What you want is to be, to inhabit being more fully; that's all you want. Being is all you ever wanted, but your desire got twisted around some mental figment: a special toy, the latest gadget, the dream job, the perfect vacation, the perfect 10. None of that ever does the trick because all desire is desire to be. It's not toys or gadgets or power or prestige you want; you want to be happy, satisfied, content. You want your life to feel rich and full. Those are all qualities of being; toys and gadgets and accomplishment won't make you feel like that. But you already knew that.
Of course earlier cultures were not like modern consumer culture; traditional cultures valued the internal, invisible, spiritual aspects of life over materiality. Sure, uh-huh. I think maybe they just didn't have cars. Anyway, we know what the story is now: "he who dies with the most toys wins." That's the spiritual heart and soul of our culture in 8 words; it's probably always been like that. The culture doesn't like you if you're not like that; the culture does what it can to keep you from developing.
Being pleasure is what you experience when you move to inhabit being a little bit more; it's your direct experience of your own development. Being pleasure can go by unnoticed if you're not primed to recognize it for what it is. It's crucial that you recognize being pleasure when it happens and carefully consider what led up to it so you can figure out how to go on from there. You can only find that out by an ongoing process of experimentation. If you do what you think lead to being pleasure again but being pleasure doesn't happen again, it may be some other factor or combination of factors that lead to development instead of what you thought it was. Or maybe you need something entirely different now; you've gotten all you can get out of whatever you were doing before. So you try another experiment. The more attention you pay right at the moment of being pleasure, the better clues you'll have for finding your way forward
You have God in you, but that's not where you live; you don't inhabit being. You're living out on the periphery of yourself, mostly out of touch with who you really are, which is being, God in you. The process of development is a process of inhabiting being, of moving into deeper parts of yourself and living there rather than out on the fringes.
Being can't be said to develop, but it's possible for being to become. Being becomes more of itself. For you, becoming and development are essentially the same thing. The task in front of you is to inhabit being more fully and deeply. You can call that development or becoming; it's movement in the direction of being, and it's the highest expression of human creativity, the art the other arts are trial runs at. Once you come to occupy being more fully, being in you can become, can move into a greater and deeper expression of itself. That's when you really begin to shine.
Being in you is a particular manifestation of God. Developing is inhabiting that particular manifestation more fully. At an advanced stage, development is becoming: you become more of who you are as the truth of God shines through you. When you shine, you come into full manifestation of your ability to manifest, to bring forth, which is the quality you have in common with God. The world is how God becomes, and when you shine you're part of that; then you are truly participating in creation. Nothing is more desirable.
Ordinary human interactions can be boiled down to some kind of transaction: trade, purchase, barter, exchange, etcetera. Resources and skills are exchanged and rearranged, and everyone involved hopes to come out ahead. What all transactions have in common is that nothing new is created. It's the human version of the law of conservation of matter and energy: things change form, sometimes quite dramatically, but everything evens out. An apparent gain over here is simply the reappearance of an apparent loss over there. Only being offers the potential for real gain.
Acts of being do not involve loss. When you develop or become, there's no offsetting diminishment of someone or something else; it's a pure absolute gain. When you love another being some essence or quality of that being is added to you, but the other being is not diminished. Development and becoming are the only creative acts possible; everything else is simply rearrangement, redistribution, refinement: change of form or position without creation of anything genuinely new.
However, development and becoming occur in the same context as ordinary human transactions; a common mistake is to think that ordinary life is not good enough to foster development and becoming. Two-bit messiahs promote this mistake by offering retreats, workshops, getaways, sessions, and all kinds of other chances to escape real life so you can really work on development; it's all purely a scam. Real life is where development happens; if it doesn't happen there, it doesn't happen. To develop, you live your life and take part in the transactions that life consists of while paying attention to being. If your life is anchored in being, everything you do can be part of development; every day can bring real gain.
You have a persistent delusion that you "own" things, but you don't even own your own body. You don't even own yourself. Everything's a gift from God; you're part of that everything. The part you might mistakenly call "my being" is in fact God in you; you don't own God.
Gifts must be received. To receive a gift, you have to open up and let it in. Part of opening up to receive a gift is acknowledging that it is a gift; there's someone to thank for it. You feel empty because you can't receive the gift of your life. Your life feels heavy and unsatisfying because you're carrying it around like an unopened present. You have to receive your life and acknowledge that it's a gift before you can begin really living it; really living your life is giving it away.
An unopened, unreceived life - a life you're trying to keep for yourself - is a burden; it makes you feel guilty and secretly useless. As long as you're hanging onto your life and everything else God gave you saying "mine mine mine" you can't receive the gift and really begin living. You can't receive anything until you're ready to give it away. That's the law of gifts. The principle of giving is the foundation of the economy of the universe. You either open up to life so things freely come to you and you freely give them away, or you close down and nothing gets in because nothing can get out. Holding on to things, to your life, is poverty; giving them away is wealth. That's the economy of the universe.
