What does one tell a forner student who writes in some desparation that she may be losing her mind, that nothing seems real or certain anymore, that she is beginning to doubt her own existence, that nothing seems to matter anymore?
Well, here is my "answer", for what it is worth. I have edited it for reasons of privacy, from two separate e-mails that I sent her over a few weeks. That's why it might sound disjointed.
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You may be depressed, but you certainly haven’t lost your mind! The thoughts that you are thinking – that nothing makes sense any more – are more common than people care to confess. But the very fact that you have chosen to put them down in an e-mail to me shows that you are trying to look at them with some kind of distancing and objectivity. You may be feeling like a woman drowning, with nothing to hold on to that might keep the head above water, and running out of breath. But you are probably just like a person who hasn’t learnt how to swim properly and has just strayed into the deep end of the pool, and finds that he can’t find the bottom without going under completely. These sorts of situations almost always sort themselves out, after some thrashing and flailing about. But anyone with any kind of sensitivity to life must thrash about from time to time.
Your mother is right, things do really start to make sense later, but that isn’t very helpful, because they need to make sense now. What your mother probably meant is that one’s worldviews about things become more stable and confident with age, when one has seen more of life, and is better able to sort out different contradictions. Nevertheless important contradictions remain even when one is older. So if you are seeking a philosophy of life from me that guarantees relief from pain and disturbance, or that relieves you from the experience of having to struggle with life, I can’t supply you with one!
All I can tell you is this:
We are intensely and radically social beings - that is how we are biologically and psychologically constituted. So interaction with other people matters.
What matters even more is the recognition that our minds are forever active in grasping both material things and ideas, and are always remembering, anticipating and expecting things from other people as a result of this interaction. This constantly troubles our minds and keeps them chasing expectations and running away from aversions. This is the source of both our creativity as well as our misery.
Most of the time we are unaware of how powerfully our thoughts and emotions agitate our minds. Most of us have very little control over them. If you really want to become aware of this, just sit quietly for half an hour and try to focus your mind on your breath as it enters and leaves your nostrils, and see how long you can do that without other thoughts pulling your mind away in all sorts of other directions. Once you become aware of this, you begin to realize that our minds are constantly agitated by thoughts, and we are like a swimmer caught in the swirling currents of thought, with very little control of our own movements. If you do this for long enough, you become aware of anger, greed, hatred, aversions of all kinds, but also of deep insights and feelings that you never thought you had. You cannot see the bottom of a pot of water if you always keep stirring the water (especially if the water is muddy); but let the water be still and the mud settle to the bottom, and you can see through the water clearly. Similarly, you need to calm the agitation of the mind (and let the “muddy” ideas and thoughts settle to the bottom) if you want to see clearly in it. This is a struggle, because it doesn’t happen easily.
Now what does all this have to do with finding one’s feet again? Once you begin examining your own mind, you will begin to see that ideas like freedom and happiness away from other people are illusory, and exist only as sources of confusion, like a mirage. Other people, as I said, are important, because they are the ones who make any idea of freedom and existence meaningful. It’s because of other people, too, that care, kindness, compassion, responsibility, respect and such things are important, especially when they seem most absent in the world. To me, the state of the world is the most convincing evidence that they matter, and matter urgently, because the misery everywhere is fundamentally a consequence of our collective failure to live as individuals and communities and nations, and conduct our public affairs, according to these principles. (Of course there are other causes, too, but I’m speaking of fundamental ones.) But they are important not only for other people, but also for oneself, partly because they lead to one’s own feelings of well-being (a scientifically attested finding).
This kind of advice often sounds like pie-in-the-sky, airy-fairy, moralistic sermonizing. Well, try LIVING as if nothing matters. You won’t be able to. You might live, as many others do, as if the only things that matter are one’s own happiness, satisfaction, convenience, power, status, or wealth. After all, this is what our public institutions encourage. But the single-minded pursuit of these things, although often apparently successful, almost always imposes a psychic cost, and it’s very doubtful if they bring happiness. If power, status and wealth were worth pursuing, how come surveys have shown that the most powerful and wealthy people feel so deeply insecure? If convenience and satisfaction were such worthy aims, how is it that technologies that promise them (succeed) at one level deny them (fail) at another? Mind you, I’m not advocating seeking a monastic life, but I’m pointing out the illusory nature of certain things that we are seduced by. Happiness, in my own experience and observation, certainly doesn’t come by running after it. It may come from living life with careful and compassionate attention to what we do and to others around us.
