The Architecture of Being, part II

Our Aim is not the Chair (Find your own Turtle)

Let’s discuss the unique responsibility of Being from an individual point of view.

As Oscar Wilde said, “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”

The central question in the statement is how to Be, not how to be yourself. To Be is to be within the wholeness of Being itself, not one’s own version of wholeness.

And herein lies the difficulty: we formulate.

The mind is incapable of approaching anything without formulation. It is designed to formulate, to express an idea in a concise or systematic way. Once we begin doing that, inevitably, we create a presupposed idea of what it means to Be. We then pursue that at the expense of Being itself, because we always prefer for things to Be the way we want them to Be rather than the way they are. Because of this, ego does not come in after the fact and inflect our attitudes and assumptions towards Being; it inserts itself at the beginning of the process because of willfulness. And this is the way in which our willfulness interferes with Being: we will ourselves to Be, rather than Being in order to will. When we will ourselves to Be, we don’t have real will; and we never can. This is because real will emerges from Being, and not the other way around.