Existential Crisis

[polytropos]

I would say I’ve experienced a couple existential crises, once in high school and once in college, both while I was an atheist. Both were also inspired in large part by English classes… Catcher in the Rye and War and Peace.

No altered states of consciousness. The time in high school I remember being incredibly depressed. In one of my classes I would whisper some very depressing things in my friend’s ear. It bothered him a lot. I don’t think he knew whether I was joking. But I got past it.

 

[oldcelt]

Okay. But what exactly was your “altered state of consciousness?” (I got the impression that your asphyxiation crisis resulted in some kind of spiritual experience.)

More of a dual consciousness. To those around me I was confused, etc., while my memory of the event…what there is, is calm and peaceful. Nothing as exciting as a vision or such.

 

[Counterpoint]

More of a dual consciousness. To those around me I was confused, etc., while my memory of the event…what there is, is calm and peaceful. Nothing as exciting as a vision or such.

I would argue that the experience of peace in the midst of turmoil (especially when the turmoil is suffocation) qualifies as a bonafide spiritual experience. That’s what it’s all about.

 

[GEddie]

I would argue that the experience of peace in the midst of turmoil (especially when the turmoil is suffocation) qualifies as a bonafide spiritual experience. That’s what it’s all about.

Maybe, maybe not.

As the body begins to shut down in asphyxia, the mind (if still in operation) may indeed register the quiescence of its soma as “peacefulness.”

ICXC NIKA

 

[jimmy]

I am curious where you get the idea that an existential crisis involves an altered state of consciousness. The wiki article you reference doesn’t make such a claim. In fact it confirms what I said in its examples of what can bring on an existential crisis. One of the examples is reaching a significant age and it includes 16 and 40. In otherwords, the mid life crisis is one of its examples. The fear of death is the basis for this. The idea of the crisis is that they question their purpose and meaning in life.

Yes I have had what would be considered an existential crisis. Have you ever woken up with a thought that makes everything make sense as if it all fit together like a puzzle? Or a thought that made everything you believe fall apart? I have had both experiences. The former felt great. Everything fell into place. The latter experiences made me question my purpose and path in life, considering that I was in a masters of theology program, planning on a career teaching, and that is precisely what the thoughts were related to. I began to think I wasted my time studying theology. ‘What do I do now?’ It was as if my thoughts had been reordered and, and my perspective changed in a moment. I read once that the basis of existentialism was the realization that the world isn’t a garden through which you can experience God. With the enlightenment the perception of the world went from being a garden, to being just a bunch of interacting forces. It went from order to being chaotic. Existentialism was a response to this chaos. Existentialism declares that you must create your own meaning. My experience was pretty similar. It was as if the world went from being a garden to being chaotic.

 

[Pancras]

I am curious where you get the idea that an existential crisis involves an altered state of consciousness. The wiki article you reference doesn’t make such a claim. In fact it confirms what I said in its examples of what can bring on** an existential crisis. **One of the examples is reaching a significant age and it includes 16 and 40. In other words, the mid life crisis is one of its examples. The fear of death is the basis for this.

The idea of the crisis is that they **question their purpose and meaning in life. **

Yes I have had what would be considered an **existential *crisis. Have you ever woken up with a thought that makes everything make sense as if it all fit together like a puzzle? Or a thought that made everything you believe fall apart? I have had both experiences. The former felt great. Everything fell into place. The latter experiences made me question my purpose and path in life, considering that I was in a masters of theology program, planning on a career teaching, and that is precisely what the thoughts were related to. I began to think I wasted my time studying theology. ‘What do I do now?’ It was as if * my thoughts had been reordered and, and my perspective changed in a moment.

I read once that the basis of existentialism was the realization that the world isn’t a garden through which you can experience God. With the enlightenment the perception of the world went from being a garden, to being just a bunch of interacting forces. It went from order to being chaotic. **Existentialism **was a response to this chaos. **Existentialism **declares that you must create your own meaning. My experience was pretty similar. It was as if the world went from being a garden to being chaotic.

But one can have an existential crisis without any regard for existentialism.

Without getting lost in the infinite loop of what existentialism is and/or what it is not, you don’t have to even go there in the first place. Your sentence above, jimmy, “My perspective changed in a moment” touches on a human experience that transcends all lives of all people. Even as sentient beings we are subject to such a prospect in our mental state, when some experience places us in a new and different outlook all of a sudden.

