Mormon Existentialism: A Historic Contextualization

As of late I have heard words from real people like you and me promote classic existentialism, promote angst, the absence of god, the purposelessness of life and its meaninglessness, and a world view, so common today, of nihilism.  So many isolate existentialism to a 20th century phenomenon that still effects human ideology even more powerfully today and this is accurate.  But in the same manner I have a different view. I see existentialism as old as the primitive peoples who sought ritualized veneration of the major life events such as birth, love, suffering and death, and this existential exploration over many, many centuries through art and history, has seen birth of Christ in countless images of the Renaissance, images such as Botticelli and van Eych, and in the Enlightenment Boucher, Watteau and Fragonard were all oriented to amorous affairs.  

Suffering is the great subject in life seen in every epoch from every country.  Europe in the days of the Barbarian Invasion was desperate for any kind of knowledge in a very dark age with only one place to find it and one place for it to be found… the Catholic Church.  Countless millions suffered in complete ignorance knowing nothing about the world beyond their free town of fiefdom and craved truth.  Suffering will find its rearing head ubiquitously to our day being a primary factor in all art so extensive it cannot be elucidated here, but this suffering was existential as those who did, learned and gained truths through a life fraught with suffering.  Death is also another common subject historically, this representation is largely the crucifixion of Christ, on the cross or with the Virgin in a pieta.  A ghastly graphic lifeless cadaver in the famous work of Mantegna and another iconic reference with skin greened and a skeletal body by Holbein Sr are other examples. 

How better to understand one’s own reality than to find peace in the death of Christ who was, like all will be, resurrected and ascended into heaven.  This theology bound all of Europe and Byzantium a millennia before the printing press.  This was the lands of mystics, witchcraft and superstition, and disease on a frightening scale.  This only sought many more to turn to the Church for answers, as much as could be gleaned, and no other resources for any kind of religious or secular learning existed anywhere outside of monasteries.  All of this mentioned and infinitely more that libraries are dedicated to, may be looked at as primitive and manipulative or it might be seen as some source of knowledge, a souse significance enough to instigate art including mosaics and crude painting and architecture as well as the single thread that kept the progression of Europe alive by this common factor and as people found answers in the Church, the church found supremacy in Europe.   

As existentialism was non existent in medieval Europe, even though there was no movement there still came the perpetual questions of subjects that people generally sought to find a comfort in what was a life of difficulty, the higher power, which was bigger, greater, mightier, all-power, the highest power, our Heavenly Father, offering understanding of something bigger than they were.  Those who built Stonehenge sought answers from the sky, the Greeks thought they could find the answer in man who was “The measure of all things,” the Renaissance thought that nature could provide the measure for all of the answers, the Enlightenment- reason and the faculties of mind devoted to art, philosophy, music, science, this was the path to truth, but man was to find no answers of his own making and nature, not as a measure but for a spiritual awakening for its own sake by Rousseau and then a revival of all that existed before the modern period of the Renaissance when things were simple and pure… artists that had been painting in the grand Rococo style suddenly painted peasants such as Fragonard, Bucher, Chardin, and then William Blake would reach the high point of truth of a humanity that almost found the answers it was looking for in the dialectic of good and evil powerfully expressed in Blake’s seminal poetic epic “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” 

But this closest mankind has ever been to a unified true reality could not last and the industrial revolution had to happen as did revolutions in France and the United States.  Modernity was a refinement of the industrial era as Napoleon III had grand schemes to modernize the great boulevards of Paris, which occurred in the form of Paris today, but there was nothing existential about this, only an ambitious emperor and the rapid passing of time in the great period of revolutions and civil wars as all men sought for the truth to one question…

Liberty?  The 19^th century saw both Germany and Italy become nations as this historical context is that which led to what is the pinnacle and at the same time what is the most threateningly ominous moment in time for the official movement of the early 20^th century that we will call Classical Existentialism.  It was the pinnacle due to the great works of men like Heidegger whose text “Being in Time” is one of the greatest volumes of philosophy extant and in a manner insightful and prophetic, Heidegger elucidates on the realities of being, called da sein, and the conditions of being within a society called “the they” while the self is troubled by perpetual angst, experiences the fullness of the uncanny being displaced from authentic reality.   Interestingly enough, time itself is an arbitrary condition cased by human consciousness as it is with everyone without choice in a temporal continuum of action, awareness, and stopping short.   Space is relative from one given point to any other given this being the foundation for phenomenon and the existence of the being of da sein.  

