I've been considering the notion of Being this morning and wondering if anyone has any thoughts on this...I've been particularily interested in the idea that being shifts culturally. For instance, the Japanese position being in the hara and Bernadette Roberts confirms this, with her existential experience of the "still point" She connects this idea to Yung's notion of the higher self as in the hara. Other cultures seem to differ. Some cultures position Being in the forehead region, others in the heart. I suppose I've been interested in Deluze's idea that there no place of being; his radical call to overthrow all ontology. This has facinated me and given me less of an impetus on moving in some direction, rather than simply walking in faith. It seems that in this space, this utter disregard for the self, and a playful acceptence of it at the same time... love does open up in the heart, however this love cannot be said to be still, rather it moves...Being somehow always seems (at least semantically) to presume some place that is unchanging, when I don't think this is ever the case. It seems that love stretches back and can never be still, rather it moves, into and around the heart and finally throughout the body. Is there such a thing as a "stillpoint" or a radical dimension of Being, apart from that which is changing? I don't think that there is, and to try to divorce self into That Which Is seems dehumanizing...at least it does to me now, for some reason. To love is to suffer to love, to change and find love breaking through and flirting all sorts of human possibilities...and new relationships with God, with the Spirit in others. Anyway. I couldn't sleep, as this was on my mind and I thought I'd share in case anyone felt the need to comment. I wonder whether a Christian would position Christ and Being as one. What does it mean to Be? Who Is? Love must be. This I am certain of, but it also changes forms, expresses itself in so many ways...So I cannot say it is being. Yet I also don't accept one still position of being (even after experiencing such states) I feel that they are incompatible with ones humanity...that they exist forever as other, apart, enamoured within their own grandeur and solitude.

It's difficult to tell whether you're wanting to discuss this from the standpoint of philosophy or personal experience. I think how we experience Being is one thing -- especially in terms of chakras or somatically; what Being might be in and of itself is another thing, however.

Since you capitalize the term, it seems you're referring to Being as God -- Supreme Being . . . the Being in Whom and from whom all beings receive their being. As we cannot know God's experience of God's Being, but can only speak about this analogically, we are left to examine our own experiences of Being and being, and here, I think you make a good point that there are all kinds of ways we know this. And I think that's a good thing.

You are supposed to be a human doing. Where were you when the utilitarians handed out the scripts!


If I were to presume and prognosticate without the aid of any psychic ability or crystal ball,
I should have this gut feeling that eric will have much to say about this, and that Asher and he will become a
shalomplace dynamic duo. mm <*)))))><

Asher, after reading your entire post I'm left with the conclusion that you have it almost absolutely right regarding being. That is to say, it is indescribable to a large extent. What I got from what you said, even if you didn't explicitly say it, is that if we come up with an airtight concrete description it will probably automatically be wrong. So I found that your "rambling" post rambled most appropriately. How could it not if one were trying to put one's finger on something that seemingly defies being fingerprinted?

To love is to suffer to love, to change and find love breaking through and flirting all sorts of human possibilities...and new relationships with God, with the Spirit in others.

I thought that was a great line.

quote:

Originally posted by Phil:
[qb] It's difficult to tell whether you're wanting to discuss this from the standpoint of philosophy or personal experience. I think how we experience Being is one thing -- especially in terms of chakras or somatically; what Being might be in and of itself is another thing, however.

Since you capitalize the term, it seems you're referring to Being as God -- Supreme Being . . . the Being in Whom and from whom all beings receive their being. As we cannot know God's experience of God's Being, but can only speak about this analogically, we are left to examine our own experiences of Being and being, and here, I think you make a good point that there are all kinds of ways we know this. And I think that's a good thing. [/qb]

-Thanks to all for responding...in answer to your first question, Phil: I was wanting to consider Being...well ha. You're correct. It is difficult to distinguish, or disentagle the personal, philosophical from my comments.

-The two seem to be intertwined within me, and since I don't have any explicit religious formations; I've been flirting with the idea both in my mind and in experience that being is something that always seems to change. I'm not suggesting multiple personality disorder

-I suppose I'd like to start with culture. How does culture (asking everyone here) influence/define/shape ones experience of Being?

-I have to make it clear by what I mean by Being, although please feel free to answer with your own definition of being...What I mean by being is the moments that everyone experiences in their life. I think Brad put it nicely in the "enlightenment" thread when he talked about the peace that just drops into ones life like a gift...

-Than there is faith, which seems to underlie even these pleasant experiences...it is always there for me, even in the worst conditions. I have just realized this...but I cannot call it Being...because I've always understood being as being a place of rest...but faith is even in action.

-It is not the Witness experience, but it something so much more personal and loving. But I cannot rest in it...

