But what is this nothingness that we aspire to? Is it emptiness? Of course not. Nothingness is not, the opposite of being is not emptiness. The opposite of being is freedom.

The opposite of being is freedom.

I want you to understand this. Nothingness is freedom. And that’s why we have nothingness as a capacity of our consciousness because it has evolutionary advantages. It is a capacity of our consciousness and evolutionary advantages.

Had nothingness been destructive, had nothingness been empty, had nothingness been a dead end, evolution would not have allowed consciousness to become a nothingness machine and nothingness generated.

To understand consciousness, we must understand the negating power of consciousness and how this negating power underlies the self.

Nothingness, the self is one huge nothingness.

I opened with a statement by Jeffrey Seinfeld that this schizoied core, this emptiness, this nothingness at the heart of the self, this identity of not being is actually an engine of accomplishments, of ideals, of striving, of efforts, of energy, of joy, of cheer, of happiness.

Seinfeld considers the empty core as a positive thing, not negative if it’s not associated with trauma.

So self is founded on emptiness which is essentially not empty but it’s nothingness, it’s the negation of being.

And so when we consider for example questioning and reflection, yes, we consider question and reflection.

We can ask yourself what does it mean to reflect on nothing? What does it mean to question nothing?

Our very language betrays us because we had constructed human language around being.

We are so terrified of nothingness because we’re terrified of dying.

And so our language is deceptive. It’s a psychological defense mechanism writ large. It’s denial. Our language is in denial so it’s very difficult to use language to discuss nothingness because for example again, what does it mean to reflect on nothingness? How do you question nothingness?

Sartre shows that reflective consciousness negates the pre-reflective consciousness that it takes as an object.

So when we reflect on something we also reflect on the state of mind before we had reflected on this something.

So there’s like pre-reflection and reflection phase and the reflection phase involves reflecting on the pre-reflection phase.

And this creates an instability within the self because the self is torn between a unitary being a unity because the self wants to think of itself as a unity. So the self is torn between the sensation that it’s a unity and this duality pre-reflection, reflection. Any act questioning, reflecting object relations, any act creates immediately two states. One state that preceded the act and one state which is the act.

The action breaks down the self. Action breaks down the self. At the very least it creates duality sometimes more. Action conflicts dramatically head on with a sense with a unitary sense of the self.

But of course this unitary sense is self deceptive. It’s a bad faith project.

This lack of self identity is given another twist. It’s a kind of task.

The unity of the self is a task of consciousness.

And it’s the self using leveraging consciousness to ground itself somehow.

It’s unity is like without unity I’m going to die, without unity I’m going to dissipate, I’m going to evaporate, I need to feel unitary. I need to feel there’s a core.

And even in psychology we have this value judgment that if you don’t have a stable core of identity something’s wrong with you. You need help.

So we have identity diffusion with adolescents. And we have identity disturbance with borderlines and narcissists. And these are bad things.

Because in identity disturbance and identity diffusion there’s no core stable identity and that’s not good.

You see biases and value judgments permeate our sciences, our psychology, the way we speak even.

The dimension of this task to create a unitary self, the task that consciousness is engaged in, is intimately connected to temporality, intimately connected to time.

The lack of coincidence of consciousness with itself is at the heart of what it is to be conscious.

Consciousness is not identical with the past, with its past. Consciousness is not identical with its future. It is already no longer what it was. Every split micro milli nanosecond our consciousness is no longer what it used to be a nanosecond ago. And it is not yet what it’s going to become. It’s a process of becoming.

So consciousness is not this core, is not this immutable identity, is not even a process which is essentially invariant.

Consciousness is a kaleidoscopic stream of ever-changing, ever-shifting, shape-shifting, sometimes mutually exclusive states, with the capacity to negate.

And the self, the ego wants to use consciousness to create the exact opposite, a stable, rock-solid foundation of identity and feeling of who I am. And of course, it’s very difficult.

Because how do you use mercury, mercurial elements, to construct the Empire State Building? You need stone. You need rock. You need cement. You need glass. You need stable, strong things.

And consciousness is anything. It’s ephemeral.

And so when I make who I am the object of my reflection, I can take that which now lies in my past as my object while I’ve actually moved beyond it.

And that is the core problem in psychotherapy. We deal a lot with the past.

And even when people talk to us in real time, mindfulness, it immediately becomes the past. Everything immediately becomes the past. The present is infinitesimal. It has no dimensions, no length and no duration.

