20 What Is the Nature of Being?

Oliver had from his earliest memory had a strong and deep sense of his being, that is, his sense of his own existence within the universe. As he grew and matured, Oliver felt as if few, if any, of his friends and acquaintances had a similar sense of their own being. Instead, they all seemed to go about their lives pretty much without that inward turn upon themselves that Oliver always seemed to be doing. Oliver had nearly thought that he was alone in that respect. But his wide and deep reading eventually revealed to him that others had made studies of being or existence. To Oliver’s delight, he learned that the study of being was a whole field called ontology and that he was neither alone nor peculiar in having a long, deep, and abiding interest in the field. Maybe he wasn’t crazy, after all.

Being

This guide began with a definition of or introduction to the psyche, soul, or self and then continued with the self’s exploration. The guide’s purpose has been to help you understand and appreciate yourself, grow and mature toward your deeper and most genuine self, and become more aware, conscious, and alive as a whole. The prior chapter then explored our place in the cosmic structure, as conscious beings. We haven’t, though, directly addressed the nature of being, referring to the quality, state, or condition of your existence as a conscious entity in the cosmic order. You may find this chapter and the prior chapter more theoretical and less practical than other chapters. Yet one should never underestimate the deeper value of perceiving your nature and place within the universe. It may be that all other growth and maturation depend on laying a solid foundation for awareness. Take this chapter for what you will, but it may prove helpful at a deeper level. 

Modernity

Moderns think of their personal existence as involving a biological entity or person with thoughts and intentions to carry out in a material world. Sound familiar? We are conscious personal beings taking intentional actions affecting a material order outside of and apart from us. That very basic construct, referring to personal intentional being apart from the world, has dominated at least the Western mind, if not the construct of being all around the world, for at least a couple of millennia. Over that long span and widespread use, the construct of personal being apart from the world has gotten us rather handily around in the world. Yet we have also made messes of many things, including ourselves, our personal, community, and national relations, and our planet. Those personal, relational, and material messes have only accelerated in modernity. We violently murdered something like 100 million of our own kind last century, and for more than the past half-century, we have poised our much greater new armaments to instantly destroy the entire world. And those rather stark horrors involve only our outright warring, not our other savage transgressions against one another and our material circumstances. One could say, at the least, that things seem poorly balanced if not downright out of order. 

Duality

A first insight, then, about our self-conception of being in the world is that we may have in some way defectively and even fatally separated ourselves from the world. We may be acting upon and against the world, and indeed upon and against ourselves and our thoughts, rather than living in a healthier unity. The traditional view separating our intentions, will, and actions from our own being, and our own being from our own thoughts introduces a defective and even dangerous duality. We may, for two millennia or more, have been pursuing why things exist rather than what it means to exist. We don’t know the proper nature of our own existence, and so we have fated ourselves to our own destruction. Our true being is not as conscious personal entities walking around in a material universe apart from ourselves, to intentionally act upon it. That construct is instead a distorted duality. To recover a proper sense of our existence or humanity, we need to reunify our being with our circumstances.

Unity

Consider an alternative and ancient sense of being that reunifies us with our material conditions and circumstances. In that ancient sense, being involves not a personal entity in material circumstances but instead a process of drawing potential from both within us and out of our material circumstances, in an integrated, unified, or reciprocal manner. Being means deriving the possibilities from things that present themselves to us as meaningful, useful, and purposeful. Material circumstances present themselves to us as a revelation of their purposes within and through ourselves. Take, as an example, the construct of working with tools. The modern mind would see the worker as putting the tool to use, as if worker and tool were independent of one another. The unified ancient mind would instead see the tool’s revelation of its effective use as arising out of the union of worker and tool, which in no sense exist apart from one another. One isn’t a worker and a tool doesn’t exist, until worker and tool come together, unconscious of their separate existence, to accomplish work. A worker, working skillfully, has no consciousness of the tool apart from the worker and work. The work, worker, and tool absorb, form, and define one another, out of which come all three, none of which exist apart from the other. 

Robotics

The unity of person, purpose, and world just described may at first sound absurdly abstract. Yet that unity has already proven itself essential in the design of robots, in a way that might help you appreciate your own design, not as a personal being apart from the world but a being deriving your being in unity with the world. You can’t design and program a robot other than as an entity drawing its being from the work you wish it to do in the world. You can neither program the work without conceiving of the robot entity, nor program the robot without conceiving of the work it will perform. You can’t, in other words, model a robot like moderns model our own existence in the world, as entities apart from and acting on the world. Intelligent robots must have a programmed sense of deriving their entity or being from the work they do in the world. Same thing with artificial intelligence. Unity of entity, being, or existence with the purpose of the object about which the entity, being, or existence thinks makes robotics and artificial intelligence possible. 

