# The Paradox of Finding One?s Way by Losing It



## beatnikbdog (Jan 8, 2005)

ok everyone, ive been meaning to post this for quite a while, but haven't gotten around to it til now.. i know this is quite lengthy, but for anyone interested in dp/dr and philosophy/spirituality, this may well strike a chord. if you want to skip straight to the dp/dr material, scroll down to the section titled 'ALIENATION', but I would recommend reading the whole thing.. Washburn is a philosophy professor at Indiana University South Bend. I transcribed this essay from the book Sacred Sorrows..

The Paradox of Finding One?s Way by Losing It

The Dark Night of the Soul and the Emergence of Faith

By Michael Washburn, PhD.

There comes a point in some people?s lives when worldly goals lose their significance and life loses its perceived value. When this happens, it seems as though life in any meaningful sense has come to an end. In fact, however, this apparent endpoint can be a turning point toward a new beginning. It is a paradox that we sometimes need to lose our way in order truly to find it, or, as Jesus says in the Gospels, that to save one?s life is to lose it and to lose one?s life for his sake is to save it.

In existential terms, the paradox is that despair is sometimes a precondition of faith. The process of losing one?s way and the spiritual possibilities that can ripen within it have been recognized in the world?s spiritual traditions. The overall process, for example, has been described as the dark night of the senses, the spiritual desert or wilderness, the state of self-accusing (Islam), the great doubt (Zen), the ordeal of dying to the world, and the death of the self.

The process in question has many expressions. Among its expressions, the following are perhaps the most important and will be considered in this essay: depression, alienation, deanimation, despair, and the emergence of faith.

DEPRESSION

Depression can be caused not only by unfortunate circumstances, but also by neurochemical and psychodynamic imbalances that arise irrespective of life circumstances. Most clinical cases of depression probably involve combinations of these factors. The type of depression discussed here differs in that its primary cause is not to be found in any negative events or situations or in any neurochemical or psychiatric conditions but rather in a loss of faith in an existential project: the pursuit of happiness.

Depression as we ordinarily experience it is a passing mood triggered by specific setbacks in life. We are depressed, for example, because we did not get into the college of our choice or because we are experiencing problems in a relationship or at work. Depression of this sort is painful, but we rebound from it. New opportunities arise, the problems vexing us are resolved, and we move back into the mainstream of life. Depression as we ordinarily experience it is indeed a form of acute unhappiness; setbacks in life can be stinging blows. We usually survive these blows, however, and resume the pursuit of happiness. Our energy is restored, and we experience a renewal of the drive for worldly fulfillment.

Many people who been fortunate enough to enjoy some of the rewards of life never lose faith in the pursuit of happiness. And even many people who meet with major setbacks in life do not lose faith. Nevertheless, such a loss of faith is something to which we are inherently susceptible. For the pursuit of happiness is based on a false assumption, namely, that happiness is to be found ?out there? in the world. This assumption is false because the world cannot provide what ultimately must be found within ourselves. Accordingly, although the goods of the world are indeed gratifying, we are nonetheless prone to being disillusioned in the pursuit of happiness. If and when such disillusionment sets in, the character of depression changes.

Disillusionment manifests itself initially in the form of vague feelings of dissatisfaction and futility. These feelings can lead to such questions as ?Is there no more to life than this?? and ?What is the use of trying?? The emergence of feelings of dissatisfaction and futility can understandably lead to depression. But the point here is that this depression is of a special type. For unlike the depressive episodes that follow setbacks in life, this depression can occur without a triggering cause. It can even set in after what normally would be a gratifying worldly experience or accomplishment. Also, this depression is tenacious; it is difficult to rebound from. People who suffer from depression of this sort frequently seek treatment, and properly so. For this type of depression, although ?existential? rather than neurochemical or psychiatric in the strict sense, can be seriously debilitating.

