Learn-Grow-Be

Even though most people are always doing all three things throughout their lives as a matter of basic survival and living and sometimes raising a family, these three things are basic components of a life well lived.

In a sense the first thing we do as babies is BE. At least until someone teaches us some other thing that is usually not as worthwhile as just Being.

I have believed for some time now that people are the most amazing when they are first born before they start to get conditioned by family or culture. Holding a newborn in your arms for me has always been a lot like holding God in my arms. Culture, religion, conditioning, all seem to dehumanize in some ways more than humanize a person.

It has always seemed to me that enculturation of all kinds always has to be a tradeoff. Something is lost for whatever is gained in the end, no exceptions.

For example, take my learning to type in 7th grade typing class. Though it enabled me to start whipping out English, History, Chemistry and all my other junior high, high school and college papers it took me away from just writing by hand in my journals. Even now, almost 50 years later I tend to treasure most what I have written by hand, even if it is scratched out in pencil or pen or whatever, or even written on the back of a grocery bag in 1980 when I didn't have paper immediately at hand. This was how my character Arcane first came to be in the summer of 1980, the time traveling priest scientist of the Planet New Deva. It wasn't until I almost died in 1998 that I realized that this wasn't just a character but a past life when I was born in the future on another planet. When I first wrote this I thought all reincarnations had to be linear from past to future. Later I learned that one could be born in one place and time and then be born in any other place and time past, present or future. But in 1980 this was way too much for me to grasp let alone comprehend that I was writing about a past life. I just thought that this character at the time was going through a lot like I had just gone through in my 20s in the 1970s.
At the time I wrote this I was 32.

So, in life one must learn and grow in order to be even though being is the most natural thing we all do at birth. However, it is the most naturally powerful thing we can ever do.

So, as I have grown older and wiser I have found that knowledge can destroy Being. In other words to become successful rather than insane or dead, knowledge can only be a tool in the service of being. If knowledge becomes more important than being than self destruction of the individual or group then begins.

If you want to see pure being go look at newborns of any species. That is the most primal Being one can ever see in living forms. Look at the ocean waves or the clouds in the sky to observe pure being, or watch the sun or moon come up and watch them travel across the sky. All these things are pure being.

If you pull the petals off a flower to find out what it is then you have lost the being of the flower and it dies. The same is true with any living thing you take apart. Yes. You may discover how to heal or other things by cutting or tearing things apart. But you are still sacrificing one being to do this. And every being you sacrifice is YOU. So every time you kill or harm another being you are killing and harming a part of yourselves.

This wisdom born of a lifetime of experience might be one of the most powerful things I can tell you of.

The second thing accompanying the first is that having compassion and kindness towards oneself and all other beings in the universe in the past, present and future is the second factor of living a truly amazing life. Just knowing these two things and living them will take one to enlightenment even in one lifetime.