As I sit down to write this essay, I am aware of the feeling that this may be the most important writing I will ever have done.  The subject matter has scratched the undersurface of my mind for most of my life, and especially in the past few years, but now I am moved to write these thoughts down.  It feels urgent that I communicate them now.  I have spoken about them to a few people, but now I am impelled to set the thoughts down in writing.  I have no idea where this work will take me, but I know it is something I must now do.

            I was about six years old when the awareness first came upon me that I am me, that my existence is unique, that I take up space that nobody else can take up, that I was born in this bodily container, that I am and always will be me-alone in this space, and that I shall one day die and this existence will be ended.  Throughout my youth and early adulthood, this awareness came upon me periodically and remained briefly (thank God), and whenever I thought about this existential consciousness, I felt an ominous chill and dread.  I felt utterly alone, and dying was a terrifying concept.  The fear of death continued until 1972, at the age of 45, when, during a therapy session under LSD (the only time I ever took that drug), I had a death-like experience that transformed my fear.  However, it had no effect on my awareness of my being me-myself-alone in the universe.

            In an effort to communicate clearly and fully the exact nature of the experience-- what I am calling existential consciousness (henceforth referred to as EC) -- I shall describe it in as much detail as possible.  Please understand that my repeating myself represents a symptom of the importance to me that through what I say, you intimately understand and personally experience what I mean by EC.  It may be that you grasp what I’m saying already.  It may also turn out that no matter how much I try, you won’t be able to grasp what I mean by EC.  Nevertheless, I must go on.

            To elaborate, each instant in life while I am awake, I can focus only on my own existence.  In a sense, it is as if I have access to and experience the only awareness in the universe.  I am the center of all that IS in the universe.  I alone know the nature of where I am and what I experience, and no one else can be right here with me in my consciousness, neither can I enter the space and experience of anyone else.  It is as if each of us were a planet or world unto ourselves.  The reality of what is outside of my own being exists as a consequence of my experience of it.  I assume that must be true for everyone; consequently, logically, reality must be subjective.

            From this individually unique self-centered vantage point, I can understand and empathize with the experience that every other person might just as well be a robot or a hologram.  I only know what is in here; I know nothing of what is in whatever is out there -- not intimately, not as an immanent experience.


            I know nothing of what is going on in Bosnia, in the next town, in the next neighborhood, or next door.  Yet, there are people living there, and those people must experience themselves, each individually, to be as present in his or her own space and centered alone in the universe as I do.  That thought, when it comes upon me, is overwhelming.  In a crowded place, such as a mall at Christmastime or at a large airport, looking upon a sea of humanity, I am struck DEEP in the gut by the thought that each of those humans is (or might be or could be) as focused on and possessive of their unique space, location, experiences, motivations, etc. as I am with mine. 

            EC means being aware that I am always right where I am, feeling and thinking what I am feeling and thinking, doing what I am doing, and knowing whatever it is I know at the moment.  At this moment, I am sitting in my chair aware that my hands are over the keyboard of my computer and the computer screen is directly in front of me; no one else is having this experience of being where I am, doing what I’m doing, thinking what I’m thinking, and feeling what I’m feeling.  I am here with my own awareness of myself -- being in myself -- as I have been for my entire life.  As I think about it, it seems logical that every other human being must experience existence uniquely and from his or her own perspective, but I am not privy to anyone else’s EC.  Only my own!  And no one else is privy to mine.  My wife is sitting in a chair nearby doing her “thing,” and she must be (or could be) in her own EC just as I am, but I have no sense of hers.  Only mine, as always.

            My experience of EC is as natural and easy for me as viewing a stereogram, but I have been doing both of them for most of my life.  As a child, I used to defocus on pictures to make the images from each eye move about and interact and overlap to make new patterns.  So when stereograms were discovered and became publicly popular, I was able to see them clearly immediately.  But many people have difficulty with them, and it seems, from my discussions with others, that some people have never thought at all about EC or their own uniqueness in the created universe.  If that’s true, why me? 

            Then I asked myself, “Why is this awareness of yourself so important to you?”

            I cannot seem to come up with a simple answer, but I do know it has something to do with respecting others as well as myself, getting along in the world, accepting myself and others, and most importantly, making and maintaining relationships, partly through developing communication and empathy bridges between the planet Me and other people-planets..

