Beingness is something that is all around us at every moment. It is the ground of being and its most fundamental. However, it’s often not recognised. It’s like asking a fish what water is. A fish has no concept of there being a place that is not encapsulated entirely by water, so therefore, it has no use for the concept of water. Water just is.
In the same way, beingness just is. Beingness is, though, ungraspable by the mind. It is beyond the mind. I realise the irony of writing a blog post about beingness using my mind and language, which is a tool of the mind, in order to do so. Nothing I can say can really get at what beingness truly is. Reading this blog post won’t help you understand it, truly. The only way, that I know of, is to find an awake teacher and be in their presence. If their energy field is powerful enough, it will give you a taste of what I’m talking about. Actually, I lied just now. I do know of another way, that is through self enquiry, by asking the question “What is aware?” and then turning your attention back to look for the source of awareness. In doing this, I can also find the same space. But, for me it’s a matter of the sequence of events. I have no way of knowing whether self enquiry would’ve worked for me prior to being energetically opened up in a Buddha field for some years. The truth is, I suspect not.
In any case, beingness is not a feeling, not an experience, it’s not something you can touch with your hands. In fact, anything that appears in your awareness cannot be it. It is the subject and not the object. And as I write all of these things, there’s a paradox that underlies all of it, because beingness is also all of those things as well, it is beneath and behind everything I’ve just outlined, but not on the surface, at great depth.
There is the possibility, as a human being with a body-mind, to be experiencing beingness quite directly. So, even though, beingness itself is not an experience, there seems to be a certain flavour that comes through in the body-mind when awareness turns and locks onto awareness in your nervous system. The experience is like a mild satori, which I’ve described in other blog posts, but it’s profoundly peaceful, beautiful and vast. It’s lovely being in this state. To die for! 😉
Once the taste of beingness becomes familiar to you, you can check in and find how in touch with it you are at any given moment and you can often measure it quite accurately. You can be more “in” or more “out” with your attention. This proportion of being in or out titrates the experience of beingness in the body-mind; either strengthening it or weakening it.
To be awake or to be enlightened is to always have some portion of awareness on beingness or, to say it another way, to always have awareness on awareness itself, at least to some degree. Before awakening, this experience may come and go, but it will not stay long, in most cases. This is because the body-mind organism is a survival mechanism. It has no use for beingness. What is the point of munging out when I’ve got bills to pay? How is infinite bliss gonna get me that awesome new car I want? How long can I afford to just let my awareness rest in the vastness of empty space when I need my attention to make shit happen in the world? And so on…
The tendency is for attention (I use attention here to discriminate from awareness to give it a sense of personal agency or choice) to stay on awareness for a short time and then come back to the default mode network (DMN) in the brain. The DMN is the brain in standby mode essentially, either in daydreaming or mind-wandering when not actively engaged in an external task. You can tell you’re in DMN when those random, seemingly unrelated thoughts just seem to pop into your head out of nowhere. This is part of our evolution as humans and appears to be quite useful in terms of memory consolidation and constructing a coherent sense of self.
So, because this tendency for attention to always tend to want to come back either to the DMN or to external reality, rather than staying with beingness, it requires a lot of effort, from the perspective of the ego, to remain there. It’s going “against the stream” to borrow a useful term from Buddhism.
How then, does one wake up and stay there? Well, firstly, I don’t now. I’m not awake. But from what I can gather from spiritually advanced practitioners who I do believe are awake and in that state 24/7, one has to give up everything that the mind is attached to including the sense of self. That means your kids, your husband, your wife, your job, your possessions, your status, your prestige, your image in the eyes of others, everything you care about. Essentially, you have to be willing to die right now. Without any form of trying to protect yourself. This DOESN’T mean you can’t have those things in your life, you can, you just can’t be attached to them. Because any form of attachment is going to take the body-mind into clinging or some kind of defence system, which necessarily attracts attention to it and, hence, away from beingness.
This explanation of how the survival mechanism works makes a lot of sense to me. It seems coherent and logical. If one is to stay in touch with beingness or, to say it another way, if one is to stay awake, one must remove everything in the way of attention resting with beingness.
So, on the one hand, it’s quite simple to do. On the other hand, it’s the most difficult thing you will ever attempt in your life.