Letter: Only place to be alive is in the unknowable present

From: Tom Lane

Columbus

As I sit drinking my coffee and reading the newspaper, I wonder why it is so difficult to see that we humans have lost our essence. I pause with my reading and feel my own being, sitting in my room, just aware of my surroundings and feeling the connection to life. We lost our way.

We lost our way when we began to “name” everyone and everything. This is how we make people into objects, including our own being. We name something and then believe the name is the actual being. We then add our conditions and judgments and beliefs and values and paint over that essence. We have made another human a thought, and lost the actual being.

Pause for a second from reading this, and see if you can go to your essence. Can you see that you are not your name, your identity, your job, your family, your religion and all the rest? At this very moment, you are a point of awareness, alive in this world. Can you step back for a moment and just be with that essence, or have you lost that forever? Can you hold that presence, as it is sometimes called. It has no name, only the direct experience of being alive. Being here.

And if you can hold that, you can look around and see all the people/things in your world and how we have named it all. And how that “name’ has taken the place of the essential being. How we have done that to our entire life and everything in it. We live in our mentally constructed world of names, and the attached values/beliefs/biases/judgments.

We no longer deal with the essence of any other being, only with our named opinion of them. And them of us. And us of us. And we sit and endlessly argue, debate, fight and threaten all those whose “names” are not fitting with our version. I hope you have stayed quiet to see this for yourself. My words can only point to a possibility for you to “be” in your life, even for a second.

We have made this world quite insane, in all our endeavor to name and know. And in the process, we have lost the essence of being alive. The only place to be alive is in the unnamed and unknowable present moment. You can now return to your regularly scheduled programming.