Most people are morally confused, and have always been. Read literature and history, they are rich sources of human experience and insights that go beyond one’s own. What they both show is that good and evil may not be parts of the fabric of the world, but they are creations of our minds, and possess a certain reality, because they motivate and provide standards and examples for our actions. To say that they are illusory is therefore both true and mistaken at the same time.
As for God, there is either nothing to be said (because nothing CAN be said) if one regards God as part of the universe. Or if one regards God as a source of psychological comfort, there is nothing MORE to say. Or if one regards God as a creation of the human mind that enables us to speak of something that is literally otherwise un-speakable, then what I have to say is this: God is the infinite-dimensional projection of human BEING and human capacities and qualities. Conversely, we humans are the four-dimensional projection (in space-time) of God: just as a solid three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow on a flat surface, so we are God’s “shadows”. Another more common way of saying this is to say that all human beings have a “divine spark”.
The human mind has certain unique qualities and capacities – humor, art, music and mathematics and the capacity for metaphysical insights are all uniquely human, language and morality probably less uniquely so. These capacities have probably emerged from the unique complexity of our neural networks. But they have given our species a unique ability to look at the world and the universe, including ourselves, and to make sense of it all. However dimly we perceive these things, and however tainted by error and misjudgment our stories about the universe and ourselves might be, we are capable of both correction and self-deception, of waking to the truth, as well as shutting ourselves out of it, like the people in Plato’s cave. God may or may not be part of these stories – I think it’s a matter of taste whether one finds stories without God compelling or not - but what matters is that we need metaphysics for everything else to make sense.
The confusion we all feel from time to time is from a temporary loss of our metaphysical moorings. Confusion happens when the consequences that we anticipated because of our metaphysics didn’t happen, or when the vectors along which we ran our lives have led us into situations or circumstances we didn’t want or anticipate. I suspect something like this has happened to you. Examine what has turned out to be other than you expected. What fundamental assumptions have turned out to be wrong? Your body continues to be a temple for your mind, so take good care of it, even if you don’t have time for sports. Your mind has capacities and qualities for sorting things out that you never suspected, so give it some chance. Your mind has also the doorway to something that you, like all of us brought up in modern, scientific-industrial cultures, are taught to neglect and ignore – your spirit. So give yourself some chance to discover it......
In response to your question “Do I exist?”, I don’t really have much to say in reply, except to advise you to stop worrying about the reality of your own existence. Who is the person reading this e-mail at this moment? Who is the person struggling through her confusion? I have two distinct responses to this, but hopefully both will help you to stop this worry.
(I may not convince you to see things my way, because we’re talking metaphysics here, not science. The truth of the things I talk about here are insights from experience and self-examination and personal experimentation. Check them out for yourself and see whether they are true.)
On the one hand, if you claim that your existence is an illusion, then that only makes sense in the context of reality, just as white only makes sense in the context of black. If everything were illusion (as well it might), that illusion WOULD be our reality, just as the reality of the fish is the water in which it lives without recognizing it as water separate from other things. WE know it’s water, and that there is a world outside water, but we aren’t fish! To claim that what you are experiencing is an illusion, you would need to be aware of a reality other than what you experience (which you would ALSO call an illusion because you claim that EVERYTHING you experience is illusion!).
On the other hand, trying to find a definite answer (or stopping point) to the questions “Who am I? Who is feeling this pain? Who is even asking these questions?” may result in a blank, rather like the error message you get in a calculator when you divide by zero. That’s because it’s very difficult to discover an I, SEPARATE from the world. Look at the bubbles in the water of a bubbling stream, or the water droplets in the spray of a waterfall. For how long do they have an existence separate from the stream they arise from? Can a bubble or a drop of water separate itself from the stream or the waterfall, even as long as it exists as a bubble or drop? (This analogy obviously has its limits, but you get the picture, don’t you?)
What I’m trying to tell you is that there is in fact no self separate from the world. We are constituted by, and to some extent constitute or construct, the world we are in. We are a holomorph of the world – the entire world reflected and repeated in a drop of it! Whether this engenders a sense of claustrophobia, as if you are entering a very small enclosed space from which there is no escape, or whether this gives you a sense of freedom, is like the choice between two different perceptions – duck, rabbit? old woman, young woman? - that we discussed long ago.
You write: “I don't want to give up on anything before I find satisfactory answers for my questions. I know there wont' be answers for all of them, but just even knowing that there are no satisfactory answers is a good enough answer. But I have to know if there is a point to life. Maybe there isn't. If there isn't then it will be my choice to pursue my life, maybe to make a point by myself. Maybe to enjoy, to see it just as a one time chance.”
Well, I think I have lived my life so far in just this way, and I’ve found it to be well worth it! Whether there is a point to life or not depends on how you choose to live it.
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