Being

miércoles, 10 de agosto de 2005, 09:29 am

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Remitente verificado por DomainKeys
"Kenneth Salls" <kenneth_salls@yahoo.com>
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sephirah50@yahoo.com.mx

"Being Versus Having and Doing

No matter how much we may read or speak about being, no

matter how often, how subtly, how emphatically, our attention
is called to this conception, it is only after a long time
that one begins to grasp the importance of what is meant.
Some people never grasp it. What is being? Is it possible
to think about it?

Over and over again we confuse doing and having with being,
even after we have learned to speak very well theoretically
of levels of being. We talk about it, but we do not understand
it. We substitute having and doing for being in the way we
relate to life. Blindly, we attribute to a higher level of
being the same values as obtain on this one. It is next to
impossible to grasp how it would be to have new values even
though just what these would be is spelled out again and
again in all teachings and religions. Even when we sense a
higher level of being in another human being, say for example,
Jesus Christ, and sense also that His values are not ours of
everyday, and we respond with love and gratitude and wish to
follow such a one, it is still a long, long step before one
even begins to wish actively for such a change for oneself:
to wake up enough to see how necessary it is and in what it
consists.

Being. Whatever one says about it is clumsy; it is so fine,

so pervasive. Perhaps it is one of those things that can be
approached only in silence. Still, we have to try, and words
are all we have for tools. We have to begin somewhere, and,
as always, the best place to begin is right here and now,
where we are. Before my values could change I would have to
know very well what they are at present and how ingrained
in my essence- essence, the only place, the only part of me,
where any change of being can take place.

At present I automatically respond to the values of life.

I speak of being, but I honor position, recognition, power,
possessions. The machine is very strong. My thought says
one thing, but if I regard what I do, that is a different
story, though there is a confusion because of my genius
for self-deception. Even when I try to make a small effort
to be free from at least one of these tyrants momentarily,
the machine automatically adjusts so that I find my attitude
to my life is one of adding merit to me as I am, regarding
the merit as a possession. Or I give way to all sorts of
self-doubts.

I can be filled with something like aspiration when I hear

the words of Jesus: 'What shall it profit a man if he gain
the whole world and lose his own soul,' and resolve that I,
at least, will choose to work for my own soul and forego all
worldly gain. But then what happens when there is some
special occasion to which my friends are invited and from
which I am excluded? I'm afraid it won't be work ideas which
fill my mind and heart on such occasions. Patient continuing
work may bring me to a point where at such moments when I am
burning up with a feeling of being slighted, of rage and
resentment, I can remember that it is for being that I work;
then if I can make the effort to non-identify, something
wonderful can take place. Something in me is changed, a
process of transformation, you could call it. It takes
many, many such moments if any real development is to take
place.

Gurdjieff tells us in All and Everything that 'Being' is

synonomous with 'to suffer.' A rock cannot suffer as much as
a plant, nor a plant as much as an animal. But, he says, there
is as much difference been a rock and a man as there sometimes
is between man and man. What he is saying is that being, or
capacity for suffering, can be wider apart between one man
and another than between a rock and a man. This is a good
point to ponder. Madame Ouspensky's words put this a little
differently. In answer to a question as to how one can measure
Being she answered, 'The measure of Being is the measure of
how much you can bear.' Most of us can't bear much, or believe
we cannot, and make a big fuss about whatever we do have to
bear, or dramatize it. [......]"

Pg. 70, Themes I - A.L.Staveley

"You sit around waiting for pearls when what you should actually
be doing is not to be swine." Mme. Ouspensky