Severance from Being

We live our lives separated from Being.

We are divorced from the Being of others around us as well as from our own inner Being.

Animals, which we relate to as inferior, are doing much better - they are never disconnected from their essential, authentic Being. In fact, each animal is an intact, wholistic essence, undevided or splited. Their Animal Being is ruling and uniting everything into a one homogenous, nucleus being. However, in us humans - every single part of us aspires to domineer the others, to take control and become a single ruling monarch, even if for a while: our gluttony, our sexual urges, our greediness, pride, vulnerability, lust for power - every part wishes the whole dominion for itself. If the boss (the Being) is not at home, the kids (the demons of lust, emotions, sex and ego) are in frenzy for dominance and control.

When Gulliver arrived at the “Yahoo’s land”, he met human beings who were subject to their most primitive and raw urges and thus acted “like animals” - where in fact their behavior was typically and totally human. They behaved in a manner which we (unjustly so) attribute to animals,’ although animals never behave the way human do. The animals (the horses) in “Yahoo’s land”, who were the masters of the place, were peaceful, enlightened, full of essence & being. The implication is clear: not like the animals, who have stayed faithful to voice of their natural being, we Human beings have crowned upon our undeveloped inner Being the demons of lust and desire.

To be in touch with our inner Being means: to be authentic, to come from within, to be in communion with our inner core, with our own personal center of gravity, with one’s own inner child. As we grow up and mature, we should naturally and gradually part from the inner Being of childhood - the juvenile, premature, crude and formless inner being. By majority, most people get stuck and trapped in one point or another of their marginal life which surround these primitive essences, instead of letting a more mature essence and a center of gravity to form up and be established within them. It is very much like the change from premature baby teeth, to permanent adult teeth. We are, in relating to our inner being, like a person who still keeps his baby teeth and thus is bound to be very preoccupied with his lips - sipping liquids and licking ice-cream all day, avoiding hard solid foods.

What else is it like? It is like a group of people who crash-land on a deserted island. Once they settle, each one of them gets involved in a different activity, as suits each traits, inclinations and whim : one is looking for some food, another is busy wandering around, another builds a tree house, while others swim, or pray or whatever. They all try to personally adjust to the situation, none of them is connected to the very essence, the real and only being of what it actually means to be stuck on a deserted island. If they were - they should have been burning with the fire and urge of finding a way out. Indeed, this is the term which best defines the attitude toward the being: to burn in an inner fire.

What comes from within, from the inner core of our selfhood (inner Being) is charging us with great strength & vitality, as if we were connected to some electrical current source. That means that things may happen because we ARE - not because we DO. The other alternative is to get yourself charged up and activated by your own batteries: by moods, pressure, stress, aggression, anxiety, fears, lust, initiative and self discipline. In these outer sections of life style your actions are mechanical: you need “to do” so you could “be,” and if you do not do (each time anew) you sink into void and emptiness - for there is no Being inside you.

To be activated by and from the Being - is to be present, to live life generated from your true and real existence. You do not have to do anything from your own initiative - because the mere fact of your being in harmony with your core existence - makes you do what is needed.

This is like the famous riddle of “what comes first” - the chicken or the egg? Do you need to do so you could be, or do you need to be so you could do? Well, of course, the Being comes first. The doing results from the Being. However, most people are investing in doing for the sake of doing - escaping the void which lurks within, getting from this doing a kind of false sense of having a Being.This activity is not natural and is mechanical, generated by great anxiety, fueld by fear of emptiness. Indeed, Sisypus’s curse has its print here - each time over and again we try to fill up this chasm of emptiness, and each time, on the next day or so, it gets empty again. In nature all comes from being, from the core. Only we, human beings, are in exile from our homeland, from our own Being, ceaslessly trying to reach fulfillment and happyness, exerting efforts non-stop , all the time in full gas, with our engine in maximum capacity - just not to be left behind. The loud, extroverted Americanization is ruling our life and leading our actions , while the quiet Being is fading away, disappearing.

The Being goes mute, withdraws from any expression - while we find more and more external substitutes to the unmediated contact of our own Being with others’: Internet, fax, cord-less phone, magazines, parties, social gatherings, excitements, entertainments. Thos who are “Being-starved” (not getting the real fuel become addicted to substitutes: more TV watching, more news consuming, more shopings, more parties, more trips, more sports, etc. Each new toy, activity or way of spending time - is yet another tombstone on the grave of the being.

And so, modern human being lives in continual severance from his inner Being and from the Being of those around him. Thus alienation and foreignness are celebrating and life become dead , in an empty, mechanical world, lacking any dimension of depth, intimacy and individuality. A world in which ‘the other’ is perceived as a poster, one dimensional, loud and superficial. For the individual this is a world of labels and not of essences, of mechanisms and not of dynamics, of techniques & manipulations, and not of values and significants.

