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It has often been the case in my life that I have gone through a period of difficulty which, whether it was caused by some debilitating feature in my physical circumstances or from some confounding of the ideational constructs I had formulated with regard the nature of reality and its relationship to the structure of my own psyche, presented me with an obstacle that I had no choice but to try to surmount.  The process of overcoming such obstacles often brought about moments of inspirational insight followed by longer, if still brief, passages of time, lasting some hours or days or weeks, during which I felt a sense of having been released from all conflict.  The effects of this sense of release have never, unfortunately, proven to be more than short lived; soon the problems inherent to my existence in this world gave rise to yet more circumstantial and/or psychological stresses – which eventually yielded yet again to moments of insight and release.  A sense of the ultimate futility of this little roundelay has led me to desire a method by which I might extend the periods of insight and relief indefinitely, if possible; or, failing that, one that would allow me to avoid those difficulties which gave rise to my distress in the first place.  However, the desire for a single insight so all encompassing as to end entirely the need for further questioning, and the attempt to discover a methodology by which to avoid such difficulties as are inherent to the human condition, seem equally fruitless.  Where, then, do I find hope?

At the risk of sounding as if I am once again indulging myself in an insight that I believe will prove lasting and which turns out to be ephemeral, I would like to propose a new methodology for living.  It derives from my consideration of suicide, and the guarantee of its surety is no mean task:  it depends upon the nullification of all desire to avoid the problematical aspects of existence, and the admission that no insight brooked by the kind of psychological investigation I have pursued thus far will ever yield an insight which will end suffering.  That is to say, the new methodology depends on precisely this:  acknowledging that the problematical aspects of life and living, being impossible to wholly solve or avoid, must in consequence be accepted.

What this means is that the sorrows and sufferings which are an inherent part of my experience of living in this world must simply be borne, the burden they present picked up and carried:  and the key as to why this must be so is that life, as I have stated often enough, is essentially a matter of experiencing.  Only by acknowledging the experiential condition as primary to all others can life be approached wholly and honestly; anything less means that some kind of falsification has occurred.  In my own case, for instance, I have come to realize that the underlying motivation for my exploration of the psychology of experientialism has largely been founded on a desire to discover a methodology that would allow me to avoid suffering.  However, since the experiential condition can only be achieved through its own self-defining qualities, any consideration on the matter of suffering that seeks to deny its validity as but another aspect of the experiential condition becomes no more than an obscuration and falsification of the process of living.  Thus when I say that one must "pick up and carry" those burdens which life brings us, I mean that one must meet them openly and accept them willingly whenever they come; for it is only by means of such acceptance that one can enter into their experiential qualities, and so achieve a genuine understanding of their relative values.

None of this is to say that I have reached a point of disagreement with regard to the validity of suicide as an ongoing option for the individual, the choosing of which may be decided upon at any given moment in time – for it is only through the existence of such a choice that we may lay claim to the ownership of our own lives; and this can be so only if the act of suicide is held to be not only a theoretical possibility, but also an actual one.  Suicide represents the fundamental guarantee of individual freedom, which is a necessary prerequisite to the full exploration of the experiential condition.  It should also be added that an acceptance of life's perceived negative experiences and the discovery of their experiential relevancy is the most genuine means we have of claiming true social maturity, for the life which partakes of such conditions is a life in which the power for personal – and therefore social – transformation is maximized.  This transformative power is inherent to all of existence:  all things, both sentient and non-sentient, enact, even if only by means of merely existing, some degree of communicative power, and hence are involved in a revelatory act of transformation upon the social totality of their environment, be that environment the artificial construction of human civilization, the world of nature, or both.

So it is that once again I find autumn to be not only a season of death and dying, but one in which I celebrate my own birth – and rebirth – as well.  The phoenix rises yet again.  Outside my apartment, the trees have flamed and faded as I've sat here writing and struggling within myself these past several weeks to overcome despair:  now the trees are bare.  The season has left me feeling fragile and forlorn, yet hopeful as well:  for now the possibility exists within me for the creation of a new species of being, a being which I believe will prove better equipped to withstand the vicissitudes of living, and the suffering which living so often brings.  For I have come to recognize that through acceptance, through the process of entering into and becoming one with hardship and toil, one may come to embody the possibility for transformative change.  Suffering is no less frightening to me than it was before; but I understand now that, at least up to the point at which it becomes so overwhelming as to cause a sense of utter hopelessness, suffering may be accounted as that which holds the key to an experiential understanding whose power to transport one through life, and to transform life through the process of one's living, I had never before realized lay so nearly within my grasp.

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