Existentialism has always existed and always will in many shades, and considering the shade of a philosopher grounded in delusions and ubiquitous influence subsequently, this is a pernicious thing indeed. Nietzsche, who cannot stand in the shadow of a philosopher at the level of Heidegger with Nietzsche writing prose, claimed a “proof" of denial of absolutes in existence and that morality cannot be proven individually or generally and this is the condition that he demonstrated convincingly to his people, whom, as can be well understood, found understanding for their day that explained their existence giving morality as myth used purposefully and not spiritually. 

“Christ was the only Christian,” Nietzsche said.  This one giant leap into the danger zone of a nihilistic personal reality and a nihilistic societal reality completely void of morality; of this he was certain of, to become the birth of popular nihilism, something that has only grown stronger in its insidious hold over popular culture and society in general.   “The death of God” was Nietzsche’s battle cry as if there was no morality there was no God and if there was no God there was no truth thus no meaning. This battle cry was second only to the “will to power” as what is the point for unity when nobody means anything to anybody except the self to the self so the “Superman” must live only for his own rise to power and personal attainment of property. Ultimately, this was the stuff that the purified state of the fascist was made of just as Marx influenced communism. 

Skipping Sartre, Camus, Foucault, Derrida; Nietzsche lived in the angst ridden pre-WWI German bubble.  The country had just been formed a few decades earlier and was desperate for power.  Nietzsche was a product of his time and nothing else, and had he been a 17th century philosopher the name Nietzsche would be unknown. But it came to be so and was very much a part of the exegesis of post-structuralism and deconstruction and the rape of meaning of humanity.  Today, our world being entirely interconnected in its multiculturalism, its global freedom of trade of knowledge, culture and goods, the unification through art, science, medicine, philosophy, theology, demographics of every kind… we are a world of plurality and that is a reality that cannot be denied as our reality of post-Modernism cannot be denied.  An existentialism such as Nietzsche is today a memory… a distant fragment of history that has no relevance and cannot have any hold on the though that it instigated on the absence of God, truth, meaning, and the rise of rationalism it gave form to as well as the propagation of deconstruction when reconstruction based on the human will to create meaning from randomness is equally valid.

The existentialism that passed through Nietzsche to Sartre to Derrida to Godard to Giacometti to Pasolini to Kubrick to Rauschenberg to Warhol to Baldessari to Obama is pure lazy mindedness and lack of insight and a useless capacity for vision or the ability to look past the physical and the polemics not knowing what it means to “transcend.”  Society must stop asking the same tired, trivial, mundane and very vogue questions.  Anybody who chooses to stop and consider and question the condition of today’s plurality will find one’s own brand of Existentialism based on personal life exegesis that is existence processed in the mind of conceptions.  Given the Modernist utopia, today there exists a utopia-like globalization and as such in the reality of plurality, one idea no longer can apply to all in today’s post-Modern world. 

All must face personal existential questions and for each person this inquisition will be different amounting to a unique shade of existential philosophy for each individual.  One must address one’s consciousness and decide to continue or to stop living in the shadow of a madman whose mind amounted to the most cumulatively evil of the 20th century as well as echoing louder in the 21st considering, he providing the fuel to fire fascism as well as secure the disturbance of angst, doubt, confusion and fear that his writings have instigated for the subsequent century on the popular level and rage loudly and angrily to this very day.  One must stop and listen to one person and that is one’s own self and find one’s own truth and what is authentically real.

People

In my life I live in a downtown area and walk as well as take a short bus ride to wherever I need to go.  While on the bus today and making a joke with the bus driver, a sudden realization dawned on me.  So much of my energies are concerned on writing about, reading about, and thinking about the human condition, where so little of my energies are devoted to writing about, reading about, or thinking about people.  It might seem a given than when making a life study of the human condition, the study of the person is necessarily complicit, but this is not the case.  I found myself realizing today that I need to pause for a moment and consider the reality of the person, speaking existentially, and then we will find the two subjects complimentary, but not complicit.  I do not know if I am capable of touching the capstone of this weighty subject, but I think one such as I, who has devoted his life to art, spirituality, philosophy, and to people, is as worthy a candidate as any, so here goes.

