“Planetarium instead of space”

Only very rarely, maybe once every few years, someone alone suddenly answers: “fear.” I think this is the most honest answer. And maybe the only one that is possible at all. Only this is not even fear, but something even more – a deep horror before the infinity of the Universe, which we are unable to comprehend and realize. Yes, we are trying to comprehend the Universe, to study it, but the possibilities of science are also too small in comparison with the vastness of the Universe. And when they are not enough, we can only defend ourselves against this vast and unimaginable infinity. And where defense mechanisms are activated, science ends. And we are trying to turn space into a planetarium, to make it commensurate with our own scale, homely, cozy. We put the stars into shapes that we understand and come up with constellations. And we populate the world with infinitely powerful, but at least relatively understandable, imaginable beings.

We act in the same way in relation to the microcosm – to man and his inner world. We build some myths, archetypes. And they even explain something, give us some ideas about complexes, fantasies. But in a sense, all this is the same constellations in the planetarium, the same attempt to domesticate something huge and unimaginable. Therefore, for me, psychoanalysis is always a journey into the unknown. Freud was convinced that the unconscious is infinite, like the macrocosm, and postulated the impossibility of finally understanding it, embracing it with reason. Yes, our mind can move in this understanding, transferring some parts of our experience from the category of the unconscious to the category of the conscious. But the scale of this movement is probably comparable to the launch of a space rocket to the Moon or even Mars. It seems to be very far, but for the infinite Universe – negligible. In principle, everything remains the same distant, infinite and unknowable.

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• Psychoanalysis: dialogue with the unconscious

Freud’s other most important thought is that the experience we repress is being repressed not only into the far “back streets” of our unconscious, but also into the outside world. And from there it returns to us in the form of transformed, distorted images that continue to haunt us. Take stories about aliens that abduct people and threaten our world – this is a clear transformation of that very human horror before the infinity of the cosmos. And that means, when trying to communicate with supernatural forces and beings, a person interacts with himself, with his inner world.

Here it is important to distinguish between the unconscious and the mystical, magical. The unconscious is part of our nature. And magic and mysticism are part of our culture, rituals, attempts to introduce meanings. Say, I traveled a lot in the Altai Mountains and I am familiar with the ancient shamanic rituals there. There you need to cut figures out of wood. This is a long process, you invest time and effort into it, and gradually you enter a state of altered consciousness. And as if you come into contact with the spirits of mountains, streams, forests – to which these figures are sacrificed. In fact, this is also an interaction with your own inner world. And it is not necessarily associated with horror, it can be associated with hope. A person opens up some parts of himself, and this can make his life easier. To give confidence, strength, to help in the work, as before, for example, it helped in hunting. But a person sees in this a confirmation that external forces exist – after all, the rituals of communicating with them helped!

With the help of rituals, mysticism, magic, we are trying to protect ourselves from the infinity with which we have to live. The simplest example is dreams, which continue to be a great mystery. We have a strange, disturbing dream, and we quickly grab onto the dream book. This is the path of rituals, the path of mysticism. And there is another way – to turn to psychoanalysis and, starting from the dream, to establish a more serious and deeper contact with your unconscious.

From a psychoanalytic point of view, there is another very important point. From the moment of birth, the child is in the mother’s universe. This is a friendly universe for each of us. We are its center, everything helps us, everything revolves around us. And everyone unconsciously wants to return to this infantile state of the center of the maternal universe, where miracles happen and all our questions are resolved, all our needs are satisfied. After all, all prayers, all magical rituals are ultimately aimed at this – to satisfy our wishes, to call for miracles that we need. But there is also a dangerous contradiction here. After all, that same maternal universe is not always only friendly. When a mother leaves and does not return for a long time or does not hear the cries of her child, he experiences a horror akin to the fear of death. And the mother universe becomes hostile, destroying, the child in it is absolutely helpless. I will express a strange, perhaps controversial thought. I am an atheist and do not believe in miracles. But if you try to imagine that a person suddenly acquires the ability to always and in everything receive help from above, then I feel sorry for such a person. He returns to his mother’s universe – and, therefore, to a state of complete helplessness, when nothing depends on him. For me, this is mental death.

Returning to rituals, I want to say that they can be useful – to the extent that they contribute to establishing contact with one’s unconscious, one’s experience, repressed outside and transformed. But very often they turn from a way to establish contact into a way to avoid it. They replace the communication of a person with a part of his “I” hidden from him, and then, of course, they do not help anything.

As I said, I am an atheist. And the infinity of the Universe means for me the infinity of the possibility of its knowledge. This, it seems to me, is the highest meaning of life: to move, to open new horizons. Their expansion, the constant going beyond their comfort zone is very difficult. But it is possible. And above all – thanks to the communication of the unconscious and conscious components of our nature. With each step, getting closer to something new, sorting out your projections into the outside world along the way and understanding yourself better – this is the main point. And the possibilities of finding it, fortunately, are inexhaustible.