            If each of us is the center of the universe, and if the only experience we really KNOW is the experience we are aware of, that accounts for why it is faulty, at best, or impossible, at worst, to deeply grasp another’s different experience with anywhere near as much clarity as our own.  We can try to imagine another’s experience, but there is no way I know that we can directly experience another’s experience precisely as the other experiences it.  No wonder we tend to believe (and often insist) that our views, opinions, thoughts, feelings, etc. are “right” and defend our convictions with self-certainty, because what each of us holds to be true comes from a unique and immanent EC.  What others have in their ECs is existentially utterly alien to me.  What I have in my EC is obvious, immediate, and “real.”  What you claim to be in your EC is hearsay to me.  It is immediate to you but not to me.  It is known by you, but at best vaguely imagined by me.  (My imagination may be clear and vivid, but the degree to which it corresponds to what you experience can never be “objectively” fully evaluated or determined.)

            Then how do we connect with each other?  How do we create bridges making it possible to “understand,” communicate, express and rely on mutualities, etc.?  To be able to do so seems like a kind of miracle to me.  For connecting with each other, I perceive that we use language, in its various forms, and inherently depend upon the commonness of animal and human experiences and the universality of archetypal images.  It seems that we project parts of ourselves and form bridges between the center of our conscious/awareness (the Ego, according to Jung) and the mirrored image of what we perceive to be going on outside ourselves.  It looks to me as if it’s the best we can do and expresses our unique reality. 

            If everyone else’s experience is like mine, relative to the totality of our consciousness we generally spend very little of our aware-time in EC.  It appears to me that most of the time we are ‘involved’ in activities of one sort or another, so that during the times when we are not in EC, we continue to behave self-centeredly based on the inner reality that has developed within us and to which we have grown accustomed.  When I am living life without that awareness, I may feel sorry for an invalid who does not want or need pity, I may react to someone’s actions as odd or commonplace or funny or dull.  If one is judgmental, one holds to a Should as if God had made it a universal law, such as, “People should not marry outside their own culture,” or “Children should be seen but not heard,” or “Siblings should get along with each other,” or “Parents’ authority should not be questioned because they are older and wiser than their offspring.” 

            My experience is my reality and only my reality.  If I were not conscious of that, I imagine it would be a very small step in reasoning to assume that my experience is the only true (absolute) reality and is “right;” anyone who claims to experience something different must be in the “wrong.”  I suspect it is this lack of EC that ultimately results in most (if not all) conflicts and wars between people or between a person and another aspect of nature.1  For example, it is a very tiny step from thinking, “I enjoy this book” to “This is a good book” to “Others should enjoy this book too, and if they don’t, there’s something wrong with them, and if they do, they are made of the right stuff and are on my side” to “The world would be better off without people who don’t agree with me” to “Let’s get rid of those people.”  The “good” and “bad” doesn’t have to refer to people.  It could be animals or plants or a location on the earth.  For example, “I enjoy being in the mountains more than anyplace else on Earth” can become “Being in the mountains is the only right way to live.”  And that can become (in a few more steps), “Anyone or anything that does not flourish in the mountains should be eliminated from the Earth.”

            I find that as we develop, the inner child’s desire for harmony, security, safety, to be cared for, to be respected, to be comfortable, etc. is experienced as important inner needs, just as they were for us when we were children.  Hopefully, these needs were generally satisfied by caretakers, and the inner child’s longings is also attended to by inner caring complexes.  In my empathy for the child -- as I perceive it through projecting my own inner child -- I receive pleasure from observing a child’s receiving those things.  I enjoy when my inner child receives them, so I tend to empathize with that fulfilling experience.  I can, in a fantasy world, imagine a child who desires just the opposite, i.e., to be mistreated, abused, and neglected.  Such a child has as much ‘right’ in this God-created (not my-created) world to receive its desire as the child who wants the ‘good stuff,’ but I doubt that I could empathize with this alien-seeming child who seeks the opposite of that which I experience as pleasing and desirable, especially when it is in harmony with my soul (God’s Will).  (Could the opposite really mean centeredness, inner harmony, Tao, in anyone if it isn’t in me?  I suppose so, but I may not be able to empathize with it.)

