How To Be “Never Better”

The other day, someone asked me, “How are you?”

As usual, I replied, “Never better.”

And she said quite seriously, like someone looking for a solution, “Tell me how.”

This was the first time that I had gotten that response. It made me want to tell her how. And it started me thinking.

I am a piano teacher. As such, I am used to providing immediate, successful solutions to people in need of them. Adjust a hand position, use a practice method, or perceive a musical pattern, and problems vanish quickly and easily.

Why not be able to do the same on this other topic? What is the quick, easy technique for how to be “never better”?

I can tell you how NOT to do it. That would be to tell yourself something, such as, “I shall remember that life is total fullness at all times,” or “I am going to keep saying ‘never better’ because then it will become true.”

This is how not to do it because that would just be your thoughts talking to your thoughts.

I am not “never better” because I tell myself to think that way or to say those words habitually. When I say, “never better,” I am giving a current report on my true state of being.

So how to be never better is to know your true state of being.

And I can tell you what your true state of being is NOT. It is not your current circumstances.

Circumstances are “what’s happening”, or “my emotional state”, or “today’s health report”, or “a series of events I feel caught in,” and so on.

Being is not those things. Being transcends all of those things.

To transcend all of those things means to be independent of all of those things.

Being doesn’t depend on circumstances. It is the ultimate generality: no matter what is, being is there.

Your true state of being is the aspect of you that is there at all times, no matter what.

So then you need to know how to know the aspect of you that is there at all times.

Answers From Silence has a chapter called, “How To Be Enlightened.” To summarize: recall different times in your life, first a few years ago, then a few years before that, then a few years before that, and so on.

Afterwards, notice that there was something there, something that did not change with circumstances, a part of yourself that was being the same all the time—which means a true state of being.

And it took no effort to be in that state.

That’s because there is no technique for being. Being is automatic. Without trying to be, you are. There is nothing to do to make it happen.

And then there is no “how”.

—JC