> What is existentialism?
Consciousness is always trying to find lack. Lack is the essential property by which each consciousness gives meaning to its situation. For this reason, existentialist philosophers say that a person endowed with consciousness can never reach full satisfaction. Humans interpret any situation, from their own standpoint, as missing something. If someone is making food, the food is perceived as lacking the “process of being made.” When the dish is ready and being eaten, the food is perceived as lacking the “act of being eaten.” (p. 61)
To put it technically, phenomena stand not on being but on non-being. Phenomena are born for consciousness only when a specific lack is imposed on consciousness’s mushy, uniform being, and a distinguishable existence is thereby defined. (p. 60)
: Without consciousness to begin with, even lack or expectation could not exist.
: A loud noise or the anger of another person is, in the end, merely sound, or merely a shift inside the other person’s mind.
:: (BM) So what if we could offer possibility to another person? Or expand the range of thinking by giving them a new consciousness (possibility, potential, the possibility of swan-ness to a duck)?
> Existential counseling
The existential counselor tries to help the patient accept the fundamental truths about human reality that existentialism defines. For instance, the truth that we exist as an unceasing process of becoming something that can never be fully satisfied.
… This is because to think is to constantly strive, as a fundamental human attribute, not to be the self you are now but to align with the self you will be.
… Accepting this fact lets us avoid the thought that there is something profoundly wrong with ourselves just because right now we aren’t feeling great happiness, or because we never feel satisfaction.
… The ultimate goal is to help the client find meaning in their own life. … The fact that only they themselves can give their life meaning, and the fact that any meaning at all can be given. We give meaning to our lives through the goals we set, the choices we make, the actions we take. The optimistic goal that existential counseling tries to reach is letting the client know that their life is a book not yet written — a book only they can write.
Because life holds only the meaning we choose to give it.
