Existential Crisis, The Birth of Faith and the Forging of New Identity

She sits before me, her veins screaming out from her forehead that is now turning purple. Her fragile heart has been shattered by a love she thought would last forever, but who walked out the door instead, unable to step up to the responsibility and commitment of such a future. “I thought that if I asked and was ready to receive, the Universe would give me what I wanted.” The way she once thought the Universe worked suddenly isn’t real for her. And she is trying with all of her might to contain the myriad of emotion that overwhelms her for fear that she too will break wide open. He is sobbing, his head buried in his hands, his legs shaking with tragic refusal to accept what is. The cancer has grown and has escaped into the lymph nodes. The surgery now feels inevitable, despite his best efforts to avoid it with alternative treatments and hope for a radical remission. Everything he believes he suddenly doesn’t.

There is no control, no ground, no faith, no basis for life. Meaning and purpose imposed on the cancer have vanished with the latest news, leaving nothing in their wake. Existential crises can occur at any time. Life-threatening illness and death of a fierce love, only two of countless ways we can be thrown into the cosmic furnace that forges our faith through the element of decision. Such crises thrust into our face who we think we are, how we think we are supposed to live and for which reasons. The momentum of choosing is before us. We don’t often like what we see. We stand at a crossroads of identity where conjoin the waters of faith and fire of realization. It is a time to rethink all we imagine we believe and all we sense we are. Whatever we physically sense is only a darkened recess of the ocean of our true magnificence. And all we think we know is but the horizon of all there is to know. Both spacial landscapes there for our exploration, but neither defining the essence of who we really are. The human mind cannot hold the reality of it all. And that is a fact we are forced to accept through choosing to have faith in the unworldly and unseen workings of the Universal Mind. It is the time for our faith to be born or aborted. That is one decision we have come upon. It is also time to revision who we think we are and for what we choose to stand here in this plane of shadows and apparent and illusioned death. When you are at this crossroads, you can first choose to accept the circumstances in which you find yourself, as difficult as they may be, for what they are. It is much easier on you when you do and it prepares you to move forward from the place that is already known. For instance, when life throws you out of the raft and into the raging waters, you have to decide whether you will fight what has happened and exhaust yourself trying to pull yourself back up into the safety of where you have been. Most likely drowning in the process. Or you can accept the fact that you are in a class five river studded with boulders, face upright, look downstream, keep your feet high so you can use them to bounce off of the impending rocks, and wait for the calm that eventually comes where you can finally get out and climb to steady ground. Second, choose what your life will stand for, and let your actions define who you are. Decide what has meaning and purpose for you, and do that. It will ground you in the here and now. Third, ask yourself what you can believe and in what you can have faith. According to physicist, chemist and neuroscientist William J. Bray, we are eternal and it is mathematically impossible that we are not, if it is true we exist at all. Remind yourself of your infinite nature, that all of life is a vibrational hierarchy of existence, and that though you are here appearing in finite form, it is not who you are. Practice having faith that you never really die, and that there are many not in bodily form who love and hold you dear. And that you are here, as a unique stream of energy, to bring into form some quality of love that is otherwise formless. In deciding to allow that infinite self to move into a dawning realization, faith gets stronger and so do you.