Living in the moment

Peter always needs to do, do, do.  He believes that if you are doing nothing (which constitutes any type of activity that is pursued sitting on your butt, like writing, reading, meditating) then you are WASTING your day, life, whatever.

Once upon a time I bought into this.  For like a day or two.  But I was sitting on the deck that Peter and his father had built the weekend before, basking in the sunshine and reading the Sunday newspaper, when his father walked by with a ladder towards some unknown project and commented how I was wasting the day away.

Oh, really?  Then why build the deck if you can't sit on it?  Why are newspapers printed if it is a waste of time to read them?  Who invented deck chairs if sitting on them was a WASTE OF TIME?  And I realized that no, I wasn't wasting my time.  I was being.  And therefore, from that day on, I became the anti-worker around the house.  I was done.  Don't ever tell me I am wasting my time, because I will only do it ten times more, if only to bug you.  So it was a stand of stubborness mingled with the underlying feeling of what is the point of working all week if you can't ever enjoy yourself?  Balance is huge.  Peter doesn't have it.  None of his family really does.

And I was fine with the disengagement.  But not totally.  For many years I associated my identity with being a working person -- I needed to be a working person, a person with a purpose, a job to go to everyday and therefore not WASTE the day away.  I bought into it, and when I stopped working, it took a long time to stop feeling as though my days were frittering away like sand through open fingers.

But those days are long gone ... baby!  Oh yes -- I love waking up each day to the mountain of possibility.  But each day Peter wakes up to ... the need to do something.

Back to A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Eckhart Tolle:

The ego knows nothing of Being but believes you will eventually be saved by doing.  If you are in the grip of the ego, you believe that by doing more and more you will eventually accumulate enough "doings" to make yourself feel complete at some point in the future.  You won't.  You will only lose yourself in doing.  The entire civilization is losing itself in doing that is not rooted in Being and thus becomes futile.

Well, the good news is we all just got free passes to be lazy!  I mean, if we are doing then it means our ego is being pushy and we really need to ignore that ego!  Oh, I can turn things around, I am a spin doctor .... yeah yeah.

No, seriously, there is doing and there is Being.  And you find Being in the still, alert presence of Consciousness itself, the Consciousness that you are.  Human is form.  Being is formless.  Human and Being are not separate but interwoven.

After reading that I kept thinking Human Being.  We are called Human Beings.  Doesn't that sound so weird?  I am a human being.  I think this is what the book talks about when your mind gets jumbled in thought!  If I am a human being, does that make Peter a human doing? HAHAHA.

So what if you don't know who you are?  What if you don't know what it means to be yourself?

If you can be absolutely comfortable with not knowing who you are, then what's left is who you are -- the Being behind the human, the field of pure potentiality rather than something that is already defined.

This really goes against anything we have even been taught.  What are you going to be when you grow up is one of the first questions we are asked when we are little.  Well, I don't know, you will answer, but you will quickly see that that is NOT the right one!  So if you really don't know, you will say doctor, lawyer, indian chief.  (Well at least that's what I said!) and they will roll their eyes because again, you didn't answer the question properly.  But there was Johnny over there with his arms crossed over his chest and he would close his book and say "I am going to be President of the United States," and the adult would beam and say that is wonderful Johnny.

Kiss ass.  Never did like those Johnny's.  But now I know that NOT knowing was the right answer!

In form, you are and will always be inferior to some, superior to others.  In essence, you are neither inferior nor superior to anyone.

So ha Johnny!

So this morning, while I was laying in bed reading, Peter came along in an incredible burst of doing, commented on my perceived laziness, rushed off, returned later to comment on my perceived laziness, I then read him excerpts from the book and basically told him his perpetual state of doing was futile and he asked what that meant and I said he needed to learn to chill and then ... he sat in a chair in the living room all day and watched TV and then said he didn't feel good.

So I believe I sucked out his essence of being by saying he couldn't do and therefore he is deflated and empty.

There was no mention in the book of this possibly happening.  I may have to insist upon a disclaimer, like smoking is hazardous to your health on cigarette packages, this book will have to say that reading this may be hazardous to your doing.

And the other thing -- when he is doing he is not being in my space.   Hey, you can't save everyone ... one enlightened person at a time, let's not get crazy here.