by Steve Taylor, author of many books on spirituality and psychology including The Clear Light, The Leap, and The Calm Center
In general, there are three different modes in which we can live our lives: doing, thinking and being. Most of the day we’re busy doing – working in our jobs, doing chores, following our hobbies and enjoying ourselves in our free time. Thinking usually takes place between activities, when there’s nothing to occupy our attention, or during activities which are more repetitive and undemanding, when we don’t need to concentrate too much.
And being? Most people don’t spend much time being. Being occurs when we're relatively inactive and relaxing. It’s when our minds aren’t chattering away with thoughts, and when we aren’t concentrating our attention on tasks or activities. In this mode, we usually pay a lot of our attention to our surroundings, and to our own experience. We’re in this mode when we go for a leisurely walk, do sports such as swimming or running, meditate, do yoga or listen to music.
Of these three modes, our culture prizes the first two far above the third. Doing and thinking are seen as the engines of achievement. Thinking logically enables us to solve problems and come up with ideas. If we have a problem, we sit down and think it through. And doing – working and being busy – enables us to achieve our goals, to be productive, to make money and become successful.
But being is unproductive. It equates with laziness, and wasted time. Why waste our precious hours doing nothing when we could be filling them with activity and achievement?
The Benefits of Being
But this is misleading. Even in terms of achievement, relaxing and ‘doing nothing’ can be extremely beneficial. States of being and inactivity allow the creative potentials of the mind to manifest themselves. They allow insights and inspirations to flow. As I say in one of the pieces in The Clear Light:
I love the days of not needing
to be anywhere but now.
I love the days of not being productive
that become the most productive of all.
I love the days of doing nothing
that become gloriously full of being.
It’s in this state of being that ideas suddenly come to us, seemingly out of nowhere - when songwriters have ideas for songs, when writers have ideas for stories, when scientists suddenly ‘see’ the answers to problems that have vexed them, when inventors have ideas for new inventions. These creative potentials are usually blocked by the busy-ness of our minds and our lives. In order for them to emerge, both our lives and our minds have to become relatively empty and quiet.
This is why many - perhaps most - of the greatest discoveries, inventions and creative ideas in human history have not come about through ‘hard work’ or sustained logical thinking, but by doing nothing. That is, they have mostly occurred by accident, or unconscious intuition, in states of relaxation. The physicist Newton described how the ‘notion of gravitation came into his mind’ when he sat ‘in contemplative mood’ and saw an apple fall from a tree. (The apple didn’t actually fall on him, as is popularly believed.) The concept of coordinate geometry suddenly occurred to Rene Descartes when he was half asleep in bed, watching a fly buzz around the room.
A high proportion of the world’s great works of art were also inspired and conceived during moments of relaxed inactivity. The most recorded song of all time, "Yesterday" by The Beatles, was ‘heard’ by Paul McCartney as he was waking up one morning. The melody was fully formed in his mind, and he went straight to the piano in his bedroom to find the chords to go with it, and later found words to fit the melody. Mozart described how his musical ideas ‘flow best and most abundantly.’ when he was alone ‘traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep… Whence and how they come, I know not, nor can I force them.’
The Calm Center
I feel exactly the same about my own poetic reflections and meditations, published in The Clear Light. It’s difficult to say where the pieces come from. Most of them came as a surprise to me. I’ve learned not to expect them, or to wait for them. I only know that they tend to come at times when my life is fairly quiet, when I’m not busy with projects or duties, and free of pressure or deadlines. They tend to come when I have empty spaces of time to myself, and in a relaxed mood. In other words, they tend to come when I’m in the mode of being. They arise out of what I call ‘The clear light of the present.’
Since they arose from a state of being, it’s fitting that many of the pieces are about the importance of being. They describe how we need to be in order to regenerate our energies, to re-attune to ourselves, and to regain the feeling of well-being and connection to the world around us. Being belongs to the present, so we need to be in order to find the peace of presence, to resist the pull of the future and the past. We normally associate happiness with doing and having, but the most stable and the deepest well-being is that of being itself, which arises naturally when we stop striving to do or to have. As I say in the book,
Here there is no lack
only the wholeness of what is now.
Here there is no doubt
only the certainty of now.
Here there is no complexity
only the simple truth of now.
So why choose absence when we can be present?
Why be elsewhere when we can be here?
For me it’s wonderful that these pieces - which stem from the highest or deepest aspects of my own nature - seem to have the power to reach people’s highest, deepest selves too. This is one of the great things about art, be it music, poetry or painting - it’s a channel through which we can transmit our experience. If you feel ecstatic, sorrowful or awestruck you can express and capture your state of being in a piece of music or a painting. Your state of being or emotion becomes encapsulated in the piece, and it remains there, fresh and timeless, for any receptive listener to absorb. A piece which was written 300 years ago can be as fresh and inspiring as a piece which was written yesterday. This is especially true of spiritual art - spiritual poetry, spiritual music, or visual arts. At the spiritual level our connection is deepest and strongest. The spiritual is the ground of all our being, where individual differences fade away — in fact, where individuality itself fades away. At the spiritual level, we expand beyond distinctions of gender, ethnicity or religion, and touch into a common core. So insights and experiences from the spiritual level can be communicated very powerfully, without any barrier or interference. As I say in the book:
We are each other.
Every human being’s feelings flow
like currents of air through the atmosphere
of our communal being —
brushing each other’s souls
touching each other’s hearts
stirring mutual compassion.
The portal to these spiritual depths is a state of being. Being is the source of both creativity and spirituality.
Steve Taylor is the author of several bestselling books on psychology and spirituality, including The Clear Light, The Leap, and The Calm Center. His articles and essays have been published in over 50 academic journals, magazines and newspapers, including Scientific American and Psychology Today. Since 2011, he has appeared annually in Watkin’s Mind Body Spirit magazine’s list of “the world’s 100 most spiritually influential living people.” He lives in Manchester, England, with his wife and three children. Find out more about his work at www.stevenmtaylor.com.
Excerpted from the book The Clear Light. Copyright ©2020 by Steve Taylor. Printed with permission from New World Library.