BEING and THE WAY

by Hugh M. Lewis

A bamboo is more supple than a gnarled old limb—the bamboo bends in whichever direction the wind blows, while the limb is sure to break in a heavy storm. But the old twisted limb is sure to make the more dependable walking stick.

Truth resides in the undichotomized whole, and is revealed in the relations between the many parts. The way is always a paradox—a dilemma of alternative avenues.

We seek what we cannot know and we know what we cannot seek.

When we exhaust all our answers, only questions remain. There is no solution that does not give birth to yet a new set of problems.

Every path leads to the way, and the way follows every path.

In a world of proud princes, it is the humble pauper who is king.

In a world of big Chiefs, it is the little brave who would carry the day.

In a world full of captains and commanders, it is the peacemaker who conquers

In a world of the beautiful and sophisticated, it is the plain and simple that is most sublime

In a world full of the unusual and the extreme, it is the commonplace and average that is most outstanding

In a world of prophets and visionaries, it is the blind mute who points the way.

In a world full of many winners, it is the loser who counts success as a lesson well learned.

In a world full of complicated words, it is the simple deed that speaks the loudest.

Nothing is, that also is not. Everything that seems to be, is really something else. The art of living is always an art of indirection, and the way of life is never a straight line.

It wasn’t until I walked the way of the world that I came to understand how much of a home-body I really had been. But, upon returning home, I soon realized how much of a discontent wanderer I had become.

A never ending source of paradox is that although our illusions must always be dispelled, our life is full of illusion that sustains us in the darkness of disillusionment.

The way lies in waiting for the hapless wanderer who come stumbling along searching for it. It is ever patient and ever present and ever silent. It never tells the wanderer when she or he has found it.

There is only one way, though it comes from many corners of the world and leads in many directions. If you happen to meet someone along the way going in the opposite direction as yourself, neither traveler is wrong. Both are just upon different parts of the same path.

The way that is, is never the way. The way that isn’t, is always the way. Neither this way nor that way is the way, nor is the other way. The way that isn’t the way always winds between the other ways.

The way has no beginning and no end, but is always between both beginning and end. It is an eternally moving moment that never comes to rest. To follow along the way is to make a journey without ever reaching the journey’s end. The destination of the journey is to be found along the way.

There is no wrong way, because there is no right way. There is no best way, because there is no worst way. There is only one way, but it leads in an infinite number of directions. Though there are an infinite number of directions, they all lead in the same way. We cannot lose the way that we cannot find—we can only lose the way that can be found.

The way always leads in only one direction, and the way is without any direction. We cannot turn back along the directionless way. The way is always forward, though there are many dead ends. The directionless way is always long and winding, twisting and turning in many directions, and though each direction is the way, the way remains only one directionless direction.

To follow the way is to lead the way is to follow the way is to lead the way….until we’ve finally lost our way. And once having lost the way, then we will finally find it. And finding it, then we eventually lose it forever.

The directionless direction cannot be found by any map or compass. It is the direction that the wind blows and the water flows. It is the direction that the earth moves through the universe, and the direction the human takes through the forest. The way is always a grand circle within a circle, encompassing yet other circles. The directionless direction of the way is infinitely roundabout and circular.

We cannot ever change our way, though the way is always changing. The power of the way is its paradox, and the paradox of the way is its power. The direction without direction leads in all directions and yet goes nowhere. The directionless direction leads nowhere, and yet can be found everywhere. It is somewhere and anywhere. And there is here and this is that.

The way is silent, and silence is to be found along the way. Words are like stones in the way—they mark the path but make the path difficult to follow. Words are strung together by silence and the way of silence is strewn with words. Words may need the way, but the way does not need words.

The wise person knows the way though s/he has never seen it. The fool is blind to the way though s/he may have long lived beside it.

The way passes through this world, but is not of this world. It is of another world. This world is full of petty people who think they are important, but travelers along the way are few and far between. The way begins at the end of the world, and the world begins at the end of the way.

The way ends at the end of the day. The way is not a matter of distance, but of duration. It is not a sense of place, but one of process. Where the sun rises, that is where the way begins.

Night overshadows the way, and clouds our senses. We fear the night because we lose our way.

To lead the way is to follow the way. To follow the way is to lead the way. To see the way is to seek the way. To seek the way is to see the way. To find the way is to lose the way. To lose the way is to find the way. To learn the way is to travel the way. To travel the way is to learn the way.

Like a long tunnel that never ends, the way always leads through darkness to a distant source of light. Which star in the nighttime sky is not the way?

