It's easy to catch the existential blues in the dark cold, dead of winter. Without the sunshine and song birds to warm our optimism we might ask ourselves what life is all about anyway? When we fall into the disorientating wasteland of existential angst, life seems meaningless. We feel like a speck of sand in an indifferent, heartless, random universe. All our spiritual woes surface causing us to wonder if indeed there is a divine plan within this sea of emptiness. Lately, regardless of the season, more and more of us are succumbing to attacks of the existential blues. Why?
My existential pain (despair, hopelessness, isolation, disconnection) surfaces when I experience the discrepancy between my sense of potential and my current, limited self. There is a gap between my vision of all that I was meant to become in this incarnation and who I actually turned out to be. If we hold our ideals too high, is that fodder for an existential descent? When we fall short of our idealized, self-actualize being is there nothing left to hang on to? Is that gap simply the juncture between fantasy and harsh reality? Or is it the interface between the dimension of the soul (fully-actualized Self) and the ego/personality (small self)?
Our first contact with our soul may be accompanied by weird, ghostly pains unrelated to our current life. Many of us are venturing toward the threshold of enlightenment. In this threshold deep soul aches surface. All past lives of the soul emerge to bring profound qualities of feeling, saturating our current emotional body.
Collectively we are moving to a new level of consciousness. The route to this frontier brings a loss of meaning as we leave the old paradigm. In this new dimension, unchartered and foreign with no maps of meaning, we miss the nostalgia of the old paradigm. As we cross the chasm to the new world order, all of the old ways are stripped down, depositing us into an existential cauldron designed to bring up all past life meaninglessness. Because we haven't touched the new fronteir, we rely on faith alone to believe that it does indeed exist. Like Columbus, we are way out on the water, hoping for dear life that the new land will eventually reveal itself. Otherwise, we may fall off the "edge of the world" into nothing. This nothing is the seductive existential realm.
As we leave the old dimension our values shift. Priorities of the ego give way to the values of the soul. The ego no longer generates the meaning through which we direct our lives. There is a gap between all that we have known (in our small reality) and the new dimension of our highest truth. In that gap we can plummet into a meaningless abyss with no hand holds to grab on to. Is this a test? How do we cross that abyss?
I can be sailing along through life filled with a great sense of progress. The existential blues suddenly descend like a dark cloud. Waking up with them in the morning is like waking up with the flu. Existential sickness plagues my heart as my mind scrambles for some understanding of this internal weather system that is robbing my joy and inner peace. The more I try to put aside this heavy weight of bleakness the more it tenaciously settles in, determined not to let me off the cosmic hook. All of my tricks for battling the emptiness, like communing with nature, practicing my favorite chi gung forms or playing the piano, feebly fall by the wayside of my "blues". Engulfing despair flattens reality into a one dimensional cartoon that is not funny. I lose all clarity as reality blurs into this magnetic flood of illusions usurping my "knowing". The tsunami wave of futility and meaninglessness has me in its grasp, devouring my enlightened, inspired self, convincing me that there is no place to go from here. The walls close in, shrinking my reality into a gray cement box, a coffin that severs all motivation while it annihilates vision and understanding. I try to connect with higher frequencies like the Tibetan or the angelic realm, to provide a porthole to the larger picture that would explain this quicksand of misery I've fallen into. Inevitably, during these storms all I can "pick up" is static, like a computer that crashes. These existential blizzards last a few minutes or several weeks.
To avoid the narcissistic pull of these energies that generate complete self-absorption, which further blocks out the big picture, I have learned to talk about this pain with loved ones. Sometimes I wait, hoping to hear the encouraging subtle voice of higher consciousness. Service helps. When I focus on others, my angst recedes. But there are times when nothing works. There I sit, holding on for dear life as my internal fabric of well-being recedes like a shrinking island. I must dare to stretch beyond the known. Existential crisises challenge me to puncture my bubble of wisdom into a larger order of knowing while swimming through the gulf of the abyss where all the dead bodies of my outgrown self float. Yes, the existential blues carry death of the old meaning. If only I could avoid this torment - somehow get it right next time and be spared this awful human experience of spiritual dismemberment.
The Tibetan reaches out his arms, exuding compassion, reminding me that the spiritual plane is always available for comfort. He says:
"Once soul development through the paradigm of duality is fully harvested, students release the belief structures of the third dimension and find themselves vulnerable in a wasteland where old skins are shed. Obsolete meanings lose potency while self struggles to make contact with the emerging, still undecipherable, significance of the next level. All that self has worked for - cleansing, purification, healing, opening - has been to leave the small room of the ego to venture into the vast terrain of the Magnificent Self.
