Philosophers like Martin Heidegger, author of Being and Time, make a big something out of nothing (or, in the case of Heidegger, “no-thingness”). Meditation gurus also make nothing into something. Seems that in the background of our plain, but busy, lives there is this need to get in touch with “being” itself. Or should I say "Being Itself"?

Problem is, we’re always busy, maybe too busy to be concerned about being because our focus is on doing. So, there’s this almost unavoidable dichotomy that plagues us: Being someplace doing something vs. being someplace doing nothing. “What? You need me to… Let me check my schedule…Thursday’s good for me, say about noon. I’ve been trying to get away for some relaxation, maybe a quiet time to ‘just be me’ for a couple of days. No hassles. No schedules. I want to slow down, get in touch with myself, and possibly just stare at a meadow or mountain or ocean. I want something different, a place and time that take me away from all I have to do.” We have either said such or heard such.

But could “doing” actually be our “being”? Staring at a meadow or mountain is actually doing. Right? “Okay, staring is not a frenetic activity by comparison with handing in reports, fixing a machine on time, or preparing others for some task. Getting in touch with our “being” always means doing something. We are doers.

Now what are you doing? Meditating? That’s good, right? Getting in touch with “Self,” “Nature,” “Being Itself.” But do you really need to “get in touch” with any of the three? Aren’t you, by virtue of existing in a place and at a time where and when you do something, connected to Being?

Heidegger, philosophers, and ascetics want you to reconnect to something from which you cannot be separated. Thingness is your earthly destiny. And things require action from the movement of their subatomic particles to their movement by some physical or biological agent. You and “things” are the manifestation of Being in place. Being reveals itself in you. And, sorry to tell those who think they need to “get away to get in touch,” doing is being in touch with Being.

There’s nothing wrong with quiet reflection, with travels to see the guy on the top of the mountain who has “all the answers,” or with pondering philosophical matters. Just remember that both you and the Wise One on the mountain both had to “do” some climbing just to get there. Before you make the trip in search of wisdom and a greater connection to the Great Whatever, think about the life you’ve had in a place, where you have done the work of Being. Maybe we should all be traveling to see you. Your daily activities are the essence of Being.

Enjoy the hassles, the deadlines, and the searches for Self. They are the meaning of Being.

The tragedy of suicide that afflicts families just about everywhere has been, is, and will be the result of a mysterious choice. Yes, we might have a sketchy idea why some might take their own lives: Terminal and mental illnesses and losses of some kind, such as financial loss or the loss of a loved one. But at the heart of any decision to leave life voluntarily is the question about the final nature of the choice. There is, after all, no return policy on the decision. All sales are final.

Tenuous as every life is, self-conscious life is apparently also rare in the universe. So far, we seem to be in a very small group of self-aware beings. Because humans have a tradition of valuing highly anything that is rare (gold, diamonds, platinum), shouldn’t we also value highly the rarity called self-consciousness? Accepting self-consciousness as valuable makes suicide all the more mysterious. Why abandon something deemed to have great value because of its rarity?

Suicide removes a self-conscious organism from the universe of rare self-consciousness. That removal befuddles the living because self-consciousness defines human value. Shouldn’t we want more, not less?

In the universe’s store of possibilities, self-awareness has its price. It can be costly to realize that no product is perfect, that much effort has gone into the development of imperfection, and that such a product as consciousness can fade or decay. Every life has a flaw of some kind. Self-conscious life has the ability to focus on its own imperfections. For some, that focus appears to be an expenditure too great to bear.

The cost of continued self-consciousness is continued life and experience, regardless of circumstances. Yet, for some, circumstances seem to diminish or outweigh the value of self-awareness. They make the choice that the living find difficult to understand, a mysterious choice to abandon an essence of being human.

From our birth, we self-conscious beings go to the store of life to purchase more self-consciousness. Not every product, however, satisfies our need for greater awareness, and we discard some awareness in the vagaries of memory. We remain, however, self-aware until some terminal event closes the store’s door to further purchases.  

Self-consciousness is an existential affluence that exceeds in value any material storehouse of treasure. To enhance awareness adds value to human essence. To eliminate it is a mysterious choice.

You take a photo with a phone, and through the magic of GPS, the phone tells you where and when you took the picture. Think about that. If you had the storage space on your smart phone, you could travel the world snapping photos as fast as your finger could hit the button. Want to relive the trip? Just view the pics. Put the camera on panorama, and you’ll get almost as much a view as the one you acquired with your brain’s camera.

There they are, all those megapixels of where you have been now readily available and stamped with a date, a time, and a place. Also, those pixels capture much of what the camera sees. It’s almost as though we don’t need the brain’s camera. Technology is replacing us, isn’t it? Actually, no. There’s a difference.

