The Severance From Being

We live our lives separated from Being.

We are divorced from the Being of others around us as well as from our own inner Being.

Animals, which we consider as inferior, are doing much better - they are never disconnected from their inner-being. In fact, each animal is an intact, united essence, never divided or split. Their animal being is ruling and uniting everything to a one
homogenous, nucleus being. However, in us humans every single part wants to be the ruling monarch, even for a while: our gluttony, our sexual urges, our greediness, pride, vulnerability, lust for power - every bustard wants the whole dominion for himself. For if the boss (the being) is not at home, the kids (the demons of lust, emotions, sex & power) are in frenzy for dominance and control.

When Guliver arrived at the "Yahoo’s land", he met human beings who were subject to their most primitive urges and thus acted "like animals" - where in fact their behavior was totally human. They looked and behaved exactly as we perceive (unjustly so) the behavior which we term as 'animal behavior,' although animals never behave the way human do. The animals (the horses) in "Yahoo's land", who were the masters of the place, were peaceful, enlightened, full of essence & being. The implication is clear: not like the animals, who have stayed faithful to voice of their natural being, we Human
beings have crowned upon our undeveloped inner Being the demons of lust and desire.

To be in touch with our inner Being means: to be authentic, to come from within, to be in communion with our inner core, with our own personal center of gravity. As we grow up and mature, we should naturally disconnect from the inner Being of
childhood, our preliminary, crude and formless inner being. As we age, we get stuck in one aspect or another of our marginal life which surrounds these primitive essences, instead of letting a more mature essence and center of gravity to form and establish itself within us. It is very much like changing from premature baby teeth, to permanent adult teeth. We are, in relating to our inner being, like a person that still keeps his baby teeth and thus is very concentrated in his lips - sipping liquids and licking ice-cream all day, avoiding hard solid foods. (The teeth are the inner being, the lips are the replacing demons).

What else is it like? It is like a group of people who crash-lands on a deserted island. When they settle, each one of them gets immersed in different activity, according to each fears, inclinations or personality : one is looking for some food, another is busy wandering around, another builds a tree house, while others swim, or pray or whatever. They all try to adjust to the situation, but only one of them is doing more than that. That individual is connected to the very essence, the real and only being of what it actually means to be stuck on a deserted island. Thus he is burning with the fire and urge of finding a way out. Indeed, this is the term which best defines the attitude toward the being: to burn in an inner fire. What comes from within, from the inner core of our selfhood (inner Being) is charging us with great strength & vitality, as if you are connected to the power of an electrical current. That means that things can happen because you are - not because you do. The other alternative is to get yourself charged and moving by your batteries: by moods, pressure, stress, aggression, anxiety, fears, lust, initiative and self discipline. In these outer sections of living the activity is mechanical: you need ‘to do’ in order ‘to be,' and if you do not do (each time anew) you sink to emptiness - to the absence of being.

To be moved by and from the Being - is to be present. To be as a direct result of the actual fact that you exist. You do not have to do anything for it, as the fact of it - causes you to do. This is like the famous question of what comes first, the chicken or the egg? Do you need to do in order to be, or do you need to be in order to do? Well, of course, the Being comes first. The doing is a consequential factor of the Being. However, the more common case is concentrating in doing for the sake of doing as a preliminary force, all the time in an escape from the nothingness that lurks within, thus getting from this doing a kind of temporary and false sense of Being. It is not natural, it is mechanical and is fed by great anxiety, a fear of falling into the pit of the absence of being, to the hole of emptiness. Indeed there is something from the curse of old Sisyphus in this: each time again to try to block this hole of emptiness, which gets empty again - the next day. In nature all comes from being, from the core. Only us, human, are in exile from our homeland, from our own Being, trying all the time to attain something, all the time in an effort, in full gas, with engine in full capacity - just not to be left behind. The loud, extroverted Americanization is ruling and leading, while the quiet Being is in a process of disappearing.

The Being is silent, does not come anymore into an expression. Instead we find more and more external substitutes to the unmediated contact of our own Being with others: Internet, fax, cord-less phone, magazines, parties, social gatherings. All those who are "Being -starved" (not getting the real food) become addicted to the substitutes: more and more TV watching, more news-editions, more newspapers reading, more parties, more excite trips, more sports, etc. Each channel of the multimedia or line of activity - is yet another tombstone on the grave of the being.

And so, the modern human being lives in continual severance from his inner Being and from the Being of those he is in touch with. Thus alienation and foreignness are celebrating and he lives in a dead world, empty, mechanical, lacking any dimension of depth, intimacy and individuality. A world in which 'the other' is perceived as a poster, one dimensional, loud and superficial. For the individual this is a world of labels and not of essences, of mechanisms and not of dynamics, of techniques & manipulations, and not of values and essences.

We have lost the ability of simply to be and to maintain a symbiotic communication between our own Being and those of others. Instead of feeling and sensing the inside of another (from the inside of ourselves), instead of streaming towards him (or her) quietly and letting them stream toward us without effort - we paint and engrave upon the exterior of the other - our version of our own inner turmoil. For a person who is disconnected from his own being - a meeting with his inside is a meeting with emptiness. This person is used to the loud noise of external emotions and thoughts, which in relation to them, indeed the inner Being feels like one big empty frightening nothing. But hardly any person is persisting to remain with the nothing in his own soul - until he can feel the silent presence of his inner Being. Most of us are running away from this silence, although silence is the main medium through which the inner Being is expressed and communicating.

The severance from Being means being asleep, or the lack of consciousness to the real happening of life beyond the illusion of their outer display. Those who are severed from Being live in a sleepy world, a world in which DREAMS are flourishing, and the stronger is the severance from the Being - so deeper the sleep the stronger the dream. We dream of romances, love affairs, bigger houses, food, sex and more sex, successes, and so on. The culture helps us to actualize these dreams and fantasies by offering us its substitutes: commercial in TV, color photoes of supermodels, color articles in magazines about the rich and the famous, action & erotic movies, all work in the service of sleep, all function as factories of dreams. Those commercial dreams join the private fantasies that we manufacture from within ourselves, fantasies that encircle around the prison bars of our sleeping cabin in which our inner essence is trapped.