We are still speaking the language of the Mormon Existentialist so I will not wax secular and atheist, those things that I am not, but address the person as who each one is to the very fiber of each being, prior to earthy mortality.  This of course, is the inheritance of a body in the form of God the Father of whom each individual is a child of.  Each of us, like Christ, was born to an earthly parent, but in reality, is truly the son or daughter of God, and in that are a part of a very special and holy progeny.  In this regard, each person in this mortality has been called to a very exalted position to serve God.  We have the living manifestation of Christ as an example as to what that is in essence and how God’s children can begin a life connected to their heavenly parent, as Christ was connected to his.  We can know through Christ’s example, and with his sublime guidance, can walk the road of life, not alone, but with him, our Savior, and can know, as he did, well in advance of reaching the final stages of this life, just how this life is to be lived.  Accordingly one may fill ones place best in this holy progeny and find one’s place eternally as their own propagators of their own within the vastness of this holy progeny.

Unlike Adam and Eve, the human person was born with a human consciousness.  The essential qualifier of this human consciousness, is to know and feel when one is doing right and when one is doing wrong.  This makes the person very aware of the self.  The person can live a life and try to hide this consciousness and over the years succeed in this and essentially live in a false state of denial, or, the person may live, from the youngest years, in full recognition and awareness of this consciousness, and allow this consciousness to “be their guide.”  If one is to do this, this is to live authentically; this is essentially, to “be real.”  There is no human faculty of its condition greater and more acute than the consciousness and if one has covered it up with utter falseness one is themselves false but if one has been true to that consciousness and authentic, that person is in tune with their reality and “is real.”

To fully engage in the consciousness as commanded by he who imbued it with us, it can only be strengthened and secured with a greater sense of self and a greater understanding of the human and eternal conditions by prayer, by healthy living, by good works, by honesty and integrity in all things, a life of honor, a life of service, by living the gifts that he whom imbued us with them gave us, a life of worshipping the Savior by acknowledging all things that lead to him, by loving each of one’s fellow men on a level through the greatest gift of charity.  Through an awareness one can only go so far but with an awareness grounded and then built upon such commandments given to each person for their greatest good and happiness, will only lead to each person’s greatest good and happiness.

If one is to be the truly ideal human being as the father of all intended each to be, each in their very special and individual ways, with specific gifts and specific personal purposes as well as the ultimate Plan of Salvation, obeying the commandments of God is the only means to effectuate this.  Most will say, “We were born into life without a manual,” or “there is no set path to life,” this kind of talk is unenlightened.  For the commandments of God that we learn in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, although tarnished with a “can’t do this” reputation, is actually that very manual of life people are looking for and the path to happiness, fully realized success, and an entryway into the eternities that is magnificently prepared to be on a level where one might think to be able to hold one’s head up to the light of Christ and the Eminency of God.

Prayer will give each person personal revelation and a sure path to truth.  Healthy living by abstinence in some areas and promotion in others will aid in a healthy body able to produce more, and a healthy mind more secure to effectuate the being of that body.  Good works are the stuff that makes this life a beautiful one and often good works are the small things one does and not on a grand scale but by touching the life of another without realizing the joy one is instilling.  Without honesty, integrity and the steadfastness of honor, the world could not function and the human spirit could not dwell in this mortality.  As faulty as the world is, it is held together in function and as a stable place for God’s children to dwell, only because of honesty and the integrity of human kind and the vestiges of honor that remain in the hearts of mankind.  A life of service is one where those who have more give their resources and energies to those who have less and this only prepares each person to how the eternities will function.  To live a life in accordance with the gifts our Father gave us only enhances our true selves and is a sure way to happiness and success in life with the authentic being of humility.  Keeping a focus on the Savior keeps one focused in life and keeps all things true and in place.  It keeps us firmly, “grounded.”  And if we are focused on the Savior and realize that all things lead to him, as he is the source of all things, our sense and the power of charity in our hearts will grow and become a stronger reality within us.  With this, the greatest of all gifts, each person can look at the other, no respecters of persons on any level but each as the son or daughter of God and act and communicate accordingly.  It makes life only so much easier.

Thus the person is ready to keep moving forward, building their life in great works, establishing the authenticity in their relationships, and the first people in that list should be God and the self.  If each person makes it a real commitment to develop their relationship with themselves, they will become “more real” and others can see this and slowly this will grow as more and more see this and people become in tune with who they really are and “the natural man” will become not such a bad thing.  If as well, that authentic person is in tune with their Celestial Father, they will only be more ready for that day that can be tremblingly terrifying or cataclysmically catalytic for the eternities, because this WILL happen, and each person is free to choose.        

Why I Love "Existentialism!!!"