All those brain-camera images are as much impressions as they are images. They are as much sound, smell, touch, and taste as they are images. Plus, you don’t see the world you think you see. Just as there are gaps between the pixels of your camera’s images, there are some gaps in your images. Remember that “blind spot” in your eyes you learned about in science class? You don’t take in the entire scene that your eyes scan. In addition, you don’t recall the images you originally captured. Between capture and recall are intervening experiences that alter memories, and, thus, mental images.

So, the places we believe we mapped accurately are not quite the accurate photo-like representations we might think they are. Our mental maps are at once figments of our imagination, collections of experiences and facts, fragments of concepts and introjections, and segments of faithfully sensed reality all gathered together under the aegis of mood. Their time stamp is flawed; their location, afloat on a Heraclitean river of memory. Gee, I thought this room was bigger. Gosh, I thought this park had the smell of flowers. I don’t recall this trip’s being this long.

Yet, for all their literal inaccuracy, our mental maps are more faithful representations of who we are than any megapixel smart phone image could capture. 

You have accumulated information, and you treasure it as yours. Of course, some of it is shared information. Sharing information is the way the universe works. That’s one of the reasons that physicists like Stephen Hawking spend time thinking about black holes. Black holes might be sinks for information. Whatever—star, planet, dust, and gas—falls into them takes information about itself into the darkness. Black holes are the ultimate burning of the library of Alexandria.

What causes us, sometimes, to act like black holes? Is it just a matter of our finiteness and limited intellects? All that information we learned about what is good or bad, about “smart” and “dumb,” about healthful and unhealthful, and all the associated information disappears in the black hole of disuse, forgetfulness, and willful hoarding.

Apparently, from generation to generation we burn our libraries. We fail to pass on the information that would save the next generation from folly, mistake, and evil.

Is there any sign that we are preserving our Alexandrian library for the next generation? Will we fail like those who built previous libraries?  

What is the math of your life? What percentage of you is just you? What have you added to the base you? What have you compounded? Are you constantly changing the logarithms?

Every once in a while you encounter some test of your personal math: On a scale from 1 to 10, what is your pain level, what is your anger, what is your anxiety, what is your…? Name it, and there’s a quantifying scale. Trouble is that much of what you are, and no one knows "how much," isn't quantifiable. Yet, there are those who would have you do the math.

How frightened have you been? 10? Wow! That’s a bunch of fright. It has to be much more than a 9. Are you dealing with logb(x)=y? What is the log? What is the exponent? How did we arrive at the base number? What if, for example, I was frightened only 2? What does that mean?  

Now beliefs. Do you believe in God? In gods? In a material world composed only of matter and energy with no spiritual component? Is that belief, on a scale of 1 to 10, an 8? Is it “off the charts”? As philosophers might ask, what is the nature of belief anyway? You say, “I believe what I believe.”  

What’s the point? If you truly examine yourself, you will find that you can qualify, but not quantify. Yet, you constantly attempt to “decide” on the bases of numbers. And you tie the numbers to an economics of living.

At what number do you tip the scale in favor of one action over another? Sorry, I know this is frustrating, but the realities of decision-making warrant some examination of the process. The realities of your behavior also warrant that examination.

Take pot-smoking. Harm scale: 1? 6? 0? Any way to know? Weigh the risks in life, you are told. You can look at scientific studies, of course. Those who write them surely are quantifiers, aren’t they? Well, okay, you see some contradictory studies, some incomplete studies, and some supposedly definitive studies. But how do you quantify the studies themselves? Statistically? So, do you adopt a behavior because “on average” you might…. No, of course not. Does it matter that some people suffer damage to brain fibers, according to a recent study, by smoking high potency pot? If someone tells you the “numbers,” do you consider them in your behavior? In your beliefs? Stephen Hawking, the renowned physicist, should have died years ago according to the statistics on ALS.

When it comes to you, you are a qualifier.

Allow me to borrow from a dying Simón Bolívar. After setting a number of colonial areas on their paths to independence, Bolivar said that America was ungovernable. (For those of you on the northern continent, yes, those on the southern one are also Americans)

Basically, Bolívar said on his deathbed that his fellow revolutionaries had merely “plowed the sea.” Like the wakes of boats, furrows won’t last long in water. The “sea” of nineteenth century South America was no place for seeds to take root and grow into the stable countries the revered revolutionary had envisioned.

Revising the makeup of a country is not an easy task when one considers how difficult it is just to revise one’s own life. We try. We plant seeds of change, and we want them to grow. Occasionally, we get a crop of change we can harvest, one that provides the sustenance we need for long term. Often, however, we plow the sea. The furrows collapse before we plant, and the seeds we do scatter fall on nothing substantial, no nourishing medium, rather merely salt water.