ALIENATION

Disillusionment can lead to alienation, to a sense of being cut off from the world. For in losing faith in the pursuit of happiness, one tends to withdraw from worldly involvement. This withdrawal is two-sided; it expresses itself both inwardly in one?s feelings and outwardly in one?s perception of the world. Inwardly, it consists of a gradual loss of interest, drive, and capacity for engagement. And outwardly, it consists in an alteration in the appearance of the world, which seems gradually to lose its ?realness? and meaning. One becomes apathetic, confused, and cut off; simultaneously, the world becomes barren, purposeless, and out of reach.

Alienation is not a voluntary process. Alienation follows upon disillusionment as an effect follows upon a cause, not as a decision follows upon an insight. It is therefore a process that one is powerless to reverse. Alienation is not renunciation. The alienated person does not give up the world; rather, the world simply slips away, becoming remote and unreal.

If any one idea captures the essence of how the alienated person perceives the world, it is flatness. The world goes flat because withdrawal from the world is at the same time a withdrawal from the projected meanings (cognitive intentions) and values (cathexes) by which we interpret and enliven the world. Accordingly, when alienation sets in, the world begins to lose all modes and gradations of lived depth. It loses its peaks and valleys, challenges and disappointments, profundities and banalities, heroes and fools. It becomes a world in which everything is ?equal? in the sense of being equally shallow, neutral, and gray. Actions become ?equal? because they are all reduced to mere motions. And persons become ?equal? because they are all reduced to mere personas. The world of the alienated person becomes flat throughout, for in withdrawing from the world the alienated person ceases intersecting in depth with the world.

A perfect example of what it is like for the world to go flat is available from the domain of the cinema. Everyone is familiar with what happens when one is suddenly drawn out of the action of a film. Let us consider an example. Let us suppose that a man and a woman are viewing a mystery-suspense film. The woman is totally absorbed. The world of the films is, for the present, her world. She identifies with or responds to the characters and is caught up in the action. The man on the other hand, having already seen the film, is not absorbed, and let us suppose that, in a moment of impatience, he reveals the conclusion to the woman -- which conclusion, let us also suppose, the woman finds disappointing. Given this situation, it is likely that the woman would suffer disillusionment and would lose interest in the film. That is, she would become alienated from the world of the film. Simultaneously, the film itself, as everyone has experienced, would go flat. Without the depth factor provided by outreaching thought and feeling, the film would cease being a self-contained world, a reality unto itself, and would become instead only a film, a fiction. The characters would be reduced to mere actors saying lines, and what was a compelling drama would be reduced to a mere plot or story line. The world of the film would no longer be engaged, and so it would cease being an engaging reality. It would become only a setting, a sequence of scenes.

The experience of the alienated person is virtually identical with that of the moviegoer. For the alienated person, like the moviegoer, ceases being absorbed in a world of possible experience and watches as that world goes flat, becoming remote and unreal. For both, what were meaningful deeds become only idle motions or empty roles; what were real people become only surface characters. The experience of the alienated person parallels that of the moviegoer in all these ways. The alienated person?s experience, however, differs from the moviegoer?s in one crucial respect, for the world that the alienated person loses is not a fictional world but rather the world of material and social reality. Accordingly, whereas the moviegoer is temporarily estranged from an optional world of fantasy, the alienated person, it seems, is permanently estranged from life itself.

In clinical terms, the flattening of the world that results from the alienation process is a special case of derealization in which a person?s everyday experience loses its sense of immediacy and familiar reality. Like the depression discussed earlier, however-- and like the rest of the conditions to be discussed in this essay-- the derealization associated with alienation has existential roots rather than neurochemical or strictly psychiatric causes.

DEANIMATION

The derealization of the world is at the same time a deanimation of ego identity, for ego identity-- or, henceforth, simply identity-- is inextricably a part of the world: it is selfhood in the world. Identity is selfhood as defined and justified in terms of worldly categories. Hence, when alienation renders the world remote and unreal, it does the same to identity.

The deanimation of identity leads those suffering from alienation to perceive themselves in the same way they perceive others. Just as alienated people perceive everyone and everything else in the world as flat and dead, so they perceive themselves as flat and dead. People suffering from alienation sense that they are no longer real people in a real world but are rather only assemblages of traits, habits, routines, and roles played out on a lifeless stage. In suffering deanimation, alienated people begin to perceive their identity as only a mask, a persona, a disguise.

