondary power”. This is to say that laksanalaksanāis the most precise reference for that power of language (laksanāśakti) which is secondary in nature. Pandey says:

The ordinary secondary meaning is got out of a construction by simple laksana, for instance, the meaning of “Gangāyām ghosah” as “Gangātīre ghosah”. But the meaning that “Ghosa” is cool, holy and so on, is got by laksanalaksana. That is, the secondary power of language, after having aroused the secondary meaning, the bank, works again to arouse the additional ideas of coolness, etc. The rise of suggestible meaning, therefore, according to the opponent, can be explained by assumption of the said variety of laksana.51

Laksanalaksanā and dhvani both describe the signifying function of speech—that what is said slides in a chain of signifiers that always stand for another signifier. If we take the term ghosa (translated as “hamlet”) at the level of the signifier, then we see a signifying chain—ghosa not only means “hamlet” but also “sound of speech”, “the thundering of clouds”, and “proclamation”. As such, it appears that the classical example of a hamlet on the Ganges illustrates the function of speech in its own language.

Pandey concludes his examination of the debate between laksanalaksanā and dhvani with the following summary:

The ideas, which the suggestive power of words is intended to arouse, are certainly different from those which the secondary power is said to give rise to. The necessary condition for the power to operate in the latter case is the apparent lack of harmony in the different constituents of a sentence. But the former does not presuppose this condition. If a statement is intended to suggest what is not directly expressed, or rather under circumstances cannot be so expressed, but is suggested by a peculiar arrangement and choice of the words, it requires the power of visualization (Pratibhā) in the hearer, and not simply the knowledge of the secondary convention (Laksanā). Hence the distinction between Laksanā and Dhvani has got to be admitted.52

It is simple enough to accept that dhvani and laksanā describe different aspects of the signifying process inherent in the field of language and invoked in the function of speech. Notably, Pandey uses the term pratibhā to describe the “power of visualization in the hearer” that dhvani evokes. Pratibhā means “reflection”, “brilliance”, “understanding”, and “genius, especially poetic genius”. Pratibhā evokes the mirror stage as the genesis of language, where the spatial lure of identification becomes a grammatical and pronominal reflex.

Is it pratibhā that the analyst must cultivate as he listens to the free associations of the patient? Must he not only auscultate but see their sonorous rhythms, metrical arrhythmias, and slippery spheres? Does this explain Lacan’s desire to formalize the unconscious with topology?

In the penultimate page of his essay, Lacan writes:

To say that this mortal meaning reveals in speech a center that is outside of language is more than a metaphor—it manifests a structure. This structure differs from the spatialization of the circumference or sphere with which some people like to schematize the limits of the living being and its environment: it corresponds rather to the relational group that symbolic logic designates topologically as a ring.

If I wanted to give an intuitive representation of it, it seems that I would have to resort not to the two-dimensionality of a zone, but rather to the three-dimensional form of a torus, insofar as a torus’ peripheral exteriority and central exteriority constitute but one single region.53

Lacan sees the field of language and the function of speech as a singular structure, a region where the contours of dhvani and laksanalaksanā slide across a sphere of signification. In Lacan’s structural assertion of the unconscious, we discover a resolution beyond the traditional debates of Indian grammarians, where secondary powers and suggestiveness are free-floating across the smooth surface of circular speech.

Before concluding what could be called his dharmic exposition, Lacan articulates the place of psychoanalysis in the very locus of the human being:

Psychoanalytic experience has rediscovered in man the imperative of the Word as the law that has shaped him in its image. It exploits the poetic function of language to give his desire its symbolic mediation. May this experience finally enable you to understand that the whole reality of its effects lies in the gift of speech; for it is through this gift that all reality has come to man and through its ongoing action that he sustains reality.

If the domain defined by this gift of speech must be sufficient for both your action and your knowledge, it will also be sufficient for your devotion. For it offers the latter a privileged field.54

Lacan then proceeds to quote a passage from the Brihadāranyaka Upanishad, titled “What the Thunder Said”. In this section, Prajāpati (the god of thunder and lord of all creatures) responds to the request of the devas (gods), the humans, and the asuras (demons), who, upon finishing their novitiate with Prajāpati, begged of him, “Speak to us”. To each of them, Prajāpati utters the syllable, “Da”, and then asks, “Did you hear me?” The devas answer, “Thou hast said to us: Damyata, master yourselves—the sacred text meaning that the powers above are governed by the law of speech”. The humans answer, “Thou hast said to us: Datta, give—the sacred text meaning that men recognize each other by the gift of speech”. And the asuras answer, “Thou hast said to us: Dayadhvam, be merciful—the sacred text meaning that the powers below resound to the invocation of speech”.55

Do the devas, humans, and asuras each hear their own message, returning to them in an inverted form, perfectly resonant with subjective meaning? For Prajāpati utters the same syllable for each to hear in accordance with their own ear of heart.

Prajāpati’s utterance (“Da”) and the response heard by the novitiates (“damyata, datta, dayadhvam”) was famously quoted by T.S. Eliot in 1922 in the concluding stanzas to “The Waste Land”. It may be that Lacan first encountered this Upanishadic reference from reading Eliot’s poem, as he does cite a different poem from Eliot, “The Hollow Men”, earlier in the essay.56 However, Lacan’s engagement with the Upanishads is already well-established, as he cites the mahāvākya “Tat Tvam Asi” (“Thou Art That”) in the concluding lines of “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” just four years before delivering “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”. Nearly ten years after the writing of “Function and Field”, Lacan returns to this Vedāntic utterance in Seminar X, in the chapter “Buddha’s Eyelids”—“Tat tvam asi, the that which thou dost recognize in the other is thyself, is already set down in the Vedānta”.57

The syllable “Da” means “the one who gives” and “what is given”, and with each utterance, Prajāpati gives the gift of speech to devas, humans, and asuras. “Da” is the root-syllable in the variants they hear: damyata is the calling to mastery, datta is the calling to generosity, dayadhvam is the calling to mercy. Prajāpati speaks the Name-of-the-Father—Da—and thus invokes the laws of speech in the three realms. For who is Prajāpati if not Brahma himself, he who sovereigns the symbol of creation? Is it he from whom the seed of the world springs from formless resonance into the form of sound?

Prajāpati speaks a proper name in a divine voice, and thus translates the signifier in the real. The name and the voice form the binary structure of speech, as Lacan notes, “The relationship between the proper name and the voice must be situated in language’s two-axis structure of message and code, to which I have already referred . . . It is this structure that makes puns on proper names into witticisms”.58

The devas, humans, and asuras hear the Name-of-the-Father, echoing from the Other in their subjective fields. Thus, they receive the inheritance of the law through a morphological family, a morpheme unified in a common root from which they are each derived. Prajāpati says, “Da”, but the beings of the three worlds receive their own message, in a form suitable for baptism—as it is the holy spirit of the signifier that falls from the Father’s lips to bless his children in the eucharist of speech. Prajāpati thus returns the repressed signifier to his children in its primordial text, a transmission of filial inheritance and spiritual regeneration. It is the tone of his divine voice that slides the signifier across the register of the real.

This is why it is said, in the Chāndogya Upanishad, that “[w]hen the gods and the demons, both descendants of Prajā-pati, contended with each other, the gods took hold of the udgītha, thinking, with this, we shall overcome them”.59 Here, the reference to gods and demons is condensed within a single signifier—devāsurā—where its usage depicts the existential conflict between light (illumination) and dark (ignorance) within the human being. This section of the Upanishad is titled “Life (Breath) as The Udgītha”, where udgītha refers simultaneously to the breath, speech, and the syllable Om. The relationship between speech and breath is elucidated in the third section:

. . . [O]ne should meditate on the diffused breath as the udgītha. That which one breathes in, that is the in-breath; that which one breathes out, that is the out-breath. The junction of the in-breath and the out-breath is the diffused breath. The diffused breath is the speech. Therefore, one utters speech, without in-breathing and without out-breathing.60

The function of speech originates in the still-point, the median void between inhalation and exhalation, where a pervasion of syllabic resonance is already heard in the heart of what is spoken. The notion of udgītha thus brings us to the very essence of speech as a circulation of sound. In the Chandogya Upanishad, Prajāpati admonishes the devas and asuras to meditate upon Om as the basis of speech, but in the Brihadāranyaka Upanishad, Prajāpati commands “Da”. What is the relationship between Om and Da? “Om” is more accurately transliterated as aum, where we see its tri-syllabic structure. These three syllables correspond to various trinities in Indian thought—Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva; waking, dreaming, sleeping, and so on. Dissecting this further, the syllable “a” is most prominent in the pronunciation of “Da” (and this may also be why the Tibetan tradition has adopted “A” as their primordial syllable)61; the combined sound of “a” and “oo” becomes the long vowel (ō)at the root of “Om”; and the “m” is the origin of the syllable “Ma”.

The modern spiritual master, Adi Da, dissects the Om-sound into three primary syllables constitutive of the mahāmantra—Om Ma Da—where Om represents the “Self-Father”, Ma the “Mother-Power”, and Da the “True and First Son” of their union.62 If we interpret this as a homology for the Christian trinity, then “Om” is the Father, “Ma” is the Holy Spirit, and “Da” is the Son. As the “son”, “Da” functions as the condensation or epitome of “Om” and “Ma”, and thus signifies via inheritance the totality of reality.

If we translate this paradigm in psychoanalytic terms: Om is the Name-of-the-Father, Ma is the holy spirit of the signifier, and Da is the signifier in the real. “Om” is the name of the symbolic, “Ma” is the measure of the imaginary, and “Da” is the name of the real. Together, the three syllables constitute a primordial structure of kinship that originates in the three registers of human reality. As Lacan notes, “any analyzable relationship . . . is always inscribed in a three-term relationship”.63

If “Da” is the Son, then Prajāpati’s utterance is the birth of language, an incarnation made of love. As Lacan says, “Giving someone a child as a gift is the very incarnation of love. For humans, a child is what is most real”.64 Therefore, “Da” constitutes, at the level of the signifier and its signified, the very gift of speech.

