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Excerpts from existentialist paper, January-April 2000^[1]

Light of Being

•           The Light of Being is conceptually universal and thus conceptually meaningless. It is the light of actuality, the difference between an imaginary / conceptual object and an actual existence. It is not any particular fact or concept but the Existence of each and every fact or actuality.

            As it is conceptually universal it is very difficult to relate with words. Yet it is deeper than the fact that language is insufficiently subtle to describe experience. It is both more basic and more incredible.

            The fact that we actually feel what we feel, that anything truly exists at all is amazing and wondrous beyond all comparison.

•           “Existence” or “Reality” is the infinitely dazzling light which illuminates everything. It is nothing, and yet it is everything. In ordinary discourse and philosophy I circle around it; I must plunge right into it! It can be either positive or negative; really it is neither. It is a very intense energy; it is all energy, and the level of intensity is not limited.

•           Life is REAL! It is not the ideas that one has about it in one’s mind. It is not like a game, with rules and points or winning and losing. As it is, the stark truth of it all, the full intense immediacy and reality, is completely overwhelming. For example, if I see it, it’s intensity can be like the awakening shock I get when I deeply realize that I am going to die. It is like when I am immersed in some distant kind of thought, and then I suddenly re-realizes the truth of my own situation. Its magnitude is not limited. You are awake, you are aware, you are present. You suddenly connect with the fact that it’s real! and it’s really happening! Everything comes alive this way.

•           For example, on January 12^th, 1998, I was standing on a street corner just after sunset talking to a friend, when I had a strong experience of the Light of Being. Nothing has been the same since; the increased awareness of that amazing and terrible openness of Real Being will never fully go away. Seeing others on street, each has their own entire life --> vastness, openness, unknown, weight, wonder. Deep knowledge of death. Intense feeling of being Alive. (Awareness of life / death, being / nonbeing duality and struggle.) Intense frightening groundlessness, openness, limitlessness. Freedom. Reality. Immediacy. Sudden dropping-away of conceptual distance and ghostly abstraction, of narrow limited thought patterns. Later that night: Amazing beauty of creation from total void. Boundless unlimited wonder, past all comparison.

•           Paradoxically, the transience which makes life so unreal is also what makes it so starkly painfully terrifyingly real. Impermanence cuts all the way through us.

•           The incredibility of existing existence, that what is, IS. The terror of it, the wonder.

•           Existence, subjectivity is the ultimate truth, which can never be conceptualized or described.

•           The truth that is incredible is that everything is real, everything has value.

            One tends to drift in a world of cognition, understanding, representation, encountering things externally as objects, as data. Knowledge is representational, (what we call objects are representationally defined), of something external, outside. Knowledge holds truth, existence, etc. at a distance, as distant, as objective. Thus it takes on an unreality, an emptiness, a valuelessness.

            Thus focus inward on the momentary inside / I / living substance / light of Being reveals the infinitely startling, terrifying energizing reality of immediacy, the actuality of Truth. Out of the emptiness and valuelessness of the distant object and the empty subject comes inexplicably the non-neutral, undeniable, infinitely real, excessive, value-saturated Being.

            Objective knowledge is empty and valueless in that it is detached from the substance of value, yet it is in objective knowledge that dichotomous, simplified, conceptually rigidified crystallizations of value appear.

•           Awareness of Existence is activated by awareness of death and nonexistence. When I contrast one state of existence to another, the nature of it is not as apparent as when I see it in contrast with total nonbeing. Why view my life relatively, circumstantially, comparatively to others’ lives, to past and future, to narrow, mean conditionals? Life should be viewed in comparison with total and utter void, if anything. Then its substance may become more apparent. The substance of Being, in relation to nothingness. Not one set of circumstances in comparison with another, but the bare substance of life itself.

•           Ultimately there is nothing with which to compare Existence in its totality. Existence is groundless. There is no essential baseline for reality. Absolutely nothing is ordinary, absolutely nothing should be taken for granted. Existence is strange beyond all comparison. Existence is beautiful beyond all comparison.

•           The Light illuminates the Great Duality of existence. The Light illuminates contingency, illuminates impermanence or death, illuminates uncertainty, illuminates tension, pain, and sickness.

•           The confrontation between life and death. The confrontation between being and nonbeing.

•           In a way, Existence is powerfully incredible / unbelievable. It is inconceivable, unreasonable. In a way I feel sometimes that it shouldn’t be possible in its wild blind naked unprotected unlimited intensity and passion. One is taught as a child, reassured that life is safe, that it’s ‘okay.’ One tends to assume that the world makes sense, that it is understandable, that the way of physiology and culture form a safe track leading continuously onward. But really, it’s not safe at all.

