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Existence

Issues: ... self-reflection … stability … identity … defining yourself accurately … finding yourself … thinking clearly of yourself ….

Warning: You may experience nausea reading this article because it requires your own thinking to understand it. Take your time. Stop. But persist in going through a pure philosophy experience. (see further warning at the bottom)

Thoughts

Obsessed as to whether I am a philosopher or not, as my retired, friendly professor friend questioned recently. What is a philosopher, anyway? Nay, what is a Strephon? I should be asking if I am a true Strephon philosopher. Or just a true Strephon?

I lie in bed in the early evening of the day, leaning back on nice new pillows, and why should we not have them, my partner and I, it has been several years since we bought the last ones?

I look down upon my belly bulging out at age 75. I lost recently over 10 kilo due to my disciplined juice fast to do so. It took 42 days to achieve this weight reduction, changing my food attitudes in the process.

Is this me?

What defines my existence?

I look down at myself lying in bed propped up on new pillows and contemplate what defines my existence. For I have tried, faced with a lung cancer diagnosis, to come up with something that is really me, that I am, that gives me at least a rock base to be able to say, ‘this is me …’

• To this philosopher-psychologist defining in absolute truth terms a truth that is indisputable, that is me, I find incredibly challenging.

She and I have just eaten a simple meal at the bed. Now she’s gone to her room to be her own existence without me, whatever that is. I contemplate my own belly, my body, seeing if I am about to cancer cough or not. I don’t find the need to at the moment.

• Maybe that’s it. When you have cancer, when the doctors show you the x-rays and scans and take the computer cursor and draw a diameter on the computer image of your tumor and it shows 10.5 centimeters, and the specialist doctor says that’s large when you ask her, and you realize that now you are a cancer patient just like most of these waiting in the outpatient clinic room with you, and you think, I am a cancer patient now, that’s the diagnosis, and you don’t panic.

And you wonder, and you finally know why a couple of weeks later, for you realize that your real problem is anyway, never mind others, that you don’t  know really who you are, you don’t know enough how you exist or what is you that you experience existing.

• Therefore you wonder, now as a psychologist, is that what happened? that you had cleaned all the devils out of your house and now bigger devils have moved in?

Is it that you have realized that you maybe did not pay enough attention to your existence?

Maybe you realized already, and you certainly did, that you are not your labels, and all those images and achievements and defeats that other people see you as.

You can quote how many of your various books you have sold, what organizations you helped come into existence, yes, how many of the human species you have linked up with in your sexual-emotional life, and also what you have been awarded from others …

I am the retired psychotherapist and psychology teacher who has helped a significant number of people change their lives for the better. I am that he who also complains that nobody appreciates me now that I am not working, because I can’t work at still changing lives by going through core processes with people as indicated by their dreams.

1. Nobody appreciates me, and I have said this to people. They have assured me they do, but how can they know me, experience me now, as I live in my threatened new existence?
2. I am a cancer patient now, and that means measuring me in centimeters and giving me numbers.

Oh, you are a cancer patient. You have cancer. How shall we measure this for you? What treatments shall we give? What are the likely results? Again numbers. Your chances for survival might be 15 percent if your tumor were smaller. Now you are inoperable, but we can try if you want this. Why not take the chance? We know of others who have survived their similar cancer. Why not you?

Existence. I contemplate my raw belly. Had a little fight over it. I said I was proud to lose so much belly weight and I want to lose more. She said that’s air in there. Don’t lose any more weight. Your body will start eating your muscle and we don’t want that.

I guess I am still in the captain’s seat but someone else is looking out for me in the crucial control tower. The decision she says she thought we agreed on is ‘wait and see.’

• Well, I sit up in bed after dinner and contemplate what clearly defines existence. Am I losing my mind? Do you have a definition we can all rely upon?

I’m part body because I have to keep making decisions about it, feed it, listen to care-takers whose profession is to come in and help take care of this body also. What must they really be thinking sitting, lying, existing in their own bodies all the time dealing with other bodies, most of them dying?