Adi Da continues his exegesis by expounding on the significance of Da as a “name” (a name he notably adopts as his own appellation)—specifically a function of the name that stands as a signifier for the real:

The One and Only . . . Divine Person . . . Is, By Tradition, Named—In Order To Be Invoked By Humankind.

Therefore, Traditionally, The Divine Source and Person Has Been (and Is) Named (and Invoked) By Many Names. In The Practice Of Some Traditions, The Divine Source and

Person Is Named “Da”.

The Name “Da” Is A Name Of Real (Acausal) God65 (or The Necessarily Divine Reality, Truth, and Person That Is).

This Name Has Appeared Spontaneously To Many (and Many Kinds Of) Realizers, In Traditional “Religious” and Spiritual Cultures All Over the “world”, During and Ever Since Ancient times.

The Name “Da” Signifies (or Points To) The Transcendental (and Inherently Spiritual) Divine Reality, Truth, and Person—As The “Giver” Of Life, Liberation, Blessing, Help, Spirit-Baptism, and Awakening Grace.66

Adi Da’s commentary emphasizes the function of the name as the means for invocation. Lacan has already given us the link between the name and the function, when he says, “the name of the father creates the function of the father”,67 a point he elaborates upon in “Function and Field”: “It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the basis of the symbolic function which, since the dawn of historical time, has identified his person with the figure of the law”.68 Is it not Prajāpati, the father of creation, who utters this syllable to his children?

Adi Da also suggests that “Da” is a universal name, found in cultures around the world since antiquity. I read this statement in the tone of an oracular vernacular rather than the silence of a scholastic notation. We cannot verify the truth of the statement with anthropological serums. The real of Adi Da’s utterance is, in fact, located in the very function of the name, as Lacan has already remarked: “A name . . . is a mark that is already open to reading—which is why it is read the same way in all languages—printed on something that may be a subject who will speak, but who will not necessarily speak at all”.69 I read Lacan’s reference to the name as the mark in the code of Sanskrit etymology, where lingam means “phallus” and “mark”. If the phallus is the signifier of desire that raises its primordial rank in the Name-of-the-Father, then the question of the name is the question of consciousness.

The syllable “Da” may indeed be at the very origin of spoken language, already on the tip of every tongue. In Sanskrit, “Da” is a dental syllable, spoken with the tongue behind the front teeth—a location that forms a circuit of conductivity in Indian and Daoist yoga.70 Commenting on this yogic mudra, Adi Da references Patanjali’s Hatha Yoga Pradipika:

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika and other similar yogic texts speak of the soma as “the nectar of the moon.” By pressing the tongue up through the roof of the palate and closing off the passage in the head above the sinuses and above the mouth, and entering into meditation, the yogis prevent the nectar of the moon from burning up in the “sun,” which is the lower body or digestive region, the digestive fire of the navel.71

The association between speech and soma was originally formulated in the Rig Veda. In verse VIII.100.10-11, speech is likened to the milking of a cow:

When Speech, saying indistinguishable things, sat down as gladdening ruler of the gods, she milked out in four (streams) nourishment and milk drinks. Where indeed did the highest of hers go?

The gods begat goddess Speech. The beasts of all forms speak her. Gladdening, milking out refreshment and nourishment for us, let Speech, the milk-cow, come well praised to us.72

The goddess Speech (Vāc) is described as a “milk-cow”, who pours forth a somatic stream of words. The context of these verses is cryptic but revolves around the pressing of soma for the ritual sacrifice that is central to the Vedic hymns. Speech is thus regarded as an oblation, a devotional offering sacramentally milked for the gods.

Unlike most of the hymns in the Rig Veda, the goddess Vāc speaks in the first-person (aham) in a self-confessional mode known as ātmastuti. In verses 2, 3, and 4, Vāc speaks of herself as bearing the “swollen soma”:

2. I bear the swollen soma, I Tvastar and Pūsan and Bhaga. I establish wealth for the man offering the oblation, who pursues (his ritual duties) well, who sacrifices and presses.

3. I am ruler, assembler of goods, observer foremost among those deserving the sacrifice. Me have the gods distributed in many places—so that I have many stations and cause many things to enter (me).

4. Through me he eats food—whoever sees, whoever breathes, whoever hears what is spoken. Without thinking about it, they live on me. Listen, o you who are listened to: it’s a trustworthy thing I tell you.73

If the Rig Veda casts Vāc in feminine, then how do we understand the relationship between speech and the father—for Vāc herself says, “I give birth to Father on his head; my womb is in the waters, in the sea.”74 Is it Vāc who embodies the name of the father? Later texts attempt to resolve this riddle by placing Vāc as either the daughter or consort of Prajāpati, where Vāc is seen as the manifestation of the creation generated by Prajāpati.

Is Vāc the function of speech through which the concealed truths of creation are penetrated in the names-of-the-father? Is “Da” that dawning syllable of the speech circuit, the locutional link generated in the current of discourse? Is “Da” the soma we press in our own mouths to sever umbilical ties?

“Da” is spoken by children before they speak in sentences—in English, “Da” has phonetic resonance with “Dad” (in British English, “Da” functions as a direct reference to one’s father) and in Sanskrit dādā is the signifier for one’s paternal grandfather.75 It may be with this intention that Lacan recalls the child’s game—Fort! Da!—only two pages prior to Prajāpati’s speech:

These are occultation games which Freud, in a flash of genius, presented to us so that we might see in them that the moment at which desire is humanized is also that at which the child is born into language.

. . . We can now see that the subject here does not simply master his deprivation by assuming it––he raises his desire to a second power . . . the child thus begins to become engaged in the system of the concrete discourse of those around him by reproducing more or less approximately in his Fort! and Da! the terms he receives from them.76

In German, “Fort” means “gone” and “Da” means “there”, a spoken alternation of absence and presence. As the child receives the function of his speech from the field of the Other, the novitiates receive the gift of initiation in Prajāpati’s spoken deliverance. As novices, the gods, humans, and demons are completing their training for entry into a religious order, when they ask Prajāpati to grant them the initiation of their submission. This context is not lost upon Lacan, who on the preceding page mentions the sublimity of the psychoanalytic undertaking and the ordeal of its training:

Of all the undertakings that have been proposed in this century, the psychoanalyst’s is perhaps the loftiest, because it mediates in our time between the care-ridden man and the subject of absolute knowledge. This is also why it requires a long subjective ascesis, indeed one that never ends, since the end of training analysis itself is not separable from the subject’s engagement in his practice.77

Lacan is thus presenting psychoanalysis as an initiatory rite and a rite of passage, a training homologous to a novitiate’s entry in a religious order. Indeed, Freud had formed a secret order of initiates, to whom he gave seven rings. Earlier in his essay, Lacan mentions this fact in a passing remark about Ernest Jones, who is “the last survivor of those to whom the seven rings of the master were passed”.78

It is as the initiatory rite that the function of the name is discovered as a transferential transmission by which an esoteric order is founded. As Lacan says, “We are aware of the use made in primitive traditions of secret names, with which the subject identifies his own person or his gods so closely that to reveal these names is to lose himself or betray these gods; and what our patients confide in us, as well as our own recollections, teach us that it is not at all rare for children to spontaneously rediscover the virtues of that use”.79 The guarding of the name is the protection of the holy, the setting apart of the esoteric from the exoteric via the passwords of sacred law.

In the Rig Veda, the notion of the secret name is posed in a hymn on sacred speech, which opens with the following stanzas:

1. O Br̥haspati, (this was) the first beginning of Speech: when they [the seers] came forth, giving names. What was their best, what was flawless—that (name), set down in secret, was revealed to them because of your affection (for them).

2. When the wise have created Speech by their thought, purifying her like coarse grain by a sieve, in this they recognize their companionship as companions. Their auspicious mark has been set down upon Speech.80

Is “Da” the secret name of the Father uttered for initiation? Does its invocation restore the devas, the humans, and the demons to the laws that govern their worlds? Is it the nature of “Da” as a dawning signifier in the real that grants it the gift of inauguration? If the real resists symbolization absolutely, then it can only be called upon by name. This is why Adi Da refers to “Da” as a “Meaningless Pointer (or Name)”,81 emphasizing its phonetic, rather than symbolically meaningful, function. The meaningless phonetic of the signifier is the meaning of mantra—a syllable behind thought that is spoken for the resonance of its invocation.

We return to an enigmatic riddle of meaning. Is meaning intrinsic to the phonetic of the word and thus to the function of speech? Or does meaning reside in the field of linguistic implication, in the grammatical rule of the spoken, where what is heard is the suggestion of the enunciation? This is the rebus that Indian grammarians have attempted to read in their articulations of dhvani, which indicates the “articulate sound” because the word produces “sound waves very much like the ring of a bell”.82 Pandey writes that “the grammarians explain the sound-sensation as due to the contact of one of the sound-waves, proceeding in a regular series from the source, with the drum of the ear . . . Just as sound comes to the hearer’s consciousness through succession of meanings, the conventional, the contextual and the secondary”.83

The grammarians place sound as the universal component of meaning and thus attribute meaning to a function of speech. Here, dhvani emerges as an intrinsic suggestibility that is conveyed in the resonances the word evokes. As Lacan notes, a signifier always stands for another signifier. The signifier constantly slides across the signifying chain and thus elides a singular meaning. A signifier functions at the level of speech as the totality of what it can signify in the field of language. As such a slippery sphere, it is the unseen but audible that makes itself known across the field of meaning, where the signified grasps the last tail of its winding signifier. “For these chains are not of meaning but of enjoy-meant [joui-sens] which you can write as you wish, as is implied by the punning that constitutes the law of the signifier”.84

The phonetic mechanism of speech is explained by Indian grammarians as a function of “the universal sound, called Sphota . . . According to them, the awareness of the Sphota of a word, is necessary for the consciousness of meaning of a word”.85 The concept of sphota was popularized by the Indian linguist Bhartrihari in the fifth century CE, and later expanded upon by Abhinavagupta. Sphota means “bursting”—it is the eruption of meaning that flashes forth in the sound of the word.86 The notion of sphota resonates with the theory of spanda in Kashmir Saivism, which Abhinavagupta popularized. Spanda bears the connotations of “throbbing” and “palpitation”, and is used to mean the “pulse of the supreme level of speech” and the “pulse of the vibratory universe”. It is the causal root of language and suggests the heart as the circulatory locus of sacred speech, an atrial fibrillation of meaning. As Lacan says, “I know better than anyone that we listen for what lies beyond discourse, if only I take the path of hearing, not that of auscultating”.87

Language is the construction of a symbolic order, but its spoken sound is heard in the real. Therefore, the function of speech is not the communication of meaning but an invocation by name. When Prajāpati thunders “Da”, his speech erupts the sound with a flash of meaning, heard by each in the tone meant for their listening. Prajāpati thus “shatters discourse only in order to bring forth speech”88 in a sudden storm of language.

