Existential Realities In Buddhist Optics

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Epigraph - real existentialism is produced only in the existential region of France, everything else is sparkling anxiety. (Bernard-Henri Montaigne Montesquieu, fighting discourse monger 1st article and @apsullivan)

Mr. Yalom once identified 4 existential realities that define the ultimate human experience. Ultimate - because with the greatest clarity they indicate the fundamental foundations of true existence. Strictly speaking, these given are present in everyone who considers themselves to be living beings, however, they do not at all guarantee their manifestation for each individual. Relating to authenticity and, thereby, creating boundaries within which only the subject can appear, they begin to exert their influence only when awareness has the ability to approach these boundaries; in all other cases, you can hang out all your life somewhere in the center of your existence, never getting to know yourself in extreme experiences, when it seems that the usual coordinates begin to distort, and the usual supports fail. Existential realities are the very last pillars and frontiers of the humanistic perspective, which you can resort to whenever you feel doubts about the reliability of your personal world.

Mr. Yalom has done a great job of researching the existential dimension, however, there are still a lot of questions on this topic. For example, to what extent are the characteristics of existence singled out by him truly ultimate, or can they also be deduced from some more fundamental basis? And here - tadam - the perspective of the Buddhist science of the mind comes to our aid. I can offer this - of course, only intermediate - the answer to this most interesting question. All existential givens can be reduced to no more than two, although four is a more symbolic number. Whenever the subject approaches the limits of his individual existence, the individual existence itself turns out to be that fundamental given from which all others are derived.

Try, for a start, imagine that you are not there. Not in terms of physical death, but as the absence of that very sensation of I, for the sake of maintaining which everything that happens to you in life happens. Biological life as the ultimate base rests on a carbon atom, perhaps somewhere in the universe there is life based on a silicon atom etc; it is incredibly difficult to imagine that somewhere else there is being, which has as its foundation not the sensation of the individual I, but something else, possibly transpersonal and supra-individual. This is simply not the case in our experience. And therefore, this is the most basic border, after reaching which, as in the famous engraving of Flammarion, you see how the sky touches the Earth and ask, what then is the sky?

In this regard, we can say something very romantic, for example, death is in fact, the main thing that happens in life or something like that. Psychoanalysts and others have already spoken about this. It is important that death - one of the existential given according to Yalom - becomes, in another reading, life as a burst of individual being, beyond which one cannot go without dying. Buddhists, however, argue the opposite - they say, in order to start Living, it is not necessary to wait for death, but more on that later. What, then, will be the second most important rationale for this curious process?

We have already mentioned this foundation earlier - individual existence needs constant confirmation, preservation and development. If you look at the events of the mind as if from the outside, it turns out that consciousness is constantly in motion: we make efforts to move from this state of mind to another, driven by discomfort and thirst; we get involved in a variety of emotional processes and act as their inner logic tells us; in shortage, we hope to reach a state in which ultimate satisfaction can be experienced, and we do not find it.

If you ask the question - what is driving me now - then in the depths of any activity you can find anxiety associated with the fact that everything is somehow going wrong. How exactly this is not clear. At this point, the existential given, concerning meaning, or more precisely, meaninglessness, describes such an important aspect of being as the doom to strive to move somewhere away from the place or state in which you are now. After all, if you stop, as if, along with this, the meaning disappears.

So let the two basic existential realities be designated as individuality and incompleteness. This is where the fun begins. The subject finds his ultimate support, investing in his sense of himself and becoming a hostage of meanings that accidentally arise in this himself. All this gives rise to what Buddhists call the general word suffering, which relies heavily, in turn, on clinging and attachment to a certain version of reality given to us in sensations. After all, everything that happens inside the head seems to us to be real, doesn't it? So, in addition to the fact that suffering has an ontological character, Buddhists also claim that they know a certain way by following which suffering can be overcome. That is, in other words, to go beyond those given that define it.

To do this, you need to do a fairly simple thing, namely, transgression beyond your own horizon. And in such an extreme formulation, the way to get rid of suffering turns out to be the most terrible thing that a living person has ever encountered, since it is impossible to imagine in the current experience his existence, which has any other grounds than individuality and meaning. Therefore, for such a point strike into the very heart of mental obscurations, a kind of "leap of faith" is necessary, within which you can rely on the fact that sooner or later you will meet with a clearer foundation, and not disappear into the abyss of madness and mental decay.

Psychotherapy is pretty well accustomed to the space that is formed around the demand for meaningfulness. We train clients to draw on the experience of an observer who is able to notice mental wanderings, rather than being involved in them unconditionally. However, all this takes place within the framework of the pole of individuality, the barrier of which seems insurmountable. But psychotherapy, as a secular practice, is hardly worth claiming for more. It is enough that she actively uses the principle of transgression - studying herself at the border of what defines me and establishing new horizons, within which there will be a completely different story. What is happening, however, is still with me.