•           The world of the ordinary is a thin veil over the world of the real, the world of Existence, of passion, of nonsense, of madness, of chaos, of struggle. The intensity of its passion, of its potential fear, cannot be related, cannot be believed.

•           Our real lives are a dream we can’t believe (it’s too incredible). (I.e. to our ‘conscious,’ objective mind.)

•           Tonight I felt that same intensity and incredibility of all things, that same beauty and holiness and overwhelming transience and unseen-ness of all things.

•           The intensity of subjective experience is fully unconceptualizable. One does not recognize it in the words of others until one is looking for it, and then it is everywhere. It was always everywhere, but one was afraid to see it; one’s eyes hadn’t opened up yet.

•           The romantic Awareness of that confusion, un-conscious-ed in the dim light of everyday awareness. The illusion of known-ness and stability pretends to cover up the Reality of Existence and Subjectivity and Pain and Chaos and Loneliness and Awareness.

•           Everyone’s most terrifying and wonderful secret is that they Exist. To believe that other people Exist is such a huge leap. To accept that others’ lives have value is difficult in the same way as accepting that our lives have value. That the behavior of others is governed by the same tension and passion is an amazing and terrifying thought.

•           To come to terms with the passion, the dread, the uncertainty, the freedom, the aloneness. For the subject to grow comfortable with itself as a subject, rather than continuing to flee toward objectivity, to seek anesthesia.

•           So many layers of reality, the temporal invisible I racing through them laden with value of love and fear.

•           The world of Existence is inconceivable boundless, yet always instantaneously engulfed again by the void.

•           We hide from value, hide from the Truth, the absolute, the NOW. We lose it, hide from it moment by moment. But it is always seeping through the cracks. Desire to embrace it, maybe it is heaven. Desire to run from it, maybe it is hell. Fear of the being of Hell and the nonbeing of Heaven. Heaven, Hell, Oblivion. VALUE!

•           Objectivity hides everything. Everything is unseen.

•           Life is Heaven and Hell!!!!! It’s amazing!! Life (Living) is unseen! It’s amazing!!!!

 

imPermanence

•           The inside is the instantaneous here-now spark of living Being. The outside is all other time and place; a night-dark infinite expanse of unknown.

•           The outside is in past self which has disappeared into the void; in the future self, the longed-for and feared. The outside is in the causal structure, the distance of the truth and trial-and-error uncertainty as to whether it can sustain us, if we can affect it to sustain us, if we can affect our ultimate continuance / annihilation. The outside is other people, other beings.

•           Momentariness is the ultimate alienation. Transience, isolation of experience from experience. Isolation of self from self. Despite the attempt to grasp, to finalize, make permanent.

•           The instantaneous light of experience and will is confronted by void of uncertainty on all sides.

•           I don’t know what will happen to me. Death is a possibility; pain is a possibility. I don’t know; I am this.

•           Experience is separated, spread across time and space, longing for and fearing the outside… That separation is the quality of Being…

•           The I is a ripple in flowing water. Or is it the fire guardian of fire?

•           Void permeates as well as surrounding Being.

•           This moment is gone, this moment is gone, this moment is gone, I am gone. It escapes! It disappears. My life disappears into the void. I can’t see what will happen on the other side. We forget everything. Forgotten all my childhood. My childhood is my lost self which I cannot recover. It has gone into the void. I see that my now-self is disappearing into the void. My mind disappears into the void.

•           Everything passes, everything is unseen. What is the unseen? The unseen is not remembered. Existence (--consciousness) is not rooted in permanence, but in the temporary, relative, contingent.

•           All existence is transient, dependent on change; all existence is ultimately unseen. It is seen once, but the seeing, seen, and seer are destroyed simultaneous with their creation. In this destruction they are unseen.

•           Or, all existence is unseen because it is acted out but never viewed. The viewing is activity in itself which is equally unseen. The subject sees, the object is seen, but the seeing is unseen. Existence, living Existence, is the seeing. The subject is active and unseen. It seeks to see itself, to be permanently alive, thus to be both seer and seen, to be both living and static. But living and stasis are irreconcilable, the seer and the seen are irreconcilable, as are the subject and object. (Or, we are actors in life’s drama but nobody is watching us, so in that sense it is all for nothing. We see, but what we see is in a sense only a reflection of Living subjectivity, of its activity; we see an objectification, a conceptualization, an image.)

•           The seer is unseen. The seeing is unseen. I am unseen. This is unseen. The seeing is Existence, Being, Living. The seen is the objective world. The seeing is the living world, of experience and will.