I love existentialism.  I love the freedom that we have as human beings to question.  If we did not question, we would not know, and we would be a weak and feeble species indeed.  But we do.  It is fundamental for humanity to question, and the first questions, we know, were about purpose in life.  When we look at cave paintings, we see many bison and antelope, but we see man wearing the heads of such animals.  Why? 

Apparently, Man, in this cave dwelling variety, attributed sacred powers to these beasts that were the source of food, warmth, and many other practical uses we are unsure of.  But the surety of the cave dwellers has always been a doubt, but a true existentialist will know that existentialism did not begin in the 20^th century, no, it began with the most prehistoric man, disconnected from any source of knowledge and truth, who went to great lengths to beautify, in a manner of mysticism, the walls of their caves in resolve to their yearning to know, to understand, as they are essentially linked to us, and we want to know, to be human is to want to know.

Plato used the allegory of the cave in his existentialism and painted the idea of three men chained in a cave.  There was a wall in front of them and behind, a fire.  Certain beings and objects would pass behind these men and in front of the fire casting a shadow onto the wall in front of the men.  According to Plato, these shadows on the wall were as close as we as human beings will get to true reality in mortality.  Authentic forms, such as virtue, exist in the cosmos, but we will never see these, only the shadows on the wall.  Incidentally, when the three men were set free, they were struck forcibly by what lay in front of them, dazzled and mystified.

It is the 21^st century and humanity is asking the same questions that the earliest prehistoric man asked, the quandary Plato presented, and all of the questions asked of reality from every reach of the globe for the past 2500 years.  From out of those questions there was for a time, an answer.  This was the Meridian of Time.  This was the time of Christ.  It was the answer as Christ was fulfilling his earthly mission for a brief 33 years and what he left in his wake was truth.  The God who manifests reality left for humanity truth. 

Humanity was not ready for it.  And most of humanity today will still not accept it to the core of their being.  If only they would listen and learn.  Humanity wants these answers that we have.  Their purpose is gnawing at them.  Their stigmas that there is no truth, and reality is relative, and the “death of God” rule the popular thinking of today’s vernacular.  When we ask, do you want to know the truth, but they learn that it comes from Mormons, the ears are shut and the mind is closed.  Only because they lack vision.

The “educated” and “literate” world thinks laughingly of the aged ideas of heaven as fluffy clouds and cupid angels.  They think of a bearded God sitting on a golden throne amassed in white.  They think of a devil spearing the innocent with his minions in lakes of fire in a subterranean world.  And they think of a Jesus who “saves” some way, some how.  And of course, to them, these are all absurdities and the whole thing is a fallacy of the past, and today, no educated thinker would dabble in such absurdity.

They do not realize that heaven is not above… it is everywhere… it is beyond the veil, it is beyond space and time, it is a place where spirits, something that the educated are all too quick to profess that “I am spiritual but don’t believe in religion,” where these spirits dwell in wondrous heavenly realities that have existed before time and ours awaits us.  They are not idle on clouds but engage happily and whole-heartedly in the Lord’s work. 

God, whom is to say, whom is to question his omnipotence, his omniscience, his omnipresence?  None of us on earth have any vantage point beyond the veil so whom is to question what God, our Heavenly Father, the embodiment of celestial love, can and cannot do?  Who is to say he cannot answer all prayers?  Who is to say he cannot bless all and take care of all of his children, after all, he is our father? 

And the Savior, we have his 33 years of mortality to learn from, we have prophesies and his visitation to the Americas, but we have something more.  From Christ, God of all Gods and manifestation of reality itself, without whom not a grain of sand would have ever floated upon any shore, not a leaf to stir in any wind, not a single heart to beat with love, it is from him, whom we understand the least yet is the embodiment of the sublime and is with me right now just as he is with you, so great is his mercy and love; he empowers us with the Spirit which speaks for him so we may know!

We may know truth!  We may find answers!  We might find resolve for any troubled mind or spirit!  We might find solutions!  We might find reason!  We may find personal purpose!  We may know just who we are as sons and daughters of God and how to live this life as is our own personal best and do our own personal best to one day be cradled in the arms of our Savior and feel a feeling of total reality… that… is worth living a life deliberately that requires asking questions.   

To My Philosophical Defense...

