Jay Earley
Most of my life is devoted to "doing"—achievement, accomplishment, producing things. I have produced three books, numerous articles, created various theories, led many workshops and groups, and now put up a website. Practically every moment of my day is oriented toward accomplishing something. Sometimes I am engaged in work that is pretty mundane—answering email, working on the website, writing a brochure. Sometimes I am doing something more creative, such as developing a new understanding of the relationship between spirituality and social transformation. However, it is usually oriented toward accomplishment in a way that is divorced from being truly present in the moment—sometimes completely divorced, sometimes only partly. As my spiritual work deepens, I feel the hollowness of this mode of activity. Despite the fact that I am often working on worthwhile things that mean something to me and may have a positive impact on the world, there is frequently a flatness to my experience--a lack of aliveness, depth, and meaning. It is often not the activities themselves that are the problem but rather the way I go about them.
I usually approach these activities in a way that is divorced from Being. I am using the word "Being" to refer to being present and fully alive in each moment, being embodied, in touch, open. I have come to see Doing and Being as a profound pair of complementary qualities in human existence. Because of my personal history, my inclinations, and our societal values, my life has largely been devoted to Doing to the exclusion of Being. This is despite the fact that I have been deeply engaged in psychological and spiritual growth for over 30 years and have changed and developed enormously in that time. I suppose it is all relative. Compared to the average American workaholic, I am deeply devoted to Being, but compared to what I sense is possible, I am not. Recently my spiritual work has opened me up to a new level of appreciation for the beauty and meaning of Being, to the realness and juiciness of Being, and so I know that Being is what my heart really wants. Or rather, what I desire is an integration of Doing and Being, so that my action can flow from presence rather than cutting me off from presence.
However, I am so deeply entrenched in my Doing orientation that it is hard to find my way to Being. If I begin to let go of my preoccupation with Doing, I flounder. If I decide that today I won’t simply spend my time on one project after another, I don’t know what to do with myself—notice that—do with myself. At those times, I can’t find a sense of what to do or how to be. I could just spend my time doing enjoyable activities such as reading or hiking (which, of course, I do), but this goes to the other extreme where I am only Being. It perpetuates the split between Doing and Being. I don’t know how to be in an ordinary day where I do want to accomplish things without being cut off from myself and from spirit. The old Doing motivation runs so deep that I feel lost without it to guide my actions.
I am not unique in this dynamic. Our society is also built on Doing in a way that is disconnected from Being. Today our society is run primarily by our economic system, which is oriented toward only one thing—short term profit. At the personal level, this translates into a drive toward career advancement, money, power, status. And the push toward profit and personal advancement has led us to do everything faster and more efficiently, with little regard for the consequences to our quality of our lives, the viability of our biological support systems, our community connections with each others, and the resilience of our technological systems. Our exclusive preoccupation with Doing has led us into an unhealthy and dangerous situation. At a societal level, Being has to do with community, connection with the earth, and the quality of one’s inner experience. If our society was more oriented toward Being, it would mean taking things more slowly so we could experience ourselves, so we could examine the consequences of introducing each new technology. It would mean looking at the human outcome of our economic arrangements. It would mean caring about our roots, our history, and the values that gives our lives meaning.
In my research on social evolution (see Transforming Human Culture: Social Evolution and the Planetary Crisis), I identified what I call ground and emergent qualities of societies throughout human history. The ground qualities have been around since the beginning of our history and correspond to Being. They are natural living, community, equality, and participatory consciousness. The emergent qualities have gradually become more prominent as society has evolved. They are the Doing qualities—technology, social structure, and rational thinking. In today’s society, The Doing qualities have taken over and suppressed Being. This is the root cause of the great number of social problems our world is facing today. We have sacrificed Being for speed, power, and profit. We have huge chains replacing the Mom and Pop stores that were an integral part of their communities. We have large conglomerates that pursue maximum profit while they destroy quality—for example, quality of patient care in medicine and psychotherapy and quality of writing in publishing. We exploit Third World countries for their natural resources and cheap labor and ignore the consequences to the lives of their people and our own.
Social activists are also prone to Doing in a dissociated way. After all, we are products of our society and it isn’t easy to change such a deeply ingrained pattern of Doing. In addition, we often feel an urgency to accomplish as much as possible because of the destructive momentum of our current society. There is a trap in this. We often ignore our relationships with each other while organizing meetings. We forget the depths of our souls while pressuring people, institutions, corporations, and governments to wake up. When we do these things, we are acting partly out of the same mindset that produced many of our problems in the first place. If we approach social change in this way, we may prevent some of the worst abuses, but we won't really be able to transform society.
Let’s go back to my personal struggle with Doing and Being. Right now, my accomplishing has to do with my website. There is so much to do and seemingly so little time. I feel a burning need to produce a great web site, both to help with societal issues and for my own ego needs for recognition. However, I realize that if I spend most of my time in such a hurried, closed state of consciousness, I really won’t have much of value to offer to people. My website may get up fast with a lot of material on it, but the material will be of poor quality, especially the material that I write. If I am closed off from Being, I am closed off from my creativity, my sensitivity, and my depth. In that state, what I produce won’t be worth producing. I begin to see the futility of my accomplishing mode.
This leads me to explore this dilemma using my spiritual practice (the Diamond Approach). First I take some time to feel what it is like to be without my Doing agenda. I allow myself to stay with and explore the experience of not knowing what to do, the experience of being lost. This eventually leads me to feel the sensations in my body in a more direct way, to be more present with myself. I gradually sink to a level of presence that is very satisfying. I feel grounded and whole and in touch with my depths. However, though this experience is very pleasant, it isn’t enough to answer the question at hand. I have now switched into Being mode, but in a way that is cut off from Doing. Being and Doing are still not integrated. If I go no further than this, when I stop my spiritual work and return to my work of the day, I will be back in a dissociated Doing mode.
Then it occurs to me to write about my current dilemma and experience, and to connect it with societal issues, as I have done in this article. Immediately, my presence shifts and deepens. I have an experience of grounding and maturity, which seems connected to being aligned with a profound sense of life purpose. I know that this is a sign that writing this article is the right way to go at this moment. And as I write the article, I feel different. I feel present while I am accomplishing a task. I have taken a small step toward integrating Doing and Being in my life. Hopefully I have also contributed to helping others with this issue and, in my small way, changing society.
How can I take this further? How can I integrate Being and Doing more fully in my life, and especially in my social transformation work? How can we all do this? Can we make real contact with the people we meet and work with in our community organizations and in the government and media? Can we take the time to be with ourselves in deep ways on a regular basis despite the urgency of the issues we work on? Can we think wisely and creatively about our goals and strategies instead of rushing to do the first thing that seems to arise? Can we be compassionate and understanding with people who see the world differently, so we can communicate with them in constructive ways? Can we listen to our deeper intuition in making decisions about how to proceed, so that our activities lead toward a healthier society and not just the prevention of immediate harm? Can we truly work for the good of the whole rather than only for our own comfort or ego needs.
If we can, then our lives will be richer as we work on social transformation, and we will be more likely to succeed.