So, I am is never who I am. That I am is no longer who I am, because that I am immediately becomes the past. And it’s no longer who I am, it’s who I was. It’s the same with the future, of course.

I never coincide with what I shall become, what I shall be. Temporality is another problem, core problem, in the way in which negation is at work within consciousness and exercised upon the self.

These are fundamental features of consciousness. The past corresponds to a facticity of human life that cannot choose what is already given about itself.

So, when we talk about the past, we cannot change it. It’s given. And the future opens up possibilities for the freedom of consciousness.

So, the past is the opposite of freedom because it is. The past is being. The future is nothingness.

I want you to listen to this very carefully. The past is 100% being. It cannot be changed. No decision you make can affect it. Nothing you can do about it. It’s 100% rock solid, impermeable, osmotic being.

The future is 100% nothingness. Why?

Because it involves choices and decisions. And choices and decisions involve freedom. And freedom emanates out of nothingness.

The future opens up possibilities for the freedom of consciousness.

The coordination of future freedom and past facticity is a problem. It creates conflicts, dissonances, incoherence. And it’s another aspect of the essential instability of consciousness, let alone the self.

And this leads us to self-deception.

Because when we are faced with all these conflicts and dissonances, we are very tempted to lie to ourselves and to lie to others about ourselves.

And this is what Sartre called bad faith.

The project of bad faith. We said that self-identity, consciousness that operates on self-identity, in self-identity, is a task. Consciousness is engaged in generating and gendering the self as it goes along on the fly.

But it’s a task. It’s an assignment. It’s a defining project of consciousness, the generation of self.

And all the resources of the individual go into this project. It’s the number one project, the most important project.

Because the self is to be continuously generated. The self is not a construct in some ways. Largely it’s a process or a construct that is engaged in a process.

And if the process stops, the construct disintegrates.

So it’s energy-consuming, resource-consuming, and everything, all the internal contributions are aspects and facets of this fundamental project.

But when consciousness engages in creating the self, because consciousness is introspective, we are the only animal species, sentient beings who can introspect.

In other words, create a model of the world in which we are and then observe ourselves from the outside, so to speak, within this model.

So we can introspect.

How does consciousness introspect? How does consciousness understand itself? How does it define itself as a specific individual?

In other words, why does my consciousness define itself? Why does my consciousness understand itself as Sam Vaknin and not, for example, as Jean-Paul Sartre? Why don’t I consider myself to be Jean-Paul Sartre?

In which specific ways my consciousness is channeled and directed to reach the continuous conclusion that I’m Sam Vaknin, what’s the connecting thread?

That’s the first question that we should ponder.

This core identity seems to be a statement, a self-referential statement of consciousness, and it is disrupted in psychotic disorders, where the identity disturbance reaches the point, where the consciousness is no longer sure, no longer ascertained as to who am I.

That is psychosis.

The project of bad faith is very important for existential understanding of what it is to be human, because unfortunately, it’s the easy way out.

You see, I gave you a list of all the conflicts that create a lot of instability and coherence and lack of cohesion and conflicts and dissonances.

It’s an unpleasant egodystonic state. You want to get rid of it. You want to finish it.

And one way of doing this is to deceive yourself.

So what is to be human? What defines human includes regrettably bad faith and self-deception.

And that is why we have morality and ethics, because all of us engage in bad faith, self-deceptive projects.

We need an external body of agreed upon edicts, tenets, to keep us in the straight and narrow, to keep us honest.

Because we have a tendency to dishonesty, as the studies of Dan Ariely had conclusively proven.

Sartre’s analysis of the bad faith project, the lack of genuineness, lack of authenticity, self-deception, is the best part of the book.

It’s an amazing part.

And one of his most famous examples is a waiter in the aforementioned cafe.

So there’s a waiter in a cafe, and the waiter has precise, manneristic movements. He’s like a doll or a puppet. And the waiter is identifying himself with his role as a waiter.

His consciousness renders the waiter a waiter. The waiter is discarding his real nature, his real consciousness, his freedom.

And instead, he’s adopting an external identity, external set of guidelines, the guidelines on how to be a waiter.

Waiterhood, if there’s such a thing, waiter, that’s an external object.

And the waiter takes on the features of this external object, suspending his own project.

