The Balance between Being a Human Being and Being a Human Doing

5/7/2018

You have probably heard the phrase “you are not a human doing, you are a human being” emphasizing the value of being in Being, being in the integrated awareness of yourself as awareness, as pure being, as undifferentiated consciousness. There’s also its mirror, “don’t just sit there and meditate, get up and do something”. Like all things in life, there is a fine balance to achieve between human activity, human doing-ness, and being centered, being grounded in Stillness. There is a balance to be found between being the doer in your experience and being a door to your experience – both of which are valuable aspects of your wholeness.

Being the doer, being a human doing, is remaining in a contracted state where your attention, awareness and focus is absorbed in your story. Where you’ve been, where you are, where you want to go, what you have to do, all that you’ve already done, and the entirety of your narrative as a separate self or identity who is experiencing things, accomplishing things, and so on is the state of the doer. This is the ground of your unique preferences, your dreams, your vision all from the level of accomplishing things, making things happen, creating things, and in its unchecked extreme controlling the flow of life. This is a recurring requirement of embodied life. Your to-do lists, your running internal voice of all the things you have to do and need to do, all the goals you need to set and realize, and the like all stem from the active aspect of your being.

There is an important distinction to make here and that is your being is both the active and at rest qualities of consciousness. One is not favorable to the other. Rather, the key to a holistic life that expresses wholeness is the ability to achieve a balance and ebb-and-flow between the two states. How balanced are these two aspects in your own life? In what areas of your life are you more inclined to emphasize one aspect?

Being a door to your experience, being a human being, is an open expanded state where your attention, awareness and focus is absorbed on the awareness itself. You’ve moved out of the mind sphere, you’ve retracted and pulled back to the originating space of all creation and creativity. Here there is no story or center of reference. There is nothing to reference for there is no one to do the referencing. There is no personal narrative or a beginning or a destination. It’s a very relaxed state that is void of all form and the impulse to give anything form or shape. Peace, serenity, openness, vastness, expansiveness describe the qualities of this state of awareness. Here your humanness is simply an opening to this no-thing. Your body and your mind are mere doorways for the flow of this undifferentiated and indivisible intelligence, consciousness.

Now for most in the “Western” world where the cultural and societal focus is on achievement, accomplishment, amassing material goods and titles, it’s really easy to be in doer mode. Cultures that have their focus on achievement have well laid out plans for everyone to be able to get to their desired end through sequences of doing-ness. Within this type of cultural and social setting life demands you to assume an identity and then function from that identity from moment to moment doing one thing after the next. Common in this type of a setting is the inability to really pause and be at rest in all that you have brought into being. The moment you have materialized your outcome, you’re already thinking about what you’re going to do next. If you’re at home or at work and in any type of having to relate with the things and people in your life, you likely find yourself being in the doer mode.

Doer mode is a mode of continuous movement, momentum. Once you identify with the personal narrative, you give it continuity, you create, project and sustain a past, present and future and live only within the bounds of that projection. It takes a significant amount of energy to live within the bounds of your projection so if you notice what’s happening to the body, you’ll notice that it’s in a continuous dance of tensing and relaxing. Unless you pause and meditate and introspect and develop the ability to take yourself out of contraction routinely, that momentum the personal narrative gets will keep it rattling on endlessly forever. When you wake up it’s there, when you go to sleep it’s there, and when you’re going about your day it’s there. It is the song that just doesn’t end.

The mode of being a doorway to your experiences is observably different. It is a state of weightlessness for your physiology, for your psychology and for your overall energy. When you’re in that doorway mode, thoughts may arise and dissipate but there’s nothing feeding them. There is no grasping. Thought has lost all its power of believe-ability for you are awake to your inherently empowering nature to all things you give your full undivided attention to. In this state, awareness is staying aware of itself, you as awareness are remaining aware of yourself as awareness so you’re not fueling or providing validity to the personal narrative, so the personal narrative dissolves and you live moment to moment in a state of relaxation on every level. This has a marked impact on the nervous system. Patterns of trapped energy begin to release from the body, from the muscle and fascia, and the energetic layers the more you maintain and sustain this level of introspection. In this state you are not the body, the mind, the ego, the incarnation or anything else in between. You simply are.

Now if you have are a part of a culture, family or society or workplace or almost any environment that automatically has you assuming identities, roles and cultivating your personal narrative as a doer, creating a practice where you routinely drop these is really helpful to bringing to balance the two aspects of your being in a way that fuels and energizes you much further and much deeper than you can imagine. If on the other hand you are a part of a culture, family, or society or workplace or any environment that automatically has you dropping all identities, roles, and releasing all personal narratives, and you want to create, develop, and maintain localized identities to create from, then the balance to that is to move yourself into mental motion. The key point here is the value of bringing to balance the two aspects, allowing yourself to integrate both aspects into your daily life and cycles of creation, for in that balance is a level and depth of being like no other.