op cit, pp54-56



In our attempt to justify the recourse to hermeneutics that are already constituted—that of the phenomenology of religion and that of psychoanalysis—we suggested that their conflict might well be not only a crisis of language but, deeper still, a crisis of reflec­tion: to destroy the idols, to listen to symbols—are not these, we asked, one and the same enterprise? Indeed, the profound unity of the demystifying and the remythicizing of discourse can be seen only at the end of an ascesis of reflection, in the course of which the debate dramatizing the hermeneutic field shall have become a dis­cipline of thinking.

One trait of this discipline is already clear to us: the two enter­prises which we at first opposed to one another—the reduction of illusions and the restoration of the fullness of meaning—are alike in that they both shift the origin of meaning to another center which is no longer the immediate subject of reflection: "conscious­ness"—the watchful ego, attentive to its own presence, anxious about self and attached to self. Thus hermeneutics, approached from its most opposed poles, represents a challenge and a test for reflection, whose first tendency is to identify itself with immediate consciousness. To let ourselves be torn by the contradiction between these divergent hermeneutics is to give ourselves up to the wonder that puts the reflection in motion: it is no doubt necessary for us to be separated from ourselves, to be set off center, in order finally to know what is signified by the I think, I am.

We thought we had resolved the antinomy of myth and philos­ophy by appealing to interpretation itself for the mediation between myth and philosophy or, in a broader sense, between symbols and reflection. But that mediation is not given, it is to be constructed.

It is not given like a ready-made solution. The dispossession of the ego, which psychoanalysis more than any other hermeneutics demands of us, is the first achievement of reflection that reflection does not understand. But the phenomenological interpretation of the sacred, to which psychoanalysis seems to be diametrically op­posed, is no less foreign to the style and fundamental intention of the reflective method; does it not oppose a method of transcendence to the method of immanence of reflective philosophy? Does not the sacred, manifested in its symbols, seem to pertain to revelation rather than to reflection? Whether one looks back to the will to power of the Nietzschean man, to the generic being of the Marxist man, to the libido of the Freudian man, or whether one looks ahead to the transcendent home of signification which we designate here by the vague term the "sacred," the home of meaning is not con­sciousness but something other than consciousness.

Both hermeneutics pose therefore the same crucial question: Can the dispossession of consciousness to the profit of another home of meaning be understood as an act of reflection, as the first gesture of reappropriation? This is the question that remains in sus­pense; it is more radical than the question of the coexistence of sev­eral styles of interpretation, or the whole crisis of language in which the hermeneutic conflict is set.

We suspect that these three "crises"—crisis of language, crisis of interpretation, crisis of reflection—can only be overcome together. In order to become concrete, i.e. equal to its richest contents, re­flection must become hermeneutic; but there exists no general her­meneutics. This aporia sets us in movement: would it not be one and the same thing to arbitrate the war of hermeneutics and to en­large reflection to the dimensions of a critique of interpretations? Is it not by one and the same movement that reflection can become concrete reflection and that the rivalry between interpretations can be comprehended, in the double sense of the term: justified by re­flection and embodied in its work?

For the moment our perplexity is great. What is offered to us is a three-term relation, a figure with three heads: reflection, interpre­tation understood as restoration of meaning, interpretation under­stood as reduction of illusion. No doubt we shall have to penetrate quite deeply into the conflict between interpretations before we see appear, as a requirement of the very war of hermeneutics, the means of grounding the three together in reflection. But in its turn reflection will no longer be the positing, as feeble as it is peremp­tory, as sterile as it is irrefutable, of the I think, I am: it will have become concrete reflection; and its concreteness will be due to the harsh hermeneutic discipline.

Hi t, 
Is it expensive ? I'm kinda broke Apparently one must have a one on one teacher for this stuff. 
Also not much of a religious lad over here and Tibetans are heavy on Devas and Hobbits and such  

Any GOOD link for dummies like me to read on Dzogchen? 

I did try to wrap my head around the 6 Realms model but I just keep laughing at Mind pondering all this stuff. At the end THIS either Is or Isn't and the rest is kind of a dream anyway until you hit your head into something and realize you are very much alive ouch! 

At the moment im mostly "chop wood, carry water" with fellow humans who know nothing about any of this stuff we fine folks ponder about here