It could be a car accident, or a shipwreck, for example. The former occurs very quickly, the latter could take hours. But they both render a person facing a new outlook on life, and just as soon as he has a moment to reflect on what has happened, he is facing an existential crisis, by necessity. And this is a very animal thing, for a dog or a horse could be so subject to such a crash, and survive: what do I do now? is the question – if it’s your pet dog and he’s a loyal pet, and you survived too, he’s probably going to remain loyal to you and even risk his own life to help you, but if he’s not so loyal, he might take the opportunity to run off, perhaps in confusion, because of the crisis he is enduring.

But for people, such a crisis can result from being told something that shocks the mind into a change in fundamental outlook on life, on one’s own purpose for his existence.

I don’t think that drugs or drug use is a helpful addition to the problem because it complicates the essential question. And that essential question was well stated in the OP: Have you ever had an existential crisis?
.

Are you having (or, have you ever had) an “existential crisis?”

The causes or occasions for an existential crisis can be of two kinds, therefore:

1. Some event or physical trauma that happens in the life of a person, the direct effects of which he has felt or experienced, that is, some objective reality that exists outside the mind of this person having the crisis, and,
2. Some idea or concept or principle or proposition, communicated to his mind by way, usually, of spoken words or perhaps of written words, but it also could be one of or a series of images, sounds, sensations or other perceptions. It could even be a dream. A dream would not fall into the first category because it is only a subjective reality, that is, the dream exists in the mind of the dreamer and not outside his mind.

But there is as it were a third category, that of some real event that has occurred remotely, which affects a person’s life directly (1), but the person becomes aware of it by way of a message, that is, the spoken or written word (2). Therefore, this third category is a combination of the first two. It is something that has real existence outside the mind, plus, the mind has become aware of its existence and consequently, its truth.
.

 

[Pancras]

.
Rather than comment on my comment above, it seemed better to make a second post, since this might be distracting from what I wrote, above. The reason that we are well advised to prescind from any consideration of “existentialism” in view of this question (the OP) is, that there is no distinction between the two categories I enumerated above, in the ‘deep well’ of unknowing into which one inevitably falls, when one dabbles with such matters as existentialism.

Compare my post, above, to the article in Wikipedia, if you dare.

For the existentialist, there is no distinction between objective reality and subjective reality because for one stuck in that rut of ignorance, reality is in the mind, therefore, what happens TO a person is indistinguishable from what happens IN a person.

For the likes of one who willingly conforms his reality to "I. Kant" for example, He Can’t see the distinction at all. And the mere act of studying such material has the power to suck your mind into its tractor beam of attraction. There is for him no distinction by means of his umbrella fiat, that “reality is in the mind” – which is, to be honest, an objective lie. Therefore, when you start by believing a lie, you end up in all manner of chaos, or, perhaps, in an existential crisis. But then, it’s a crisis of your own making, because it was your choice to even go there in the first place.

Consequently, my advice to you is, don’t even go there. And you don’t have to. If you are interested in the truth, you don’t have to follow blindly the blind, and then fall blindly and headlong into the pit of unknowing, which is exactly where *existentialism *will take you.

And you might not even need a Category One trauma to get you there. It could be a Category Two alone: such as, just reading a book by one of the lunatic fringe philosophers who define what modern intellectual vacuousness is all about and to whom present day philosophy courses at most colleges defer as if they’re some kind of deities.
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[Sochi]

It seems to me that the essence of an existential crisis is the discovery in part or in whole that one’s thought paradigm of the world and Reality haven’t a 1/1 correspondence. And the crisis has depth in proportion to the sense of identity invested in the paradigm. Part also has to do with the level of maturity one has achieved in awareness, as well. And such crisis often happen at the fulcrum points of changing levels in the movement away from infantile self absorption. Somewhat similarly to forcing an electron to another level. It takes energy to change levels. Such a crisis also reveals what tools one has to handle it. Part of the crisis might be in finding new tools. And if one doesn’t, well, there are consequences.

For my encounter with such a crisis, I found, despite diligent effort, that my religion was an inadequate tool. It was ten years and a lot of sorting later that I found what was ultimately useful as a cognitive line that matched the event of my crisis. It took quite a while to stabilize. As I found out much later, that is not uncommon in such events.

