To be or to become - an integral approach

[undeather]

Disclaimer:  This is an essay I wrote a coupple of years ago - its an attempt to unite the notions of "being" and "becoming". Its an issue that took me quite a long time to work thorugh and I know that a lot of people struggle with it as well. You will notice that the language/writing used in this essay may seem sloppy from time to time. Its because its originally derived from loosely bound ideas and concepts rather than anything written down. Over the years I have shared this ideas with many people and the feedback was overwhelmingly positve. Thus I decided to share this with you guys. Enjoy
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To be or to become? On presence & purpose in life

Many times in my life I asked myself this question: Why do anything? Why struggle? Why work on myself? Why face rejection? Why be someone?
After all, isnt this just ego? If the ontological nature of my day to day reality is based on an illusion, what basis is there to do anything at all? Especially with all the potential suffering that comes with it. If all meaning is illusory,  whats left to do? Is there even something like a free will or is this just pure theatre? What does "free will" even mean in the context of what I know? Why should I do anything else than meditating 24/7, trying to deepen the connection with the source? Is there a way to make sense of this? So I tried...

We can be in a place where we flip flop between truths that both are self-evidently true and yet seem irreconsilable - or we can reconsile and live them both more fully simultaneously. In order to do the right thing we have to enter a plane of higher-dimensional sensemaking. Its how we understand the complexity of reality that really matters here. First of all lets introduce a model because I really think it will help with the understanding:

I want to compare for a minute, roughly generelized, very oversimplified, a eastern model and western model of the nature of reality, meaning and spirituality. Obviously its simplified because first of all there are a lot of models and the delineation between them isnt clear at all. But lets say, with eastern I mean the kind of vedantic-buddhist primary interpretations, which are very "being" focused. We are using them as a reference for this particular dichotomy. You will notice in most interpretations of the Buddhist tradition, the focus is exclusively on being. In fact,  "doing", that to say any chop wood-carry water like activity is just because it needs to be done, while everything else is focused on the being while doing it - which ultimately is the only thing that matters.

One of the reasons why that becomes insightful, is that the Buddhists and the Hindus vedantic model of time is a circular one. They have this system of time called Kalpa or the Yugas, where the time and universe itself is believed to  cycle through birth and death. These people watched nature very deeply . They saw seasons like spring and fall, they saw empires rise and fall, they saw people born and die, they saw relationships come together and fall apart - they just saw everything cycling. They saw cycles within cycles, days within months, within years, within galactic cycles. So because of that - if everything's cycling, nothing is actually going anywhere. There is no progress, it's just the wheel of time. So if you're trying to push something forward, you've bought into the illusion that you're going anywhere. 

They talk about this as Maya, illusion or samsara, the cycle of being. If it's just this illlusory wheel that isn't actually going anywhere, going further is fundamentally meaningless. The goal there becomes getting off the wheel, getting out of the concept of linear time completely, being able to access the eternal through the now. The idea of becoming, progress, or making the world better when the whole thing itself is illusory to begin with. It just means you bought into the illusion and you don't get the ultimate truth. Its the lived ontological quality of  "now and complete" - in a way that doesn't have progress built in at all. Basically that's the kind of pure Zenith of a being model.

You notice that happiness in that worldview is a model of contentment, serenity or fullness with what "is" right now. In fact, anything like passion or desire or excitement is called the cause of all suffering - because that means that you believe something good is in the future, so you sacrifice being in the moment for wanting something  thats not "here". We all know how it works because it just leads you to getting all feverish and fucked up. When you get what you want, you aren't even that happy - you want something else while being anxious of losing it. Dont desire anything, dont have passion- they are for plenty of sound and fury leading to suffering and nothing - Be full and content now. It can sound boring, but of course the idea of boring, in that model, would be a mental trap. And that when you come into the fullness of being right now, you can access, and this is true, a state of serenity, that has a kind of blissfulness to it, that doesn't need you to do anything.

But that's that model. And even though its true in some ssense it's also so far from TRUTH that it's actually infinitely off the bigger picture.
Now the western model of time is basically originating in Judaism, greek philosophy and then of course modern science. Because the early Jews were very focused on history they were recording that they were actually noticing net change over time. There was clear evidence that new things were emerging that didn't exist before. So rather than focusing on the nature and seeing everything as cyclical, they were focused on the emergence of creations. They realized that adding stuff actually means going somewhere,  which ultimately led to a more linear model of time. In their eyes, time was phenomologically real, actually going somewhere, which led to a dialectic of progress and a general focus on becoming rather than being.

New implications arised – if there is progress, there has to be something like a beginning and an end. Maybe the beginning is the beginning of the universe in Genesis? Maybe the beginning is when you were born, maybe the end is heaven, right? There are different kinds of theological models and they can completely disagree with each other.

