The existential

Existential  just means "of-existence".

See also:  U G Krishnamurti, Niezsche, spirituality.

WHAT IS THE EXISTENTIAL? WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
"What comes after this? After we die? Is it just blank emptiness, like in space? Forever?"

It's only the very center of every issue of our lives. It is the predominant issue that exists all around us - the issue of ourselves, by our relationship to the universe.



''What are we here for? How can we come to understand this very situation we call life? How are we to know value, or be valued? I do not feel complete. I am having difficulty. - These are all existential ''concerns. From time to time we may become aware of not just the agency itself of our lives (the experiencing of ourselves) that we carry out regularly, but the mechanisms behind this which govern everyone and indeed everything, in the case of the philosopher. We can become conscious of the framework behind life, and this is sometimes a concern. Death Speech  is a narrative example of this.

"WHAT EXISTS?" - This is the area where the greatest thinkers have been lost & confused because it throws everything you knew out the window: thinking about existence further plunges you into a personal crisis, "existential despair" (dread). Unless you know better. The existential is a troubling concept for most people - they never even knew it was there!

This is such a broad subject - it basically attempts to cover all the big questions in life, and this, if you are a complex thinker, will connect up with every other issue of thought.

We start with the obvious, and then it gets weird.

Society


The basic realizations a person encounters when 'waking up' are:
 * We've been lied to
 * Everything in our culture is geared against the general health & wellbeing of the many
 * Most people are blind enforcers of their slavery

Swimming under the black night
Everything has a causation (cause and effect). This is widely accepted scientific fact.

Your mind is in every cell of your body.

―Candance Pert

People are minds, not faces. Faces are masks, that hide the brain making the contortions of facial body-image which transfer feeling and identity of that brain to us.

The head is by far the most important part of the body because it is where the thinking happens-- or is it?

Maybe, the stomach pains or the mass of fat on someone's body causes the most "disturbance" or "disruption" in their daily life from a "healthy" one. Maybe a certain person thinks by first bouncing the question off a certain friend, in which case they have social / peer-pressure contexts that dominate the evaluation process going on.

Your world is a living expression of how you are using and have used your mind.

―Earl Nightingale

We are continously affected by a/the combination of the state of mind that we have built for ourselves over time (our experience), and the environment we exist in. Our perception of our environment is particularly central here, because a "weakness" in the quality of thought, fundamentally and exponentially, will have effects towards making us "weaker" in understanding (innacuracy; uncertainty; doubt).

If we can't be sure of anything, most of all our own identities - this totally breaks the common (modern) psychology of the human being, who has not been equipped to deal with anything radically outside his culture.

Absurdism
You will never find an answer to life (that the average Westerner can accept). There is no correct zoom level, and no correct position from which to view. We are tiny organisms on a rock floating in a massive expanse of space. There is no order to be found, (nothing that condenses into human meaning at least), and no action/thought has either a beginning or an end. The concept of the self is a fraud: our past experience drives who we become each day, and experience is a known liar. We are not our own; we are not substantial - everything we have we owe to society, and everything it gave us is imaginary.

This is essentially the notion of absurdism. It is an attempt to gain some understanding of the character of reality, at its most fundamental. As such, people call it a "philosophy" and now we have the word "absurdism", but it's just as much an experience.

In a sense we are merely the husks of the sociological activity (interplay) on this planet. Imagine being a tree-trunk. (And then posing the question; "why is this particular tree shaped like this?"). Something nonsensical, unbelonging, insane even -- that's what physical form is. Because everything that is is simply what was required to emerge from the last state of everything in that particular environment. Animals have noses/beaks because that is what this particular planet and its atmosphere (planet size) allowed or required.

It's an experience - the absurd - where you catch a glimpse of how nothing really belongs in this universe, but is just silly, pointless, undefined except to the particular local space, the local use and scope. Arbitrary. Completely alien from the simple and isolated narratives we tell ourselves; that our mind is designed to continually manufacture as part of an automatic function, to protect the organism's sanity and self-interest, so as to adapt in an environment, so as not to be in danger.. - this neverending chain of causation is where the absurd draws its power. And nothing else can match it.

Man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy

―Schopenhauer

A mix of needs that cycle on and on forever. A simplification, yes, but a useful one.

Aburdism follows from the very nature of our perception being limited to begin with. What was once so clear becomes so distorted, because we had not been thinking in the broader, (infinite), realm of the everything of everything - and that backlog, your life's knowledge being wrong, hits you all at once. The absurd scenario demands a recount of earlier models, collapsing their existing thought systems and projecting each element into a new form. Absurdism is a type of clear truth, a nature much more close to the universe itself, and it warps our perception of self (showing it up for the fraud that it is) because what is involved in the concept "I", like how the ant is small enough to eat and crush, is reframed. Absurdism only has to involve reframing something - that is how fragile our identity concept is. Any alien form of life will have to go through the same process. This is an inevitable relationship - it's a solid mathematical inevitability inherent to existence.

What could our day-to-day life *BE*, if not inherently unbelonging, for us to then attach any purpose we want?

Absurdism is keen on encapsulating everything else within it. It is compatible with spirituality because spirituality gladly embraces all concepts and notions - so the two can be experienced at the same time. Another related concept is sonder.

Without anyone watching, the absurd doesn't technically exist. But that's even more complex..

Resolves
If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is. ―Charles Bukowski The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. ―Albert Camus

resources
http://anarquiamoral.blogspot.co.uk/ - Some images that will get you thinking along these lines http://www.principiadiscordia.com/bip/1.php (grab the PDFs at the bottom) http://www.principiadiscordia.com/book/1.php - book of the website name

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawNihilist          http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AbsurdityAscendant  http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Absurdism

The mind

U G Krishnamurti

Nihilism

Left/Right hemisphere