57:Man's Existential Dilemma

57

Man’s Existential Dilemma

Man is mortal and one day he will die. This is the reality of our situation. But in this reality lies a quandary, because man does not want to die; he wants to live forever. This is man’s existential dilemma, and the subject of today’s spiritual musing…

I don’t know when it happened, but somewhere along the way on my journey of self-discovery I had the simple but astonishing realization that we’re all limited by our own belief systems, and if our belief system does not allow for self-transcendence we will suffer from the existential dilemma of our inevitable mortality, which in turn makes us anxious of our vulnerable short life that gives rise to thoughts of our irrelevance to the cosmic scheme of things, and in righteous anger we’re all going to shout one day, “What’s the point of it all?”

This perspective was punctuated by a series of brilliant lectures on Personality that I came upon online by a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto in which he talked about the inevitable consequences of man’s existential dilemma and his best efforts to relieve the anxiety that man’s oppressive dilemma gives rise to by learning how to cope with the enantiodromiac forces of our nature, which in his wisdom he saw as finding the right balance between the being and non-being of our mortal nature; meaning, our false shadow self and ego personality, which he drew upon from the Taoist philosophy of Yin and Yang.

The philosopher Jean Paul Sartre summed up man’s existential dilemma in the following words: “I am what I am not, and I am not what I am,” concluding that man is both being and non-being forever in the process of becoming, and when he dies he ceases to become and is no more. Which is why Sartre saw no exit out of man’s existential dilemma, and the most that man could do was to make the best of his situation by taking moral responsibility for his life to keep the chaos of unfettered freedom at bay, which led to Sartre’s most quoted words: “Man is a useless passion” who is “condemned to be free.” But that wasn’t good enough for me, which was another reason why I left my philosophy studies at university to find a way out of man’s existential dilemma.

Finding the right balance between our being and non-being is not enough, as my own life experiences proved to me; because finding the right balance keeps one stuck on the tightrope of life that does not resolve our existential dilemma, and the only solution that I could see to resolving the quandary of our paradoxical nature was to transcend myself, which Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” helped me to do, as well as the radical teaching of self-transcendence encoded in Christ’s cryptic sayings and parables.

But this only worked for me because I dared to embrace a belief system that provided an exit to man’s existential dilemma; and herein lies our problem, because this secret belief system does not come without a price, as the rich young man in one of Jesus Christ’s most disturbing parables came to see.

In the Gospel of Matthew a rich young man came up to Jesus and asked him the question: “Good Master, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?”

And Jesus replied: “If thou wilt enter into life (eternal), keep the commandments.”

The rich young man pressed Jesus and asked which commandments he should keep to gain eternal life, and Jesus replied: “Thou shalt not murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Honor thy father and thy mother: and, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

“All these things have I kept from my youth up: what lack I yet?” said the rich young man, pressing Jesus still further for the secret of eternal life.

And Jesus came to the point and bluntly spelled out the final cost of eternal life to the brazen rich young man: “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.”

But when the rich young man heard what eternal life would cost him, “he went away sorrowful: for he had many possessions.”

This led to Christ’s most misunderstood sayings: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God,” and  not until one breaks the code of Christ’s sayings can one see that Jesus was speaking in metaphor about the secret way to transcend ourselves by transforming the dual consciousness of our mortal nature, which I managed to do with Gurdjieff’s teaching that introduced me to the transformative principles of conscious effort and intentional suffering that Jesus expressed in his most paradoxical saying, “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” As the Sufis would say, one has to die before dying to be reborn to their true self.

The irony is that we are all immortal souls anyway, but we don’t realize that we are immortal until we resolve the paradoxical nature of our being and non-being, which is what Christ’s teaching was meant to help us do as he revealed to the rich young man who wasn’t willing to pay the price to transcend himself; but over time Christ’s teaching got so watered down that it lost its original meaning and became a hollow doctrine of salvation that absolves man of the pilgrimage and penance stage necessary for self-transcendence, and as fervent as one may be in his vain belief that through the redemptive power of Jesus’s death upon the cross he will be saved, not until one takes “salvation” into his own hands and resolves the paradoxical consciousness of his own nature will he transcend himself.

I found my true self by dying to my false self, as Jesus said I would if I kept his sayings; and at the risk of saying something that will be sure to threaten the spiritual complacency of the status quo, I did what I had to do to transcend myself by transforming the shadow side of my ego personality and making my two selves into one, which I expressed in the following words that brought resolution to Sartre’s demoralizing no-exit philosophy: “I am what I am not, and I am not what I am; I am both but neither. I am Soul.”

In Christ’s teaching, I gave birth to my transcendent self. That’s how I resolved the issue of my mortality and became my true self. But I don’t expect anyone to believe me unless they have embarked upon the same journey of self-discovery, which we all must do eventually to break the cycle of life and death that keeps us trapped in our existential dilemma; and if we don’t get it right in this lifetime, we will just keep coming back until we do.

That’s the irony of our existential dilemma and life’s joke upon Jean Paul Sartre, because man is not condemned to be free as he claimed us to be; he is free to be condemned by his own belief system!

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