Yet this dynamic unveils something else. if you think the universe is actually going somewhere, then adding to this evolving project is inherently meaningful. Also you and me, being a part of where it's going is inherently significant. So then, just being in the moment is not that interesting. Becoming evermore in a universe that is itself becoming evermore, developing oneself to he highest capabilities is the thing to do. That means just being completely content in a way that has no drive is antithetical to what's purposeful. You do notice that their definition of happiness has a lot more to do with qualities like passion and excitement, rather the peace and contentment. If you were to look at this culture, there's a lot of singing, dancing, even partying - whereas more eastern philosophies tend to be a lot quieter. (I do realise the exceptions, yet in general this is true.)

Now, some might argue that the eastern model sounds fundamentally bland and boring, which is not true. In fact, it‘s the kind of western bias that only the unexperienced would utter because they haven't dropped into that place of getting it. You might have had moments where you are just walking along a lake or a beautiful landside or during meditation - and you stop, and everything kind of stops. You just see sparkles on the water, there is no  thinking about what's coming next - the moment is just full. Whats surprising is that it's more full, in a certain quality, than excitement about the future could ever be. It's about independence. A part of enlightenment in that model is being able to be fully with what „is“, no matter what. It doesnt matter matter what is happening, because everything that's happening is an illusion, right? It's all just changing and flexing - but the consciousness that's witnessing it is ever present. Realizing that the light is actually the light of consciousness - that's what waking up means in their context.

Now, so if one wanted to bias from that direction, they could look at the western thing with all the singing, dancing, linearity of time and say: „Look how immature it is !!“ - It's excitement when things go well and disappointment when things don't go well. Look at how little sovereignty those people have, they're so affected by their environment, their circumstance - look at how they rush around trying to change their circumstances to make themselves happy - look at how attached they get to other people and how fucked up they are when things don't go the way they want. Look at how unhappy they are, when they lose something. Look at how when they get what they want - they're only happy for like 15 minutes, and then they want something else. There's like almost nothing of seeming enduring depth there. 

In the west the focus becomes purpose because purpose is a time bound concept, which unfolds chronologically. Evolution is a time bound concept. So if it‘s about evolving ourselves, evolving others, evolving the world around us - becoming more able to express more of the infinite potential through the finite, through time - then of course when you get what you wanted, you aren't just boringly happy about it. Because then you would stop becoming, when the goal is to be becoming forever.

The goal is actually to be in the process of blossoming, that actually adds to the depth of what the universe is. The evolutionary „intelligence“ that brings subatomic particles together into particles and particles into higher order particles, into biology - the whole thing from the Big Bang on is what keeps organizing the universe towards more orderly complexity. You are "it"  and the infinite blossoming into higher order potential of universe at the same time. You also have the ability to choose, in a way, that aligns yourself with that truth. And so, of course, when you get something, you're only happy for a moment because you're in the becoming. Whats important to understand is that it's actually the being in the becoming, which is is interesting. Its what many great philosophers called „the lure of becoming“  - because it's about becoming and it's also every moment!

Now, what's interesting is, when you put these two together, you have a circular model of time and a linear one. Corresponding with the circular is being, with the linear is becoming -  the circular is presence, the linear is purpose. The circular is contentment, serenity in the fullness of the now. The linear is passion, purpose and the promise of possibility. You notice that the circular model maps to seratonin and the linear model maps to dopamine which makes perfect sense.

If you take MDMA, a seratonergic drug, you usually will become very in the moment, very sensory, very feeling, very in the fullness of everything being overwhelmingly beautiful right now, with almost no awareness of anything else. Contrary to that someone else takes a dopaminergic agent like Adderall or cocaine or whatever. They will became profoundly focused on what they want to create. All they want to do is being in the process of creating it. Well now we can also see the beauty and the crashes of both of those - what becomes more available or less available. We can see them in the ways of living. A lot of the Eastern practices are serotoninergic practices: being in the moment, breathing slow, being in nature, having all of your awareness at one point. On the western part you have it the other way around: create goals, achieve the goals, feel good that you achieve them, check them off, reinforce having goals, create more goals - those are dopaminergic practices. You also get addiction with that, which is mostly working on the dopaminergic axis.

Now lets go back to the circular and linear model of time. If we embed those two on each other in a higher dimensional way, you get a spiral of time, which is a circle that isn't closing on itself. It's a circle that is actually moving along the line. So you might ask, are there even cycles now? Yes, there are cycles. And there is net change from one cycle to the next. Now as we look at the ecosystem we see that you've got spring and fall and spring and fall involved, things are born and die, the cyclical nature is there. Yet over the course of time, you look at the fossil record, there's evolution of new organisms that weren't there before, so there is net change over time. It's important to understand that there are cycles, because in ordert to proceed in your becoming, you need to have phases of activity and phases of rest, phases of going outward and phases of coming inward, phases of learning new things and then phases of applying that learning followed by phases of digesting. If you don't understand the cycles you'll feel like you're not making progress.

Anyhow, I hope this makes much more sense now.