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: