Featured Post

The link to Americ's SoundCloud (It's wonderful to hear his voice)

https://soundcloud.com/americ

Tuesday, July 20, 2021

Being

   Thinking about being is not an everyday act for us. Instead, we tend to become absorbed in a wild chorus of events, appointments and emotional disturbances. 

   Contemplate being long enough and your life will be transformed into joy unattached to any particular experience. This is like being in love without a lover. The love is just there without dependence on the presence or absence of an external party. 

   The joy of being comes to us as we still the desiring aspects of mind. For so long as we are "ahead" or "behind" ourselves, we are not "here now" to experience the full intensity, wonder, and mystery of existence itself. The quality of our action in life depends on our day-to-day connection to our source, our being. The sense of "I am". 

   Terms such as "God", "infinity", "totality", and "existence" seem to refer to something in common. It is as if they commonly map a certain feeling area of the brain. But "brain" is itself an idea that is secondary to Being. Being contains "brain".

   We lose ourselves in what is "expected" of us in what we "must do". Eventually, even the very thought of being is lost to us. 

   Anyone who becomes committed to the attainment of self-knowledge has a journey to take back into their own heart. In part, it is the "downward path" from the head. In another part it's a "stepping back" from desire, frenzy and activity.

   Look at a wall and fall into wonder that it exists! This is the radical perspective. Our root experience is our deep felt sense of existence, being, or sense of "I am".

   Being is not passive, being is the stillness within all the process. Being is the eternal within the temporal. It is, in the words of T. S. Elliot, "the still point of the turning world". 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I very much appreciate the beingness I read in this post. Often, when I'm relaxing and time feels expansive, I worry about being lazy or unmotivated. Much of me wishes to realize my high ambitions for myself, one of which is becoming my inner Buddha. As I'm writing this, I begin to worry that I'm conflating the outer ambitions with the inner ambitions. That I'm seeking external results instead of internal realizations. I guess I feel so much pressure to look like I'm going somewhere and have tangible results to show for it. I will attempt to contemplate being in this response instead of focus on what I'm not doing right. Being is presence. It's a responsiveness that dances with whatever presents itself in each moment. It does not shun, resist, or ignore. It moves with it and becomes one with it. That's what being is, it's being one with everything I experience in my limited and groping perception. It's acknowledging the tendency to see self as separate while recognizing the reality of interbeing. That we all exist as one giant pool of spilt milk on the kitchen linoleum.