"Once out of the nest, students may be surprised by what they encounter. Expecting a celebration, soberly they find themselves in a dimensional hinterland that must be resolved in order to merge into a greater field of being. At that moment self says : "I want to go back into that warm small house where I knew who I was." Yet the door is shut. The house fades. The universe won't allow retreat. Knocking on the door to get back in only perpetuates the existential blues. Ambivalence about going back prevents self from accelerating through this dimensional field into higher ground. Evoke the courage to move through the existential blues by remembering that self is braving terrain that has never been closer to enlightenment.
"Disillusioned with the old paradigm, deep grief emerges from self's inability to believe in what used to be important. This feels isolating because many are not yet emancipated from their small self. In this gap between the unrealized and the potential self surfaces a soul ache that carries the profound longing/desire/heartache for the Higher Self. From lifetimes of experiencing enlightenment as an unattainable consciousness beyond the student's reach, deep levels of disappointment/sadness create an intense spiritual hunger that cannot be fed in the old ways. The student falls into a pocket of emptiness, a strange nostalgia, where all the earthly rewards fall short of deep fulfillment. In past lives when there was a gap between the Higher Self not yet in form and the current self struggling to break through illusion, like children with noses pressed up against a locked candy store, there developed a searing, inconsolable feeling of disappointment.
"Invoke the Light of Acceptance to heal the gap between the magnificent and unawakened self. In this gap is the illusion, fostering humanity's greatest suffering, that self is not yet awakened. When existential pain emerges through the emotional/mental body, self is closer than ever to the deepest terrain of the soul. Ironically, the existential blues reflect the crash and burn of illusion. Despite the discomfort of traversing the gap, self has attained a state of spaciousness never touched before. It may not feel like spaciousness because the heart contracts in this hinterland while it reorients itself, through a breakdown process, from personal to impersonal love. Self is bushwhacking a terrain with no support from the mainstream because third dimensional reality cannot perceive it. It truly is another spectrum.
"Accept the existential blues with gratitude. Bring curiousity to them. Trust that a greater reality, in profound communion with all beings, is ushering in a light factor whose brilliance will quickly overshadow the diminished light of the small house. Fill that small room that used to hold the old world with a large love. This eases existential bewilderment and reminds self that haunting pangs are aches of recognition of the Higher Self's true domain. The ache of longing still carries the illusion that self is not yet within that Magnitudinal Self, while a greater ache of resonance indicates that self is finally dislodged from the small room to touch this larger domain.
"The ache is the memory of all lifetimes when self could not respond to the Call now ushering forth. When self froze in the gap, paralyzed, a deep sense of failure/impossibility, experienced like an ice storm, crystalized. Surrender allows the existential blues to shift in their color, creating a profoundly peaceful acceptance of this requirement to leave the nest of the small self. Embrace the wondrous climates and weather systems that shape and hone the soul, evoking wisdom and transmutation. Then self is established on the new land, no longer traveling back and forth.
"Meditate on the ache. Ask for guidance from the heart chakra. A blocked heart, holding the illusion that heaven and earth are not together, feeds the existential blues. The ache surfaces for clearing as the student evolves closer than ever to the union of the heaven and earth within. As this ache informs self of the immediacy of this greater domain, the student responds by creatively giving it expression, form and LOVE. Creativity pulls up and transmutes all unconscious memories of past lives at this threshold. Through creativity the wisdom within the ache emerges into a form - a pathway ferrying self through this liminal state. Trust that there is a magnetic field in this existential wilderness that literally transports the student through this inter dimensional band of emptiness.
"If the student is desperately trying to get back to the small room for comfort or standing within the existential realm reaching negative conclusions such as: " I am abandoned. I will never feel connected. My life has no meaning", then the creative energy will pour through these false constructs to manifest another small room (joyless) because it is no longer the room of the small self required to germinate and grow though warmth and love. It becomes a room of resistance, capturing the existential pain as a permanent place rather than as a part of the great labor and birth of the Magnificent Self.
"This gap is pure mystery, unchartered by most of humankind, with no reference points from the small room. Many students have stubbornly clung to their fear of moving through it. Yet even the most tenacious have eventually been ousted from this dismal shroud because it is ultimately illusion. Remind self that it is impossible to stop one's unfoldment. Self cannot fail to awaken. Embrace the pure not-knowing of existential crisis. Those who have crossed great bodies of water in stormy seas and dark nights, not knowing what awaited them, have had to face similar issues of faith. When the sun peaks through these gray clouds, it sends forth great shafts of light upon which rainbows dance which are the ladders into the Greater Domain of Being through which all students harvest their liberation. From this elevated kingdom the existential blues fade like gossamer veils to reveal the New World Order - a place of great Purpose, profound Meaning and utter Joy lavished upon humankind like the pot of gold so richly deserved at the end of a long, arduous journey of Faith."
Moriah Marston is a soul psychologist who includes astrology, dream analysis, and past life integration in her intuitive work as a mid-wife to the soul-alignment process