IN DEFENSE OF NOTHING part I

Nothing is the state to be.

Why is one so averse to being a non-entity, a non-achiever, a non-believer, a non-person, in a way non-sense. We are so obsessed to being more than ourselves, we cannot accept the concept of just 'being.' Without the trappings of our doings' we still are, and that is a thought we find discomforting. We stripped of our worldly masks, our synthetic roles, our apparels, our personas are to ourselves naked and exposed and that we cannot accept easily.

Why is that? Is it because we are afraid to meet ourselves in our raw and primal state? Is it because we may discover that underneath the false and temporal outer casings we indeed are 'nothing.' Is it because we know that the 'being' in us will reject the form that we have taken in this world. I haven't a clue. All I know is that we all, and, I more than anyone,are terrified of confronting our beings.


What is being? Being is what we are sans job title, sans our accomplishments, sans relations. It is as the philosophers say 'the thing in itself', it is the consiousness minus titles that is ascribed to us, and the ones we ascribe to all our lives. It is us without the names, without the habits, without even our definitive bodies, it is the idea of an existence which has feelings, emotions, and needs, but those very things do not limit that being.


We are so not aware of our inner substance that at times we forget that we even have it. We go through life pretending, acting, putting on, and hiding from our true selves. We restrict our selves to what our role is in this world, a happy successful one, a sad one, or that of a criminal, a lawyer, a mother and so on, and in this endeavor we literally forget that we are in fact all these and a lot more. We have an existence besides these roles and faces that we so readily cling to. We are, we live, and we feel even beyond these masks that we have put on. We are so anxious to assert our roles that life is spent exclusively doing just that, that being, acting and playing 'role ' we have chosen for ourselves. We become insecure if any of these definitive acts of ours are no longer valid or a role is taken away from us, why? because we don't know how to do nothing. It is so wrong in our puritan morality to do nothing, nothing is fearsome, its inexplicable, its threatening simply because it is not known, we avoid it, if a role is taken away from us we run hither and thither to fit our selves into another, whether it fits us or not isn't the point we just have to have another definition for ourselves so that we start doing, acting, playing according to the norms of the new part. How uncomfortable it makes others to be around a person who no longer fits a slot, who is between parts, how to deal with such a person? how to respond? how is this person to act? who is this person? where does such a role-less person fit?


I, on other hand want to do just that. Just 'be' and do 'nothing.' Wouldn't it be liberating to relinquish all roles, tear all boxes that we confine ourselves into and for once just be. Just do what we like to do and live according to instinct and not habit. I'm not advocating sheer irresponsibility towards oneself and others, what I am defending is being comfortable with being instead of having, doing, making, going and all kinds of action words. We need to acquaint ourselves to our cores, our inner conciousness, the I in all of us, we need to realize and establish the superamacy of the voice thats in our head and live as we feel and not as we ought. Because if we make that connection within us then we will live authentically, meaning as we ought to, whatever that ought might be, and not according to a false set of expectations that we have adhered to in absolute delusion.

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