Garret B. Wyner, PhD

After suffering an existential crisis in my late teens, I’ve had one overriding concern: To answer the question, “Is there a reason to live?” That is, “Is there meaning, purpose and value for human life and for my life?”  If so, in what does it consist and how can it be realized?

Increasingly it became clear that the core problem of human life revolves around imbibed prejudices about what it means to be a person, and a person of genuine value. A truly good, conscientious, caring or loving person. That in spite of the commonly accepted assumption  that “no one knows” or “no one can know the answer to such fundamental, enduring philosophical questions, the opposite is true. Not only can we know, but none of us can avoid responding to what is revealed to us – even by trying to push such revelations into the most remote corners of our minds. But denial has its consequences: most of all, it makes the hope of discovering who we are, as well as creating who or what we can become, appear like a fantasy.

The great witnesses in every culture in every age bear witness to our capacity to realize a truly and fully good or spiritual life. That there is  a way out of the coldly indifferent “real” world we awaken to all around us and within us. A way out of our temptation to despair in the ambivalent fear that reality itself may not only be indifferent to us, but actively working to subvert the struggle to become better than we are. A way that can free us from the temptation to believe that denial is the only option to avoid being overwhelmed by despair. This way is by a time-honored step-by-step ethical or “spiritual” journey out of the valley of our dark cave up to that mountaintop from which we may see and make our own a different kind of life than the kind of life we are now living.

THE question we must ask is: “Are we willing to go against social demands for conformity by opening our own eyes to look and see the truth for ourselves?” If so, then we place ourselves in a position to allow the spirit of truth itself to become our guide. And in the process, we will find that the spirit of truth and the spirit of love are one and the same. That even children, in their limited form and measure of sensible insight, can feel the call of compassion in their heart and be led by it. That the “simplicity” of this time-honored way is only complicated by a broader contemporary world within which this spirit or “Voice” has becomes so enmeshed with our prejudicial distortions that we are now hard-pressed to distinguish the “wheat from the weeds” in our journey.

Despite the barriers in our way, we can choose to undertake a journey aimed at gaining a deeper, experiential understanding of what words like truth and authenticity, empathy, love or compassion mean and how such an authentic, empathic and deeply compassionate life may increasingly be realized in and for ourselves as well as others. And, as we walk in this way – as we see for ourselves the real fruit or empirical evidence of an increasingly changed life, we will also discover that we are already changing the world in which we live.

There are “fortunate altruists,” raised from birth and privileged circumstances in the most spiritually nourishing environments. I was not one of them. Not raised in a healthy psychological, moral or spiritual, or even “intellectual” environment. And the result was that I almost succumbed to suicidal despair. Almost paradoxically, however, the depth of the need all the more drove me in search for answers. I began talking classes in Philosophy and Psychology to find a reason to live. And although what I initially found in “formal” education seemed only to confirm my despair, I found myself drawn to the most inspired witnesses or “voices” in our history moved by the same fundamental need. Like a loving father searching for his lost child, I felt a love in them I had never known personally. A spirit of love reassuring me that I could become more and better than I was. That we can become more and better than we are. I turned to the study of Classical Philosophy as a foundational discipline because of this searching spirit in its best representatives. Because it encouraged a questioning, searching orientation to life.

Like the openness of a child’s or the Buddhist’s “beginner’s mind,” I opened my heart and mind to question the prejudices I had imbibed from my early relational context. Raised as a Jewish-Atheist, I had little to no awareness of what it meant to be a Jew or an atheist, much less a believer. It is likely that this played a part in my initial search for answers through the mediation of atheist humanist-existentialists and, especially, a select group of atheist witnesses of the Holocaust like Primo Levi and Jean Amery, who seemed almost prophetically able to diagnose our contemporary problematic condition in terms of a collective moral crisis. But although, like the Jewish prophets of old, they included themselves in this indictment, they could not point to a way out of our condition. And so, I found myself increasingly drawn to the testimony of the most enlightened “religious” or “spiritual” witnesses in our collective history as consistent with, but going far beyond, that initial testimony.

By means of an independent study of  these practical experiential or “mystical” visionaries in our history I was increasingly enabled to distinguish a trans-cultural religion of the heart from “organized” forms of religion that had lost sight of their origins and come to subordinate devotion to the spirit of truth and love to the use of empty forms of doctrine and rigidly ritualized forms of life for the sake of individual and group self-centered agendas. The shared Vision of these religious witnesses was worlds apart from the lives of the majority of their modern-day professed followers. For me, at least, Moses, Socrates, Gautama Buddha, and Jesus shared more in common with a modern-day atheist of good faith like Primo Levi, than the vast majority of their professed followers. Nor was this a Vision accessible only by “spiritual olympians” or academic professors as if they were more capable of realizing it than ordinary folks. On the contrary, reliance on any gift – intellectual or even spiritual – all the more nourished that spirit of pride blocking our way. Instead of being offered to the privileged, it was and is a vision consistent with our youthful idealism before the so-called “real” world influenced us to stifle that hope. Such a vision has sufficient power to enable us to recognize what is truly good working in and through us all – atheists and believers alike – while also enabling us to expose the most subtle forms of prejudice blocking our way.

As a “wounded healer,” the clinical practice of Psychology felt like a call to help fellow sufferers in a more intimate, Buberian “I & Thou” sort of way. That in much the same way as we are initially formed by our intimate relationship with our parents, and by extension as well as subsequently by the social groups with which we all most identify, so too we can be reformed or transformed by our own choice of who or what we will most trust. The value of such an intimate personal relationship with the “family” of the great spiritual witnesses, therefore, offers a therapy of hope that goes far beyond symptom amelioration or a deficit vs. growth oriented model of psychotherapy.

This same motivation led me to contemporary relational psychoanalysis in its emphasis on the uniqueness and unique value of each person and each relationship. We are not things to be fixed and there is no quick fix for the collective crisis of conscience we are all now suffering from.