Being

No one really knows why success occurs, only that if we are in touch distances of it, it can be directed to flow into our life.  It is what success is built on which is my primary business.  Success can come with a price and success can come with a value.  The price of success is written large in major outcomes of the 20th Century, and those outcomes now extend to the century we live in - that is if we actually consider ourselves to be 21st Century people.

That 20th Century was based on human doings and some of that doing did address being as a philosophical construct which was much more important than being a practical construct.  If we live in an area rich in economic improvement, we will not notice that much how that is a privileged position, a paradise compared to many regions of the world and certainly percentage wise in terms of how many people in the global population live lives at this higher level of quality.  Climate conversations about man-made effects do translate to this conversation also.

What Steven Pinker discovered in his research on how much less violence the world experiences today than in yesteryear has touched on may have more to do with old inhuman practices lessening as new human practices continue evolve under the surface layers of society - but not significantly or not near a tipping point or a critical mass.  We are still doing violence.

For me the triumph of being over doing has not scaled to the level one could refer to as a "renaissance" moment, but whatever it is we refer to as "progress" in this world has a few more signs of being about being and slightly less about our doing culture.  We will exist in the doing culture for some time because that is our predominant psyche, it is the one many people get processed through and conditioned by whether education is a doing, or media is a doing, or health is a doing - in all cases we are doing things to people.

Being remains more of an idea though if we live privileged existence we can afford this utopia we call "being".  Yet it is driven by economic boundary rather than increasing the boundary where humanity can evolve.  Economics often trumps humanity if we look at the unease we have currently about the rise of corporate power to place profits before people.  Putting people before profits does not guarantee being, it is more likely to shift the nature of our doing, and that is a shift from a for-profit culture to a civic culture, and if that shift does not include value, there is plenty of unintended consequences that can arise, the least of which is learned helplessness and stagnation.  Division of labour has been very good for economic growth, but less so for growth as human beings.

If the privileged minority sector of the global population is still struggling with issues like basic happiness, then how does the existence of doing culture help those who do not live in privilege?

The question that hampers my vision is how do we engage being when we think being is doing?

Being is not a philosophical question, it is a practical wisdom and it is a painfully slow road in terms of progressing towards living in a society that is based on being.  How does a society handle brutal honesty if they cannot handle even mild honesty?  We guard against a doing mindset with ideas such as political correctness or personal branding.  In doing we do not trust being.  The only reality we know is based on doing as an economic imperative and not being on a humanity imperative.  Speaking about or "doing" humanity is not the same as being human.

There is no code to crack on "being" because we already know in our minds what we think when we say we are being "human", thus we are more likely to engage the doing of charity than we are the being of love.  There is a being of love but it sits buried under our primary focus on doing, and there is sufficient amounts to bring us moments of humanity which we have all experienced, but we do know that there is a massive amount of inhumanity in play in our world.  Once in play this psyche takes up residency in our world, and we can only help the future gives rise to people who want to see less of it.  What is freedom than a state of being, but even freedom has been relegated to a doing and so people in the world do inhuman things in the name of freedom.  That is not freedom, that is still the prison of doing, not being freedom.

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