Without going much into detail as to what happened as a trigger, I will only say that my crisis had to do with an inevitably necessary “ground up” re-evaluation of what it is, experientially, to be human. In an instant, I knew that what I considered to be “me” was a bit of conjecture projected on a screen that can only be called “I.” And that “I” has no attributes whatsoever, save Being. “Me,” or person, is a totally conjectural and circumstantial construct specific to a point of view made necessary by association of the sense of identity with a bioapparatus called “human.” This understanding was later deepened and verified a little over a year ago.

And when this happened, while a woefully inadequate description of what my conclusions are (fundamentally they haven’t changed) garnered many negative assessments, many of my activities measurably improved, like my grades in school. The difficulty was in linguistically integrating the Reality of the meaning of the recognition in an inescapable context of experiential limitation. There appear to be two distinct realities, the limited person one clearly and utterly dependent on the grace of the impersonal one that was BEing itself. Yet they are irrevocably one.

And while one of the negatives pointed at me was that I might engage the services of a good psychiatrist, it was very clear to me, after some research, that the dynamic was not amenable to either psychological or religious analyses in the common senses of those fields. Interestingly, the psychological considerations given me were kinder and more compassionate than the rather dismissive and uselessly pious ones of my religious consultants on the matter.

So after all these years, well ten or so after the incident, and then more and more as years went by, it was clear that this wasn’t a matter of madness. It was a phenomenon that is not uncommon with humans. It just isn’t talked about much for the very reason I myself encountered. It is socially dangerous to do so. Unless, of course, you find someone else, or others, who have similarly had their personal rug unceremoniously yanked out from under them.

I won’t baldly state what was the necessary conclusion of this crisis. In ordinary terms, and by that I mean the protective consensus “reality” of the majority, it just doesn’t make sense, or worse. But since it is real to me, so to speak, and since there is a growing body of public work about such a happening, I’ve found it of interest to put out there what happened. Yes, it attracts uh, comments, like flies to honey, but the reward is that on some rare occasions I’ve met someone who “gets” the meaning. And that is the fragrant lotus that grows from the mud.

As a sidebar note, I would encourage Pancras to re-examine the hypothesis that there is an “objective” world and how one might think there is. To begin with, all conjectures regarding that are inevitably subjective, if one really looks. Don’t think so? Look for your “looker” and tell me what you find.

 

[jimmy]

Existentialism is basically the result of a crisis of civilization, so it is relevant. You may not like Kant, but that is the world we live in. Platonism and Aristotelianism are no longer the dominant philosophy.

Regarding your criticism of existentialism not making a distinction between what happens to a person and what happens in a person; it is somewhat relevant. Not that the subject determines reality or that reality exists only in him, but essentially his perception of reality is all that matters at the moment. His perception may be false, but he sees it as reality. Nietzsche’s loss of faith led him to develop his own ideas about life and its meaning. That was an existential crisis. Whether his perception was in line with reality is irrelevant.

 

[Pancras]

Existentialism is basically the result of a crisis of civilization, so it is relevant. You may not like Kant, but that is the world we live in. Platonism and Aristotelianism are no longer the dominant philosophy.

Which philosophy you allow to dominate your own thinking is your own choice.
If you choose to live in the dead world of "I. Kant" thinking, have it as you like it.

When Our Lord said, "He that shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved" (Matt. 24:13), He wasn’t talking about *he who perseveres in erroneous thinking. *

Regarding your criticism of existentialism not making a distinction between what happens to a person and what happens in a person; it is somewhat relevant. Not that the subject determines reality or that reality exists only in him, but essentially his perception of reality is all that matters at the moment. His perception may be false, but he sees it as reality. Nietzsche’s loss of faith led him to develop his own ideas about life and its meaning. That was an existential crisis. Whether his perception was in line with reality is irrelevant.

Thank you for recognizing why the life work of Friedrich Nietzsche was an existential crisis. The poor man regrets his folly in eternity as a direct consequence of his impudence against the revealed truth of God. Anyone who reveres what he taught or believed seriously risks following him into the “pit” of eternal perdition.

“God is dead” -Nietzsche.

“NIETZSCHE IS DEAD” -GOD.

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[jimmy]

What Is the point of your rant? After reading your posts I highly doubt you have ever read any of the philosophers you are disparaging.

 

[Counterpoint]

I am curious where you get the idea that an existential crisis involves an altered state of consciousness. The wiki article you reference doesn’t make such a claim. In fact it confirms what I said in its examples of what can bring on an existential crisis. One of the examples is reaching a significant age and it includes 16 and 40. In otherwords, the mid life crisis is one of its examples. The fear of death is the basis for this. The idea of the crisis is that they question their purpose and meaning in life.