 

LIFE ANd death

•           My earlier amazements with “Life” and “Mind”^[2]  are still with me. Part of what I saw that night was the confrontation of life against the void of its absence and negation, and mind against the void of its absence and negation. Life with its struggle!!!!!, mind with its awareness!!!!! The void where no struggle occurs, no awareness occurs, no value, no perceived-reality (with objects, etc.)

•           Being struggles against nonbeing. Nonbeing is always about to win even though it is completely passionless and awarenessless and effortless, completely without will.

•           Life dipped in pain like black water, struggling to ascend all the way out of it. Or: Life struggling to ascend all the way out of pain. Being which seeks pleasure and safety and order, and avoids pain and disaster and chaos. Life struggles constantly, constantly, constantly to ascend all the way out of pain.

•           But the pain is in life itself, rather than in the chaos / void (although people may not tend to realize this), so how can we escape it? The pain and pleasure lie not in void but as a motivator in life’s struggle to overcome the void of its negation. Life itself is fully inseparable from its struggle against death.

But although the pain is in life’s struggle against the void, death is in the void itself. Death in the sense of no-existence, no-value. Thus if one believes that life has or might have any value which is dependent on circumstances, one should continue struggling to live and better life. Even though all value (pain and pleasure-->good and bad…) might possibly be created as an incentive to struggle and ascend to life!! (So many consequences of this!)

•           A flaw in the universe, in one’s image of perfection, like a thorn that won’t come out.

•           Chaos as ground-substance in the meta-context of biological logic. Process of life in ascending against chaos, against entropy, against complexity, against uncertainty, against sickness, against death.

•           Self-perpetuation is unattainable, circular. • Life must continue moving to stay in the same place. • Chaos, complexity, entropy etc. are all eternal. Death proceeds life, sickness proceeds health.

•           The activity of life, the means to self-perpetuation, is ascension. Ascension is never-ending. It cannot be satiated. It cannot be completed. Perfection does not exist. Perpetual incompletion of life, perpetual imperfection. Perpetual frustration.

            Ascensionism: We not only have problems to solve, but the function of our consciousness itself is problem-solving. Thus how could it be possible to finish solving all of our problems? We are not simply entities who are currently ascending, but rather the nature of our consciousness is ascension. Thus how could we ever reach the place we are reaching to?

            Ascensionism universalizes dualism, gains, losses, worries, plans, pains, pleasures of whatever type (e.g. social or non-social) into a single force.

•           So much disappointment--maybe even horror--in the possibility of all life needing to perpetually spend effort in moving forward, only to stay in the same place. No progress, no salvation, no reward for our endless struggle-effort, just self-perpetuation, adaptation.^[3]

•           The universe is purposeless, chaotic. Living organisms always have some purpose. Thus there is frustration, insufficiency.

•           We need to know, and yet we don’t know. We need to see and yet we are blind. We need to live and yet we die.

•           Life is contingent. Am I entirely contingent? I don’t know.

•           Of course the point of all of these is the beauty of It along with the sadness and pain and wanting and tragedy. The not-two-ness of the beauty and pain.

Miscellaneous

•           Keeping in mind that Existence is not the seer or the seen but the seeing.

•           The climbing spirit climbs on in emptiness.

•           The potential slips away in every moment and is replaced by the actual; the ideal is replaced by the real. The real is bleak and harsh in comparison to the ideal. Yet the ideal, the potential never exist, they are fantasies, projections. And the richness, the depth of the Real is infinitely beyond anything that one could conceive.

•           We don’t need teleological purpose for our lives to have value. It’s in This. We don’t need definitive permanent objective reality in order to exist. We both exist and do not exist. The middle ground between absolutism and nihilism. There is no specific, ultimate purpose to existence, but rather there is purpose and value in each moment of life.

•           Two types of philosophy: Objective and subjective. Structural and immediate. Scientific and spiritual. Scientific philosophy has its place in practicality, utilitarianism, manipulation of cause and effect. But it is through experience, phenomenology, mindfulness, that we encounter most directly the truth, meaning, value, substance, of our lives, of our Being.

Meditation Notes

•           Passion is not necessarily bad, but through self-negation you have come to believe it to be so. So if you turn yourself in against passion, the fact of Existence/Life is passionate becomes Existence/Life is suffering. When you see passion as suffering, the whole world becomes Hell before your eyes. Embracing passion, versus alienating from the life cycle.

            Seeing its end you have sought to abandon it. Feeling its pain you have sought to abandon it. But you can’t abandon it, you are it.