As an established educated professional who is current on international news, whom is acutely perceptive to the world around him and being aware to the dynamics of his personal reality in the same sense of being sensitive to the reality of others; I profess that my “renegade” philosophy of Mormon Existentialism is in fact not so “renegade.”  Although, the headlines read, the discourses infer, all refers to a lingering 20^th century based pre-WWI Heideggerian, Nietzsche-based philosophy, without doubt or question, I find my singular philosophy, grounded in academic analytics, in its application, follows the model of Jesus Christ’s Gospel to an exactitude, and in this application dispels worldly angst and epidemic anxieties of the nonexistence of truth, reality or purpose.  The devout and focused Mormon will find their paths to truth and transcend this state of artifice.  But this point has been sedimented countless times in this forum. 

The point for this post is not to compel the worldly by a spiritual testimony most will hardly accept as far away from reality as they are, or, on the contrary, will readily accept being so far away and recognizing lucidly the truths contained.  But for the lay philosopher who will not accept any analytical approach to Mormon Existentialism based on the very delineated, counter balanced and poised Christ’s Gospel; presented here are current demographics unavoidable in their context on a global and very pragmatic level.

In the day of Nietzsche where he stated to mankind the “death of God,” he was not addressing mankind.  He was addressing the very tense pre WWI recently and very tenuously unified states of new German Principalities.  Germany was desperate for power and what better call to power than Nietzsche’s call to all individual humanity without the moral base to connect them… the “Will to Power.”  Since then, the world has undergone drastic wars and revolutions, not only Korea and Vietnam but the social revolutions of the 1950’s and 160s, that would forever change America and have led to an unquestionably more unified situation than ever before… reaching farther and farther away from the ignorance of early tribes and dwellers who knew nothing of the other tribe but to fight.

Today, thanks to these revolutions and the ‘90’s that galvanized social norms for many; intolerance and a rejection of others based on difference is unacceptable.  We are currently farther along in the digital/virtual world where a young Chinese schoolgirl can be mentored in China by an English speaker from Detroit, Michigan.  The phenomena of interconnectivity is literally without limit and ripe with exciting possibility in the post-Modern state of human being.

To reach a further point, there no longer exists anything close to what compelled Nietzsche to write what he did, for Sartre to write as he did.  Writers are charged in their content by contexts and by their circumstances and noone today can comprehend pre-WWI Germany.  This is not praise for Nietzsche, for his oeuvre, but I can understand it better after grasping its historical and ideological context.  Heidegger… he was simply a visionary who wrote like a scientist and how he compiled his body of work, so abstract in content, connected as if by a thread but in actuality so monumentally fundamental to the realities of the day… this is a true revolutionary.  Indeed I might, labeled a “renegade” as I have been, may be someday be known as something of a revolutionary myself.  If that actuality comes to pass, the world will be in a better sphere. 

The post-Modern globalized state of interconnectivity that is separated by a gulf of reality that Nietzsche could never have foreseen, that Heidegger could not have understood in their world that looked for a superior race, permits that in this day of PLURALITY of race, culture, society, politics, economics, demographics, religion, truth, faith, ethnicity, resources, realities, not debasing ourselves to relativism once again, but in the full consciousness of realism, I recognize my own private reality just as you recognize yours. 

But in our post-Modern world, my recognizing my own private reality does not in the very slightest affect anything to do with anybody else’s reality and why should it, how could mankind have been so selfish and stupid?  This “they,” “the other,” “the absurd,” was, and worse still, is, a sad and very pathetic nihilistic viewpoint of one's fellow man.  Thinking that there was no morality was the basis for the worst of nihilism and this is just a lazy man’s excuse for an attitude of “eat, drink and be merry… and, “I don’t care.”  

We as Latter-Day Saints and Christians and all whom believe in good, should follow the teachings of Christ’s that say “Love thy brother as thy self.”  Literally, love all humankind, be good to those who spitefully use you.  It is a christ like attitude that is not so hard once the gift of charity is implanted in your heart and you come to a reality that all mankind are the same and we are not capable and not allowed, to judge another.  Only one is.  This is Jesus Christ, he who has walked with each of us down our long and rugged road that we could not have walked alone, he walked it with each of us, he walks yours right now with you, just as he walks mine with me, this is the beginning of the sublime truth of Him.

But in doing so, only HE has the power to accurately judge the mentally ill homeless minority wearing dirty clothes with raggedy hair and burn skin holding a Dixie cup as well as the man who is let off in from of HIS high rise glass tower from out of his chauffeured Bentley early in the morning to be greeted by the night watchman, through for the night, who accompanies this man, mightiest of all men, to the top level of his 4 level personal residence while in office, as he begins his day with a hands free shower and then he operates the conveyor belt to choose which of the Roman handmade suits suits his needs for the day along with the right Croatian tie, the English hand sewn shirt, the diamond cuff links, the Tuscan handcrafted shoes, the diamond cut watch handmade in Switzerland, socks handcrafted from hand spun from Japan, all that remains is his toiletries and he gives care less and less to, this with the passing days.  In fact, he is giving less and less care to anything these passing months, and years.