That is bad faith. That is self-deception. He’s denying the transcendence of his consciousness in favor of a kind of transcendence characterizing the object of waiter.

The burden of freedom, because freedom is a burden, the requirement to decide for himself what to do, who he is.

The minute he adopts the waiter external object as his project, the minute he becomes the waiter, the minute he becomes this external thing, he no longer is free.

And because he no longer is free, he is liberated from decision-making.

He doesn’t have to do. He’s exempt. He doesn’t have to do. Make any decisions.

And because he doesn’t have to make any decisions, the burden is lifted. His behavior becomes automatic and robotic, dictated fully by the role that he had adopted.

And so he feels unburdened but actually is a slave.

Most slaves feel very free. And it’s part of their own self-deception.

Slavery makes you feel free because you no longer have to worry. You no longer have to choose. You no longer have to decide. And above all, you have no personal responsibility.

That’s very liberating. That is experienced as freedom when actually it’s bad faith. It’s fake. It’s false.

And you are 100% a slave. That’s why people give, empower dictators. They want to be slaves because slavery feels good.

The mechanism involved in bad faith projects is an inherent contradiction.

The very identification with an external object like being a waiter, being a driver, being a father, being a husband, these are all external roles.

So when you identify with these external roles, it’s possible because the waiter is conscious.

Consciousness enables projects of self-deception and bad faith.

The irony is you need to be free to become a slave. To become a slave, you must make a decision. You must make a choice.

Becoming a slave is a choice. Becoming an abuse victim is a choice. These are choices.

And to make choices, you need to be free. And to be free, you need your consciousness.

So it’s a conscious choice to actually commit suicide, to suspend itself.

The sequence is, I have consciousness. I’m going to choose to not be me.

That moment, I have no need for my consciousness anymore. Suspended, dismissed.

That’s the sequence.

But of course, remember, choice is freedom.

Freedom is nothingness. When you are free, when you are free, you take the chance of getting no for an answer. You take the chance of annihilation, of negation, of vitiation, of destruction. To be free means to risk nothingness.

So when you make this choice to be a slave out of freedom, you make this choice out of nothingness, in effect.

But it’s the wrong choice.

Because instead of nothingness, you come out of nothingness, you emanate from nothingness. This is your base point. I mean, this is the base.

And then you end up being, you end up in being.

You start with nothingness and you end in being.

What being? Not your being.

The role that you had adopted, what society had told you to do, what your family forced you to do, what your wife insists that you do. You adopt roles, you role play.

But role playing is embedded in consciousness, says Sartre.

So the freedom of consciousness is a precondition for the project of bad faith, which denies the freedom of consciousness.

The agents defining his being as an external object is the result of the way in which he had represented himself to himself.

This is a misrepresentation, of course. This is self-lying, but it’s still the responsibility of consciousness. It still represents a choice and a decision. Nothing is hidden.

Consciousness is transparent. The project of bad faith is pursued while the agent is fully aware of how things are in pre-reflective consciousness.

Bad faith is self-deceit. It raises the problem for accounting, for contradictory beliefs.

So self-deceit is a project which is constructed on healthy foundations.

Consciousness is healthy. Nothingness is very healthy. Choices, decisions, they can all lead to a healthy path of self-actualization, to use Maslow’s term.

Why don’t they? Why sometimes these healthy foundations become a poison tree? Why do they end badly with a bad faith project with inauthenticity? Why self-deceit? How can self-deceit be constructed on such extremely good foundations?

Because of inadequacies, inadequate representations of what one is.

Sartre dispensed with the unconscious. He seriously disliked the idea of unconscious. He said that the only lack, the only problem could be if we don’t know who we are. If we don’t have a clear view of our identity, if we don’t have a path, if we don’t know where we’re going, not in the sense of mission-oriented, not in the sense of accomplishment-oriented, but who we are, the essence, the quiddity.

He said, if we don’t know who we are, we misrepresent ourselves to ourselves.

And then if you are nobody, it’s easy to become anyone. If there’s nothing there, it’s easy to put anything there. If there’s no core, it’s easy to adopt a core from the outside.

This is the bad faith project.

If you don’t have a self, it’s easy to not be yourself, but to be someone else.

I’m not expressing my views right now. I’m just describing Sartre’s work. It’s a point where I strongly disagree with him, but we’ll come to it perhaps in a future lecture.

So there’s a dichotomy, you remember, of consciousness and external objects.