By Herbert V. Guenther
There are many kinds of problems which confront man in his meaning-seeking activities, but the mayor and disquieting one is that he himself is intrinsically problematic, not only for others, but above all for himself. This disturbing fact, more often than not, causes man to evade facing up to his problematic nature by seeking refuge in a variety of easy “solutions,” which, of course, solve nothing, because the basic questions concerning man’s problematic nature have not been squarely addressed.
It seems, however, that there have always been special situations in which people wondered why they exist at all, and more specifically, exist as they do. However, the mood of despair prevents rather that stimulates any balanced questioning, for such moods not only foster misunderstanding the very source of that which prompts the questioning, but also obscure and undermine the urge to know. Consequently, the actual source of the questioning is clouded over even before it has been authentically experienced. The result is then a merely “subjective mood,” which usurps the genuine impulse to know. The question of existence is thereby reduced to and channelled through a subjective feeling of emptiness and vacuity and a sense of futility and hollowness with its attendant denigration of all that is.
It is therefore more likely that such questions as “Why is a man a problem?” and “What does it mean to be?” are most authentically raised during or after feelings of exaltation, when man has been “most himself,” has experienced himself as perfect, whole, and complete, and has been able to perceive perfection, wholeness, and completeness both in the others and in the world around him.
But it is necessary to distinguish Being and existence. The former names what may be called the enduring reality in the latter. Existence, by contrast, is a pulsation, fluctuation, and “projection” of Being, in the sense that each and every pulsation reveals a different possibility of Being’s infinite openness, a program, as it were, of its own readout.
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