Through the Looking Glass: On existentialism and the dissolution of separation.

Through the Looking Glass: On existentialism and the dissolution of separation.

Or

You don't need to be an astronaut to get the “Overview Effect”. 

I recently read an article reporting that astronauts, having spent roughly six months in space, experienced a staggering revelation. They magically begin to see the earth as a unified whole. The concept of borders, nationalism, and division fall away and they “see”. 

They call it the Overview Effect.

Here on earth we are constantly “reminded” of the existence of the maze. Hunting that elusive piece of cheese around every blind corner. Trapped in the illusion of the individual. Yet we have an innate seeking not to be separate. We want to believe in a shared experience, to believe we are seen by our fellows, family, partners and peers. To be seen gives us validation for our existence. This relation (relative positioning) to our fellows gives us worth, purpose, importance. This is not trivial “attention seeking”, this is crucial to the human psyche. As vital as water to the body.

Too often we are disappointed in this pursuit. Repeatedly alienated by the discovery that we are rarely seen for who we are. Too often identified as the gap between who we are and what is expected of us. This negative space becomes the thing which bears our name.

No, there is no shared reality.

The fact that light itself takes a measurable (if very small) time to travel from object to eyeball further evidences the separateness of things. The reality we see with our eyes is itself incrementally already past. Even then, the interpretation of that “reality” is dictated by each of us through our own perception and prediction models; shaped by our own sensory bandwidth, history and expectation. This may offer a grim and lonely outlook to the question of existentialism. 

When we have rightfully lofty goals to remedy the vast injustice in the world around us and then see the smallness of any drop we might deliver, we might fall into the paralysis of pointlessness. 

When we look into the night sky and see the light from stars that may have already spent their flame and vanished from existence; when we are faced with the inescapable, inevitable fact of mortality, our own or having borne witness for another, we may sink into the pit of futility.

When we see the inconsequence of ourselves within the vast abyss of space, this is precisely where I find the seed and spark of purpose.

For in the staggering unlikelihood of my existence, the unlikelihood of life itself, lies the wonder. I realize that I am not merely a substance, a material to cling to life as if to contain the ocean of time. That one age is not to be heralded and grieved over another; the innocence of childhood, the vitality of youth. In our world we hold these to be ideals, if our childhood was perfect it is to be forever grieved as a thing lost. If ours was not perfect it is the ideal that we grieve as if we have been singularly denied and hobbled. 

Youth is the elixir sold to us in pots and bottles by influencers and institutions alike. As if we begin dying, embraced in the creeping cloak of fear on the very day we fail to outperform the day before. A performance measured as a fixed target on a river bank while we are in fact the river. 

Of course, we travel in a material world, in a material convenience. Of course our bodies are subject to the arc of growth and decay. Of course we experience our world through the perceptive instrument that is the physical body. But it is an instrument. 

Let’s not now be seduced by the modern love for hierarchy and determine that the body is somehow inert and subordinate to the superior mind. Or even that there is a separate spirit that animates and then lives on without the body’s expression. No, it is neither that easy nor that romantic. 

Instead the experience we have of life is an interaction of the material instrument in its perception and execution, its interaction with the external world, and the complex strategist that navigates and maintains its existence. Our awareness of that interaction is what we call life. 

What we call life is not the animation of the body, it is the experience of that animation. The experience of the interaction. 

Which brings me to my point. Evolutionary purposes give rise to self preservation. The preservation of the instrument, by the instrument (the physical body, the identity). Self-preservation perverted becomes greed and sociopathy. Hallmarks of our modern culture. Greed is not innate to human behavior. It rises when we perceive we have no other option to continue our survival. (However inaccurate that perception may be.) As with any extreme, individual greed will eventually kill the individual. 

Human behavior, as we have evolved to exist, is in fact inherent with the preservation of the group. This, too, can be perverted into ideologies that erase or enslave the individual. Again, the extreme will eventually kill the host. 

But the personal question that plagues many of us, summed up in the single term existentialism remains: why am I here? How do I demonstrate value? How do I know I am worthy? 

How do we measure worth? In status, power, wealth or good works? In our relative positioning or impact on others of our kind? To bind ourselves to our reflection in the mirror of humanity renders our value dependent on the mirror. To strap ourselves to the operation of grand works shackles our perceived value to the success and longevity of our impact. Given the river of time and the ocean of humanity, this valuation is doomed. It's no wonder the best of us can find ourselves unable to crawl from the covers and face another day. The sheer weight of perceived success or failure being impossible to sustain.

I submit, it is the very river of time, the ocean of humanity and the abyss of space that frees me. The staggering unlikelihood of the collection of elements and organization that is me, my experience of life, in itself is the purpose of my existence. 

We are comfortable saying that life is an event, we are less comfortable recognizing that I cannot be separate from the event that is life. If we must transition from thinking of ourselves as a noun, I can be considered as simply the experience. 

The experience of life is perceived by the material but appreciated by the awareness of it. The full expression of the event is the perception, the evaluation and strategy, and the execution of that strategy. All for the effect of continued existence. I am not the material alone, nor am I the strategist alone, I am the operation and the awareness of the operation. I am an event. I am a verb, not a noun. 

If life is an event, an experience, then my terminally unique perspective, the act of my witnessing, is the most profound and fundamental expression of valuation possible. 

As I look into the maw of space, as I receive the information offered by the light of a now vanished star, in that moment of interaction is everything. It is singular. Complete. It can never be duplicated, it will never happen again and has never happened before. No other collection of elements can experience that precise moment. Because no other collection of elements is that precise moment. 

In that experience, in the act of witness, I am the universe witnessing itself. I am both singular and infinite. Recognizing that singularity is the moment separation dissolves. 

As you stand witness and one with existence itself your value is obvious. Your singularity is endemic, instrumental, inseparable from the infinite, from all that is. Known in that moment only to yourself and to the fact of the universe itself: Your value is a secret thing.

Equally, in that moment, we realize that no effort can be futile. That all movement has an effect just as all effects are fleeting. That all effects are fleeting and widely imperceptible is seen as a devaluation is a measurement as misplaced as the clinging to youth in a pot of facecream. To measure worth with a flag on the riverbank is to miss the experience of the river. 

The act, the experience of doing the thing, is itself the value of the thing. Just as the act, the experience of your existence is inherently the value of that existence. Given the absence of a shared reality, any gesture, even generosity, will never be seen by another as you yourself bear your own witness. No one is watching. No one is keeping score. In that lies freedom. 

For if we no longer do a thing for the illusion of permanent and penetrating impact, we are free to do the thing for the immediate and fleeting impact. For the pleasure of doing. Equally, if our value is experienced as an intimate secret, we no longer rely on the clarity of the mirror to estimate our relational position in the world. We are free to experience the interaction with another as we do the interaction with light from a star. Far from reinforcing isolation, this investigation into our singularity actually deepens and lays bare our connection.