Speech is the primal sound of cosmic existence, or nāda brahma. Adi Da thus positions “Da” in precisely this category when he makes it synonymous with “Om” as the sound-vibration at the root of the cosmos. He writes:

The Cosmic Divine Sound-Vibration “Om” (or “Da-Om”, or “Da”) Corresponds To and Signifies and Points (Beyond Itself) To The Native (Soundless, Silent) Feeling (and The Very Condition) of Being (Prior To All Separate ‘I’-ness) That Is The . . . Root Of All Vibratory Modifications (and, Therefore, Of all sounds, and Of all thoughts, or all ideas, including the “I”-thought, or the “Separate-self”-idea, and Of all things, or Even Of all the kinds of conditional forms and states) In The Cosmic Domain.89

In other words, “Da” and “Om” are sounds voiced in the real, that even when spoken, resist symbolization utterly. The assertion of “Da” as a signifier in the real is elaborated in the Brahmana following Prajāpati’s discourse. After declaring Brahman as “the True or Real”, the Upanishad equivocates Prajāpati with Brahman, and locates the real in the locus of the heart. The Brahmana structures this argument by elaborating on “Da” as the central syllable of the tri-syllabic hridayam—a word meaning “heart center”:

This is Prajapati (the same as) this heart. It is Brahman.90 It is all. It has three syllables, hr, da, yam. Hr is one syllable. His own people and others bring (presents) to him who knows this. Da is one syllable. His own people and others give to him who knows this. Yam is one syllable. He who knows this goes to the heavenly world.91

“Da” is the core syllable of the Sanskrit word for the heart––hridaya. Yet, hridaya does not merely signify the physical or spiritual heart of man. Hridaya is all that is held within the chest, a “divine knowledge” and “guarded secret” of one’s “innermost desire”. As it is said in the Nārāyana Sūktam of the Mahānārāyana Upanishad:

The Heart, the perfect seat of meditation, resembles an inverted lotus bud.

In the region below the throat and above the navel there burns a fire from which flames are rising up. That is the great support and foundation of the Universe.

It always hangs down from the arteries like a lotus bud. In the middle of it there is a tiny orifice in which all are firmly supported.

In the middle of it there is a great fire with innumerable flames blazing on all sides which first consumes the food and then distributes it to all parts of the body. It is the immutable and all-knowing.

Its rays constantly shoot upwards and downwards. It heats the body from head to foot. In the middle of it there is a tongue of fire which is extremely small.

That tongue of fire is dazzling as a streak of lightning in the midst of a dark cloud and as thin as the awn at the tip of a grain of rice, golden bright and extremely minute.

In the middle of that tongue of flame the Supreme Self abides firmly. He Is God. He is the Immortal, the Supreme Lord of all.92

The heart that hangs an inverted lotus below the throat is the speech that thunders the syllable to lumen the real. We receive the function of speech in an inverted form, hanging on symbolic threads of meaning, echoing in the field of the Other. But when the real speaks its own name aloud, it gives a baptism in tongues of fire, that its eternal law may be heard in conveyance of its submission, gift, and grace. As Lacan clarifies in a footnote to the Upanishadic passage, “It should be clear that it is not a question here of the ‘gifts’ that novices are always supposed not to have, but of a tone that they are, indeed, missing more often than they should be”.93 What is to be understood is not a meaning but a hearing, a tonal truth that transfers itself in Prajāpati’s oral transmission to the ears of the novices.

At last, Lacan concludes, this is “what the divine voice conveys in the thunder: Submission, gift, grace. Da da da. For Prajapati replies to all: ‘You have heard me”.94 There is no absence of understanding or confusion of tongues, no babbling aspirations for an other world. Prajāpati translates the Oedipal errors of ignorance, love, and hatred into submission (to the laws of speech), gift (of recognition through speech), and grace (of the invocation of speech). Thus, the three worlds are purified by Prajāpati’s utterance, as thunder restores a light in the dark cloud.

The beings of the world thus find the law in the place of the real, where they currently stand. A hamlet appears on the Ganges is always already the case. There, in the current of sound, betwixt the knots of head and heart, churns the throated consonance of a nectarous nādī—immortal in its shapeless synecdoche.

Preface

I recently got together with my friend, Andrew Flores, Jr., to discuss Lacan’s essay, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” (video above). Our free-associative and wide-ranging conversation inspired me to write this essay about the mirror stage.

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In what follows, I offer a textual afterthought to this conversation by tracing the chronological development of Lacan’s mirror stage, its confluence with the cultural context of surrealism, its parallels with Upanishadic Advaitism, and the implications for a radical psychoanalysis that approaches the threshold of the real. I ground my analysis in ample selections from Lacan’s works to give new readers a feel for his evocative, aphoristic style.

Psychoanalysis and Surrealism

“The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” is published in Lacan’s Écrits, a collection of his written works, where it is placed as the second essay. Since the Écrits is not organized chronologically but conceptually, the early placement of this essay marks its significance as a paradigmatic foundation of Lacan’s articulation of psychoanalysis. However, Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage dates to 1936, predating the publication of this essay by thirteen years.

Lacan’s exploration of the mirror motif arises in the milieu of surrealism, where mirrors and labyrinths were employed as tropes for the unconscious. In the Spring of 1937, Salvador Dalí painted the Metamorphosis of Narcissus, a double-image painting depicting the Greek myth of Narcissus. In Dalí's painting, Narcissus is drawn as a figure of stone whose head takes the form of a cracked egg. On the left side of the image, roots grow from the cracked egg, and on the right side, a Narcissus flower blooms from the egg.

The timing of Dalí’s painting (one year after Lacan presents the mirror stage) and the close friendship between Dalí and Lacan illustrate a confluence of considerations. In one sense, we can say that Lacan’s notion precedes Dalí’s painting, but this does not guarantee the genesis of the notion. The intermingling of psychoanalysis and surrealism in Paris is already evident in Lacan’s 1932 doctoral thesis, On Paranoiac Psychoses in its Relationship with Personality, where we see a confluence between Lacan’s notion of “paranoiac knowledge” and Dalí’s “paranoiac-critical method”.1

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A Textual Chronology of the Mirror Stage

Marienbad Congress (1936) and La Famille (1938)

Lacan first presented his notion of the mirror stage at the IPA Congress in Marienbad in 1936, where he was famously interrupted by Ernest Jones. In Lacan’s own words:

. . . [T]he structure that is characteristic of the human world—insofar as it involves the existence of objects that are independent of the actual field of the tendencies and that can be used both symbolically and instrumentally—appears in man from the very first phases of development. How can we conceive of its psychological genesis?

My construction known as “the mirror stage”—or, as it would be better to say, “the mirror phase”—addresses such a problem.

I duly presented it at the Marienbad Congress in 1936, at least up to the point, coinciding exactly with the fourth stroke of the ten-minute mark, at which I was interrupted by Ernest Jones who was presiding over the congress.2

There is no apparent record of the presented paper, to which Lacan adds, “I did not submit my paper for inclusion in the proceedings of the congress; you can find the gist of it in a few lines in my article about the family published in 1938 in the Encylopédie française”.3 Thus arrives the first articulation of the mirror stage in print in Lacan’s article titled La Famille. The term “article” is misleading, since this piece is a significant essay that explores the Oedipal complex in relation to the “formation of the individual”. Early in the essay, Lacan presents the mirror stage:

Affective identification is a psychic function whose originality has been established by psychoanalysis, especially in the Oedipus complex, as we shall later see. But the use of the term at the stage we are studying remains ill-defined in the doctrine. That is why I have attempted to fill the gap with a theory of this identification whose genesis I describe by using the term ‘mirror stage’.

The stage thus designated corresponds to the final phase of weaning, that is, to the end of those six months during which the dominant psychic feeling of discontent associated with a retardation in physical growth expresses the prematurity of birth that underlies weaning in the human being. Now, the recognition by the subject of his image in the mirror is a phenomenon that is doubly significant for the analysis of this stage: it appears after six months and its study demonstrates the tendencies that at that time constitute the subject’s reality. Because of these affinities, the mirror image is a good symbol of this reality: of its affective value, illusory like the image, and of its structure in that it reflects the human form.4

Here, we find Lacan’s most basic definition of the mirror stage as a developmental phase, beginning at six months of age, and as reflective of a “prematurity of birth”. Lacan will continue to employ this phrase in his writings on the mirror stage, but his association of this with the final phase of weaning is notably explicit here. Lacan also makes clear that, in associating this phase with the phenomenon of a mirror, he is elucidating the affective and illusory nature of the egoic structure.

We can already see how Lacan’s mirror stage is an elaboration of the myth of Narcissus. And he proceeds to give direct commentary on this:

The narcissistic structure of the ego: The world appropriate to this phase is thus a narcissistic world. In so describing it we are not simply evoking its libidinal structure by the same term to which from 1908 on Freud and Abraham assigned the purely energetic meaning of investment of libido in the body. We also wish to penetrate its mental structure and give it the full meaning of the Narcissus myth. Whether this meaning is taken to indicate death—a vital insufficiency from which this narcissistic world grows; or the mirror image—the imago of the double is central to it; or the illusion of the image—this world, as we shall see, has no place for others.

Parallels in Adi Da’s Teachings

Lacan’s observation of the narcissistic structure of the ego precedes an identical observation by Adi Da, marking a significant parallelism between psychoanalysis and spirituality. To my knowledge, Adi Da was not familiar with Lacan’s teaching, though he studied Freud and incorporated the Oedipus complex into his considerations of spiritual development. In his earliest publication, The Knee of Listening, Adi Da presents his discovery of Narcissus as the “controlling myth” of human life:

Eventually, I began to recognize a structure in my humanly-born conscious awareness. It became more and more apparent, and its nature and effects revealed themselves as fundamental, inclusive of all the states and contents in life and mind. My own “myth”—the governor of all patterns, the source of presumed self-identity, the motivator of all seeking—began to stand out in the mind as a living being.

This “myth”, this controlling logic (or force) that structured and limited my humanly-born conscious awareness, revealed itself as the self-concept—and the actual life—of Narcissus. I saw that my entire adventure—the desperate cycle of Awakeness and its decrease, of truly Conscious Being and Its gradual covering in the mechanics of living, seeking, dying, and suffering—was produced out of the image (or mentality) that appears hidden in the ancient myth of Narcissus.

The more I contemplated him, the more profoundly I understood him. I observed, in awe, the primitive control that this self-concept and logic exercised over all of my behavior and experience. I began to see that same logic operative in all other human beings, and in every living thing—even in the very life of the cells, and in the natural energies that surround every living entity or process. It was the logic (or process) of separation itself, of enclosure and immunity. It manifested as fear and identity, memory and experience. It informed every function of the living being, every experience, every act, every event. It “created” every “mystery”. It was the structure of every imbecile link in the history of human suffering.

He is the ancient one visible in the Greek myth, who was the universally adored child of the gods, who rejected the loved-one and every form of love and relationship, and who was finally condemned to the contemplation of his own image—until, as a result of his own act and obstinacy, he suffered the fate of eternal separateness and died in infinite solitude. As I became more and more conscious of this guiding myth (or logic) in the very roots of my being, my writing began to take on an apparently intentional form. What was before only an arbitrary string of memories, images, and perceptions, leading toward an underlying logic, now proceeded from the heart of that logic itself—such that my perceptions and my thoughts began to develop (from hour to hour) as a narrative, completely beyond any intention or plan of my external mind.

I found that, when I merely observed the content of my experience or my mind from hour to hour, day to day, I began to recognize a “story” being performed as my own conscious life. This was a remarkable observation, and obviously not a common one. The quality of the entire unfolding has the touch of madness in it. But people are mad. The ordinary state of human existence—although it is usually kept intact and relatively calmed by the politics of society—is founded in the madness of a prior logic, a schism in Reality that promotes the entire suffering adventure of human lives in endless and cosmic obstacles.5

Adi Da arrived at the discovery of Narcissus through a process of writing, fueled by the inquiry, “What is Consciousness?” He describes writing everything that came to his mind throughout the day, in the hopes of uncovering the fundamental structure of consciousness, a practice that bears more than a resemblance to Surrealist automatism and Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method. Thus, the myth of Narcissus became central to Adi Da’s teaching, where it is featured in the title of his first (unpublished) work of auto-analysis, Water and Narcissus (1967), and as the central motif of his literary work, The Mummery Book (1969).

The Structure of Paranoia

In Adi Da’s description, we encounter Narcissus as the structure and source of madness. Lacan establishes the link between the mirror stage and madness as an intrinsically paranoiac structure:

In my view, this activity has a specific meaning up to the age of eighteen months, and reveals both a libidinal dynamism that has hitherto remained problematic and an ontological structure of the human world that fits in with my reflections on paranoiac knowledge.6

The structure of paranoia is evident in the gaze of Narcissus, which not only sees its own reflection but sees a mirage staring back. In Seminar XI, Lacan describes the “pre-existence of a gaze” as “I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides”.7 The paranoiac structure of the ego is also aphoristically articulated in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: “Wherever there is an Other, fear arises”. This parallels Lacan’s formulation of the encounter with one’s mirror image as the genesis of the Other, which echoes Lacan’s aphorism: “The unconscious is the Other’s discourse in which the subject receives his own forgotten message in the inverted form suitable for promises”.8

The Tripartite Mirror

In the aforementioned passage on the narcissistic structure of the ego, Lacan describes a threefold structure of the Narcissus myth:

1. death as a “vital insufficiency” that becomes the fertile ground of narcissistic delusion,

2. the mirror-image as the “imago of the double”,

3. the illusory image as a “world [that] has no place for others”.

These three aspects can be seen as constitutive of the self, Other, and world. The vital insufficiency of death is the mortal confrontation facing the specular self. In the mirror-image, the self encounters its double in the form of an Other. This illusory image conditions the existence of a world in which the mirage of subject-object relations remains bound to a narcissistic structure of imaginary identifications.

The tripartite structure of the mirror stage can also be seen in relation to the Buddhist ontology of the mirror: the essence of the mirror is primordial purity, or intrinsic clarity, which allows is to self-reflect phenomena; the nature of the mirror is luminosity, which allows it to reflect phenomena without being altered by the otherness of the images it reflects; the energy of the mirror is reflected image itself, which constitutes the world of appearances.

When we apply this to Lacan’s three registers of the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary, we can trace the following correlations: The essence of the mirror itself is the real; the nature of the mirror is the symbolic; the energy of the mirror is the imaginary.

Now that we have grasped Lacan’s mirror stage as the ontological structure of Narcissus, let us continue the chronology of his articulation.

Presentation on Psychical Causality (1946)

After La Famille, Lacan gives a significant commentary on the mirror stage in his 1946 “Presentation on Psychical Causality”. This paper was delivered as a critique of Henri Ey’s organicist theories of psychosis and principally functions as a commentary on Lacan’s doctoral thesis. Lacan reintroduces the mirror stage by commenting on his earlier work in La Famille:

My aim there was to indicate the connection between a number of fundamental imaginary relations in an exemplary characteristic of a certain phase of development.

This behavior is none other than that of the human infant before its image in the mirror starting at the age of six months, which is so strikingly different from the behavior of a chimpanzee, whose development in the instrumental application of intelligence the infant is far from having reached.

. . . What I have called the triumphant assumption of the image with the jubilant mimicry that accompanies it and the playful indulgence in controlling the specular identification, after the briefest experiemental verification of the nonexistence o the image behind the mirror, in contrst with the opposite phenomena in the monkey—these seemed to me to manifest one of the facts of identificatory capture by the imago that I was seeking to isolate.9

Lacan is referring to the experiments of the French philosopher and psychologist, Henri Wallon, whose developmental theories influenced his conception of the mirror stage. Lacan then proceeds to survey “man’s prematurity of birth”, citing the origin of this notion in Louis Bolk’s theory of “fetalization”. The following passages detail this correlation and are among the most beautiful of Lacan’s writing on the mirror stage:

I have, in fact, taken my conception of the existential meaning of the phenomenon a bit further by understanding it in relation to what I have called man’s prematurity at birth, in other words, the incompleteness and “delay” in the development of the central nervous system during the first six months of life. These phenomena are well known to anatomists and have, moreover, been obvious, since man’s first appearance, in the nursling’s lack of motor coordination and balance; the latter is probably not unrelated to the process of “fetalization,” which Bolk considered to be the mainspring of the higher development of the encephalic vesicles in man.

It is owing to this delay in development that the early maturation of visual perception takes on the role of functional anticipation. This results, on the one hand, in the marked prevalence of visual structure in recognition of the human form, which begins so early, as I mentioned before. On the other hand, the odds of identifying with this form, if I may say so, receive decisive support from this, which comes to constitute the absolutely essential imaginary knot in man that psychoanalysis—obscurely and despite inextricable doctrinal contradictions—has admirably designated as “narcissism.”

Indeed, the relation of the image to the suicidal tendency essentially expressed in the myth of Narcissus lies in this knot. This suicidal tendency—which represents in my opinion what Freud sought to situate in his metapsychology with the terms “death instinct” and “primary masochism”—depends, in my view, on the fact that man’s death, long before it is reflected (in a way that is, moreover, always so ambiguous) in his thinking, is experienced by him in the earliest phase of misery that he goes through from the trauma of birth until the end of the first six months of physiological prematurity, and that echoes later in the trauma of weaning.10

Lacan is not only echoing Bolk’s embryology but furthering Otto Rank’s theory of birth trauma as the primal (and pre-Oedipal) source of repression.11 There is another key elaboration in this passage: the relation between the mirror stage and suicidal aggression, which Lacan lays bare as “the fundamental structure of madness”.12 Thus, Lacan places the origins of aggressivity in the narcissistic structure of the ego, as constructed in the mirror stage. This is why he places the essay, “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis” after “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function”.

Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis (1948)

“Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis” brings another dimension of commentary on the mirror stage. Here, Lacan focuses on the imago of the fragmented body as “elective vectors of aggressive intentions”. These aggressive intentions originate through a “formal stagnation” in the dialectic of the mirror stage. Lacan writes:

Now, this formal stagnation is akin to the most general structure of human knowledge, which constitutes the ego and objects as having the attributes of permanence, identity, and substance—in short, as entities or “things” that are very different from the gestalts that experience enables us to isolate in the mobility of the field constructed according to the lines of animal desire.

Indeed, this formal fixation, which introduces a certain difference of level, a certain discordance between man as organism and his Umwelt, is the very condition that indefinitely extends his world and his power, by giving his objects their instrumental polyvalence and symbolic polyphony, as well as their potential as weaponry.

What I have called paranoiac knowledge is therefore shown to correspond in its more or less archaic forms to certain critical moments that punctuate the history of man’s mental genesis, each representing a stage of objectifying identification.13

On this basis, Lacan briefly explores Charlotte Bühler’s theory of transitivism in children, and then presents a fresh sketch of the mirror stage:

What I have called the “mirror stage” is of interest because it manifests the affective dynamism by which the subject primordially identifies with the visual gestalt of his own body. In comparison with the still very profound lack of coordination in his own motor functioning, that gestalt is an ideal unity, a salutary imago. Its value is heightened by all the early distress resulting from the child’s intra-organic and relational discordance during the first six months of life, when he bears the neurological and humoral signs of a physiological prematurity at birth.

It is this capture by the imago of the human form—rather than Einfiihlung, the absence of which is abundantly clear in early childhood—that dominates the whole dialectic of the child’s behavior in the presence of his semblable between six months and two and a half years of age. Throughout this period, one finds emotional reactions and articulated evidence of a normal transitivism.