When my doctor speaks twice of having a husband, what does that mean for her? Is that one of the sign posts that defines for her she is existing, that she is some autonomous awareness existing in life.

• I am not her doctor but she is mine. Is she helping me define better my existence at this point in my life? When do I switch into, ‘I am a dying man?’

Now let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Strephon. Ok? Yes …

I ask you again, as I ask myself, what defines me as existing, and is it valuable?

When I do die what of that that has been existing as me goes, stops, is no more? And what is left?

Training Others In Consciousness

Once an advanced training class of mine was questioning me on some statements I had written in my considered classic, The Jungian-Senoi Dreamwork Manual. I found myself trying to explain and defend the issue statements that I had written.

Then something clicked in me and I realized, why am I defending this book? I wrote it but now published and available to people it has a life of its own.

MY BOOK IS NOT ME!

What a revelation and I told my students right there, ‘why are you questioning me about something in the book? I am not the book. I should know this. Why am I unconsciously defending the book? I am not this book, this paper with ink on it and a dynamic color cover and back. The book exists in its own right. If you have an issue with something in the book, take it up with the book, not me!

So ever after when students tried to place me in guru position and ask important questions of me, I would say, ‘That’s an interesting question,’ and smile. ‘I wonder what some answers are to that question?’

‘But you said it,’ replies a student. ‘I can quote it here.’

‘Who is you?’ I ask.

‘You, you!’ answers the frustrated student. ‘You, Strephon!’

‘Which Strephon?’ I ask. ‘The one facing you today? The one who wrote a book called The Jungian-Senoi Dreamwork Manual? Which Strephon so maybe we can pin him down?’

‘You,’ persists the student, smiling as the dawn comes. ‘The one sitting right here.’

‘What if I told you, Strephon does not exist. I do not exist. What would you say to that? What if it’s true? I don’t exist!?’

A number of faces light up by this time with smiles. They have tried to get me to exist again as the author of this dreamwork manual. They have tried to get this person making noises in front of them to exist in a definable way they think they will understand. But he does not comply.

He is teaching them something about dreams, and to teach them something about dreams he must give them experiences about labels and direct experiences, and who or what poses the questions and who or what answers them?

I think they got their ‘true answer’ but it must have been hard for most of them to realize exactly what it was and apply such ‘answer’ to themselves in their own self-definitions.

Of course people still don’t get it today. They want answers to their life and personality questions. They want answers to their dream issues and questions. There always seem to be rather uneducated people who play the guru-teacher and give dream students answers, but without doing the consciousness work to know truly what a dream is and what it is all about, if anything.

Are dreams meaningful?

Of course not!

Do I exist?

Of course not in any absolute terms?

Should I be wondering about my dying?

Wonder all you want but don’t waste your energy on things that don’t help you now.

Am I dying of cancer?

Interesting question … Are you dying? Do you have cancer? What is it that afflicts you?

What do you have energy for now?

Have you done the work to remove focus and energy from anything that is no longer you, that no longer needs to exist as you?

Have you cleaned your slate so that you can write anew your existence, white chalk on clean black slate that is your new day, whether your last or not?

Do only the essential and let the rest go, is the precept that comes to me from some thought cloud working through me.

Am I a philosopher or not?

Philosopher asks, Am I Strephon or not?

Warning: you may have experienced nausea trying to read and understand this. There is a teaching here for you, but intelligent people have trouble truly thinking because thinking’s abstracting functions cause one to feel ungrounded. Try to realize that you are not labels and images, nor a range of feelings and personal histories with this person and that. Try and realize that when you take away the non-essentials you thought were you, you may panic as a ‘not knowing who you are’ entity. Take it slowly, a little at a time. ‘Discovering the real you’ means getting rid of the bullshit and experiencing what, if anything, is left. I have worked with suicides from this base, but that is certainly another story. What is so grounding that you will not self-destruct? Knowing what you can trust as a real self may be one response to the question.

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