His four story pent-house club house he has tired of and prefers the comforts found from any of the women he happens to meet from the bar he locals that cater to men with Bentley key rings, diamond cufflinks, watches diamond cut and hand made from Switzerland, and whom leaves thousand dollar tips just for the few seconds of the eyes of the waitress that will linger with his when nobody else’s will.  

Nothing else really matters to him.  It could be any bar in any city in any country.  It has all ceased to matter.  There is only one thing that can still make his heart quiver and this is the attention in the eyes of a beautiful lady, but of course, for this, he has to pay a fortune for.  Attention bought from a pretty lady.  That is his sole remedy to cure him of his life’s misery. He spent all of his thrills years ago and all at a price where even with his empire, no one has any respect for him and openly treat him like an ATM of which their code has unlimited access and he doesn’t care.  At least he is still of some use.

The person at the sidewalk below, who gets $20 at the end of the day and uses it to buy a bottle to quiet the demons screaming in her head… you think God loves her any less than he loves him?  Do you think Christ loves her and appreciates her trials less than his?

He has walked and is walking both.  One is a man defeated who in form, represents all that the “world" has to offer and is more miserable than anyone else.  She, the bottom of the rung, she hasn’t thought about her carnal appetites in so long, she is too busy trying to stay alive and enjoy her agency while she has it.  There is one like him.  Countless millions around the globe are like her.  Who will Christ judge more harshly... we cannot say? But we can say who is the most miserable there is.  And it is he who has all that there is and would just as rather die but is far too cowardly for that, while she gives every energy to fight to live.

We all have our own reality, it is not relative, it is real.  Christ’s love is the state of pure reality and we will get there someday.  But I can be an existentialist and believe in my reality in 2013 just as much as Nietzsche was an existentialist and disbelieved his in 1900.  The difference between the two is that no matter the conditions of my existentialism, your existentialism, the existentialism of an Eskimo in Alaska, I embrace your real reality with you and just because Nietzsche doubted his own reality does not mean that if I doubted mine that I would have to doubt yours.  That is ugly, cold, solipsism and it is the ultimate weak-mindedness. 

I embrace my reality and I embrace yours and I embrace ours.  I embrace my truth and I embrace your truth and I embrace ours.  I embrace my absolutes and your absolutes and I embrace ours.  Because the world who says their are no absolutes, and this is the thinking, intellectual world, has said that “God is dead.” To even write the words is sickening and if ever there was a declaration made that was based on absolute truths, that is the statements that contradicts its own purpose and in doing so proves the existence of truth and thus supports the reality of each of us.

I said I would not delineate my Mormon Existentialist philosophy academically as this can only be broken down, but I will conclude by delineating it substantively.

There is a God, without him we would have no prior notion of God in coming to this earth, there would be no order, and this universe of harmony of such beauty we cannot be ready for it yet in our mortal pre-divine state, is of such a magnitude that we must progress, we must greater ourselves, be must better ourselves, we must obey the laws of Christ if we expect ourselves to have a place in this post-mortal realm… the man whose life means nothing to him and whose reality is incomprehensible in its worthlessness other than the size of its bank account… still… meaning nothing… will find a very shallow hole and find a rock to crawl under it… but the transient who is mentally ill, who has no control over her faculties, whose every day is a battle for survival, whose every day fallen asleep is a battle won, she, she is mighty and she has great kingdoms which she can rule over and the limits of her mind we cannot know but put to good health AND given their fullness and this is a divine creature unlike anything we are aware of.  Think of that when you see your next transient.

Today’s existentialism is not mine it is everybody's.  Mine is called Mormon Existentialism because that is my own creation but it is the Lord's.  If you wish to follow in that, be my guest, read my posts and be a Mormon Existentialist, it is truly amazing as it is today’s curative for all of the ugly anxieties and insecurities of an outmoded existentialism.  If your existentialism is rooted in nature, or people, or animals, or the stars, or gender, or art, or history, or humanity, or yourself, be it, but be it not the same old same old.  “God is not dead, Nietzsche is Dead!!!!!!!"