Most of our day-to-day lives are spent doing, or thinking about what we should do next, or should’ve done before. And how we can improve our output, which is to say what we do—where do means ‘accomplish.’ But ever since Heidegger, we have been made aware, if dimly, that all this doing is not really what we are about. This doing, that is, leads us to ignore, or submerge, the real business of our lives, which is something else. How to get to that ‘something else,’ though, is really the central question, and not an easy one at that. Because we don’t quite know how to stop doing, and just “be,” or at least focus for a time on the being part. Whole disciplines like philosophy and psychology and even religions such as Zen have arisen that purport to instruct us in this art—the art of simply being, one might say.
It really should be simple. Just drop all the projects you have or might want to finish before you die, and say, ‘ok, from now on I’m going to just sit here and ‘be.’ But try it sometime. Such as now, when we all, or most of us, have time to spare in this coronavirus-enforced pause. Just take advantage of this delicious hiatus in traffic, in air pollution, in busyness, in having to be somewhere and having to engage with clients or bosses or schedules or friends, and just sit in your rocker or backyard recliner, and be. But what do you do? Take a run to get in shape. Take a long bike ride. Walk at a good pace to get that good cardio-vascular stuff going. Or do something relaxing, like a difficult jigsaw puzzle. Or just plain relax. As a wry saying in Zen goes, “don’t just do something, sit there.” But it’s not so easy. We are so habituated to doing something, anything with our spare time, anything to look as if we’re not just wasting time (oh god, don’t let me waste the precious time I have been given), that even when not pressed by an outside job or imposed task, we usually dream up projects or activities such as cleaning or reading or watching movies or mending or knitting or washing the car or digging in the garden so we can ‘make use of’ our time. It was Ben Franklin who famously urged us Americans to this manic mode, with sayings that reinforce it: ‘lost time is never found again’, and ‘never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today,’ or ‘dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.’ Then there are humble little sayings we all learned as kids: ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ or the Latin ‘tempus fugits (I always add the ‘s’ for fun).’ Which all make us constantly aware of the clock and its constant ticking the time of our lives away. Indeed, it could easily be said that we are, we modern humans, enslaved to the clock. What time is it? Will I have time to finish this task or job or take this vacation? Is it time to go? Hurry up please, it’s time.
It never seems to end, this anxiety about time, about filling our time sufficiently with worthwhile things to do. Because as Franklin reminds us over and over, that is what life is about. Which is to say, justifying our lives with enough doing so that it does not turn out to have been wasted. As if there is some judgment coming at the end, some Nobodaddy waiting at the end of the line who is going to say, “And you. How did you spend your time? Did you do enough? What have you got to show for it? Let’s weigh all the time you had against how many things you actually did, and finished.”
Just saying it makes it seem silly. There is no measurement. There is no measurer. There is nothing, no one that we know of judging us for how much we’ve done, or accumulated. There is just living, being alive at this moment. There is, in short, just being. And we are all being, all the time, no matter what we happen to be doing, or think we’re doing. The trouble is, we are not aware of it. Of being. We fog it over with what Heidegger called “das Man.” This is Heidegger’s term for “inauthenticity.” It’s the perceived demand (perceived by mass man) to yield to habitual and technological constructs, such as clocks, digital or otherwise, and computers and cars and all the appurtenances of modern life like airplanes that allow us to save time and get to places that used to take days and weeks and which we can now reach in an instant. To save time. So that everything becomes a “thing,” including ourselves. In other words, in this frantic process, living beings like ourselves become things. So that our relationship with all life, with ourselves even, becomes ‘thingified.’ What this means is that we see everything as an object with regard only to its use to us. Us human things. Plants become not miracles of living matter, each one specifically tuned to do what it is meant to do—grow and attract specific insects and produce flowers that are unique to each one and beautiful both to us and to insects and incite our wonder and appreciation for our kinship with it—but rather exhibits for our pretty garden, or, when planted and pesticided and harvested in ever more efficient ways, rewards in the market for our busyness; money in our accounts. Trees, miracles of endurance and communication and in moderating weather and creating soil and homes for countless other beings both above and below ground, become simply things to be harvested and sawed down and up and sideways into useful commodities for a like market. Animals get subsumed under this same ‘use’ paradigm: cows and pigs and chickens as rapidly-growing weight for the scales, to be sliced up in record time into bite size, and machine-packaged and sold in plastic for anyone who can pay the price to be diverted from the fact that this ‘thing’ they consume without looking too closely is a miracle of evolution and organic organization, not to mention of feeling and emotion and intelligence. And of something else besides, something indefinable that we call ‘life.’ Being. Which we still cannot identify or put a label on. We just know, somewhere in the deepest core of ourselves, that this ‘thing’ is not a thing at all, but a being. And therein lies the rub.
What, then, is this ‘being?’ What are we when we are not doing constantly, to the detriment of our awareness, but just being? Again, it’s not easy to say. That may be because ‘saying,’ using language, is associated with, connected primarily with doing. We need words to do efficiently, especially when we’re using tools, or machines, or weapons. But when we’re simply being—and again, it is no easy thing to simply be—words tend to fail us. Words are what we use when we need to be precise, and precision usually demands separating things into their comprehensible components. In other words, to ‘grasp’ the things of our world, we need to be able to see their component parts. And that is what we do when we do things, when we use language to comprehend the way to do things that are useful. When we are just being, on the other hand, we simply, if we’re lucky, apprehend what there is, without thinking about it or describing it (we may do so afterwards in retrospect). We appreciate it, perhaps. Appreciate the fact of its ‘beingness.’
A teacher of mine had a felicitous way of expressing this, using not the word ‘being’ but the word ‘experiencing.’ Now this word, in modern jargon and especially in advertising, has been cheapened like everything else that is used commercially. Experience this restaurant. Experience this movie or cereal or toilet paper. But Joko Beck had in mind something other, something far deeper. Here is her first sentence in a talk about this:
By experiencing, I mean that first moment when we receive life before the mind arises.
Receiving life before the mind arises. That sounds, to most of us, almost impossible. What is life before the mind arises? Is there life before the mind arises? I think so; and I would submit that it has to do with being. And it is both our universal condition, and the aim of our most diligent practice. It is, as Joko later puts it in this same talk, “the absolute: call it God, Buddha-nature, whatever you wish.” The problem is, life takes this initial experience and turns it into behavior. Into doing. We take our raw, wondrous perception, our being, and turn it into what we must do to survive and thrive in this world. Our behavior, our actions, our doing. And usually that doing is dominated by the tools we’ve developed or been given, and those in turn compel us to see things through their dividing-up-the-world lens. Including other beings. Including our very selves. And thus our own being remains, for most of us, hidden from ourselves (not to mention the precious being of others.) And our lives remain what Heidegger calls “inauthentic.”
Is there a solution to this dilemma? This occultation of our birthright? Not in so many words. It takes practice. And the gradual, over time, realization that in fact, there really is no gulf, there really is no dilemma. We are all always being nothing but being. But we “cover it over with our ignorance,” as Joko says. And the real task in life is to see through this ignorance, to become more and more aware of it and the why of it, and to come more and more to know that what we are, even when we are doing, is really just this. Being. Being with all other beings. All of them.
Lawrence DiStasi
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