Esteemed Reader: Being As a Course of | Might 2023

I reside on Earth at current, and I do not know what I’m. I do know that I’m not a class. I’m not a factor—a noun. I appear to be a verb, an evolutionary course of—an integral operate of the universe.

—R. Buckminster Fuller

Many authors have labored in cafes. The author scribbling in a pocket book, smoking cigarettes and consuming espresso or whisky within the nook of a bar or brasserie is a well-recognized trope. David Mamet summarized the attract of writing in crowded public areas in his Writing in Eating places. Gurdjieff penned his thousand-page opus Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson within the Cafe de la Paix in Paris. On a a lot humbler scale, I wrote a lot of the a number of hundred Esteemed Reader columns in some cafe or one other within the Hudson Valley over the past 30 years. 

Right now I’m sitting at a counter in entrance of a window overlooking a swollen stream working by means of the middle of the city. The flowing gray-green water gathers into turbulent foam because it goes over rocks. The froth takes the form of fractals, branching out in microcosmic similitudes, as one sees in illustrations of the Mandelbrot Set. The stream is a stream as a result of it has banks with water flowing between. But the stream is just not the water, or extra exactly, the stream is just not composed of the specific water that’s obvious in any second. Reasonably the stream is a stream as a result of new water spills between the banks in a steady circulate. 

The stream seems to be a factor, and certainly the phrase is a noun. But the factor is barely a factor as a result of it’s a course of in movement. The second new water ceases to circulate, or the water is dammed or overflows the banks, the stream turns into one thing else—a pond or a marsh, or is solely absorbed into the soil as irrigation. 

I feel that is why I admire writing in cafes. A restaurant is a restaurant solely as a result of a stream of individuals flows by means of. They cease on the counter or at a desk, trade phrases and emanations, absorb and rework meals, and transfer on. Similtaneously folks enter in entrance, the uncooked supplies enter the cafe by means of the rear. The cooks prep and mix elements into recipes, remodeling them into dishes with sauces and warmth. On this sense, the cafe can be a course of, inasmuch as it’s a factor. 

In physics, we’re offered with the paradox of sunshine being each wave and particle. And certainly, each recognizable factor will be understood each when it comes to its materials and vibrational features. Within the lifetime of the physique, 50 billion cells are born and die daily however are held in a sample of life imposed by an implicit “recipe,” sample, or vibration. 

I recall a Hawaiian explaining how the Polynesians had been capable of finding the Hawaiian Islands, so minuscule within the vastness of the Pacific. He instructed me they navigated the ocean of their outrigger canoes utilizing the water currents, quite than the land, as reference. This method was verified by Thor Heyerdahl who traversed 1000’s of miles of ocean on his raft, Kon-Tiki, in the course of the twentieth century. In different phrases, these navigators adopted the circulate, or vibrational sample, of the present quite than navigating between fastened objects. 

Although linguists argue the superb factors, it’s clear that a number of Native American languages eschewed the usage of the noun and as a substitute understood all the things as a verb, which is to say as a course of in movement. On this sense, a stream “is streaming,” a tree “is treeing,” and a horse “is horsing.” The closest and most constant phrase in English is “being.” A being is being, a course of—not a factor.

It appears to me that part of the malaise of meaningless that faces humanity within the present epoch stems from a bias towards the particulate facet of issues. We imagine that the particle or thing-ness of the world is what makes issues actual, perceptible, and measurable as a result of that is the lens by means of which we’ve been skilled to understand. The result’s an objectification of all the things. 

To see the world as an interaction of innumerable dynamic interconnected processes reveals the magnitude of a thriller. Being unmoored from objects as reference factors will be overwhelming if not terrifying. Nonetheless, I feel rising our worldview past the prevalent however primitive views of reductionism and atomism will open new portals to concord inside nature and humanity.