The loss of identity is experienced as a death of self. Usually, our sense of being derives from our identity in the world, and therefore the loss of identity carries with it the feeling of loss of being, of death. Alienated people therefore feel as though they are undergoing an irresistible process of dispossession leading in the direction of death. They are ?dying to the world.? As Kierkegaard, using biblical language, says, they are suffering from a ?sickness? that is ?unto death.?

This process of dying, however, can be interrupted by the eruption of materials from the dark underside of the personality, that is, from that part of the personality that C.G. Jung called the shadow. The shadow remains unconscious as long as identity is unchallenged. So long as a person lives her or his identity, the shadow remains securely repressed. When, however, following the onset of alienation, identity undergoes deanimation, the shadow, simultaneously, undergoes derepression-- and it rises into consciousness and triggers a host of unwelcome insights.

Alienated people, accordingly, are afflicted with much gnashing of teeth and many stings of conscience. They confront the hidden, dark side of the personality. Having already been disillusioned about the world, they are now disillusioned about themselves. They are jolted into a rude awakening. No longer able to be their identity, they are forced to acknowledge (what seems like) the exclusive reality of the shadow.

This derepression of the shadow eventually comes to an end, however. For the shadow is also a part of the world; it is an alter-identity in the world. Consequently, the derealization of the world that is part of the alienation process entails an eventual deanimation not only of identity but of the shadow as well. The shadow, however, must be derepressed and owned before its deanimation can begin. The typical sequence, then, is (1) derealization of world and concomitant deanimation of identity, (2) derepression and owning of the shadow, and (3) deanimation of the shadow. As the shadow begins to undergo deanimation, the process of ?dying to the world? resumes and leads toward a limit point of complete deanimation. This limit point is the point of despair.

DESPAIR

The alienation process eventually deprives a person of all vestiges of hope and leads to despair. Despair signals that the world is irretrievably lost and that identity (and the shadow, too) is completely defunct, beyond all possibility of reanimation.

Despair should be distinguished from depression, for although both of these conditions involve a sense of hopelessness, the hopelessness of despair is deeper and more final than the hopelessness of depression. If we remember, the hopelessness experienced by the depressed person-- that is, by the person suffering from the existential depression discussed earlier-- is a sense of dissatisfaction and futility that, deriving from initial disillusionment, precedes the alienation process. The hopelessness experienced by the

despairing person, in contrast, is a sense of utter dissociation and death that merges after the alienation process has run full course. The person suffering depression has lost faith in the world and therefore is no longer of the world. The depressed person, however, is at least still in the world. The despairing person, in contrast, is no longer even in the world. Completely alienated from the world, the despairing person has not only given up on the pursuit of happiness but has also lost access to the world and all sense of being in the world. Whereas the depressed person can still struggle, even if vainly, to return to his or her ?old self,? the despairing person is incapable even of mounting such a struggle. For the despairing person is completely dead to the world.

In arriving at the limit point of despair, one ceases to have any kind of meaningful relationship with the world. Dissociated from the arena of action and divested of identity, the despairing person feels as though she or he is a complete nonentity without any justifying purpose, a mere spectator without either ?tre or raison d??tre. This condition-- which mimics schizoid personality disorder-- is, it seems, a condition of the most dire possible hopelessness.

THE EMERGENCE OF FAITH

Appearances notwithstanding, despair is not an utterly negative condition. It is a condition astir with positive possibilities. For the process of dying to the world that leads to despair stimulates a yearning for life that, unbeknownst to the despairing person, draws on hidden spiritual resources. This yearning is not a hope; it is part of the despairing person?s despair. It is experienced as an unquenchable thirst, as a yearning for something impossible, as a yearning, therefore, that only exacerbates the hopelessness of despair. The only hopes that the despairing person understands are those that are now lost: the hope of achieving happiness in the world, the hope of salvaging at least a vestige of worldly being. With these hopes extinguished, the despairing person cannot understand the yearning that he or she experiences; it is an incomprehensible and therefore completely agonizing yearning.