If you can receive your life as a gift, you'll be able to begin giving it away. Giving your life away is the opposite of throwing it away. Once you grasp that everything's a gift and take it to heart, you'll feel a profound sense of obligation. Nothing will be more desirable to you than finding a way to give something back, to give your life away. Giving your life away is doing what you're here to do. Giving your life away is telling the truth, and nothing is more satisfying.
Every body eventually dies, and generally suffers pain and weakness on the way to that; bodies are temporary. Your body will grow old and die. It will not be resurrected; the elements of your body will return to the earth. Anyone who tells you different is a fool who's trying to con you; no body escapes death. But the death sentence of the body isn't the source of human misery; death doesn't have to be miserable.
Decline and death are part of nature. In nature, death's not a misery, it's just part of the cycle. The perfection of being in plants and animals lets them accept life and death in a way humans can't. The prospect of death is a misery for you because you have deep, unspoken knowledge that you must develop; you must inhabit being more fully. If you're actively developing, the prospect of death isn't a misery; you just want to get as much done as you can before it happens. You still fear death; the fear of death is critically important in the process of development. But fear and misery are very different things; fear is helpful, and it's part of nature; misery is a human creation with no redeeming qualities.
Humans miseries are not found in nature: alienation, despair, hatred, contempt, depression, apathy, and on and on. These human miseries are caused by your incompleteness, by the curse of becoming. All human misery revolves around the desire to be complete; the human miseries are what you create when you don't devote your life to becoming complete. You're gifted with profound creative power, and if you don't use it to develop, to inhabit being more fully, you'll use it to create something else; no matter what you create, it'll end up being a form of misery if you're not also developing.
Animals and plants can't develop; they're already perfect in a sense, developing only via the slow process of physical evolution and not as individual beings. Human incompleteness means we must develop. Being incomplete is a misery unless you're actively engaged in development. It's like living with a huge open wound: the air itself is agonizing. All human misery is the result of doing things and living lives not aimed at development. Once development becomes the center of your life, all the other elements will coalesce around that and become part of your development; your life will make sense to you, and it'll feel rich and satisfying. Until you do that, nothing will make sense, there will be no satisfaction, and you'll be miserable; you'll be in exile.
Making being the center of your life gives you something that feels oddly like immunity. Not that life's pains and disappointments are any less, or that you're protected from them, but they just don't matter so much; they don't mean what they did before. There's a rightness in you, and nothing and no one can take that away. Everything that happens - pain, sickness, and grief included - becomes a way of moving to inhabit being. Your life becomes your own.
Being in you is who you really are, a particular manifestation of God. You have a body, mind, feelings, thoughts, and so forth, but you are being; you are in fact God. Body, mind and feelings are simply faculties of being. Being is what chooses. Your mind may decide something but that doesn't mean anything. For instance, you may think up a great list of new year's resolutions for improving your life; new year's resolutions are mostly famous for being left undone. Your mind is impotent; it has no power. But if being connects to a course of action, that's what you do. You pull your hand out of the fire, you get out of the way of oncoming traffic, you save your child from imminent danger by doing something impossible. I use those extreme examples because for most people that kind of moment is the only time being is active and calling the shots. Turn more of your life over to being than just the do or die moments when being takes charge on its own. The do or die moments don't help you develop.
Being has little trust in your mind, for good reason. Being responds to truth, but not to "good ideas." You have to connect to being first, rather than undertaking somebody else's good ideas - including the ideas on this website - that are supposed to help you develop. Instead of telling being what to do, you need to hear what being has to say. That's advice you'll follow once you hear it; you'll feel the truth of it in your gut, and you won't be satisfied until you do follow it. It won't necessarily be easy, and you may not do it right away, but you will follow the advice of being once you hear it.
Your stuff's in the way - home, car, gadgets, artwork, you name it; almost all of it is a direct impediment to development. No, I'm not saying give it all away and go live on the street; I'm saying that what you've saddled yourself with is in almost every case too much, too elaborate, mostly unnecessary, and in the way. Study the idea of perfectly adequate and apply that to your stuff. Being's only interested in what's needed for survival and development. You need a few objects to tend to the body and keep it safe and healthy, and sometimes you need tools for becoming. Other than that, keep your junk to a minimum.
The things you need for survival are useful long-term possessions, but tools for becoming is fluid. A tool you thought you'd use for the rest of your life is irrelevant when that work's done. You can't predict how long you'll need a tool or what tool you'll need next; you can't see ahead in your process of development. What you're convinced is essential now may seem humorous or pathetic just a little further along.
