Ten Thousand Behaviors (Kim Hyung-kyung's Psychological Working-Through Essay) 2/3
Byun Chan-woo
Apparently I have just too many attachments still folded away..Two posts won't even come close to enough..
I'm guessing it'll take around five rounds.. First let me tuck it all in and erase them one by one..
- Letting Go of the Authority Figure Inside (Not Seeking Recognition or Support)
After taking up the job of being a novelist, when I was sometimes asked, "Why do you write?",
I would tell younger writers I started writing because it seemed like something I could do well, something I liked.
To fellow practitioners I would say: I believed that within the frame of literature, one could understand humans and the world more deeply.
On the way home after a meal, I suddenly had a chilling realization. The fact was: I had been trying to prove my own existence through writing. Everyone has a reason for living in this world, and they try to prove their existence with acts that match that reason. I seemed to feel that by writing, I had been granted permission to exist in one corner of this world. The next thing I realized was that, through the writing I had done, I wanted to receive recognition and support from someone in authority.
"I want to make my literary debut soon and bring glory to Professor Hwang Sun-won."
Our class was the last group of students to be taught fiction by Professor Hwang Sun-won.
Once I saw what unconscious dynamics had been at work in my immature thinking, I found my face flushing even alone. That the professor's honor had nothing to do with my debut, that I had wrapped my desire to be recognized by him in such language — it all became clearly visible.
Writing is not a means to be recognized or supported; it is part of my life, a process of self-realization, a way to share my experience with readers. All I needed to care about was how to communicate well with readers.
I came to accept, down to the deepest part of my heart, that there is no reason to prove my existence to others or to get their permission for it, and no need to have my life approved by anyone.
If amateurs work to be recognized and loved, professionals do work that is useful and enjoyable for themselves. If amateurs compete with others, professionals compete only with themselves. If amateurs leap in with "let's see this through to the end", professionals work with the mindset that they can step away from the work at any time. That decisive difference seems to be tied to whether or not there is a sense of deficiency felt within.
- Sending Off the Love-Beggar (Autonomy and Self-Use)
She was overcoming a weak stomach each time she chewed her food, breaking through her own limits and expanding her life proactively. I, on the other hand, was tied to the fact that my stomach was weak, turning my head away from the fishy smell of mung beans, bound up in my prejudices about food and my own limits.
"Self-use" is a term that corresponds to the psychoanalytic term "mother-use". A child, from the start, uses the mother in an exploitative way. From inside the womb, and long after being born, the child uses the mother as a kind of host. They say how easily the child can use the mother shapes the child's mental structure differently. But a baby who, for whatever reason, cannot use the mother, ends up using the self — sucking a finger, standing in front of a mirror and rocking the body, soothing oneself. (Selfies, or masturbation —)
I had believed I had lived fairly autonomously, but it turned out that this was the same kind of self-use a baby does. After leaving behind the dependency, I had to learn again how to use the self in an adult way. First, to love oneself, to become a person full of love, and to share the overflowing love with others — I came to see that this is what loving is. Until the time when dependency still remained, all the "loving" I had done was really begging for love.
"Don't beg for love — love."
"Until you try, you don't know what you can do."
The heroes of myth have long been telling us that everyone must become the hero of their own life. They were showing, through story, that one must set one's own vision and proactively lead one's life.
"Wherever you go, if you become the master of your own mind, that very place is truth." (Linji-lu)
To be the master of your own mind, to be the hero of your own life — that was the meaning of being an adult as I understood it.
- The Wise Person Is Like the Foolish One. (Staying with Not-Knowing and Confusion)
I seemed to see just how dangerous thoughts like "I am right" or "I know" really are.
If prejudice is a wall of the mind, then conviction might be a prison of the mind. As the fact of "not knowing" settled into my body through working-through and became comfortable, the thought of "I am right" naturally disappeared. With the thought of being right gone, I no longer judged or evaluated other people.
I also checked how I had wasted life pouring attention onto worldly affairs that were neither important nor necessary.
Going further, "revealing what is lacking and insufficient" was the work of dismantling the persona and the idealized self-image, of shedding the defense mechanisms of narcissism and intellectualization.
When the social convention — "in a cutthroat competitive society, exposing your weakness is just handing ammunition to your rivals" — surfaced, I could confirm that this too was the language of defense.
And then: "leaving past mistakes and inadequacies alone".
I could see that the desire to fix everything cleanly and beautifully was narcissism, or anxiety.
"It is only when we stay in a state of not-knowing and confusion that we come to see we live in a world complex and mysterious beyond what we can imagine."
I don't know exactly what the "prajna wisdom" spoken of in Buddhist scripture or the "wisdom from above" in the Bible is, but I felt I could tell that it's different from the knowledge humans build up to defend against anxiety.
"The deeply wise person is like a fool."