It’s often discouraging being one’s own revolutionary, being the one responsible for overturning an established way of life. But take some encouragement in this: Bolívar is renowned today as one whose seemingly tenuous efforts have turned into actual entities capable of acting on the world stage, if only in some minor fashion. Have his furrows produced what he envisioned? Maybe less in some instances and maybe more in others. Casting seeds in furrows is not a guarantee of a successful crop even when the furrows are cut into a medium more stable than shifting waters.

But some crop is better than no crop. Some seeds do turn into plants, and some of those plants do produce. So, even when you think you are merely plowing the sea, realize that your plowing and planting might, if not by your ostensible efforts then by a remote probability, produce a crop, possibly small, but nevertheless a crop.

Fortunately, It’s a Palliative World

Seems we’re constantly mourning losses. Oh! We’re not the first. The world’s been this way since life-forms could sense loss. From elephants to dogs even animals appear to mourn, and if they do so, they probably are part of a long evolutionary trait. No, we don’t know exactly why animals act the way they do after a loss, but their behaviors certainly lend themselves to anthropic interpretations and projections of human sorrow.

I once saw a small bird get hit by a car. Injured to the point of dying, it lay on the road and moved a wing in an attempt to fly. In moments another bird landed beside it, appeared to encourage it to get up, and then flew off as the next car approached. Traffic cleared, the bird returned, still seeming, as my human interpretation runs, perplexed at why the other bird wouldn’t rise. Moving rapidly beside it and flapping its wings, the healthy bird appeared to show the fallen bird how to fly. “Just move your wings like this.” Another car, another fly-off. Car gone, the bird returned again. But the injured bird showed no response. One more attempt to get the bird to rise, one more frantic dance. Then off. But to where? To some bough to mourn? Was all that behavior really humanlike? Was it an attempt to comfort? Was it just my wish that it was?

Losses to disease, accident, and murder elicit mourning. And in each of those incidents we are as bewildered and as helpless as a bird that tries to get a fallen mate to rise.   

With regard to our finiteness, complete remission is not a probability. It’s not even a possibility. The losses that trouble us now troubled our ancestors and will trouble our descendants. This seems, of course, to be a pessimistic view: No cures for finiteness. But by being at the side of those who suffer, we can serve a palliative purpose. Our very presence is a cloak that covers the pain, if not for the one lost, then for the one left behind.

Like the healthy bird on the road, those who comfort offer relief. “I am with you. Though bewildered and saddened by my ineffectiveness, I want you to know that I am with you. Let my presence be the cloak that covers your pain. Know that someone cares. You are not alone on the road of life and the path to death. Let me ease your pain.”  

Some of us are neat. We have a place for everything. We nearly fit the stereotype of the neatfreak, the retentive, or the obsessive-compulsive perfectionist. Some of us are messy. The only order in our lives is persistent disorder. But generally, one idea seems to underlie our lives: If we can find order, we can find meaning.

In reality, every organization is messy within. Ostensible organization usually hides actual disarray. Take your thoughts, for example.

On the surface, you probably seem to be more in command of concepts and principles than you really are. You make statements; others accept them as evidence of your strong principles and erudition. But internally, you have an unseen battle. No singular philosophy has universally dominated minds; the unexplained lies at the base of each. Yes, some philosophies have dominated for brief durations in local cultures, but none have become universal. Physics, too, has its problems. Has it now become philosophy as it attempts to explain both how and why there is what is? Big Bang, clashing branes, black hole genesis, and even nothingness itself producing something: These are, regardless of the ostensible organization of their proponents, still a bit messy, still a bit incomplete, and still doubted by adversarial minds.

Let’s just go with it, the messy desk, the crowded closet, and the junk drawer of thought. Acknowledge the mess but deal with the realities as they come. Every once in a while, something in the mess makes sense and actually serves as an operational method. What emerges from disorganization can briefly and locally organize. The mess can serve a purpose, become useful at least temporarily, and impose a seeming order on thoughts, actions, and events. 

You know the cliché. Messy desk, organized mind. “Don’t touch anything on my desk; I know where everything is.” And then, rummaging through the pile, not always, but sometimes, you find that key piece of paper that solves the problem of the moment. The solution lay in the mess all along. You just have to go through it piece by piece, making more of a mess by shuffling, but ultimately finding that one paper that temporarily makes the moment seem organized and your life meaningful.

Think of guilt as a place. Places have dimensions; they have shapes. So, what are the dimensions and shape of the place we call guilt?

