More Being

Being versus doing. The idea is that there is part of me which is called "being." This is a distinct part of myself. By definition, being is nothing but being. Another word to describe this is existence. To exist is nothing more than that; i.e., only to be. This is distinct, or in some way separate from, everything else about a thing, about myself. I may be a carpenter, and my skin may be green, but these things do not affect my being in any way. They say nothing about the part of me which is being, since being is only what it is, and nothing else.

Does that mean that being is "that part of me which is nothing else"? It could be that being is nothing.

This starts from an attempt to distinguish between what I do and what I am.

It might make more sense to talk about it like this: whatever I do, I do for a reason. Those reasons may be unclear to me and others. But, my actions, all of them, occur within a human context, which is my mind, body, and environment. There _can_ be (I can create?) a part of me which "exists" irrespective of anything else, except (maybe) that I've created (imagined) it.

We really don't know what it means to exist. Is there anything we understand which does not exist? What does not exist? So, to say that "all things" share a common aspect of being . . . this seems a bit forced. It does seem like we can say one thing exists and one thing does not, but where is the rock, say, which doesn't exist? Is it "gone"? If a thing "is," then it "exists," which is true of all things. This is like saying, "All things are things." Humans have a sense of "being," but I think this is very different than a rock's sense of being. So, we want to say something like: "Being is that part of a thing which is common to all things." So that, if a thing contains fundamental particles ((fermions and bosons) quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons), it exists.

Hmmm. It just seems less than air-tight.

This all comes from wanting to say: "What I do is different than what I am." So that, if I do something terrible (for whatever reason?), I can still recover myself into a stable state. It's an "out" for the mind-body. This really makes good sense to me, even if I can't prove to myself that it's true. What seems true is that, whatever I do, I do for a reason; and, the reasons will almost always (always?) be complex and hard to know or understand. I.e., I have a massive and constantly flowing river of emotional, hormonal, biological, psychological (etc.) forces within me which are "doing stuff" outside of my consciousness. The system here is very complex, recursive, self-referencing, and updated at every moment with new internal and external input. So that, whatever I do, there is a very real sense in which it's beyond my conscious control. Because of this way in which I am constructed, it makes a lot of sense to take it easy on myself, and to say: "I will create a part of me which is safe, stable, ever-loved by me. This place needs no approval from anyone, even myself. It's there, and nothing else. It's central to who I am."

Since a person can choose to be either cruel or kind, he/she is neither of these things, in essence. This part of us which can choose, this is our existence?