ABSTRACT
Building from our presentation of Nagarjuna’s teachings in Chapter 2, we turn in this chapter to a closer engagement with Freud’s discussion of Nirvana in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Like Nagarjuna’s, Freud’s theory can be read as a non-dual, paradoxical principle because the tendency toward drive satisfaction, or the elimination of tensions, associated with sexual intercourse (Psyche), stems from the same Mind linked to mental defenses against the drives. The key to Freud’s complex analysis is found in his discussion of the constancy principle. This is how, for Freud, the subject of the sexual drive tolerates a margin of pleasurable and unpleasant tensions and alternates between these and the lowering of tension. The constancy principle is the workings of a productive or life-affirming rather than a nihilistic or destructive function of the death drive. We propose adopting a specifically Caodong Chan approach to meditation to develop Freud’s reference to constancy and Nirvana. As opposed to the common understanding of meditation practice as a form of thought repression and affect suppression that stalls the symbolization of imaginary thinking in speech in the personal experience of analysis, Chan mindfulness observes from within the experience of feeling and jouissance. This adds an element of stability to cognition through a form of knowing that facilitates access to Unconscious knowing and free-floating attention for the analyst.
