Fighting Existential Despair
All of us will face a time when we recognise our true mortality.
Unless we have a satisfactory (realistic, believable) understanding of what ‘death’ actually is, it is absolutely normal to feel anxiety or even terror when faced with threats to our ongoing existence.
Our ongoing existence is something we rarely question until we are forced to consider it. Every day, every second, there are processes that support and sustain our familiar awareness of reality. We might face specific threats, illness, or persecution that threaten our way of being. Or we might recognise global terrors such as war, famine, or climate change. All or any of these may precipitate an existential crisis.
Recognise that despair manifests through an apparent absence of hope. We feel doomed when we fail to see any positive outcome. This is purely mechanical. We cannot lessen the despair at the moment, but we can recognise why it manifests. Things look absolutely terrible and there is no hope. This is doom. It doesn’t mean things are terrible or there is no hope. They just look that way.
I believe the terror is a mixture of helplessness and unknowing. Initially, we are not really sure of what we are scared of. Some might fear some karmic or divine retribution such as hellish existences, but one must speculate that these are more likely to be hypnotic inductions through religious beliefs rather than any actual reality.
The true fear is the fear of not existing. This is something we cannot comprehend and metaphorically is, for the mind, like dividing by zero is to mathematics.
The mind cannot really cope with the concept of non-existence. The mind, which is rooted in awareness, does strange things when faced with the concept of non-existence.
The reason why the mind glitches is that awareness never really changes or goes anywhere. We might think that every night we sleep and during this sleep we become unaware, but this is not the case. Our awareness has several levels, with our conscious awareness of day-to-day life just being one of them. Our dream awareness is another, more subtle awareness.
The most subtle awareness is the thing that becomes aware of your current experience, its memories and events. This awareness will be what is aware of your eventual physical death, and the bizarre and dreamlike worlds of the afterlife, the bardo. This subtle awareness becomes involved in existence after existence, life after life, universe after universe.
Whilst the health of your physical body remains capable of sustaining your body, this subtle awareness is fully invested in its well-being. Once your physical body fails, this awareness cannot grasp the bodily senses and becomes aware of a subtler (inner) process, as you shed your old mental characteristics and then, based on previous desires and fears, create new ones.
This subtle awareness might seem hard to believe. Yet it is the reason why the simplest of animals, even plants, seem to have some degree of sentience. Our superior sentience is not simply because we have bigger brains, but because these bigger brains are aware of more things.
This awareness is subtle, invisible and arises in proximity to our thoughts, feelings and sensations. This is why we can have several different senses that all relate to a central experience. When our body is in deep sleep the awareness remains, but here it is aware of ‘nothing’, which we cannot remember as there are no mental objects, so there is no subjective experience of viewing these objects.
This awareness isn’t outside you, it is you. It is the thing that looks through your eyes, feels your feelings and knows your thoughts. It is always present and fresh. Even when you are aware of being tired, this awareness of the tiredness is never tired. Sometimes we might be shocked about how old we are looking, yet the awareness that recognises the ‘old body’ is fresh and new.
Recognise this awareness is different from consciousness. Consciousness arises when we contemplate a ‘thing’. If we see an apple, in order for the mind to know this apple it creates a concept of an apple, which being an object, creates a subject. We have the experience of seeing an apple.
How to overcome existential despair
1. The cause of the despair is not important. This may seem insensitive but it is important. For the purposes of acquiring a more useful state of mind, i.e., overcoming this despair, it doesn’t matter that much what the threat actually is. Once your mind adjusts and finds a way of coping with your physical mortality it will treat any threat to life as the same.
2. Despair feels real but it is always cognitive. This means it arises through thinking. If you were facing death, but didn’t think about it, you wouldn’t feel despair.
3. Cognitively it is beneficial to have a concept of death and the after-death process. This takes curiosity, a degree of open-mindedness and certainly doesn’t involve blind faith. It is very worthwhile as once one finds an acceptable paradigm then one has the conception of a continuation, which significantly reduces the nameless terror associated with non-existence.
4. Recognise that the truest sense of existence is your awareness, which is subtly continuous and always has been. We arise as physical beings that this awareness temporarily associates with. We can almost become aware of this awareness, as it is the awareness we have before we think or identify anything.
I recommend learning about the Buddhist perspective on death. It seems that it isn’t important that you have an utter conviction. Having something that seems possible is enough to quell utter terror. The concepts, true or not, seem to settle a fraught mind.
This youtube channel has some excellent audio files:
If you wish to dig deeper, and I recommend it, then this is a very good, but thorough textbook on Buddhist philosophy:
The Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma (Bhikkhu Bodhi)
“When there is nothing left to hold onto, one learns to rest in the groundless.”
— Contemplative Saying