•           What am I lacking? I am here. I race to fill myself up, to save myself, to hold myself, to make myself permanent. I can’t be preserved in words, in images, in imagination. I am this. Yet I continue trying to create myself; can I do otherwise?

•           Non-attachment. The anguish of being only an object in others’ eyes, the anguish of temporality, of uncertainty, of incompletion, and so on: Whether such elements cause suffering may depend on the strength of my psychological attachment to their opposites (e.g. affection, permanence, certainty, satiation, selfhood, rest, etc.). Even as I lament them, these elements may in fact be the very fabric of my Being.

•           Yes, yes, there is joy

 

Freedom / Uncertainty?? / stochasm

•           Stochasm means trial and error. A such it is the basic directive force to biological activity and phenomena.

            The truth of stochasm is deeply disturbing, for it means that nothing is teleologically purposive, and that everything as it is could be in a state of critical error. There is no safety in any established way.

•           Chaos as ground substance in the meta-context of biological logic. Imperfectability of knowledge. Yet of course the process of ordering is a necessary process of life. Unity of knowledge / conceptual ordering with other ascensions. Primal uncertainty: deep, primal confusion of life.

            Confusion is created along with knowledge. When knowledge arises, it finds itself amid boundless confusion.

            Only from chaos is creation possible.

•           Although based in the trial and error / stochastic process of life, the conceptual mind is trying to look ahead and base behavior on planning instead. This is not fully possible, so there is a fundamental tension.

            Also, my own mind is looking ahead toward the occurrence of its own death.

            The occurrence of an unpleasant reality is something the mind’s function is to prevent. So it would make very simple evolutionarily sense for the mind to experience pain while looking forward to an unwanted event, pain which would hopefully motivate it to prevent the occurrence. (If it can’t be changed, oh well, it’s worth a try.) Perhaps this is a part of why the thought of death is painful, along with other things that cannot be prevented.

•           The entire world appears differently depending on ones framework for viewing it!

•           Conceptual meaninglessness is just another type of disorder / chaos which life struggles against.

•           Freedom: The lack of certain ultimate purpose. Lack of absolute values. Lack of perfect and certain knowledge, absolute objective truth, formless nature of reality, ungraspable structure. Lack of perfect behavior rules. Lack of necessity. Godlessness / fatherlessness. All these tie into stochasm in a way. In a sense the theory of evolution by natural selection discredits the Platonic form view etc.

•           Torn between opposing plans, values, goals, ascensions. I am torn between the present and the future. I am torn between rest and motion, action and nonaction. I am torn at each moment by the question: “What should I do?” And the Reality, value, of the action and the consequences, the urgency, necessity of the question. “What should I do?” is the constant function of the mind, struggle of the mind. The final unanswerability of this question condemns the mind to perpetual unrest.

•           Is survival necessarily the highest good? Nothing is necessary, we are free. Yet there is a conflict between values.

•           To abandon freedom, to abandon doubt, is to abandon flexibility, adaptability, foresight, etc.

            The dangers of false certitude, the immenseness of the portion of ones being one is thus attempting to surrender, considering what may be the very function and nature of human arch-consciousness to be in making decisions, in evaluating reality and modifying action beyond repetitive habit.

 

the existence of will

•           Freedom in the sense of non-determinism. The fact that we exist, that we feel, disproves determinism or makes it irrelevant. Causally, structurally, searching for the will, objectively, abstractly, logically, is to miss the actual fact of the will! (Subjective, concrete, immediate…) Direct awareness reveals that the actual fact, the substance, the reality of the will is right HERE, right NOW…along with the anxiety…

            I suggest the argument that if we were strictly mechanistic we would have no experience. Perhaps it is in our will, our decision-making, our confrontation with uncertainty, that our experience resides. ((Unless our experience is actually separate from the decisions we make…)) Choice Exists because we Exist and are actively choosing.

            If behavior is totally mechanistic-deterministic why does one feel it? What is feeling? Who is it that feels? If determinism is absolute, then where does experience fit in? Consider that experience and will may be two aspects of the same substance.

            In a sense to say that we don’t have will is to say that we don’t have experience. This is the one thing that we know to be false. Although we can never prove it! (As we cannot communicate it objectively, etc.)

•           Will should not only be looked at as the ability of an individual organism to create and express its own will without outside input. Such extreme ideas of individuality cannot hold up. Will is rather an ongoing quality of human being, and of each human moment.

 

INTERpersonal Relationships

•           Object and Subject. Humans as subjects, aware of each other as objects, aware of themselves as objects in the eyes of others.