My guess is that guilt is a confining place. Once in a state of guilt, long in a state of guilt, right? Leaving is difficult. It’s pretty much a Klein bottle, turning on itself, with outside on the inside and inside on the outside. Just when you think you are leaving, you find you are entering.

You might think that someone else has put you in/on the Klein bottle of guilt. You say to yourself, “So-n-so makes me feel guilty.” And maybe to a certain extent you are right. You have constructed your Klein bottle with some help, but once you start the construction, its never-ending curving, opening, and closing on itself are largely your doing. You make it even more complex over time. No! Guilt is not a good place for you. As a place, it is a trap of confining dimensions. How do you get out of the Klein bottle? You don’t do it by continuing to travel over its twisted surface. Both you and the person you think "makes me feel guilty" are bound to that single surface.

You might say that the "other" doesn't suffer; only you suffer because of the guilt. But that other person is also walking on an unending surface of dependency. Making you feel guilty is part of his or her identity and daily travels. Breaking the bond of guilt would benefit both of you.

You need an Alexandrian solution. Remember that Alexander the Great, as the legend goes, could not untie the Gordian knot, so he found a simple solution. He drew his sword and cut the knot. You need to break the Klein bottle for the sake of both of you.  

Picture your guilt. Picture a Klein bottle. Picture yourself breaking the Klein bottle. It’s the only escape. You need another dimension in your life, one more open, one that doesn't turn back upon itself. Anything else keeps you on the interminable surface. Come on, you can do it. Break that bottle. Break up guilt. Destroy that place so that both of you can move on.     

I’ll go out on a limb and say it, “You are enamored of numbers and quantities.” I don’t mean a general “you”; I mean you specifically, and I say that without having met you. Your affinity for numbers and quantities has nothing to do with your facility at math. It has everything to do with practicality and culture in a specific place. Apparently, people can quickly assimilate values derived from quantities and measures cherished by others.

With regard to practicality, I would ask you to think of being an anthropologist who is the first “outsider” to make contact with one of the estimated 70 or 80 Amazonian previously unmet tribes. You think of a series of questions to convey to them: How many tribesmen are there? How many adults are in the tribal village? Are relationships monogamous? How many children per family unit? How many huts? How far away from civilization do they live? If they hunt with bows and arrows, how many does each tribesman have? If they use blowguns, how many darts does each carry? How much of the rainforest do they occupy? How old are they on average? What is the infant mortality rate? How many indigenous diseases do they carry? How many will I kill by introducing diseases like the flu, diseases against which they have no immunity? You will think of other numbers to obtain, and you might want to ask how you can trust the validity of any of them, including the estimate of “70 to 80 Amazonian tribes” never contacted by outsiders.

Counting and measuring are part of your makeup: You do it in both ordinary and extraordinary contexts (like meeting formerly uncontacted Amazonians). You can offer a count of all your material possessions: How many cars? How many radios? How many TVs? How many suits or dresses? If you are a citizen of the United States or some other developed country, you are used to finding value in the “count and measure of things.”  

The same goes for areas and volumes: How much of the rainforest do the tribesmen occupy? How much of your neighborhood do you occupy? How many square feet in an Amazonian hut? How many square feet in your dwelling? The quantities are important to you; they might not be as important to the Amazonians—at least not initially. It’s hard to tell because by contacting them, you immediately put them in the encompassing framework of your society.

Where am I going with this? Regardless of principles like Gresham’s Law, there is, in fact, no inherent value in any quantity or numbers of objects. In the context of a society gold has value. In the context of a starving individual on a life raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, gold has little or even no value. Its weight makes gold a detriment to survival unless it can serve as a fishing hook. But even utility does not ensure value. Where there are no fish to catch, no hook’s utility gives it value.

In fact, most objects people accumulate in an affluent society serve no utility. Many such objects are just “more of the same.” Try to understand the importance of each quantity assigned a value by a culture or subculture. In the eyes of every “tribe” the quantities cherished by another “tribe” might initially seem strange. Don’t understand someone’s obsession with sports memorabilia? Don’t understand a reason for fossil collections? Don’t understand an old record collection?

Put yourself in an Amazonian village for a month without the objects you either value or have become accustomed to using. Place alters your perspective. You aren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto. Or, by your presence, reveal your values to Amazonian villagers. You alter place. Soon, formerly naked people have not just one, but two or more pairs of shorts. Hut owners acquire utensils, and their huts take on different meaning. A place becomes quantified. People assign values to quantities.

As you grew, you assimilated, and you adapted to quantities valued by those around you. Which of the seemingly essential quantities that you value are valueless in the eyes of another culture or subculture? Does Out-of-place = Out-of-value?