A child who beats another child says that he himself was beaten; a child who sees another child fall, cries. Similarly, it is by identifying with the other that he experiences the whole range of bearing and display reactions—whose structural ambivalence is clearly revealed in his behaviors, the slave identifying with the despot, the actor with the spectator, the seduced with the seducer.

There is a sort of structural crossroads here to which we must accommodate our thinking if we are to understand the nature of aggressiveness in man and its relation to the formalism of his ego and objects. It is in this erotic relationship, in which the human individual fixates on an image that alienates him from himself, that we find the energy and the form from which the organization of the passions that he will call his ego originates.14

Here, Lacan references Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, emphasizing the capture of the subject by its specular image. Later in the essay, Lacan remarks, “The question is whether the conflict between Master and Slave will find its solution in the service of the machine”.15 He continues to describe the implications of this lure of spatial identification, drawing on ethology:

The notion of the role of spatial symmetry in man’s narcissistic structure is essential in laying the groundwork for a psychological analysis of space, whose place I can merely indicate here. Animal psychology has shown us that the individual’s relation to a particular spatial field is socially mapped in certain species, in a way that raises it to the category of subjective membership. I would say that it is the subjective possibility of the mirror projection of such a field into the other’s field that gives human space its originally “geometrical” structure, a structure I would willingly characterize as kaleidoscopic.16

Lacan is proposing that the subject’s spatial encounter with its own specular image represents its entry into the social world, a point he develops further in “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function”, which we will now examine.

The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function (1949)

Lacan delivered “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” in Zurich on July 17, 1949, at the International Congress of Psychoanalysis. This essay is succinct and dense with his aphoristic style, and it is here that we find Lacan’s most poetic and precise formulations of the mirror stage. Lacan associates the mirror stage with what he calls the “I function”. This relationship is explained in the following passage:

The jubilant assumption of his specular image by the kind of being—still trapped in his motor impotence and nursling dependence—the little man is at the infans stage thus seems to me to manifest in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.

This form would, moreover, have to be called the “ideal-I”—if we wanted to translate it into a familiar register—in the sense that it will also be the rootstock of secondary identifications, this latter term subsuming the libidinal normalization functions. But the important point is that this form situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination, in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any single individual or, rather, that will only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming, no matter how successful the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve, as I, his discordance with his own reality.17

Lacan describes the “I” as a “primordial form” that exists prior to the ego’s “social determination”, a vector which he regards as a “fictional direction”. And this fictitious structure and vector of the ego-“I” will “only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming”. The term “asymptotic” means “a line that continually approaches a given curve but does not meet it at any finite distance”.18 Here, Lacan is invoking the spatial nature of ego-identification, and the fact that no matter which direction it decidedly moves upon, the “I” never intersects the axis of reality. The Greek root, asumptōtos, gives us yet another connotation: “not falling together”, or simply, “apt to fall”. The birth of the ego-“I” is thus a fall from the real, through a looking-glass, where the subject encounters the mirage of its form, and the fictional character of a so-called “self”.

Lacan proceeds to illustrate how the lure of spatial identification attains a temporal projection in the formation of a historical self:

This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the individual’s formation into history: the mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation—and, for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call an “orthopedic” form of its totality—and to the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure. Thus, the shattering of the Innenwelt to Umwelt circle gives rise to an inexhaustible squaring of the ego’s audits.19

The mirror stage is now presented as the inaugural drama of the human being, a “temporal dialectic” that moves from vital insufficiency to functional anticipation, in a process that marks the very production of fantasy. Lacan places the root of egoic fantasy in a perceptual discordance between its fragmented body that nevertheless assumes an orthopedic totality. This observation is analogous to Adi Da’s insight that “the ego is not an entity but an activity”, an activity he often describes as a “total psycho-physical” activity of “self-contraction”:

The ego is an activity, not an entity. The ego is the activity of avoidance, the avoidance of relationship.

Therefore, any thought, any function, anything that generates form, that appears as form, that seems to be form, is produced by the concentration of attention—or self-contraction. Thus, apart from “radical” self-understanding, all processes—even life itself—tend to become an obstruction. The root of all suffering is called the “ego”, as if it were a “thing”, an entity. But the ego is actually the activity of self-contraction—in countless forms, endured unconsciously. The unconsciousness is the key—not the acts of concentration themselves (which are only more or less functional). Apart from present-time conscious self-understanding, the self-contracted state is presumed to be the inevitable condition of life. That unconscious self-contraction creates separation, which manifests as identification (or the sense of separate self).

As Lacan points out, the ego functions as a “finally donned armor”, a reflexively protective mechanism that, in the presumption of its own separate identity, maintains perpetual alienation. This “rigid structure” gives rise to the “shattering” of the Innenwelt (inner world) and Umwelt (environment) in what Lacan terms a “primordial Dischord”. It is on this basis that Lacan says “the specular I turns into the social I”,20 where the field of the Other becomes perceptible via aggressivity:

This moment at which the mirror stage comes to an end inaugurates, through identification with the imago of one’s semblable and the drama of primordial jealousy . . . the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations.

It is this moment that decisively tips the whole of human knowledge into being mediated by the other’s desire, constitutes its objects in an abstract equivalence due to competition from other people, and turns the I into an apparatus to which every instinctual pressure constitutes a danger, even if it corresponds to a natural maturation process.21

Adi Da describes this dialectic of jealousy and fear as a hedge of enclosure, critiquing the mystical notion of “inwardness”:

Ultimately, all psycho-physical experience serves the separate being, the separate psycho-physical person that is “I” . . . Experience, or inwardness is the hedge around Narcissus, the enclosure of the self. The archetype of Narcissus, who avoids the world by gazing into a pond at his own image, is a metaphor for the ego, the independent self-mind. Like the pond, the mind is a reflective mechanism. Therefore, the ego or the self or Narcissus is a reflection, an illusion of independence. To enter into the realm of the mind, to persist in our flight toward subjectivity, our obsessive experience of separate self, is to be possessed of the self, not of God, no matter how profound the inward phenomena may seem to be at any time.22

Adi Da’s criticism of inwardness as a function of the Narcissistic gaze extends not only to traditional forms of mysticism but also to Jung’s preoccupation with archetypal images. The pastimes of Narcissus leave us locked in traces of self-image, gross and subtle fantasms that function as primary haunts.

Psychoanalysis in the Real

Having traced the development of the mirror stage to its alienating conclusion in the locus of the Other, Lacan now brings us to the radical import of psychoanalysis:

At this intersection of nature and culture, so obstinately scrutinized by the anthropology of our times, psychoanalysis alone recognizes the knot of imaginary servitude that love must always untie anew or sever.

For such a task we can find no promise in altruistic feeling, we who lay bare the aggressiveness that underlies the activities of the philanthropist, the idealist, the pedagogue, and even the reformer.

In the subject to subject recourse we preserve, psychoanalysis can accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of the “Thou art that,” where the cipher of his mortal destiny is revealed to him, but it is not in our sole power as practitioners to bring him to the point where the true journey begins.23

Lacan is referencing the Upanishadic utterance, Tat tvam asi,24 a mahavākya which asserts the primordial identity of the manifest being (ātman) with the transcendental real (Brahman). In the context of Vedanta, Tat tvam asi functions as an oral transmission that awakens the subject from imaginary identification to the non-dual nature of the real. Lacan thus implies that psychoanalysis can serve as a dialectical reversal of the mirror stage, undoing the firmament of imaginary identification and thus untying the “knot of imaginary servitude”. Therefore, the transcending of the misrecognition of the mirror stage allows for the radical recognition of the real—it is at this ecstatic limit, where the subject sees the “cipher of his mortal destiny” that Lacan says “the true journey begins”.

With this, Lacan is effectively positioning psychoanalysis as a preliminary to the Eastern conception of awakening to the real. Lacan looks forward from psychoanalysis and sets his gaze on the Upanishads. Adi Da looks back from the real to psychoanalysis by emphasizing the Oedipal complex as a block to spiritual development.25 How do we set our sights on the horizon of the unconscious and the real? How does a radical psychoanalysis proceed from its roots to a clinic of the real? We must await the foretold day of translation, when analysis not only meets its end but marks a passage to its future, where the hardened head of Narcissus cracks on the knee of listening, sounding its destiny to echo in the stone and mirror of the real.

This essay examines the spiritual autobiography of Avatar Adi Da Samraj through textual and personal perspectives. The first part of the essay traces the history of The Knee Of Listening, the evolution of its contents over three decades, and how it reflects the organic unfolding of Adi Da’s life and work. The second part of the essay explores the nature of Avatar as mythos and Adi Da’s language as mythopoetic narrative. This essay is informed by my history, both as a devotee and during my tenure as an editor for the Dawn Horse Press from 2009-2023.

Spiritual autobiographies represent a unique genre of literature. Most biographies of Spiritual Masters are written by disciples, whether during or after the lifetime of the Master. Occasionally, Masters write their own autobiography. Some well-known spiritual autobiographies that were influential in the West include Paramahamsa Yogananda’s classic, Autobiography of a Yogi (1946), Chögyam Trungpa’s Born In Tibet (1966), and Swami Muktananda’s Play of Consciousness (1972). To this list, we will add The Knee Of Listening as a remarkable contribution to the genre of spiritual autobiography, sure to become a 20th century classic.

I. An Parabola: Encountering Adi Da

The Knee Of Listening was first published in 1972 with the subtitle, “The Early Life and Radical Spiritual Teachings of Franklin Jones”. The book went through a number of revisions in subsequent years; the latest edition published in 2004 bears the subtitle “The Divine Ordeal Of The Avataric Incarnation Of Conscious Light”. The latest edition significantly expands upon the original publication at 821 pages—600 pages longer than the original page count of 271.1

The second edition of the original publication received a favorable foreword from Alan Watts along with an endorsement in which Watts states, “It looks like we have an Avatar here”2 and “It is obvious from all sorts of subtle details, that he knows what IT’s all about . . . a rare being”. The foreword and endorsement from Alan Watts come nearly a year before his passing in September 1973. The 2004 edition no longer features the foreword by Alan Watts, replaced by an appreciative and scholastic foreword from Jeffrey Kripal, professor of religious studies at Rice University.

