being is not doing, and neither is doing being

When I did something bad, my parents didn't make a distinction between what I did and who I was. what i do and who I am. Or, I learned that what I do and who I am are the same thing. and that if I do something wrong, i _am_ wrong. I learned this, internalized it, and I believe it. If I think I've done something wrong, I remind myself that I am bad, wrong, flawed. This has built up over time. It's pervasive, and largely subconcious.

When someone tells me that I've done something wrong, it hurts, I feel pain. The pain is residual, a "mapped" experience, again from childhood. The pain is the pain of abandonment I experienced as a child, the pain of separation from my only safety, caregiving, and love. It is felt, not understood. At that time in my life when I learned these messages/experiences, I couldn't think the way I do now. I couldn't reason. All I could do was feel, and my only conclusion was the deeply painful and overwhelming emotion of being unloved. This pain became paired with the similar notion of "being wrong". I.e., I would later associate similar experiences of punishment with these same traumatic emotions, so that the emotional-physical pain and "sense of badness" were and are often sharing the same mind-body "messaging systems."

What am I if I'm not what I do? To me, it's very natural, because it is what I learned, to think of the self as the sum of my actions. I am a typist. I am a programmer; not, I do programming. But, another way to think of "things" is that I do what I do, and I am what I am. These aren't the same, they are distinct.

There is an aspect of existence which seems (is) distinct from action. This is being. Being is nothing else, it is only being. It seems hard to know what being is. Jacob was talking about it as the absense of the self, the absence of the ego. I think I can believe that there is something which is doing, and that there is something which is being, and that being is what is when there is no doing. Is there ever no doing? I don't know about this....

I am still responsible for what I do. But, whatever I do, it seems there is a part of me which does not change, which is neither good nor bad, it only is: my being. So, I am never bad, nor good. Nor do I need to feel bad or good about what I do. You might say: you have done something terrible, which makes me angry, and I don't want you to do it again. I and I can say: how does it feel to be angry? And I can say: tell me more about what I did, because I want to understand how it was terrible.

Jacob was relating that recognizing the central nature of being is inherently connective, because there is only one whole being. We all and everything share in this connected aspect of reality. So that what I do affects my own being...? If I hurt another, I am hurting myself. And in caring for another, I care for myself.

If someone is angry with me, then I will feel pain and I will repremand myself (yet again), and feel fear and shame and the danger. I will want to hide and run and close down. But, if I can acknowledge these things, and in doing so experience my own love for myself, and if I can remember that I am not what I've done, and that my own being is inviolate, then I may realize that it's not me who is under attack, but only what I've done. And even that someone else's anger is generated by their own "doer", not be me.