This yearning for a seemingly impossible ?I know not what? signals the beginning of a new kind of faith, a faith that draws deeply on a person?s inner resources. This new faith is not the faith of affirming creeds and worshipping a god representation. That kind of faith dies, in the alienation process, along with worldly identity. This kind of faith is a faith that emerges when one is totally lost and can do nothing in one?s own behalf other than yearn for what seems impossible. It is a dark faith that at first is not recognized as a spiritual faith at all. But this is precisely what it is.

Few people go through a dark night as severe as the one I have described. Many people suffer from bouts of depression and periods of alienation. But most bounce back and become their ?old self? again. Few people follow the path discussed in this essay all the way to the limit point of despair. Those who do, however, arrive at the threshold of a new kind of faith. For their ?sickness? is ?unto death.? For them, the old self does not bounce back; it dies and therefore makes way for the birth of a new self. This new self is a self born of faith, a spiritual self that knows that fulfillment arises from within and therefore need not be pursued as an outer, worldly goal. Accordingly, although this new self is very much a worldly self in the sense of being a self actively engaged and completely at home in the world, it is a self whose basic purpose is no longer the pursuit of worldly goods. It is a self whose basic purpose is, rather, to grow in spirit and to reach out in spirit to others.

The emergence of faith does not necessarily mean that the dark night of the soul is over. St. John of the Cross, in The Dark Night, explains that the period of aridity and withdrawal-- the night of the senses, which we have discussed in this essay-- is sometimes followed by a period of even more difficult trial: the night of spirit. For the night of the senses, as a ?sickness unto death? subdues without really transforming the ?old self.? Accordingly, the dark night of the senses must sometimes be followed by a more radical purgation if a person is to be truly cleansed of all dispositions resistant to the spontaneous expression of spirit. Whether or not the emergence of faith is followed by the night of the spirit, however, the point here is that sometimes it is only in the depths of despair that genuine spiritual life is found. It is a paradox that we sometimes have to lose our way in order to find our true self. We sometimes have to die to the world and to our worldly self before we can discover that our deepest and truest self was within us all the time.


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## flowingly (Aug 28, 2005)

that was the only thing i've ever read that seemed to suggest to me that i am not alone. i read people's posts on here, and i just seem to have something...different. from what i've read, most people on this site have DP, not DR. and if some DR, not DR in any chronic form. i just can never find the words to express the fear and sense of COMPLETE loss and detachment and dissocation that i feel.

sigh. i dunno.... :?

and i am in no way trivializing DP. i see how much everyone here suffers.

i hope to find some of that faith he mentioned


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## Rozanne (Feb 24, 2006)

(edited)

A bit more at ease, R


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## flowingly (Aug 28, 2005)

miss_starling said:


> Thankyou so much for posting this. It describes my existance better than anything else I have ever read before.
> 
> I have experienced "existential depression" since I was a child, a flatness and feeling of not being a person that I could never explain to anyone else and sensed that other people did not experience. My childhood was a dark night. Quite literally, when I look back my memories are of darkness, or of days that were extremely flat and grey. This feeling of greyness and not being a person resulted in my feeling permanently lonely, as if no one else on the planet had had the same experience. I was an uncomforted child at the time so didn't get over the loneliness for years. Even now I long to meet (and marry!) someone else who has experienced the same thing, as in a way, it is my most notable characteristic, something that does seem to distinguish me from other people.
> 
> ...


i hope your paths cross again soon :wink:


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## Rozanne (Feb 24, 2006)

editted


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## IMSojourner (Nov 4, 2006)

Thank you, beatnikdog!


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## Guest (Dec 21, 2006)

Great article! It explained me better than I ever could have myself...wow.


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## sunyata samsara (Feb 18, 2011)

stopped reading at Jesus


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## Surfingisfun001 (Sep 25, 2007)

Wow that really described my experience better than anything.


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## Gypsy85 (Sep 23, 2010)

Gosh...I just constantly thought: He is talking about me. This is exactly my problem.

I hope to find my faith as well


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## beatnikbdog (Jan 8, 2005)

your loss, sunyata.


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