In his foreword, Kripal describes his experience of darśana with Adi Da:

My “meeting” with Adi Da took the form of darśana (a traditional Hindu term for the formal “seeing” of a guru or deity, in which the essence of the guru or deity is understood to be communicated to the seer through the act of seeing itself—a kind of ocular communion or visionary sacrament, if you will). The darśana took place in a formal hall of Adi Da’s residence on the grounds of the Mountain Of Attention ashram. The room was filled with devotees chanting and sitting in contemplation. Adi Da himself was sitting in a large chair, directly in the center. He was clearly in a state of ecstasy: his eyes were rolled up, his fingers were forming some sort of mudra (a posture of the fingers and hands traditionally said to convey a particular state of mind or religious state), and he was sweating profusely. I had the distinct sense that he was intending to communicate his state of consciousness directly to all present, and  particularly to those who approached him one by one (including me), by the sheer force of his presence, which indeed was quite palpable.

I knelt down, offered a flower in the traditional manner, sat in darśana for a few minutes, and was then ushered out by my hosts. It was over as quickly as it had begun. As it turned out, however, it was hardly over, for whatever was communicated that night did not leave me easily or soon. For days, I felt as if my consciousness had somehow “shifted”, that it had been affected on levels of which I was only vaguely aware. This sense of a “shift” lasted for an entire week, before I returned to my more usual mode of functioning. That occasion of darśana was an encounter, in person, with the same force of being which informs Adi Da’s books, and which you are about to “meet” in The Knee Of Listening.3

In his writings, Adi Da describes darśana as the sacred sighting of the Realizer, emphasizing it as the principal means for spontaneous and direct entry into his enlightened state of consciousness, whether in his physical company or through a photograph4. Darśana is indeed a kind of a “visionary sacrament”, but it is much more than an ocular transmission—it is the tangible spiritual transmission from the Master to the heart and whole body of the devotee.

On this basis, Kripal summarizes his impression of Adi Da’s texts and teaching:

No reader professionally or personally invested in Asian forms of spirituality and concerned about their effective (as opposed to dysfunctional) translation into Western culture can afford to ignore The Knee Of Listening or the larger textual corpus in which it is now placed, that is, Adi Da’s twenty-three Source-Texts.5 In my opinion, this latter total corpus constitutes the most doctrinally thorough, the most philosophically sophisticated, the most culturally challenging, and the most creatively original literature currently available in the English language. Certainly there are even larger canons in Asia, but these are written and expressed in languages (primarily Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese) and interpreted in cultural frames that must remain permanently foreign to the contemporary English speaker and reader. What sets the twenty-three Source-Texts apart is the fact that they were written in English, and that this English idiom has been enriched by a kind of hybridized English-Sanskrit, and that a new type of mystical grammar has been created, embodied most dramatically (and, to the ego, jarringly) in Adi Da’s anti-ego capitalization practice, in which just about every grammatical move is nondualistically endowed with the status once imperially preserved in English for the non-existent “I”. Such a reading experience constantly calls upon one’s ability to think and feel beyond the socially constructed ego.6

Kripal’s portrait of Adi Da’s textual corpus illustrates Adi Da’s teaching not only as a unique dharmic exposition, but as a transcendental imposition on the ego and its limiting paradigms. Adi Da’s texts are imbued with a functional intention: to undermine the ego and speak directly to the heart. Adi Da’s writing is thus difficult to grasp—being at once poetic, authoritative, mystical, philosophical, confessional, scriptural, and revelatory. In the post-modern era of pop spirituality, Adi Da’s writing seem to present an unnecessary challenge and demand, requiring the reader to actually engage with the text as opposed to merely “reading” it intellectually.

The Knee Of Listening began as an autobiographical narrative, but the latest edition features three additional parts that expand on the thirty-two years that have lapsed between these publications. A brief overview of the contents of the 2004 edition of The Knee Of Listening helps us see the breadth of this text:

• Part One (“The Knee of Listening”) contains the entirety of the 1972 publication. This is the most accessible part of the text detailing Adi Da’s early-life, his school years at Columbia and Stanford, his “sadhana years” under the tutelage of Swami Rudrananda, Swami Muktananda, and Bhagavan Nityananda, and his “re-awakening” in 1970.

• Part Two is a new addition from the 1972 publication—it details Adi Da’s relationship to his spiritual lineage and contains his confessions of being the reincarnation of Ramakrishna-Vivekananda. Part Two also includes Adi Da’s commentary on the teachings of Swami Muktananda and Ramana Maharshi.

• Part Three describes two “yogic death” events in Adi Da’s life and their spiritually transformative impacts in his work. This is the most esoteric part of the text and will challenge readers who are unfamiliar with embodied spiritual transformations.7

• Part Four is a single essay that describes the essence of Adi Da’s “Way”, only five pages in length.

The first time I attempted to read The Knee Of Listening, I came away discouraged and devoid of comprehension—still, I was intrigued by Adi Da’s solemnity, authority, and intensity of purpose. I was 16 at the time, and it would be another two years before the living power of Adi Da’s spiritual transmission became fully evident in my life. I found the first pages of The Knee Of Listening to be more of an encounter than a “read”. While I did not yet appreciate the mode and nature of Adi Da’s communication, I was absolutely intrigued with a desire to understand him.

I remember showing my grandfather the 2004 edition, hoping he could help illumine the contents for me. He was a professor of history and remarkably well-read on Indian spirituality and philosophy. When I gave him the book, he glanced at the photo of Adi Da on the cover for a moment and remarked that he knew Adi Da was enlightened by looking at his eyes. The photo on the cover always attracted me, and is the reason why I kept the book by my bedside for two years. I was anticipating a future engagement.

II. Expansions and Editions: 1972 to 2004

There is always a lion at the gate of esoteric knowledge. These “lions” are not only guardians of truth, they can also be the demons of ignorance preventing access to deeper truths. In the case of Adi Da, attempts to understand his life and work routinely raise more questions than answers. Nonetheless, Adi Da addresses these questions directly and indirectly in his disclosures about the paradoxical, contradictory, and incomprehensible nature of his work.

The purpose of this essay is not to compare editions, but such comparisons are inevitable in any honest examination of Adi Da’s impressive, complex, and comprehensive oeuvre. The considerable expansion of the original text—alongside Adi Da’s many name changes and progressive establishment of Avatarhood—challenges literary, biographical, and spiritual conventions of every kind.

First, the literary issues: while revised editions of a text are normative, the significant expansion and even re-casting of one’s own autobiography is unusual. It leads us to ask, how did Franklin Jones become Adi Da? What is the “Avataric Incarnation of Conscious Light” and why are these appellations absent from the original text? Why did Alan Watts refer to Adi Da as an Avatar nearly 30 years before Adi Da ever used that description for himself? What comprises the additional 600 pages of The Knee Of Listening?

These questions point to an issue in the larger trend of Adi Da’s life and work: the nature of his teaching as a spontaneous and progressive unfolding in direct relationship to devotees. According to Adi Da, his teaching was generated from the point of view of Divine Enlightenment, without any egoically superimposed preconceptions. If Adi Da felt devotees were not understanding something, he would state it differently. If he felt devotees were misusing a practice he had given, he would remove it entirely or offer an elaboration on the nature of authentic practice. Thus, Adi Da’s philosophical and spiritual doctrines were established over time, at times apparently contradicting earlier teachings. The ever-changing shape of Adi Da’s doctrine is reflected in his frequent name changes, the numerous changes in naming of his church and tradition, and even Adi Da’s dramatically shifting physical appearance throughout the decades of his teaching-work. Adi Da’s life and work was truly experimental, but by no means inconclusive. In fact, his later textual works8 reflect a definitive doctrine and practice, the conclusions of a thirty-year ordeal of teaching.

The epilogue to The Knee Of Listening, originally titled, “The Man of Radical Understanding” contains one of the keys to understanding Adi Da. An expanded version of this essay is produced in the 2004 edition, with the amended title “I Am the One and Only Man of Radical Understanding”. In this essay, Adi Da describes his nature as a shape-shifter:

The Man of “Radical” Understanding requires no persistent expression, but His manner changes in every circumstance. His understanding adapts to the habit of every appearance. He adopts no visibility that persists. Moment to moment, He cannot be found apart—for, when Truth is Known, the One Who Knows It is unknown (or become Transparent in the Spiritually “Bright” Divine Heart).9

“Understanding” has a profound and technical meaning in Adi Da’s language—it is not merely an intellectual insight or the result of logical reasoning. Adi Da introduced this paradigm in his first public discourse of the same name, “Understanding”. Given in 1972 in Hollywood, CA, Adi Da presented “radical understanding” as a spiritual “re-cognition” into the nature of the ego as an unconscious activity of “self-contraction”.10 Upon understanding that the ego and its sufferings are entirely self-caused, one regains conscious control of the root-mechanism of self-contraction. One of Adi Da’s principal criticisms is the futility of seeking for Realization, because the Condition to be Realized is “always already the case”. Thus, Adi Da’s dharma on “understanding” is a clue regarding the level of comprehension he is asking from readers—a trans-rational and tacit recognition of Reality Itself.

The 2004 edition of The Knee of Listening expands with narratives of Adi Da’s life after 1972, especially regarding the “Yogic death events” of 1986 and 2000. These two events are given considerable import and include devotee testimonies (or leela). These three additional parts focus on Adi Da’s nature as Divine Avatar, progressively revealed in the form of his embodied spiritual transformations that function as ever-magnifying expressions of Realization. In this regard, the visionary sacrament of darśana was given increasing levels of importance in Adi Da’s teaching. Further, Adi Da’s spiritual transformations not only effected changes in his physical body, but profoundly influenced the nature and course of his work and teaching.