What exactly aren’t you getting here? Being in a state of fear is being in an altered state of consciousness.

 

[jimmy]

What exactly aren’t you getting here? Being in a state of fear is being in an altered state of consciousness.

No it isn’t. You could claim that if you are being attacked by a bear and you are afraid. That might be an altered state. But someone who wakes up at 40 and thinks ‘****, what have I done with my life? I am over the hill. I have maybe 40 years left. Where am I going?’ It isn’t an altered state, but it very well may be fear.

 

[Counterpoint]

No it isn’t. You could claim that if you are being attacked by a bear and you are afraid. That might be an altered state. But someone who wakes up at 40 and thinks ‘****, what have I done with my life? I am over the hill. I have maybe 40 years left. Where am I going?’ It isn’t an altered state, but it very well may be fear.

Someone who is living in a state of fear is not living in a normal state of consciousness. (If you have to seek psychiatric help for your mental state, then it is probably an indication that you are not living in a normal state of consciousness.)

 

[jimmy]

Someone who is living in a state of fear is not living in a normal state of consciousness. (If you have to seek psychiatric help for your mental state, then it is probably an indication that you are not living in a normal state of consciousness.)

The only instance in which fear can be considered a state is when the danger is impending, as in the example of the bear attack or if you are trapped under water or something. That may be considered a different state, but it isn’t the only example of fear. Almost everyone is afraid of death to one degree or another. That doesn’t mean they are living in a different state of consciousness.

 

[GEddie]

Someone who is living in a state of fear is not living in a normal state of consciousness. (If you have to seek psychiatric help for your mental state, then it is probably an indication that you are not living in a normal state of consciousness.)

Not everybody experiencing the midlife crisis goes to a psychiatrist.

Are you suggesting that only when one is wholly unafraid is one’s consciousness “normal”? Fear is a normal reaction of the human psychosoma.

ICXC NIKA.

 

[Counterpoint]

Not everybody experiencing the midlife crisis goes to a psychiatrist.

I never argued that they did. (I don’t necessarily equate an existential crisis with a mid-life crises. IMHO, making that association is actually trivializing an existential crisis.)

Are you suggesting that only when one is wholly unafraid is one’s consciousness “normal”? Fear is a normal reaction of the human psychosoma.

Most people who face a true crisis will usually talk about how the experience was surreal. That being said, I am referring to a fear of death that propels a normal, healthy individual into a deep depression. (Clinical depression is not a normal state of consciousness. I don’t think there is any question about it.)

 

[Aloysium]

. . . (Clinical depression is not a normal state of consciousness. I don’t think there is any question about it.)

Can you explain why you use the term “state of consciousness”.
It does not add anything to one’s understanding of what is a crisis or clinical depression.
I have no idea what a normal state of consciousness would be other than it is different from an altered state.
I don’t think a person’s state of consciousness (normal or altered are the two choices) can be determined by observing a person’s behaviour. Consciousness is a “subjective” phenomenon.
So, the person has to decide whether their consciousness is normal or altered. I’m not sure I can tell the difference.
I’m afraid the label is actually meaningless other than being a way to call someone crazy.
In most parlance, “altered state of consciousness” has to do with drugs. You also see it in pop psychology and pop spirituality articles.
I know you find the term meaningful, but be aware that the statement “Someone who is living in a state of fear is not living in a normal state of consciousness.” comes across as idiosyncratic and that it befuddles a simple matter.

 

[GEddie]

I never argued that they did. (I don’t necessarily equate an existential crisis with a mid-life crises. IMHO, making that association is actually trivializing an existential crisis.)

There is nothing not to “trivialize”, unless one has an IMNAAHO unjustified admiration for existentialism. I do not.

The midlife crisis may, or may not, be the sort of of experience you are thinking of. It may have no reference to death at all. However, one may be in a panic internally when the realize that they have been alive longer than they will be.

ICXC NIKA.

 

[GEddie]

Most people who face a true crisis will usually talk about how the experience was surreal. That being said, I am referring to a fear of death that propels a normal, healthy individual into a deep depression. (Clinical depression is not a normal state of consciousness. I don’t think there is any question about it.)

I have always had a monumental fear of being dead. Because that is part of my “ordinary consciousness,” you could argue that in this instance there never was a “crisis.”

There are too many assertions and not enough clarification of terms, methinks.

ICXC NIKA.