Existential experience is an overarching feeling-awareness that pervades and serves as a background, container or horizon to self, world and reality as a whole. It is a constant, ever-present part of all of one's experience. It can be likened to a movie screen onto which the movie of our changing experience is projected. A simple way to understand it is to consider the overarching feeling-awareness that people with chronic depression, anxiety, experience of dissociation or schizophrenia have, or – in sharp contrast – the experience of Spiritual Exemplars who are in a state of Living Transcendence.

What can we say about our "existential experience"? Does it have a particular "flavor" or "color"? Does it have certain qualities that are completely stable (e.g., our being conscious of it) and others that sometimes change (e.g., during activity vs meditation, when we are happy or depressed)? Am I aware of my "background experience" right now? If I am, what can I say about it?

I am exploring these questions with scholars and Spiritual Exemplars, and designing a phenomenological research on the "existential experience". So far, the subject has hardly been studied at all. Because it's very difficult to study an experience that has no beginning or end, and which is the background of all other experiences.

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This page is dedicated to the ongoing exploration of this topic.