It's hard to explain the Rig Veda to an Existentialist

(or is it?)

"In the beginning this One evolved

Became desire, first seed of the mind.

Wise seers, searching within their hearts,

Found the bond of Being in Not-Being

~ Rig Veda (Nasadiya) 4

Reverse this poetic formula, and say that the desire for meaning begets Mind, and that Mind is the blank space into which our desires spill their seed, hoping to fertilize the oblivious Absurd -- then one has likely "existentialized" an ancient Hindu text.

When one is counseled to find a power greater than oneself, for the purpose of recovering from a certain disease of the mind and allergy of the body, one can go in circles and call this Higher Power the act of mind that seeks a Higher Power, and so on ... It won't end. Desire -- the well-spring of all that is good, bad, indifferent, or just pointless -- depends upon a willing agent. Even when the desire is for absorption into the cosmic organism, or just plain dissolution, there is no meaning when the agent is absent. "Time is no healer," as T. S. Eliot put it, for "the patient is no longer here" (Four Quartets, "The Dry Salvages" III.). Eternity is no healer either, for the patient is as if he'd never been.

I've no patience with any religion, philosophy, or "spiritual" system that belittles the existential center, the Ego (in the Classical Greek sense of the term, and in Ayn Rand's sense) and calls for a shedding of all the temporal encrustations that make the person the "unique, unrepeatable entity" that is the only ground for morals and ethics -- even in a post-modern environment where those terms are endlessly abused, ironically invoked, or transmuted into other signifiers by the great alchemy of differance ...

"Never have I not existed,

[says Krishna]

nor you, nor these kings;

and never in the future

shall we cease to exist."

~ Bhagavad-Gita, Second Teaching

From an Existentialist point of view, this statement renders the entire concept of personhood (and it is a Western concept, stated in Greek as hupostasis) meaningless; for the person comes to be in time, orients himself to the world as one who is in the process of becoming, and experiences continuity with the rest of the world (the community of others, if you will) only by way of existing as his own foundation (literally "standing under") -- which is precisely the meaning of the ancient Greek term, which we receive by way of Latin as "subject" (of, to, etc.)...

The great void out of which I emerged (and which I conceptualize only through a desire to know myself, which is a creative act) and into which I shall someday return is the sole reference-point for my personhood. Anaximander called it apeiron. An anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet described it analogically as the storm-wracked night out of which a bird flies, to enter the mead-hall for a brief spell of light and warmth, only to return again to that darkness.

Somewhere we have lost, as a culture, the love of the light of this day, the here-and-now, that makes creativity and personhood (the two are so inextricably bound as to be near synonyms) a necessity -- if we are to glorify this world for it's own sake, and not for some utilitarian end. For "Life piled on life / were all too little," as Tennyson so movingly put it ... "and of one to me / Little remains" ("Ulysses").

Being-toward-death or Being-toward-salvation: the great dilemma separating the atheist from the Christian Existentialists. Sartre versus Kierkegaard. Heidegger versus Bultmann. Moore versus AA. And so it goes.

"He who is in the sun, and in the fire and in the heart of man is One. He who knows this is one with the One"

~ Matri Upanishad

That is to say, no person, no subject, no desire ...