If you ever studied how to play a musical instrument, perhaps you had the experience of being distracted by having to think about a technique. To make the sounds come out a certain way, you had to position your fingers, or count beats, or think about breathing.
Meanwhile, if you hadn’t mastered the technique, the music became unmusical. It lost its natural flow. Anybody listening would have heard the technique, not the music.
A technique for doing something is never the same as doing that thing. It is a separate action that, when mastered, produces the desired result as a byproduct. A technique can be invented for doing just about anything.
But there is one thing for which there can be no technique at all. It is the thing that is there when you completely stop trying, the thing that is there without any thought or intention at all.
As it says in Answers From Silence, “There is no technique for Being.”
You can choose from a myriad of techniques—from meditation and Tai Chi to stress reduction programs—to arrive at the simple sense of Being. But when they get you there, there is nothing left to do.
Being is abstract. An abstraction is something that is true for more than one thing. And there is an abstraction that is true about everything that exists: it exists. It has Being.
While your consciousness is grounded in Being, you have the concrete experience of this abstraction. Being is your whole experience.
And then Being becomes the answer to all of your questions:
Being is who you are.
Being is what you are.
Being is when you are.
Being is where you are.
Being is how you are.
Being is why you are.
–J.C.
And then Being becomes the answer to all of your questions:
Obviously there is nothing to say about this, either. 😉
But it sure was fun to read.
And true.
I do think that one way to have a clearer experience of just being is to find a way that works for you to remove internal clutter at the level of your aura.
Yes, it might be a spiritual practice to remove stress or an effective technique to permanently cut a cord of attachment or any technique that really does dependably move you forward significantly every time that you do it.
Jeffrey, I would love to see a post about a topic related to being: Living in present time/present time/present time.
My sense is that this, also, has an interesting relationship to the presence or absence of internal clutter.
Curious to read your answer from Silence.
Dear Dr.Chappell,
First of all,the part about instrument playing technique is so true!
Then,this article makes me think:
1)In a way,mastering a technique of playing an instrument is a process of taking the technique from “doing” to “being”; from concrete to abstract.As you wrote in the article,”……when they get you there, there is nothing left to do.”When you have already mastered a technique, you don’t think about it when you use it, therefore, the technique existing in you—it’s being in you.
2)Being is a state of existence.Think about it grammatically, when people say “I am happy”, “you are happy”, “she is happy”, it actually means happy exists or existing in me,you or her.
Best,
XY