-I'm wondering...ha. This probably has to do with miscontrueing Being in the past as a place that the faculties had to be gathered in.

-it seems clear that the faculties can be divided at war, and still there is this backdrop.

-I would be tempted to say that I am that...what...self knowing...but I cannot. It does not belong to me...

-my questions are hard to disentagle...what I want to ask is this: is Being synomyous with Christ, or with Faith, or with love.

-because these things change...grow and evolve...or are they implicit within the psyche and is the human obstructing them?

Many questions here...I feel silly for brainstorming here, I hope you'll be able to make sense of these questions...

Thanks again,

A

PS...thanks for all your prayers...honestly, whenever I leave this place I feel that I have been blessed with hope and I generally don't flatter people etc. So really, this place is a light house for me...I'm a pretty crude person and wouldn't lie to y'all. So (as people say around here) peace out.

-I suppose I'd like to start with culture. How does culture (asking everyone here) influence/define/shape ones experience of Being?

That's a great question and I hope there's someone out there with a lot of knowledge in this area because I'm interested in learning about that.

-----
BeingThereDoneThat.com [Shamelessly ripping off MM's schtick]

Maybe I'll share my introduction to a thesis this year. Perhaps, this will spark off some more stories on how culture seems to a be a force defining us through memes, through absence etc...I know it may not be worth rehashing these things, but somehow...it seems to help to share. So here's an introduction to a long exploration into culture. I hope that it's somewhat interesting and relevent...again hoping it may spark off a discussion on the influences of culture on religious formation/ontology etc:

Kind Regards,
Asher


We live lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time--not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a quite unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed. Lawrence Durrell, "Alexandria Quartet.�


a.

Induction

I'm a second generation immigrant of Pakistani descent who has been interested in the Partition since I began my own personal search for integration twelve years ago. I have recently felt that a search for integration has been entwined in the search for a father and the search for a place. In a sense, I feel connected to the historical dialogue of a search for a "place" in Canada, but I do believe that my search is not connected exclusively to Canada, but connected to the place which my father lost on August 15, 1947--a place he hasn�t returned to. I believe that ambivalence to place (or to one cultural heritage) is common in second-generation immigrants.
I began my personal search in a religious context. I lived in a monastic setting and studied meditation under a Hindu teacher for eight years. In retrospect, such a choice fascinates me. Why would a born Moslem choose to learn from a Hindu? This may not seem correctly phrased, or politically correct, but it is as bluntly as I can put it when I consider the historical animosity between these two groups. I began to feel that my journey involved connecting the Hindu religion with Islam--a childish attempt at bridging two worlds that were cleaved in my mind. My parents never spoke about India, although they were born there. Finally, I began to ask myself how these seemingly antithetical cosmologies intersect within a Canadian setting.

When people are forced to leave their Motherland at a young age, there may not be a rite of passage into adulthood, as Kamra notes in her study Bearing Witness. I believe that the diaspora caused an arresting of individuation in victims who were forced from their homes. The first generation may forget or suppress this traumatic past; this is the silence that a second-generation Indian/Pakistani immigrant may inherit.
If one encounters silence, what does he do? He archives his parent's past; writes the stories that his parents refuse to tell, because their trauma is entrenched in a memory which do not access. In my case, my father's silence is locked up in India. Perhaps I chose to study Hinduism as a means to reconnect two pieces.
We do not consciously choose to bridge something; the preconscious has its own means of grappling with issues, in my opinion. What began as my 8-year expedition into the psyche, concluded in India in my father's village in Jalandhar-- the place he now wants to revisit. Perhaps we attempt to lift our parents out of the place where there growth was arrested through writing poetry, fiction, and narrative: through archiving their stories and, in the process, we move toward our own individuation. I do see a therapeutic import to my writing.
In The Winnipeg Zoo, Robert Krotesch writes: "we must take care of our stories." This project is the beginning of an attempt at archiving the first generation accounts of the Partition in a Canadian setting. These stories are like plants that need nurturing which need to be told before the first generation dies. The past should not be a place of fear, but a place where we creatively engage with unconscious forces that are constantly shaping us. They shape us when we forget. When we choose to go back, we either become trapped in the past, or we bring these plants back to life. The traumatic past of our parents cannot be rejoined, but the attempt must be made.
I believe that the effects displacement/diaspora of the first generation are encoded in our childhood memories via memes, wired into us, as second-generation immigrants. Without the mediation of images and stories, we cannot access these places; and they subsequently exist as an absence that begins to manifest in more covert ways. A future project will investigate second generation conceptualizations of the Partition. This project will not attempt to prove anything, but it may provide some clues on how stories that are not told are never forgotten. Indeed, the very absence itself speaks.