Flow

This unity of performer, performance, and thing on which performed, as a proper construct for existence or being, intimates what athletes, musicians, and other workers and performers refer to as flow states. A flow state, vastly enhancing performance, arises when the performer loses all sense of being apart from the performance or thing on which performed. A golfer no longer feels the grip of the club or even observes the ball and hole but instead becomes the club, ball, hole, golfer, and golf shot. A runner no longer feels the track underfoot or the heavily breathing lungs, and even forgoes all sense of being a runner, and instead becomes the race. A mother doesn’t provide care for her child but instead becomes the maternal care within the child. This unity of actor, act, and thing acted upon also hints at what psychologists refer to as unconscious awareness, in which the actor forgoes all mental processing of stimuli to instead let the conditions draw from the actor the appropriate act. Ask the heroic worker or profound performer what they were thinking when they instantly did the perfect act, and they won’t be able to tell you because their being existed somewhere within the instant conditions, actor, and act. Flow state may, in effect, represent our essential being. Imagine living in a perpetual flow state, capable instantly of the acts most fitting to reality.

Thought

In a fully integrated existence, one would also unify comprehension, language, and time with actor, act, and thing or place acted upon. Processed thought, including listening and speaking, embodies the present sense of time. Language is the present house of being. Our speaking, listening, or dialoguing inwardly with ourselves brings us into the present sense of time. But we already know or comprehend within our embodied actions and being, before we bring comprehension into the present through inner dialogue. We already know when moving in the world to grasp and employ the functions its materials offer. Knowledge thus resides within a unified being, apart from language. Language is only the present expression of being. Moreover, we do not exactly communicate our thoughts with language but instead align our thoughts to language to create communication. Language binds and constrains thought rather than our thought binding and deploying language. When we speak, we submit to language rather than control and create it. Beware trying to put your knowledge into words. The words may instead be binding and employing you, while misrepresenting the knowledge and being that you possess.

Reframing

The sundering of ourselves from the world around us may be humanity’s central story, just reframed in a philosophical or psychological sense. Humanity’s central story told in spiritual terms is that of humankind’s fall from the transcendent creator’s paradise presence. The creator’s being pre-exists creation, which is to say that the creator’s being pre-exists existence. The creator offered his unified being to his creation. But when humans removed and consumed for themselves fruit from the cosmic structure hidden within the creator’s unified being, we divided ourselves from the paradise creation and the consciousness of the resplendent creator. We introduced the deadly duality between us and our thoughts, creator, and world. We also persist in maintaining that deadly duality, until we recover it with a voluntary submersion back into the creator’s pre-existent being, available through the creator’s own advent, descent, and reascent into unified uncreation. Incredibly, you can return to our ancient, unified being through the one transcendent I Am.

Reflection

Do you have, or have you had, a curiosity about your existence within the world? Have you had any sense that perhaps whatever your construct of being is, it might be insufficient to the wholeness of your psyche, spirit, and soul? Would modern history tend to make you think that we’ve collectively not properly understood our own existence? Do you have the historical sense that perhaps modernity has stripped something out of our own understanding of our existence? Can you picture a society that would have a more holistic sense of being arising out of intending and acting as the world calls to action? Have you had moments when you were so immersed in your thoughts, conditions, and actions that you felt like your being was arising out of that unity? Have you at times been so sensitively attuned to your vehicle, bicycle, tool, paintbrush, pen, or other item or apparatus connected with you, that your being arose out of your union with that item or apparatus and your combined purpose? Have you had the sense of comprehending something before you could put it into words and that the words were inadequate to describe your comprehension? 

Key Points

• A clearer sense of being or existence may help your soul and psyche.

• Modernity’s distortions have their root in a false sense of being.

• We see ourselves dualistically, separated from our world and work.

• Antiquity unified the world, work, and worker with being as a process.

• Robotics and AI prove the necessity of unifying act and actor in being.

• Performance flow states highlight unconscious, unified awareness.

• We know or comprehend intuitively, making present with language.

• Our fall evoked our duality, from which the creator offers his rescue.