Adi Da describes his body as being spiritually transfigured by Divine Self-Realization, which he describes as the “enlightenment of the whole body”.11 As such, his body became the incarnate means for the same transformations to be effected in his devotees. This reflects the traditional understanding that by meditating on the Guru, the Guru’s realization is duplicated in the devotee through a process of spiritual transmission (or shaktipat)—or, stated simply, “you become what you meditate on”. Adi Da asserts that this principle of spiritual transmission and duplication continues even after his lifetime, and that a fundamental purpose of his birth was to establish the means (which he terms “agency”) for this spiritual process to be enacted and fulfilled as long as beings exist. The principal form of agency is Adi Da’s Adi Da’s body itself, ritually erected in life-size photographs and statues, upon which devotees express sacramental worship and practice meditation. This is also why all editions of The Knee Of Listening have featured prominent and striking photographs of Adi Da.12

The most significant difference between the original publication of the The Knee of Listening and the 2004 edition is Adi Da’s presentation of himself as Avatar—no longer only the “Guru” of the original publication or the “Siddha” of the following publications. However, the original text discusses the spiritual process as one of Guru-devotion and satsanga,13 alongside many other themes that remained a consistent cornerstone throughout Adi Da’s teaching.

The fact that Adi Da’s teaching evolved and even seemed to clarify itself over time is used by critics as an argument against Adi Da’s confessions of Avatarhood. However, this argument suffers from idealism in regards to Avatars and Realizers in general—particularly that (1) a Realizer’s teaching simply comes out of them in perfect summary form without further revision and (2) that a truly Realized being is omniscient and therefore never has to revise, clarify, or adjust teachings and that (3) Avatars are not human and therefore do not reflect the embodied realities of being human. At the root of these concerns is a failure to recognize the thoroughly esoteric nature and mythic function of Avatar.14 Therefore, the decoupling of these ideas is essential to understand Adi Da’s Avataric ontology, non-dual epistemology, and mythopoetic hermeneutic.

III. Autobiography or Autohagiography

Critics have referred to the later edition of The Knee Of Listening as a “hagiography”, claiming that Adi Da’s autobiographical narrative has become mythologized and embedded into a claim of exclusive Avataric authority. Lowe is one such critic who writes:

In later editions, Jones' childhood is presented as utterly exceptional...It is clear that Jones' autobiography might best be understood as a kind of auto-hagiography, since its purpose is to preserve for posterity a sanitized, mythologized, and highly selective account of Jones' life and spiritual adventures.15

Lowe’s critique was published in 1996, so we assume he is referring to the 1995 edition which already featured some of the expansions discussed earlier. Lowe uses the term “auto-hagiography” as a pejorative, implying illegitimacy and fabrication, whereas an autobiography should by conventional literary standards represent the “facts”. The intensely metaphysical nature of Adi Da’s life and teaching already challenges established notions of an autobiography—stretching the boundaries of fact and of fiction. For example, Adi Da asserts that Franklin Jones was a “fictional character”, a persona that he consciously assumed the identity of in order to teach human beings.16 Does this make his autobiography real or imaginary, factual or fictitious? When, how, and why did Franklin Jones become Adi Da? The Knee Of Listening thus exhibits a paradoxical ontological status only because its subject does.

Hagiography, being an established genre of religious literature since antiquity, is a biographical portrayal of a religious figure. Written by disciples, and essentially emic (or “insider”) in perspective, hagiographical accounts are viewed critically in modern times because they lack “objectivity”. However, the function of hagiography is not to establish objective facts. Rather, hagiography intentionally indulges in embellishment as a mythopoetic device in order to illustrate the transpersonal qualities of the subject and to evoke a meaningful response in the reader. In India, spiritual biographies of a Master are almost always hagiographical in nature. Tibetan Buddhism has an extensive hagiographical genre known as nam thar, in which the lives of famous Masters are described by close disciples, and where mythical embellishment is accepted as a literary device for expressing the metaphysical qualities of a Master and their Realization.

The 2004 edition of The Knee Of Listening does contain narratives from devotees, but these narratives are clearly indicated as such and only form a small portion of the text, a far cry from a hagiographical account of Adi Da’s life. Furthermore, to my knowledge, no Master has ever written their own hagiography. This raises the question of whether an autobiography can be a hagiography—it does seem possible (though unusual) in theory. The primary motivation of Adi Da’s autobiographical expansion, as reflected in its contents, is to provide an account of Adi Da’s life and work at the turn of the millennium, since the original text was written at the very outset of Adi Da’s role as a teacher. The expanded edition now accounts for radical changes and evolutions in Adi Da’s life and teaching, where the original text reads more like a traditional autobiography. Therefore, the critical issue is not an argument on the nature of the text itself, but everything the text suggests, implies, and directly states. Critics are not upset that The Knee Of Listening fails to conform to their autobiographical expectations—they are upset with the contents, the message, the person.

To clarify confusion, Adi Da opens his 2004 autobiography with what he calls a “First Word”, titled, “Do Not Misunderstand Me”. In this essay, he attempts to deconstruct the common misconceptions about his teaching and status, while criticizing the tendency toward cultism. In one such passage, Adi Da writes:

I do not tolerate the so-called “cultic” (or ego-made, and ego-reinforcing) approach to Me. I do not tolerate the seeking ego’s “cult” of the “man in the middle”. I am not a self-deluded ego-man—making much of himself, and looking to include everyone-and-everything around himself for the sake of social and political power. To be the “man in the middle” is to be in a Man-made trap, an absurd mummery of “cultic” devices that enshrines and perpetuates the ego-“I” in one and all. Therefore, I do not make or tolerate the religion-making “cult” of ego-Man. I do not tolerate the inevitable abuses of religion, of Spirituality, of Truth Itself, and of My Own Person (even in bodily human Form), that are made (in endless blows and mockeries) by ego-based mankind when the Great Esoteric Truth of devotion to the Adept-Realizer is not rightly understood and rightly practiced.17

This passage is one of countless such passages in Adi Da’s literature criticizing the cultic tendency in human beings, positing cult-making as the inevitable act of ego-possessed individuals, and differentiating it from the authentic Guru-devotee pedagogy. He defends against criticisms that his confessions of Avataric status are a form of self-delusion and aggrandizement and disavows the notion of being a cult leader, which he describes as the scapegoat ritual of the “man in the middle”. Finally, Adi Da affirms the great tradition of Guru devotion as the ancient and esoteric means for Realization while calling for a right understanding and living practice of it. Five paragraphs later, Adi Da gives another admonishment:

Therefore, no one should misunderstand Me. By Avatarically Revealing and Confessing My Divine Status to one and all (and All), I am not indulging in self-appointment, or in illusions of grandiose Divinity. I am not claiming the “Status” of the “Creator-God” of exoteric (or public, and social, and idealistically pious) religion. Rather, by Standing Firm in the Divine Position (As I Am)—and (Thus and Thereby) Refusing to be approached as a mere man, or as a “cult”-figure, or as a “cult”-leader, or to be in any sense defined (and, thereby, trapped, and abused, or mocked) as the “man in the middle”—I Am Demonstrating the Most Perfect Fulfillment (and the Most Perfect Integrity, and the Most Perfect Fullness) of the Esoteric (and Most Perfectly Non-Dual) Realization and Reality.18

Thus, Adi Da establishes a thoroughly esoteric definition of Avatarhood, decoupling it from notions of the Judeo-Christian Creator-God, and paradoxically affirming his “Divine Status” as ontologically non-dual. In particular, Adi Da differentiates the positive sacrifice of the Avatar from the negative sacrifice of the scapegoat ritual. While this passage may be less than satisfying for Adi Da’s critics, who see his claims as nothing more than megalomania and subsequent cultism, I believe an esoteric and even imaginative understanding of Adi Da’s Avataric status is the key to unlocking a greater understanding. The puzzles Adi Da presents in his teaching are not riddles to be resolved, but transcendental koans, made for puzzlement, until awakening.

IV. Avataric Mythopoesis: Fictional Character and Divine Person

Adi Da described “Franklin Jones” as a “fictional character”, and in doing so, universally extended a profound criticism of egoity. In our self-defining identities, we are all kinds of fictional characters revolving around a presumed identity, whirling in a masked mummery. In psychoanalytical thought, the “persona” is an identity worn as an unconscious compensation. “Persona” comes from mid-18th century Latin, literally meaning “mask” and “character played by an actor”. Adi Da refers to egoic life as masked play-acting that he calls “mummery”. A “mummer” is a pantomime, an actor in a masked mime. A “mummery” is a performance by mummers, a “ridiculous ceremonial”.

The individual, separate and separative life is an imagination—a reflection in the pond of Narcissus. Yet, the water itself remains to be recognized, as it is. Adi Da described how his function as Guru was to “stir the pond” so that Narcissus would awaken from a self-reflected life. The reflecting pond is a poetic image that describes the ego and the nature of Reality. Adi Da’s writings prominently display mythic ideas as an image of spiritual concern, from the myths of Oedipus and Narcissus to the mythopoesis of Avatar.

The Bhagavad Gita states that an Avatar is born to restore righteousness in the dark time, when the world is consumed by spiritual ignorance. The Avataric concept is elaborated in Hindu mythology, which describes ten such incarnations of the Divine. The first three are non-human—a fish (matsya), a turtle (kurma), and a boar (varaha). The next three Avatars become increasingly human—a half-man / half-lion (narasimha), a dwarf (vamana), a warrior (parashurama). The seventh, eighth, and ninth Avatars are largely regarded as historical persons with associated mythologies—Rama (the King of Ayodhya and subject of Ramayana), Krishna (source of Vaishnavism whose life story is told in Krishna Leela), and Gautama Buddha (the historical Sakyamuni Buddha). The tenth Avatar is known as “Kalki” and is prophesied as a future appearance.19

Avatar has always been a myth and all Avatars have their mythologies. Adi Da placed himself within the Avataric mythologem, and in doing so he employed the age-old hermeneutic of mythopoesis. The question is no longer whether we accept Adi Da as an historical Avatar, or whether his claims are factual or fictional—but whether we can imagine an Avataric archetype appearing within the dream.