The past should not be a place of fear, but a place where we creatively engage with unconscious forces that are constantly shaping us. They shape us when we forget. When we choose to go back, we either become trapped in the past, or we bring these plants back to life. The traumatic past of our parents cannot be rejoined, but the attempt must be made.

I think that's wonderfully written, as is the rest of your story, Asher. We do, I think, have to dredge up the past if we are to learn from it and ultimately be free from it.

I believe that the effects displacement/diaspora of the first generation are encoded in our childhood memories via memes, wired into us, as second-generation immigrants. Without the mediation of images and stories, we cannot access these places; and they subsequently exist as an absence that begins to manifest in more covert ways.

When people are forced to leave their Motherland at a young age, there may not be a rite of passage into adulthood, as Kamra notes in her study Bearing Witness. I believe that the diaspora caused an arresting of individuation in victims who were forced from their homes.

Most cultures, almost always imperfectly but more competently than we usually acknowledge, have the mechanisms in place for helping to turn a boy into a man or a girl into a woman for that particular culture. But we're all so different as individuals, and our parents can either pass on competence or retard our individuation. Even when one stays anchored in a culture there is no guarantee of success. But to be uprooted from a culture is a double-whammy, so to speak. We can leave behind so many of the signposts, habits and institutions that are specifically geared toward us. On the other hand, many a people have moved specifically away from their cultures (which they found to be lacking) to find a better life (that's basically the story of America, for example). And one could say that in this modern western culture, where women now have joined the workforce and male/female roles have been blurred, degraded, devalued or lost outright at times, that kids now face unique hardships in the transition to adulthood. The very culture amenable to children is being lost or encroached on.

I have the feeling that whatever story you write, Asher, and whatever conclusions you draw, might have meaning for all of us.

"Most cultures, almost always imperfectly but more competently than we usually acknowledge, have the mechanisms in place for helping to turn a boy into a man or a girl into a woman for that particular culture. But we're all so different as individuals, and our parents can either pass on competence or retard our individuation. Even when one stays anchored in a culture there is no guarantee of success. But to be uprooted from a culture is a double-whammy, so to speak. We can leave behind so many of the signposts, habits and institutions that are specifically geared toward us. On the other hand, many a people have moved specifically away from their cultures (which they found to be lacking) to find a better life (that's basically the story of America, for example). And one could say that in this modern western culture, where women now have joined the workforce and male/female roles have been blurred, degraded, devalued or lost outright at times, that kids now face unique hardships in the transition to adulthood. The very culture amenable to children is being lost or encroached on."

This is insightful Brad. Thanks for sharing those points. I wanted to turn this dialogue over to everyone, with the following questions:

1) What is a rite of passage in your culture from childhood to adolescence?

2) Explain, if you feel inclined to, if you went through a process which could assuredly be called individuation? Feel free to write in whatever style you wish: anecdotal, psychological, scientific, poetical.

3) How did this rite of passage change your view towards your religion, or towards God?

There are many more questions that I'd like to ask, but feel free to answer 1 or more of them, or simply to explore as you write.

I hope (again) that lurkers will be inspired to pop in and not feel like this is necessarily concerns a Christian upbringing. It could mean, as it does in my story, a complete rejection (on the part of my parents) of any cultural/religious mythos and consequently, living on a cultural border. This cultural "border" creates all sorts of personal, psychological and spiritual ambivalance which transposes onto my view of God.

Ultimately, these points will touch on the more broader issue of Being and the different positions of Being: dependent on linguistics, culture, and the action of Grace.

Please feel free to alter the questions to suit your interests.

Kindest,

Asher

I hope that it's not intimidating to post this little excerpt/exploration of my past. It's angry, but it does show, I think, that notions of national and cultural identity seem to have a direct relationship to this rite of passage that Brad alluded to. So I encourage people to go all over the map...he.

Mapping the Furnace Room

I.

When he was a child he had a passion for mapping the house, the earth: archaeology, de stratifying and stratifying. Imagining maps in his cobbled mind. He walked around the block with a question in his mind that had been forged in the furnace room of the house. A question like �who am I, here?� and upon arriving at the same point, the same question would blaze up. An inflammatory question forged in the furnace of his house when when he went to fill a pitcher with distilled water and clambered over a mountain of photo albums to arrive at the distiller/

At one point in my little brother�s dreams, I went back to Thunder Bay and was terrified at arriving in an absent place, a buried gable. That was in my brother�s dream. This would add another scale to an already bat-like existence, where stumbling was the same as walking�through the heat of another place, if one kept oneself open this long, the heat would either sear them, or the cold would make the bones release stories�either way, there would be stories.