            Some time has passed since I started writing this essay, and from that point on, the time I have spent in EC has increased dramatically.  I am in it much of the time when I am alone, with clients, and with my wife.  Many people seem to me to be so caught up in the child’s needs that they cannot feel comfortable in their own body with their own experience and awareness, and they have opinions and demands of others that reveal a profound self-absorption that ignores even the possibility that others may have utterly different needs and experiences from those created in their own minds.  I am therefore challenged regarding how to make a bridge to the minds of these people where I accept and respect their self-absorption and yet respect my own empathic perception of what seems to be blockages to their emotional growth and development.  I feel as if I am perpetually striving to solve a terribly complex and difficult puzzle, not only involving my projected perceptions2 of what might be going on in the other person, but how to respectfully bridge the immense chasm between us and our experiences.

            So here I am, self-consciously trying to communicate (form a bridge) with a reader whose consciousness and reality development I may know nothing about.  I have the image of sending a message in Morse code out into deep space wondering if it will reach anyone and, assuming it does, if that other being will receive any of the meaning I am consciously intending to convey.  It’s a risk, but there is nothing to lose ... nothing except the time and energy I am expending.  But I am willing to expend it because what I am putting down feels urgent and extremely important to my soul. 

            As long as I am in EC, there can be no hybris (or am I deceiving myself?); I cannot see beyond myself, and it is God’s will that is being done in the world, not mine.  Interestingly, even though I sense my aloneness in EC, it is a place where I feel strong because I can readily accept what goes on in me without judgment and I feel fine supporting my convictions with all my might, because all my convictions concern my personal experiences of which I am aware, and they are, simply, what they are.  It is perfectly okay with me if your experience differs from mine and if we utterly disagree.  Yours is yours and mine is mine.  “No problem.”  As God’s creations, and as I see it, we each have a ‘right’ to our own experiences.  If we have mutual respect for one another and we each strive to seek a common course of action together, even though we are at odds in our different experiences, we shall strive to find a way that is mutually acceptable.



ADDENDUM A:  EC AND PROJECTION

            I ask myself, how do we connect with one another.  Answer: through projection.  That seems clear enough, but I have struggled with trying to understand the feelings associated with certain perceptions. 

            For the past 35 years or so I have made it a point to have rose bushes in my garden.  The rose is a special flower to me.  (Jung talks about how the rose can be a symbol of the Self.)  Once I had a bush that produced a single bright red blossom -- the first in the season -- that must have been about nine inches or more in diameter.  It was startling.  I was awed by it.  Once I was walking in the neighborhood where I had an office and noted a single rose on a long rose bush; it seemed perfect and I wept at its beauty.  That reminds me of another time when I was walking in the same neighborhood in the Spring.  I stopped to gaze at a gorgeous garden full of lilies, roses, and other flowers and greenery, and as I soaked in the beauty I prayed.  I thanked God for providing such beauty.  Then a cat walked by between me and the garden.  It just walked by.  It didn’t stop to admire the garden at all.  I changed my prayer, thanking God for creating me such that I was able to experience beauty.  It didn’t strike me until some time later -- several years, in fact -- while I was enjoying the roses in the garden of a new home, that, while I was immensely enjoying the beauty of the rose, the experience of beauty was in me, not in the rose per se.  I felt something.  I once blurted out to a rose I had picked to adorn a room in my house, “You’re beautiful!”  It didn’t blush or withdraw or throw out its chest in pride or anything like that.  It didn’t say, “Thank you” or “No I’m not” or “You can say that again” or anything at all.  It just sat there and remained its own natural self.  The experience of beauty and the appreciation of its existence were in me. 

            This takes me to the subjects of flattery (or compliments) and insults/criticisms.  Very often, when someone says, “Your hair looks good today”, “What a beautiful picture you have chosen for your den!”, “You’re such a good conversationalist”, or some other such ‘flattering’ or ‘complimentary’ remark, the response by the flatteree is, “Thank you.”  That response started bothering me some years ago after I had spent over a year studying about and meditating on the concept of projection.  Since the flatterer is responding to his/her own reaction, why should the receiver of the projection be grateful?  I developed my own response: “I’m pleased (or happy) that you like it.”  And I am.  I am because I project my own feeling of pleasure into the other person whose statement seems to imply an inner positive experience.  That, in turn, brings forth an empathically pleasurable feeling in me.  Now, if, in response to the conscious experience of projected pleasure, I recognize gratitude for that experience, I might thank the flatteree for generating the statement that brought about that pleasure.  But the “Thank you” would not mean I was grateful for the statement itself; that represents an experience of the flatterer to which I have no direct access and for which I am not responsible.  It makes no sense to me to thank someone for their having a pleasurable experience.  It does make sense to me to thank someone for sharing their pleasurable experience with me.

