Being miércoles, 10 de agosto de 2005, 09:29 am
De:: Remitente verificado por DomainKeys "Kenneth Salls"
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"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