The furnace room was where we kept distilled water, picture albums, newspaper clipping of my dad topping his class in Pakistan, but never getting a job because he wasn�t white enough in Pakistan�he was no gentleman, bric a brac from Britain, old clocks, telephones. The floor was cold and uninviting and there were skis and imaginary mountains as soon as he walked in�objects could yearn in absence and have an independent life when doors closed those doors could be an opening in another room; a hinge unhinge another place. Dogs could still run in dreams when their paws twitched; the furnace could die and when it did there would be a fight and in the absence of heat there could be a realization of the landscape vast as an atom and a disappearance into white maps or there could be the tropics. And we could love white. And we could act our parts and slightly change our names, but those lost letters now are living in another room�unhinged, where there is no furnace and the heat could kill you.

The furnace was modulated by a thermostat in the living room where we would invite guests and if the fuse choked; we could light a fire. We had the drive to light fires to prove ourselves. We could win lotteries, even though we were winners and, if we did win, we would still be feudalists, at least father would, coming as he was, from a feudal ethos. He would tell mother to spend the money on groceries and tell her to walk 3 miles in the cold and carry the groceries back. There was the possibility of divorce. But she would whiten enough to be able to find a job.


II.

We could, in secret, hate our past. We never arrived, having never left. And always we would leave a door open to a past to a bullock cart, to a servant, to congenial conversations in a living room. The grammar is still be there, but the words would be for our children to figure. (Go figure, be a figure of speech)/ We never taught them a mater tongue. We never tongued them, but weaned them in white. There is a hut in India, charred on the side (now air) without a furnace, without a mountain. There are scattered clothes of a dead brother whose name we must archive at some point. Each place is twisting and winding now; already space is auditory, clacking hinges, a furnace humming in the morning; bamboo frames (somewhere else); already space is a mackerel slipping from fingers back into a father's lost childhood; already there is sugar cane clattering, hexing the way that a sentence could move if it remembered. A word dismembered is a new member of the family. Plates underneath the earth could quake or cleave and forge another signature over and over again. We shift from India to Pakistan to Canada. Never arriving anywhere.

IV.

Father says something like: I should have one more wrinkle, but I desired immortality; before that I had noble intensions to send money home to a mother who never visited; who disowned this part of me�when I landed nowhere, nowhere became busy (so I am told) and I was someone people imagined was successful. (So I told my son he was useless). He was useless even though all he ever wanted me to do was to tell him something. What he wanted me to tell was something that I will never tell�in 1947 I was a child. In 1947, I gave a speech for the formation of a new country--Pakistan. In 1947, I will never grow old. In 1947 I may have killed a Hindu. In 1947 I will never remember. (I think I may have thrown a knife in the Indus. The Indus will testify). The Indus is still now; it eats away the shore; an autoimmune disease. I release dead bodies from my mouth who were killed on a train to Jalandhar to Amritsar. There was confusion�now I am�someone tried to get on a train to Pakistan and he was shot dead with his leg dangling off the platform. These are por/traits now draped in white linen and the snow covers my tracks; I am a detour to another room. I could unwalk and unwalking could mean mapping backwards; let the snow melt and I�ll find my feet. Winged, perhaps.

1) What is a rite of passage in your culture from childhood to adolescence?

2) Explain, if you feel inclined to, if you went through a process which could assuredly be called individuation? Feel free to write in whatever style you wish: anecdotal, psychological, scientific, poetical.

3) How did this rite of passage change your view towards your religion, or towards God?

I have the distinct impression, Asher, particularly after reading another great chapter of your story, that you are looking for solid anchorage in this stormy sea of life. And it sounds like, as was the case with me, that you may have missed a few essential steps on the way to being fully mature and well-rounded�that is, on your journeys you missed a few ports of call. And perhaps you now sense the need to bail your ship and to put it back on the right course and perhaps to visit those missed ports or set out for new ones if the wind is such that you can't go back. And you sense the inherent dilemma: that which caused you to take on water and veer off course are the very things keeping you from effectively bailing and navigating. How can a weakness be made to fix a weakness?

Eventually we discover that the person drowning the deck with water is us. If we have lost our way then we need only discover that purpose is not the same as movement; which is to say, the point may not be to find all the right ports of call or to retrace lost steps in a sea of possibilities. There are too many possible combinations of choices. We might never find our way. But while studying and re-studying our chart of the surrounding sea, which is two dimensional (as may be our thinking), we forget that we may already be at our destination. We can, right now, jump over the side and dive for pearls or tilt a telescope into the sky and study the stars. Similarly, to find solid ground we need do no more than to recognize that it is directly beneath us now, although this fact is obscured as we float in a sea of worries and expectations. We will not drown if we let go and trust. We may feel like we're sinking but we're simply settling through fathoms of delusions and self-criticisms.

No, I have no idea why the nautical theme.

1) Learning to drive a car
2) No I didn't. I'm going through it now though.
3) To be determined.