Useless stuff gets in the way. You end up spending way too much of your life working to pay its bills. The most extreme cases are the fanatical hoarders, also known as collectors. For them, the stuff takes over completely and they spend their whole lives serving and protecting their stupid stuff. It's actually really common; if you're affluent, nobody notices. If a poor person's collecting (hoarding) old newspapers and bits of string, everyone knows there's a screw loose. But what if someone's hoarding rare books, sports memorabilia, jewelry or ceramic figurines? Why that's just a hobby, dear; all the best people are doing it. Pathetic.
Here's the test. Look at each thing and ask yourself two questions:
The test shows you what's useless. For each useless thing, ask yourself if there's any way it gets in your way: needing attention or time to maintain, holding you down, taking up space you'd rather have open, needing protection, etcetera. Get rid of everything that gets in your way. Start by getting rid of any useless object you'd be upset to find missing or damaged; think of all the potential upset you've avoided right there. Just get rid of all that useless junk. Your life will feel so much better.
If you're working to develop, people expect that all the bullshit in you will just melt away. But the patterns you were branded with in early childhood are strong enough to last a lifetime, at least in some form; progress with them can be slower than development at times. So when someone pushes your buttons, you may find yourself indulging in the same old petty shit. Working with the patterns can be useful. If you contend with the patterns, you make progress, but making progress doesn't mean the patterns go away.
It's more effective to use insight, strategy, and new resources to redirect energy and create alternatives than to directly confront patterns of bullshit; it's never a good idea to kick shit. As you develop, you'll see how your patterns play out, so you can avoid situations that trigger them. You'll also discover ways to redirect negative scenarios into something harmless or useful.
People expect that development will make you nice. Nope. Development makes you more real. You'll change some of the ways you relate to people, and people don't like it when you change. You'll likely trample some people's ideas about civility and decorum. You won't become bad or evil as a result of development; development won't make you a criminal. But it's not likely to make you the most popular kid on the block either. Social success is based on repressing qualities and behaviors not deemed cool and adopting behaviors that are deemed cool. Being cares nothing for any of that.
As you develop, you won't maintain compromises you used to make to keep the peace. You'll go through phases of being hard to be around. If you want or need to fit in you'll find a way, a creative solution where you don't upset the applecart. If you find you don't care about fitting in, well you know what they say about people who can't take a joke.
Religions have always violently opposed development because of this unpredictability. Anyone who develops, even a little, becomes less interested in doctrine and dogma. The threat of divine retribution that religious con men have always held as their ace in the hole stops being effective as you develop. So religions have always reserved the worst punishments for people interested in development.
Being is unpredictable and can't be governed by rules or dogma.
The unpredictability of being points back to the core truth that being is God in you. Being is unpredictable; God is unknowable. That's the same thing from two different perspectives. Being is unpredictable and also unerring because it's no different than God. Trust guidance from being above everything else. That's why I say to listen to being and not just my words. Anytime you can get guidance from being, follow that instead. Trusting being and letting it guide you opens up your connection to being. Being can then provide more and better guidance.
Being isn't the same thing as life, the liveliness that animates your body, but the two are connected. Life is how being inhabits the world, your world. Being inhabits your body as life and shines out as attention; attention is the light of being shining through. Attention can be very diffuse, completely without focus; that's what's happening when someone's alive but going nowhere.
Being shining out as attention is very easy to see; you're used to seeing it and you expect to see it. That's why dead bodies are so creepy-looking: a body should have being and dead bodies don't, no matter how good a makeup job the undertaker does. In the normal course of things, being and life leave the body at the same time. Technology can now pointlessly prolong animal life after being has gone, which is cruel to those who feel connected to one whose uninhabited body is being kept alive. It also happens that attention leaves permanently while being is still present, so that being is locked in a body but no light shines through, like in some cases of brain damage or mental illness. There's life in the body and being inside, but being can't shine through and inhabit the life.
Being is the source of all meaning. You instinctively know the difference between actions, thoughts and feelings that are meaningful and those that are meaningless; being is the difference. When being instigates thinking, thinking is meaningful, helping you move forward in some way. You figure out how to try new possibilities; you solve problems and figure out how to overcome obstacles. Thinking that's instigated by your mind is meaningless, e.g. when you think instead of live or when you obsess. Another example of meaningless thinking is mulling over some interaction you had with a person and working yourself into a meaningless frenzy over how they treated you. Any meaning the interaction may have had was apparent there, in that moment, at face value: if you were insulted, you felt insulted. If you didn't feel insulted right then and there, you weren't; forget about it. What you work up in yourself later is pure negative fantasy, content added by a mind with too much time on its hands, content devoid of meaning or reality.
Every positive, meaningful, creative moment in all human history was a moment when being acted in some way, via thought, word or deed to create meaning, real content. Most of the time, most people aren't inhabiting being, so most of human history is a matter of unoccupied minds and bodies doing meaningless, often destructive things; it's a zombie movie.
