How can you do by being? What does it mean by being? Being sounds like just sit and do noth­ing. Is it being lazy? What is it?

To Just Be

Being as I under­stand it, is to “just be” with “what is.” If you are frus­trated, then be with that frus­tra­tion and observe what it feels like. Don’t dis­tract your­self from that feel­ing. Do not sup­press it. If you do, then that will get lodged in your body as a chem­i­cal and may cause dis­ease. If you are inspired, then don’t resist it. Let that inspi­ra­tion cre­ate through you.

Feel Fully

Let’s see what hap­pens when you just observe your feel­ings and allow them to be expressed through your body. After you fin­ish expe­ri­enc­ing the emo­tion, body feels light and you don’t cre­ate men­tal sto­ries around that emo­tion any longer. No clut­ter, so there is space for cre­ative expres­sion to take place.

Body is Part of the Divine

The fol­low­ing is my cur­rent real­iza­tion. Our body is part of the divine that you are, though a small part. Though mind or ego (this is what we think we are) also arises from the divine, it has its own agenda—to do some­thing or the other, and to think inces­santly. This mind comes between God (the true Self) and God (the body). If this gap becomes too wide (that is mind takes over too much), then body will start react­ing adversely telling the mind to stop widen­ing the gap and cre­ate a clear link to the true Self. Mind is the one that says, “Do… do… do. Don’t just be. If you don’t do it, then every­thing is doomed. You can’t make it!” This is what the col­lec­tive mind of the soci­ety trains our minds—and we tell our­selves the same thing. This is the state of the world now—“Do, com­pete, crush oth­ers. Oth­er­wise, you are a looser and you will be left behind.” This con­di­tion­ing makes peo­ple think that it is a Dog eat dog world.

Doing Stresses the Body

Doing involves a lot of think­ing and ana­lyz­ing before doing any­thing. This think­ing and ana­lyz­ing leads to fear, which prompts us to pro­cras­ti­nate rather than do. We (as egos) think, “What will hap­pen, if some­thing goes wrong?” This “What will hap­pen?” mostly means what will hap­pen to me, my rep­u­ta­tion and my story. Mind lives in the past in fear of the future. Never in the present. Only the true Self and the body live in the present moment. When the mind takes over too much about doing mak­ing the gap too wide, the body starts telling the mind to stop—in the only way it knows how—through pain and dis­ease.

Being Means Flow

Being does not mean being lazy. But, when you are in being the work auto­mat­i­cally hap­pens. This means, if the work is meant to hap­pen, it will hap­pen. But, if it is not meant to hap­pen, then it won’t, even with all the phys­i­cal and men­tal effort we put in. This means, in beat­ing our­selves up in the “doing mode,” noth­ing will hap­pen, if it is not des­tined to. So, why beat our­selves up?

Being is Creation

Doing by being is the most help­ful in any cre­ative endeavor. “Cre­ation” by def­i­n­i­tion means “to make or bring to exis­tence some­thing new; some­thing unprece­dented.” But, fears arise, because mind can only cope with things that already known. When encoun­tered with some­thing new, it goes into a panic mode. In some peo­ple it is more sti­fling than in oth­ers. This fear is caused by thoughts aris­ing in the mind as we just dis­cussed. When the mind clears and steps aside, there is a greater link that is cre­ated between your true Self and your body, so cre­ative expres­sion of the true Self comes through the body.

Doing Melts into Being

From being, doing arises, nat­u­rally, organ­i­cally. No effort is needed on your part. Take for exam­ple, writ­ing of this arti­cle and most of the arti­cles on this site. No effort was put into writ­ing them. Yes, there was an effort of typ­ing the words, edit­ing and rewrit­ing. How­ever, no real effort, in the tra­di­tional sense of the word, was put into the cre­ative act itself. I, most of the time, have a title or sub­ject that I want to write about, but don’t know ahead of time what I am going to write. I don’t plan or out­line the arti­cle in any­way. It feels like it puts me in a box of how the arti­cle should turn out.

Some­times, I do not know what I want to write about; nor do I have a title or sub­ject in mind. It feels like there is some­thing that wants to come through me. I med­i­tate a while, sit qui­etly and access that still­ness, silence, peace, god within, or true Self that knows more than the lit­tle me, the ego. Some ran­dom words or thoughts come up and start putting them down. After a few min­utes some­thing coher­ent starts emerg­ing and that becomes an article’s first draft. That is the artis­tic or cre­ative act. After that come the rewrit­ing and edit­ing cycles which are part of the writ­ing craft and have noth­ing to do with art.

That is the state of Being. Does this mean that the mind or ego or per­son­al­ity is not there? No, mind is there and is needed to inter­act with the outer world. How­ever, this mind is a ser­vant to the god within—a clear bridge between true Self and the body. Cre­ative act hap­pens, auto­mat­i­cally, when this master-servant rela­tion­ship holds.

It Takes Practice

How­ever, this did not come eas­ily to me. I have to admit, when I started this blog in 2007, I had this idea that I wanted to make this blog num­ber one in the blo­gos­phere in the area of self-mastery and enlight­en­ment. I read about blog­ging and Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO) and imple­mented a lot of the advice. Among that was the advice that I write arti­cles on a sched­ule, and put them out every­day or at least three to five times a week. Oth­er­wise, read­ers would for­get my blog quickly. All that advice assumed that peo­ple had short atten­tion spans. How­ever, I soon real­ized that it was not true for me. I con­cluded that I could not force things out of me. That would just be the work of the mind and the qual­ity suffered.

Noth­ing Really Matters

In the past year, I real­ized that, in the end, noth­ing really mat­tered except the true Self. I decided to write only when strongly prompted from within. I was prompted more often in the ini­tial months of the blog, since it was all build­ing up inside before I even started the blog. Now, I am not prompted that often. That is why you see me post­ing arti­cles in longer inter­vals. This seems to have worked for my blog. I have a small group of loyal read­ers, who are very inter­ested in what I write and they take equal inter­est in par­tic­i­pat­ing in the discussions.

All That Mat­ters is “To Be”

All that mat­ters now is to “just be” and lis­ten to my inner prompt­ings. When the inner prompt­ing comes, the mind still resists some­times, say­ing, “If you write about that or do that peo­ple may laugh at you. You will be a looser!” Or, when there is no inner prompt­ing for any­thing, the mind may come up and say, “You looser! You are not writ­ing or doing any­thing. Look at the world, it is mov­ing for­ward leav­ing you behind. Look at all those blogs out there, they are over­tak­ing you.” Then, these times become hard, if I am not aware of myself and stop from get­ting car­ried away with self-pity and self-criticism. I tell my mind to just shut up and say, “I choose to be that way.“

Choose to Enter into Being

This way of doing holds true in all my daily work now. How does this help in my job where my employer feels that I must do? I don’t feel, “I must, have to, or sup­posed to do.” I choose to do. When I say, “I choose to do,” I remove the men­tal resis­tance right away. This clears my mind and makes it a clear bridge between the true Self and the body.

You can carry this atti­tude of “choos­ing to” (either to do, or not to do) in all your endeav­ors in your life. Because every­thing is a choice that you make. When you choose to, then you accept what is and enter a state of being that brings in a higher level of con­scious­ness and qual­ity into every­thing. This is a form of sur­ren­der to the divine.

Con­tem­pla­tion

So, in this state of Being,

• Who is creating?
• What/who is the created?
• Who is there to accept credit or blame?

Answers to the above ques­tions can only be arrived, on indi­vid­ual basis, through con­tem­pla­tion and by just being. It is up to you, now.