We cannot ever know what is in the minds of others, but only what is in our own minds. We can know what is in our minds only imperfectly and with uncertainty, for our minds area always playing tricks upon us and fooling us—hiding and changing. And if our minds are always hiding and changing, then knowing the minds of others is thus doubly treacherous. It is a miraculous wonder that we may know anything at all except our own illusion.

Humanness is the source of our being, and our being is the source of our humanness. As human beings, the evolution of our experience and the experience of our evolution has gone hand in hand with the creation of the uniqueness and paradox of our condition. With each new generation born, this evolutionary experience of humanity is recreated and relived in both the parents and their children. As such, our species are but one linkage in a long chain that stretches back time immemorial to the very beginning of life on earth. And each generation is the next and newest link.

Being is a frame of mind and mind is a state of being. It follows that if the sense of being is environmental in nature, then so too are the senses of the mind. Both mind and being are organically rooted in the evolutionary experience of the natural world.

Being is always decentered. As such it chronically lacks the sense of balance that only comes from the possession of the center. Being is always upon the outside looking in, and never upon the inside looking out. The state of being and the frame of mind of the view from the inside is fundamentally different from the being of the view from the outside. The view from the outside is subject to the vicissitudes and vagaries of nature—to its changes of weather and the predation of the wild. It suffers the cold and wet of winter and the heat and sun of summer. The view from the inside is one based upon the control of nature, the protection from elemental forces and hazards. It is an artificial point of view.

The sense of being is not to be gained through vicarious experience. Vicariousness substitutes illusion for the reality of being. It is difficult not to live vicariously in a world that so conditions our experience by vicariousness and illusion. The existential problematic of modern living is not the same imperative of survival that made earlier humankind’s sense of being in the world so sharp and acute. It has become the imperative of learning to live non-vicariously by seeing through the illusions that come between our experiences of the world and our own sense of being in the world. It has become the imperative of recovering a lost sense of being in our world from the flood of illusions that inundates our experiences.

Being begins in the bare bones of basic experience. The raw state of its reality works its way from the surface of our skin deep down underneath like an infection that spreads throughout the body. Being begins in honesty. It is free of illusion because it cannot lie.

Along the way of being, we give up our innocence for wisdom. Being does not come with disillusionment, but before the illusion. Disillusionment suffers the loss of being upon the road to becoming. It represents a return to the place where we started, with the experience of what was left behind, without the original innocence with which we started.

Our return to natural being can never be complete. It must always entail a sense of loss, of imperfection, of unfinished business, and of unfulfilled feelings. The recovery of our own natural innocence can only be had through the discovery of the darkness of our own hearts from which the possibility of our disillusionment and the disillusionment of our possibility both spring simultaneously.

Nonbeing is to be found in the denial of death, as something dark, unnatural and evil. Being is to be found in the embrace of the existential inevitability of death, in the ephemera presence and mortality of our own existence.

Being begins in the experience of death and ends in the experience of birth. In each birth is the beginning of another death, and in every death is the ending of another birth. We cannot be and deny our own mortality at the same time, not without delusion and self-deception.

Our being in the world has become increasingly defined and constrained by the earthboundness of our contemporary condition on earth. Because we cannot escape our earthboundness, we cannot escape the existential consequences of its ecological imperative upon our lives. It is a paradox that the salvation of our own being in the world is based upon and in turn forms the basis of the salvation of our world itself, just as the destruction of our world is rooted in and leads to the destruction of our own sense of being in the world. Human reality and being are inextricably related with its earthbound environment. Human destiny will be the fate of the earth.

The way changes with the world. What it was yesterday is not what it will become tomorrow. Today it takes us this way, and tomorrow it will take us that way. The way is always some other way.

The way is not well served by hurrying along without smelling the flowers and seeing the picturesque sites. The way is therefore always slow and steady, sometimes stopping and often turning. It is made for walking and not for running.

We may sleep and rest, and yet still journey along the way. Our dreams area always a journey along the way. We may spend all the day of our lives working and traveling to one place or another, and yet never once make a single step along the way. We may journey along the way by standing still, and we may move unendingly and yet go nowhere. The way moves mountains closer to our feet, but it does not move our feet closer to the mountains.

The way is always the vision of a mountaintop hovering above our horizon, and it always leads through a dense and dark forest that never seems to end. The way ends at a still and silent lake at the bottom of a mountain valley that is hidden somewhere in the forest. When we come to the end of the way, we will know its view not from the mountaintop but by the clearness of its reflection upon the surface of the water.

Of the many different paths to follow, which way does not lead back home to where we began?

All ways lead finally to the same end—that is death.

If there is a will, there is a way. The heart can have only one master, but the way can have many hearts. Being serves the human, the human serves the will, the will serves the heart, the heart serves the way, and the way serves the being. To follow the way is to lead the way, and the way always leads from and back to the human being.