            This entire discussion can apply equally well to someone’s insults.  If I take in an insult, then I am attending to an inner critic, to which the guilt-ridden inner child might respond with guilt, but which has nothing directly to do with the external insulter.  The latter is expressing a reaction to an inner feeling within him/her.  If someone is unhappy with an action I have taken, and if that person really wants to form a bridge to develop a better relationship with me, s/he will express her/his feelings and listen to mine, and in the end, together, we shall find a way of functioning in harmony.  In any event, the experience3 behind the words -- or other means of communication -- we express to each other lies uniquely in the speaker.  The same is true of the one who is listening or receiving the message.4
           
            Another issue which has captivated me is the way in which I am affected by what I project into the people I care mostly about.  I recall a moment when I was working in my garden thinking about how happy I feel when my daughters seem to be happy, and how wretched it feels when they are sick, depressed, or unhappy about something that happened to them.  I stopped and pondered, “Why should how I perceive that they feel affect how I feel?”  The image I had was that they were somehow incorporated in my heart ... physically!  Intellectually, I knew that wasn’t so, but whatever I experienced to be their feelings seemed to be reflected in a feeling in my heart.  Interesting!  Years later, I learned that there were many feelings they had that I knew nothing about, and there were times when I misinterpreted what they were experiencing.  Nevertheless, I was pleased at their apparent pleasure.  Why?  I toyed with the idea that I could empathize via projection with their positive feelings, and that gave me pleasure. 

            This mechanism also seems to operate when we receive or give strokes.  Like flattery or insults, strokes let another person know what we appreciate or dislike in what s/he is doing or has done.  The pleasure (or pain) is projected and empathically we inwardly respond similarly.  If we express our reactions, we can project additional pleasure in the other, which, circularly, adds to our own through the empathic process.  Thus, positive feelings can become amplified.  For that reason, perhaps, there have developed such aphorisms as “kindness begets kindness” and “give and you shall receive” and “service is its own reward.”  It appears that the amplifying aspect of empathy through these kinds of projections is greater the closer one feels toward someone, where there is a kind of concept (if not fantasy) of the importance of building bridges with that person.  Where two people sincerely and consciously strive to develop the interpersonal connections, the effort can be successful and rewarding.  When the effort is made by only one of a pair of persons, but where there is a conceptual basis for the attempt, the effort usually is very difficult, painful, unsatisfying, and often disappointing.  This often happens between parents and children.  The offspring may assume that a parent should be understanding and caring, only to realize that the parent has an agenda and an inner image of the child that has little resemblance to the child him/herself.  But that very assumption by the offspring means that s/he has an image of the parent that does not correspond to what is observed coming from the parent.  From my view of the world, there seems to be no person or thing that was created to satisfy the needs or to correspond to the inner image existing within anyone.  But who am I to say?  That is the way it looks to me.

            I have had people argue with me about my ideas on this matter.  They point to what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jews and others, to what the white man has done to the native Americans, and what other oppressive leaders have done to those they have oppressed.  “Aren’t they evil!?” is the declarative question.



ADDENDUM B:  MORAL SUBJECTIVITY

            I really cannot knowledgeably speak about any experience other than my own, and only that which is conscious.  I look into the world and imagine that everyone else’s experience is as immediate and as “real” to them as mine is to me.  So, if we have different experiences, which is ‘right’?  If mine is ‘right’ to me, and yours is ‘right’ to you, then the reasoning part of me says, everyone’s is ‘right’, and yet, in an absolute sense, no one is ‘right’; experiences may simply be not the same for everyone.  Consequently, I arrive at the conclusion that -- barring a message from God to the contrary -- there is no absolute ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. 