We have the ability to be and to maintain a symbiotic communication between our own Being and that of others. Pity, that instead of sensing the inside of another (from the inside of ourselves), instead of streaming toward him (or her) quietly and letting them stream toward us without an effort - we paint and engrave on the exterior of the other - our version of inner turmoil. For a person who is disconnected from his own being - a meeting with his inside is a meeting with emptiness. But one need to presist and stay with the nothingness inside - bear with its pain - until they could feel the silent presence of their inner Being slowly emerging from within. Most of us are running away from this silence, although silence is the main medium by which the inner Being can be touched and communicated to.

The severance from Being means being asleep, or the lack of consciousness to the real happening of life beyond the illusion of their outer display. Those who are severed from Being - live in a sleepy world, a world in which dreams and fantasies flourishing. The stronger is the severance from the Being - the deeper the sleep is and the more powerful are the dreams. We dream of romances, love affairs, bigger houses, food, sex and more sex, success, and so on. The culture helps us to actualize these dreams and fantasies by alluring us with commercials on the TV, colorfull pictures, sucess stories of the rich and the famous, movies, all working in service of the grand sleep, all generating dreams and more dreams. Those commercial dreams join the private fantasies that we manufacture from within ourselves, fantasies that encircle around the prison bars of our sleeping cabin in which our inner essence is trapped.

To wake up from being fast asleep means to wake up the sleeping beauty in the deserted Being castle. Who will be the silver prince who will wake the sleeping princess up from her slumber and will sublimate her romantic fantasy with the fresh vivid reality? Who will give her back her dominion in the kingdom of the living?

Of course not everything is black and white, awake or asleep, Being or labels. There are artists torn between the Being and the social substitute, who by origin, by essence and inclination are the Being-faithful. They represent the Being to the world - therefore their slogan must be authenticity, loyalty to the voice of the Being. Their craftsmanship is to shape and model the voice of the Being that overflows from within.

Poets, playwrights, musicians, singers, painters - driven by the spirit of the Being breathing inside them - try to give it expression and enable it via with their art. In other words, artists may be awake and aware to the cry of their Beings and to the Being in exile around them. However, their curse is that they can express their Being only through the limited medium of their arts, confined and conditioned by the society of the sleeping people, who would permit the Being to exist only if presented as and by art. In the isolated reserves or ghettos of their arts, far away from the political commercial reality of everyday life, the artists may experience a true sense of being connected to their inner being.

But, some artists may stray and conform to the social accepted norms - for money, deserting the vision of the being for personal gain, surrendering their art to the ruling establishment. Painters become graphic artists, writers turn into journalists, playwrights become copywriters, directors of features become directors of commercials or soap operas, thinkers and philosophers become gurus, poet become jingles composers. All of them giving up their own Being potential for the false securing hug of society. How unfortunate it is, that people are lead to believe and follow such false prophets, behind whos backs, blocked and kept out of sight , are the true prophets, the true upholders of the Being - doomed to isolation and frustration.


Quotations:

“My prayer: to be what I’ll be and do what I may do. All which I want to do, is to live in rhythm with myself. All that I want - is to do what I am doing and not to try to do what I am not doing. Just to do what I am doing. Just to advance step by step with myself. I will be what I will be.”
“I will be what I will be - but now I am what I am, and here I need to invest my vigor, I am in need for all of my strength in order to be what I am today. Today I’ll work in the same rhythm with myself and with what I need to be. And in order to work in rhythm with myself I need to continue and deepen into myself. God revealed his name to Moses, and it was: I’ll be what I’ll be.”

Hugh Prather, “Notes to myself”

“How awful it is that most people accept willingly a work of art that was born from the innermost hidden feeling of the artists, but separates them from reality with a thick wall.”

Albert Einstein

It has been said there are two types of people in this world, those who are dreamers and those being dreamed.

As far as our inner being and being divorced from it, and animals doing so much better being ‘intact’…

Well I feel this IS what makes us human.
Humans have evolved (or have been created) specialising in one form of intelligence/awareness/conciousness…
It is the only way we can view the world…as a human.
For better or worse we have lost abilities other animals still posess, and in our ultimate wisdom consider ourselves supirior to other life forms. This we can never know as fact as we can never experience what it is like living as another life form, just as they can never know what it is like to be human(or maybe they can?)
For all we know, although highly evolved, we could be the most stupid species on the planet. Just take a look at what we have done to it and ask yourself just how clever we are?

I agree completely. It is part of human “being” (or, “becoming”) to “do” things like was said. Animals are not ontologically constructed in this way. And, it is quite anthropocentric to assume that we can know about animals’ proximities to authenticity and I think it is a circular metaphor which always will end up at a simplistic notion of a unitary being-in-itself. Either way, for a human to be authentic, they have to excercise their choices in light of their “inner being,” but to devalue “doing” can get at only 50% of our ontology.