In one passage, Adi Da describes the world as an unconscious dream-image in which the Avatar appears:

The “world” does not want to be Awakened.
Does the dreamer ever try to awaken anyone or everyone in his or her dreams?
It does not occur to the dreamer to do so.
Those who appear in dreams are not there to be awakened . . .
[The world] is the manifestation of sleep.
It is unconscious . . .
The “world”, in all of its wanting to persist, is not entirely wanting the Divine Avatar to Appear, and, Thus, to Awaken all-and-All from the dreaming sleep of Being.
Nevertheless, I Am here.20

Adi Da sees the world of ego-bound humanity as a manifestation of unconsciousness, a dream-like illusion. As the Divine Avatar, he appears within the illusion to awaken the dreamer from sleep. As Jung clearly established, the images of dreams are mythic symbols. The “Divine Avatar” is precisely such a mythopoetic symbol, a mirage of Truth in a spiritual desert, a watery palindrome of Reality Itself.

Mythopoesis, or the act of creating a mythology, has occupied humans since time immemorial. J.R.R. Tolken is credited with re-introducing the device in the 1930s. Tolkien’s work is a clear example of modern myth-making. He not only wrote fantasy novels, but mapped mythic worlds complete with languages. Chögyam Trungpa is said to have referred to Tolkien’s work as a form of terma, a word that literally means “hidden treasure”. Terma forms an important category of revealed teachings in Tibetan Buddhism, where a treasure-revealer (tertön) discovers hidden teachings in dreams and spiritual states of consciousness.21 Terma is a form of mythology, a teaching-language constructed from the symbolic world of dreams and transpersonal states of being. Dharma as terma is thus one example of a mythopoetic hermeneutic in spiritual teachings.

Adi Da’s teaching functions as terma in the sense of being an esoteric revelation that is “Avatarically Self-Revealed”. Adi Da’s writing is thus infused with its own mythopoetic conventions—a “hybridized Sanskrit-English grammar” with “anti-ego capitalization” and an unconventional use of punctuation. His non-ordinary speech is grounded in his non-dual identity and criticism of egoic communication:

Ordinary speech and written language are a “theatrically”-conceived mode of communication, which (as such) is “played” upon the “fiction” of an ego-“I” . . .22

In criticizing ordinary speech, Adi Da asserts his linguistic conventions as an intentional undermining of egoity—employing a hermeneutical structure that revolves around the centerpole of Reality, rather than the fiction of egoity. This is accomplished within a mythopoetic narrative that employs word as image. As Adi Da writes, “I Spontaneously Uttered the ‘Picture’ that is My every ‘Source-Text’”.23 He elaborates how his capitalization schema functions as intentional imaging:

The uppercase Written Words Represent (or Picture) the Reality-Truth of Heart-Significance—and the lowercase words, by comparison, characteristically achieve significance as indicators (or representations, or pictures) of conditional (or limited) existence.24

Image is the sign and symbol of myth, and myth is the language of spirituality. That which transcends the conventions of rational conceptualization cannot be adequately rendered in conceptual thought, but it can be seen. Thus, Adi Da’s writing also functions as a visionary sacrament, a mythological image that points to itself in transcendental realism.

Adi Da’s writing is deeply self-referential. He refers to himself with the pronouns “My” and “Me” (always capitalized) and discusses his own texts within texts. There is an intricate weaving of the textual corpus within itself, with large portions of shared essays featured across texts. Aside from organizing and structuring his corpus, Adi Da made great effort to reveal his nature, qualities, process, and intentions in considerable detail. Adi Da’s usage of the pronouns “My” and “Me” is perhaps the most “offensive” part of his writing to those unacquainted with his esoteric hermeneutic. His usages appear resonant with the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna describes himself with the same pronouns, typically capitalized in English translations. Was Adi Da intentionally mirroring the Avataric narrative of the Bhagavad Gita in his own writing? There is good reason to think so, especially when we consider that Adi Da published his own rendering of passages from the Bhagavad Gita in early texts and later re-worked these renderings into an essay he titled, “The Divine Avataric Self-Disclosure”. In using the words “My” and “Me”, Adi Da is not promoting an exaggerated view of himself, rather he is communicating a universal and transpersonal identity, beyond the fiction of “I”. Adi Da also collapses any sense of negative hierarchy when he makes the statement, “I Am you”, making clear that his “identity” is not exclusive or separate but universally identical to the true nature of all.

An autobiography is naturally self-referential, but Adi Da’s autobiography is self-aware in meta-narrative. Self-referentiality is another feature of mythopoesis—its imaging is circular and conscious of itself. Adi Da’s autobiography is precisely of such an uroboric shape—it bends upon itself as the reader ends upon it, drawing a sphere of deepening consideration. Was Adi Da intentionally crafting a self-referential mythology or was he using the conventions of mythology to reveal a universal truth? Adi Da was well-read in the works of C.G. Jung25 and Joseph Campbell, and even wrote a commentary on Campbell’s presentation of myth26 titled “Myth is a Call to Ecstasy”. In this essay, Adi Da describes the sacred nature and function of myth:

Mythology (like art, ritual, philosophy, and the techniques of ecstasy) is one of the primary languages of religion (or of sacred culture, in the broadest sense). And the (inherently sacred) function of mythology is to “picture” (rather than to “explain”) the Great Means, the methods (or techniques), the processes, the stages, the obstacles (or tests), the Helping encounters, the intermediary goals, and the Ultimate Goal of the religious Quest (or the sacred Way).27

If myth pictures the sacred, then mythopoesis is the natural hermeneutic of spiritual literature. Adi Da differentiates between image-making and explanation, placing myth in the realm of imagination, not logic. Such notions have been passionately echoed by the Romantics who swooned in the imaginal world of myth and meter.

Adi Da continues his commentary:

Mythology is one of the languages of ecstasy. Therefore, the statements (or propositions) of mythology (and even of religious and Spiritual philosophy) are not (if properly understood) mere statements of fact (or of universal and, as mere matters of fact, always the case “truths”). Rather, they are ecstatic Revelations, or expressions of a state of Realization that (if actually Realized) presently transcends the world, the body, and much (or, in the Ultimate case, even all) of mind.28

The word “myth” comes from the Greek mythos, literally meaning “utterance”. In an essay describing his textual hermeneutics, Adi Da uses the word “utterance” four times:

The “Source-Texts of My Direct Self-Utterance are the Always-Living Word of Reality Itself . . .

The “Source-Texts” of My Divine Avataric Word are . . . the Always Direct and Non-mediated Self-Utterance of My Real Person . . .

[My Divine Avataric Word] Is The Direct Self-Utterance of Reality Itself . . .

My Divine Avataric Word of Direct Self-Utterance is Spoken from the . . . Perfect Self-Position of Reality Itself . . . .29

In the “Boundless Self-Confession”, Adi Da uses the word “Utterance” again in the hybridized phrase “Revelation-Utterances” and in reference to his art as “Transcendental Realist Utterances”. Furthermore, Adi Da cast his entire person into mythos when he stated, “I Am Simply the Utterance of the ‘Bright’”.30

The Roman historian Sallust said, “Myths are things that never happened but always are”. If we approach The Knee Of Listening as a mythopoetic narrative rather than a compilation of biographical “facts”, then we unlock the power and sacred meaning of its communication. We will also see it differently—not as mere words to be logically assimilated, but images and pictures to be visioned, a transmission to be felt, ecstasy to be experienced. Thus, “Franklin Jones” becomes a fiction of character and “Adi Da” the reality of Divine Person.

V. Rites of Transmission

Adi Da’s life and teaching calls for an esoteric and spiritually-awakened form of understanding that transcends rational, binary, and linear modes of comprehension. He says, “The Great Statements and Myths can be properly ‘understood’ only in ecstasy (or Samadhi).” In other words, our understanding of Adi Da and our appreciation of his mythos requires a transformation of view and genuine Communion.

Spiritual texts are coded communications that require initiatory rites of transmission to be rightly understood. In the Tibetan tradition, texts are recited aloud by teachers. Constituting an “oral transmission” (rlung) of the practice they describe, recitation is considered necessary for the growth and fruition of the practice. Adi Da’s texts function as agency of themselves, it is self-transmitted to the reader who participates in it. Therefore, the open-minded study of Adi Da’s teaching has the potential to become an initiatory rite of transmission.

The Knee Of Listening came to life for me one evening after a spiritual experience that I later came to recognize as Adi Da’s spiritual transmission. After this ecstatic experience of love and bliss, I decided to open the The Knee Of Listening to a random page, hoping to understand it once and for all. I opened to a passage that read:

Love-Bliss is simply Perfect Presence,
for Reality is That Which is Unqualifiedly Present.
Present Reality is Conscious As Love-Bliss.31

The words spoke directly to my experience, and transmitted it again. I began to feel a living force in Adi Da’s words, a relational energy that felt conscious and intimate. I felt somehow seen and known by this force, and I soon discovered, able to engage with it. I came to know this force through its observable characteristics and pattern of movement—like a pressure above the head that blissfully descended into the body, filling the heart with “Love-Bliss” and the body with a felt-quality of Light. I could breathe it and become dissolved in it—and this force emanated from Adi Da’s words, photos, and videos. Later that year, I was able to sit with Adi Da through a live darshan occasion broadcasted through the internet, and all my experiences of his transmission were confirmed and deepened.

This is not to suggest that such experiences are somehow necessary to read The Knee Of Listening. But it is to point out how initiatory transmission can unveil a previously coded comprehension. This is the mystery of engaging with Adi Da’s texts, as a reading of his words is an encounter with his person, and it unfolds according to its own laws. For every person, it will be different, unique, unpredictable. Adi Da says he is perpetually engaged in an “eternal conversation” with everyone who receives his words. This invitation to spiritual intimacy is fundamental to Adi Da’s work—as he summarily stated in his earliest talks: “I offer you a relationship, not a technique”.

Thus, The Knee Of Listening is more than an autobiography, hagiography, or mythic narrative, even while it employs all of these conventions. The Knee Of Listening is a living communication that asks to be felt in the quiet spaces beyond reason, to be seen with the eye of spirit, to be heard with the ear of the heart.

As Aldous Huxley wrote in The Perennial Philosophy:

The Logos passes out of eternity into time for no other purpose than to assist the beings, whose bodily form he takes, to pass out of time to eternity. If the Avatar’s appearance upon the stage of history is enormously important, this is due to the fact that by his teaching he points out, and by his being a channel of grace and divine power he actually is, the means by which human beings may transcend the limitations of history.32