            For this reason, I have long since decided that I am not suitable to be a judge or serve on any panel or committee whose responsibility it is to subjectively evaluate others’ performance. 



ADDENDUM C:  SPIRITUALITY & THE NUMINOUS

            Questions:  How does spirituality enter into EC?  Where do the issues of God, soul, spirit, “higher power,” Satan, angels, demons, and the like fit into the consciousness of ourselves?  Where does the experience of the archetypes fit in here?  (And the following question pops up in me: Is this the beginning of a mission to analyze different kinds of experiences?)

            Certain experiences arouse numinous feelings in me and consequently lie in a special category.  I have dreamt of having an audience with God; each time, the encounter has produced very powerful and awesome feelings in me!  Angels have visited my dreams, and that too produced a response pattern in me that differed from most of my other, more frequent responses.  I have dialoged with, sculptured, and painted images of the archetypes, and the process was generally accompanied by powerful numinous feelings.  How do those feelings differ from the ones accompanying sensations, intuitions, feelings and thoughts in most of my daily activities?  (Why aren’t all experiences numinous?) They seem somehow so immense -- in some mysterious way -- that their totality and reality cannot be comprehended except by inference from some superficial representation.  It’s like experiencing the tip of an iceberg or the faint smell of smoke.  I especially like the idea of the Kabbalists that the unknowable creator, En Sof, can only be sensed or intuited through an experience (which is, in itself, difficult to access) of the emanations of En Sof, the ten sephiroth. 

            (As I ponder on the numinous reactions in me, I realize that the “dread” I felt, as a child and youth whenever I was existentially aware, had a numinous quality.  Life itself was numinous!  As an adult, I seem simply to accept that it IS: by definition, the life force appears to be in all living things.  But what a miracle that is!)
 
            Because I am talking about them, I feel responsible to define what I mean by the spiritual terms I use.  For me, the soul appears to be that within me that connects me with life and with the divine; I personally sense it as a feminine part of me.  God is what lies behind creation; God feels complex because of the complexity of all that is created.  (I can really understand how the ancients arrived at the idea of a pantheon of gods, each concerned with a different aspect of creation.)  I experience Satan as that force (energy) which has to do with destruction.  Satan is also complex, mainly, perhaps, because destruction means annihilation, but it also opens the way for new creations, which probably accounts for its alias, Lucifer, bringer of light.  I define Spirit is that which moves me to action, inner and outer.

            I think I can relate more about my experiences of the soul than anything else.  When I am in awe of something I cannot explain or when I have an aesthetic response (experiences of the numinous?), soul is involved.  It’s as if the soul wraps a warm blanket around EC and I am fully immersed in the inner response.  My experience of beauty resonates within me, physically and emotionally: (1) there is the profound feeling (both within me and, it seems, within the soul) of appreciation for the creation -- which originates in/from the divine Creator and passes through the human creator -- and (2) there is the ecstasy of the soul, which I experience (how to give it words?) as a kind of oneness with the universe.  I generally feel this, for just a few examples, when I touch my wife, when I listen to a Beethoven symphony or Mozart’s horn concerti, whenever I smell a plumeria or gardenia, at the sight of a brilliant sunrise or sunset, or when I stand before a post-1938 painting of Yves Tanguy.  (If I included everything that touches my soul, the list would be very, very, very long.) 

            Numinous awe arises when I am conscious of the amazing expressions of nature.  It can encompass my EC when I focus on astronomical events, the miracles of existence and transformations that are observable in the structure and functions of living plants and creatures.  I sense a miracle in both the process and result of creation, the emergence and the object of beauty.  Both, for me, imply a source beyond my comprehension. 

            As I sit here pondering on the experience of EC and the idea of remaining perpetually focused, that in itself verges on the numinous.  I wonder if it is possible for me (or, by projection, any human) to survive a continuous “centeredness” and experience of awe. 



            Tangential thought:  I have known people who pray once a week in church, but at no other time.  I have heard of people who claim to be religious, yet demonstrate contempt and disregard for, and sometimes openly abuse, others.  There are also people who apparently have never experienced numinosity or awe.  I wonder if there is a gene that has to do with those experiences; are we born with the capacity for sensing the numinosum?  The discovery of Williams Syndrome strongly suggests that enjoying life, being outgoing, and having musical talent are genetically determined!