Suspended in being

An unsettlingly recurring question I viscerally experienced as a schoolchild was a thoughtless awareness - a suspension of thinking that questioned my own being. My cognition, for a while, would get suspended, leaving me with a fading perception of whether I existed at all. Though later, I was introduced to literature on the nature of existence and to Husserl's phenomenology - specifically the epoché, a deliberate suspension of our ordinary assumption that the world exists - the riddle persists, perhaps largely because the momentary suspension of thought I would experience was not deliberate. And perhaps, by then, as a student with a humble background, I could rarely hold a definite judgment of any proximate thing, let alone of the cosmos, existence, or the "distant" self.

'Existence' has been subjected to inquiry throughout history, and the lenses through which to look into it are many. Theology asks why we exist and answers: for a divine purpose beyond ourselves. Mysticism dissolves the question: the seeker and the sought are one. Biology sets meaning aside and speaks only of function: existence serves genetic survival. Psychology sees meaning as a human need to be fulfilled, not a cosmic truth to be discovered. Sociology reminds us that our meanings are never truly our own; they are shaped by culture. For cosmologists, we are the 13.8-billion-year-old universe becoming conscious of itself. For a layman, existence merely means to perceive and to be physically perceived. But most people do not argue an answer; they simply live one.

Of all lenses, philosophy might offer an elaborate answer and suggests a personalised way of establishing existence. What does existence mean? Who are we, and how and why do we exist at all? Are humans natives of this universe or aliens in their home, conscious intruders in a world that preceded them and will outlast them? Is existence a fact, a feeling, a construction - or a combination of all three or none of the three? Could an independent world exist without human perception to witness it and give it meaning? Or could a human being itself be attested to, could it be verified and sustained, without a world to stand in, to push against, to wonder at?

Putting it briefly, do we really exist? How do we attest to our existence? And what is the interplay between the existence of humans and that of the world?

Descartes' cogito ergo sum establishes the minimum: doubt requires a doubter, so a thinking subject must exist. But this confirms only the mind - not the body, not the world. To empiricists, existence in rooted in perception; and to rationalists, in reason. Hume unsettles both: we never perceive existence itself, only colours and shapes - existence is always inferred, never directly encountered. Idealists conclude reality is mind-dependent; realists insist the world stands independent of all observers. Kant mediates: reality exists but remains forever inaccessible in itself - we inhabit only our mind-filtered version. And since verifying a mind-independent world itself requires a mind, the bind is inescapable. Quantum mechanics suggests observation may constitute, not merely contact, reality.

Notwithstanding the outcomes, the scope and space for inquiries continue to provide food for thought for curious minds. Perhaps definite answers are questions that question human limitations - as if, unlike the belief that the human mind plays tricks with the world, it is existence that plays tricks with the humans.

The world without humans and humans without the world would not have "meaningfully" existed the way they are known to exist today. In the former case, the world would have remained a terra incognita; in the latter, humans would have remained in a functionally plant-like state.

Therefore, the existence of humans can't be made sense of in isolation from the material world. We, as spectators when looking at the world, look at ourselves in the glass self of the world - each defining the other, however fluidly. We might think we refine our thoughts on existence. It is, also, the other way around.