Who Am I ? How to Live ?
Existence and Choice develops a dharmic existentialism around two fundamental questions :
Who am I ? How to live ?
Existentialism begins from existence as it is lived from the first-person perspective, not from a detached theory of the human being. It rejects the idea of a predetermined human essence and understands persons as becoming through their choices and actions. Yet choice never occurs in a vacuum : embodiment, history, society, circumstance, and mortality shape the field within which freedom operates.
Part I asks who chooses. It examines the ego, consciousness, integral rationality, perception and sensation, the death of God, freedom, embodiment, creativity, nonduality, authenticity, and the relation between theism and existentialism. The substantial self is rejected, but not the conventional person. Human existence is full-empty : full as embodied, relational, affective, and meaningful life, yet empty of an independent and permanent essence.
Identity is therefore neither given once and for all nor freely invented. It emerges through the tension between facticity and transcendence. We are conditioned by our bodies, histories, and circumstances, but we also take a position toward what is given, confer meaning upon it, and project possible futures. Freedom is conditioned rather than absolute, but it is not thereby unreal. Choice remains the point at which existence assumes direction and responsibility.
Part II turns to the question of how to live. Here existential philosophy enters into dialogue with the Buddhadharma. Emotions, worldly concerns, the layers of mind, the Four Noble Truths, attention, mindfulness, insight, and temporality are examined as dimensions of lived practice. The Buddhadharma contributes a disciplined analysis of suffering, self-grasping, and transformation. Existentialism contributes its insistence on freedom, responsibility, authenticity, and the urgency of decision.
Dharmic existentialism joins these perspectives without reducing one to the other. There is no self-existing ego standing behind experience, yet choices and actions remain attributable to the person who makes them. Authenticity is not fidelity to a hidden essence but lucid participation in one’s situation : assuming responsibility, loosening self-appropriation, cultivating awareness, and choosing a way of life directed toward greater freedom and the cessation of suffering.
Choice is thus both philosophical and practical. It is how a full-empty, embodied, and interdependent existence gives itself direction amid impermanence and uncertainty.
