The nihilistic moment is a possibility for spiritual practice

In philosophical counseling the “nihilistic moment” is a very important moment.

Therefore, I often ask my guests to read Albert Camus´ two small novels The Stranger, and The Fall, as ways of getting the counseling practice started.

The nihilistic moment is a so-called Bardo state, a possibility for spiritual practice, a possibility for opening yourself in towards the Source.

It namely also implies the question of, whether there can be a complete philosophical freedom, wherein the human mind is facing something, which not is of time, not is pieced together by thoughts, and which still not is an escape from the facts of the daily existence: the timeless, the absolute, truth or reality.

Love can only arise when the Ego is not present

The main character in In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust  - the main character, Marcel, is seeing the things around him in the light of his projects; that will first of all say his love affairs. When his being in love has faded away, the things appear meaningless and ordinary. It is a nihilistic moment in the same way as in Albert Camus´ novels. It is the entrance of the labyrinth.

On the one hand these reactions are an expression of Man as a natural being, on the other hand they are also an expression of the historical limitation of Man, and therefore the instance, which under various forms makes it possible for the Ego to continue. The historical limitation is time and its images, the perspective you have on yourself and the world. The Ego is this historical limitation. The Ego is therefore a philosophical ego.

In such a process, there can´t be any openness, devotion and love.

Love can only arise when the Ego is not present.  

When the Ego is not present, then Man, and the Otherness, can fill each other out. This happens in the devotion. True love is devotion, where you in self-forgetful openness give yourself away with the whole of your being.

That is the reason why the Philosophical Globetrotter must understand the whole of the process of mind, which is the thinking´s process: the labyrinth.

Understanding the labyrinth is the guiding force which will lead you to follow the thread back.

Your ego creates the calculator, the dreamer, the doubter, which place itself outside yourself and your surroundings

Your personal history is the thinking´s past and future as a whole, your self-image and world-image moving from past towards future, as well as all the experiences, conclusions, values, norms, ideals, theories, speculative conceptions etc., which are manifestations of this history.

They are also symptoms of the will to power in this history, the desire after becoming something, to control and form happiness, truth and reality.

In other words, they are symptoms of the self-production, the production of your ego, the whole of this idea-complex, which creates the calculator, the dreamer, the doubter, which place itself outside yourself and your surroundings.

And they are symptoms of the consequences of this process: the disappointments, the guilt, the sorrow, the bitterness, the anger, the resistance, the anxiety, the hope, the despair, the unreality, the absence.

This process, the process of unreality, which so excellent has been described by various authors, for instance in Camus´ The Stranger, Baudelaire´s The Flowers of Evil, Dostojevskij´s Notes From an Underground, Kafka´s The Castle.

Also in the art of painting you can see it depicted, for instance by Cezanne, Van Gogh, Picasso.