Tools are objects being gives meaning to by using or intending to use. The meaning only exists while being gives it; when you put the tool down, it's just a meaningless object. So a stick becomes a tool when you pick it up to do something with it; it has purpose and value. When you put it back down it's just a stick, a meaningless and worthless piece of wood, until and unless you or someone else gives it meaning again. The object itself is always meaningless and useless; being has to supply those qualities. Being supplies all meaning and worth to the world; without being, the world is meaningless and worthless.
Being's fundamental tool - the first tool that all the others are modeled after - is body. Just like other tools, body is useful and worthwhile only if you hold it with intent. If you live without the intent of developing, your body is just a worthless, useless object. Being makes your body useful by extending into it with the intent of getting something done, and being has only one item on the agenda: becoming. If your body's no good for that, it's worthless. Of course your body is good for that, at least potentially; that's what it's for. But if something's in the way of that, if being can't use your body for becoming, being loses interest in your body and withdraws inwardly. Then your body and your life feel empty, pointless and meaningless because fullness, satisfaction, purpose, meaning, value, juice and all those other really desirable things are what being brings to your life when you're developing.
If your life's on the right track, you experience meaning and those other good things. Maybe not all of them, and not all the time, but enough so your life feels satisfying and very much worth living. Wherever you currently are on the satisfaction-o-meter, if you want that needle to go higher, pay more attention to being.
Becoming, development means different things at different stages in the process; anything anyone anywhere truly wants, any true desire, reflects the desire to become, to inhabit being more fully. Becoming happens in three phases; for simplicity, I'll call these the early, middle, and later stages of becoming.
The early stages of becoming are a process of solidification. It's all about simple, material things and the reflection of material things: bodily strength, family, property, prosperity, reputation, and various artistic and altruistic accomplishments. People who dedicate their lives to getting these things do it because they want to become, to inhabit being more fully. Providing for a family, making money, accumulating property, inventing things, advancing science, creating works of art, serving the public interest, creating a legacy - these are important accomplishments in the early stages of becoming; that's how you progress in the early stages. People who are working on external accomplishments won't be interested in the practice of being pleasure; it's not for them. Through the early stages of becoming, people generally feel a growing sense of satisfaction with what they've accomplished.
At a certain point, you begin to realize that outer accomplishment is not enough. You begin to feel the pull of something deeper; you begin to feel longing. It's a very small pull at first, very easily ignored, and it always is mostly ignored for a very long time, but once you feel it it never goes away, and it very slowly becomes stronger. The middle stages of becoming are the struggle between the pull of something deeper and all the satisfactions, appetites, and attachments you developed during the early stages. In traditional terms, the middle stages begin when you become a seeker. The middle stages are a period of growing dissatisfaction with everything that used to be so satisfying. As you progress through the middle stages, you discover that you are in exile, and the feeling of exile becomes more and more profound the further you progress.
The later stages of becoming begin with salvation - the real thing, not some religious mumbo jumbo. Salvation is choosing to participate in creation and entering the protection and encouragement of God's grace. Salvation and entering God's grace happen when you make the first act of surrender to God, to being; surrendering to God opens the door for you to eventually experience the presence of God. When you first surrender and enter God's grace, your surrender is minute and your experience of the presence of God is infinitely small, just like the longing for something deeper was when you first became a seeker. But just like the longing it never goes away and it slowly grows in you as you work in the later stages. When your experience of the presence of God has opened up enough it begins to shake things up; you begin to feel the hunger for the presence of God. That hunger makes you deeply dissatisfied with your life, which started feeling really rich and satisfying when you chose to participate in creation. That brings us to you, who are ready to practice being pleasure. You want to experience the presence of God; you have the hunger. You're like a moth to the flame. This is for you.
You're a particular manifestation of God, but you inhabit very little of that. For you, becoming is the same as development; it's the process of inhabiting being more fully, making your way to God in you. Eventually, becoming is something else.
You're incomplete and on a journey toward completeness, making your way back to who you really are, God in you. Desire is the yearning to be complete in a way you don't understand but have always wanted. Every happy ending, every tale of overcoming and triumph, every buried treasure reflects that yearning. You're in the terribly awkward position of having set out but not yet made much progress. Cheer up; most people don't even know there's somewhere to go.
To become complete, first recognize that you're incomplete. Nothing you do or accomplish that doesn't somehow help you become more complete will satisfy. You already feel the longing to become; focus on that longing, bring it to your attention. Focus on and feel your own incompleteness; that's a raw, uncomfortable feeling. Let that in, stay with it, face it. It'll give you motivation. Then it's easy to rearrange your life so everything you do contributes to development. No matter where you are in your life or what you're doing, you can immediately begin work on development, on inhabiting being more fully.
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