Rollo May Meets Otto Rank

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For any understanding of the universal suffering of human beings, isn’t the strange consciousness of living—the dim awareness that we’re alive, for a moment, on a speck of dust as it spins, meaninglessly, around the sun, itself only a slightly larger speck of dust in the vast, incomprehensible spaces of the cosmos—the single most significant fact of human existence? The nature of consciousness remains utterly mysterious. Neuroscientists cannot even agree on a definition of consciousness, or on a definition of a “self” that is conscious, much less measure either one. According to philosopher David Chalmers, who coined the term “hard problem” of consciousness, we cannot explain how the water of the brain turns into the wine of consciousness. No scientific instrument has ever been invented to detect the presence or absence of consciousness. What Otto Rank called “the consciousness of living” seems to me to be identical to the hard problem of consciousness, which requires explaining how the first-person experience of “I am” emerged in the cosmos. No one has a clue. Consciousness remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma, shrouded in darkness—just like the existential unconscious. Perhaps the time is approaching when the adjective “existential” will no longer be necessary when we speak of “science.”

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