•           Perhaps other people don’t, can’t, really care about one’s subjective experience the way one wants them to. Their seeing doesn’t see one’s soul, their seeing doesn’t make one’s soul permanent, doesn’t preserve it, solidify it, make it real.

            I think that people vie for each other to see them this way, to admire them , to love them. Yet tragically this love is never complete, it doesn’t save us from passing, people can only see the outside of each other…

•           It is true that we tend to spend more time trying to manipulate others’ behavior than truly empathizing. Caused by utility, necessity of survival and ascension, or habit shaped by such.

•           The organismic nature. The utility of ascensions. Subject-object dynamics (interpersonal) can be explained in  terms of pragmatic ascension. There are evolutionary sociopsychological reasons for desires to be loved, admired, etc. Desire for love can be linked to desire for individual and genetic self-preservation. To be loved has been extremely crucial for survival and reproduction for most of human evolution. To be admired, to have a high status, has been extremely valuable.

            Individual behavior in interpersonal relationships can be seen as utility toward seeking pleasure. Pleasure predispositions are initially shaped by natural selection, and complicated by learning and cognitive factors, etc. Thus in many cases love may be seen as utility toward individual pleasure.

•           Human emotions, including those of love and friendship, were forged by natural selection, and thus are loosely structured towards the quasi-selfish goal of genetic proliferation. Although humans are by no means single-mindedly driven towards reproduction, a disturbing fact remains in the way that our compassion has built-in limits which can be difficult to overcome even if one is willing to try.

•           In general, the life, pleasure, reproductive success, etc. of different organisms often conflict with one another.

•           Sadness about primary selfishness of all humans. The sadness of it all, the tragedy of uncommunicateableness and superficiality and selfishness. Not caring about others except in relation to self, etc. The empty space between self and other. The empty space separating soul. Utility, ascension, necessity in the realm of the relative, of causality. Pain and pleasure, fear and desire, conceptual objectifications. Utility obscures subjectivity.

•           Reconnects of course to the fundamental anguish of temporality. The separation of Being applies both to self / other and to past / present / future.

•           Revelation of compassion and subjectivity. The reality of it, in its imperfection, in its passion, in its blindness, in its awareness. (Apart from my own insecurities and petty judgements.)

            The beauty of others’ subjective existence despite my limited vision of them as objects, by which I can’t see their subjective Existence. (Just as my subjective existence is beautiful despite the fact that I am ‘other’ and object to all ‘others.’) It is through my judgmental relative-conceptual perception that I must imagine the true subjectivity and beauty of others’ existence.

 

ethics

•           A sort of utilitarianism, but a utilitarianism which is originally and ultimately without marking posts and half-blind, in terms of the eternal uncertainty and incompletion of conceptual knowledge. As value is experiential before it is conceptual, it is not measurable or calculable or comparable, yet nevertheless it Exists, before and beneath and beyond and through all of these. The value that a moral act has is not in its correspondence with a universal ethical code but rather its effect in experience (and cause in will) in lived Existence.

•           Active morality versus passive morality. Acting not for personal moral excellence / cleanliness / unreproachability (reputation, in cynical terms) but for the best possible future for all concerned. Not contenting oneself with simply following the rules, while there is so much more to be done! In many ethical systems, one can be following the rules or laws, and still be ignoring or cooperating with massive suffering.

•           It is the scarcity of life which makes ethics difficult.

•           Much of human compassion is relational. Others are still objects, although they are good-objects. This can be deconstructed through evolutionary and cultural structures to a genetic-selfish pragmatism. One’s view of another, be it good or bad, tends to be based on one’s relationship to that person. Perfect compassion would come from a non-relational revelation of others’ subjectivity. Thus it should be impartial; it should have nothing to do with one’s relationship to that other.

•           Perhaps we sow and reap as a whole entity. Our past actions affect our future self in a sense wherein my future self and another’s future self are not distinguished. This is hard for moralists and lovers of justice to accept (and rightfully so) because we are not rewarded or punished individually but as a whole. One is left with the fundamental anguish of never tasting the fruits of one’s labor. I believe that this anguish is authentic and universal. The source of morality is to go beyond the distinction between self-future and other-future. This is not easily done because of our memory and instinctive selfishness. Yet a great measure of this may be necessary to produce the level of cooperation needed to lead our species away from mutual destruction and towards greater health and happiness.

•           I think that the realization of concrete subjective lived experience, the Reality of it, can be an incredible source of compassion / empathy and responsibility. The Revelation of Being leads to compassion, for truly what is, is; what will be, will be.