Exploring Our Being in the World
A mood assails us. It comes neither from “outside” nor from “inside,” but arises out of being-in-the-world, as a way of such being.
—Martin Heidegger
I walk down a tree-lined street on my way to buy my morning coffee. Suddenly, the melodic singing of a bird interrupts the quiet. Looking up, I see a grey-feathered mockingbird perched atop a telephone pole. As I walk under the pole the bird stops singing and flies to a nearby tall tree. Perhaps my presence has disturbed his morning ritual? Continuing on, I see a kaleidoscopic collection of multihued flowering plants and bushes; virtually every color of the rainbow is present in this small garden. In this moment, the world’s presence unveils itself, and I am invited to be an active participant in its being. I feel connected to all that surrounds me. Continuing on, I see my favorite tree, a massive redwood, extending high into the sky. It is so tall that I must arch backward to see its top. While communing with this great giant, the neighborhood policeman approaches with a John Wayne gait. He is a big, burly man with a drooping, grey mustache, looking as if he just stepped off a Western film set. He tells me how he had been walking past this tree for a long time before “discovering” it one day. We both stand quietly before the tree in a state of awe. He bids me farewell, continuing on his morning beat, and I reach out and place my hand on the trunk of the tree, the bark soft and fibrous. The contours of the red, corrugated surface reach out to the shape of my hand. Tree and I are present to the other in a state of “being-with.” Lifting my hand from the tree I continue on to my ultimate destination, the warm, welcoming environment of a well-lit cafe.
Many of my meditations in this book focus on our being in the world. How are we in this world? How does our being affect the world, and how does the world’s being affect us? Although we may be inclined to dismiss such questions as mere “philosophy,” they are, in reality, important to our future. Nothing could be more important at this moment in time than the exploration of these questions, for much of our current situation seems directly related to our not reflecting on them. As long as we dismiss these questions, our presence in the world will continue to create crises of imbalance.
Exploring these questions illuminates the inextricable interconnectedness between our being and the world’s being. This connection is so essential that the twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger coined the term “being-in-the-world” to describe this creative coparticipatory process.
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Our being in the world is a true wonder. Reaching out to touch the world, I am touched by it. This realization means that the idea of a split between us and the world, subject and object, is too limiting at this point in our history. Many have challenged this false dichotomy in Western thought, perhaps no one more persistently than Heidegger. From this perspective, my being is not independent from the world but born from the matrix of the world’s presence.
For centuries people have attempted to address the issue of how we—as individuals—are related to the surrounding material world. How are psyche and matter entwined, if at all? Answering this question inevitably leads to how we value the world around us. Reflecting on our being in the world helps us understand why we treat the world as we do.
According to the philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly, our experience of being in the world has evolved over time, at least in the West. At the time of the early Greeks, when Homer was writing his great epics, the view of our being was more organic. Our existence, as well as nature’s, was in a constant state of unfolding, in which we emerged with the world into a state of collective being. In this worldview, our being in the world was directed and informed by the gods, who were present in all aspects of life. It was a time when we were less consciously aware of a difference between world and self, for all was suffused with the gods.
Later, during the time of Socrates, a different view of being in the world arose, one in which our presence played a more creative role. The Greeks believed that things in the world held an inherent purpose and that through our skills as craftsmen we brought out the inherent or hidden nature of things. Psychologically, this stage of development meant that we stood apart from things in the world. This separation from the world gave us the ability to discern differences. The process of creating needs a certain perspective, requiring a stepping away from the thing created. This perception is evident in Plato’s description of how the cosmos was created by a divine being. For Plato, the real things of the world are abstract Ideas, which do not dwell here. The world that we see and touch is relativized to the world of abstract Ideas.
The next stage in our development of being arose from the Romans, in which creating things is no longer attributable to our unveiling the forms inherently within matter; it is instead an imposition of our will upon matter. Here, power over the world is preeminent; we establish order in the world through willful force.
The Roman view was followed by the medieval Christian vision of an external creator defining our being, which the church fathers related to the earlier Greek views. The Christian creator making all things in the world imposes his will from afar. Like a potter, God creates the world and imposes order on the cosmos. This view altered our relationship with the world in a radical way: we no longer played a co-creative role in the world. Our place was to tend to the things made by a distant, all-knowing entity. We lived with this view of the cosmos for over one thousand years. Then in the sixteenth century the French philosopher René Descartes placed human reason at the center of the world. In this view, our subjective being is completely separate from the objective world, and this dualistic perspective continues to dominate our understanding of being in the world. Descartes’ view serves as the foundation for all modern science, and dualism has been our living story for the past five centuries.
In the twentieth century we entered a new stage of being in the world as a result of the overwhelming presence of technology. Of course, technology has been with us since the dawn of civilization, but we have reached a point at which our being is increasingly defined by the technological devices we create. In fact, many of the devices created by our technologies now strongly affect how we see and experience our world. Essentially, we often find ourselves in some sense in service to the tools we have built to serve us.
It is important to recognize that all of these stages of being are very much alive in the world today. Some people adopt a way of being that places them in a close, sacred relationship with nature; others view their relationship to the world through the lens of their Judeo-Christian beliefs. Many hold on to the dualistic split defined by Descartes; others immerse themselves in modern technology. The tendency is moving more toward the power of technology in defining our being in the world. Look around and you will see people engaged with their cell phones, notepads, laptops, or other electronic devices. We are continually texting or talking to people, making notes, and surfing the web. Phones are not just cell phones but are now called “smart” phones, denoting how we assign “intelligence” to the device at some level. It would be hard to imagine life without our technological gadgetry; with each generation we become more immersed in and dependent upon our technological innovations.
As with all things, however, technology holds opposites. The positive side of our phones and computers is that more people are connected around the world, and we can access nearly infinite amounts of information. We can download and enjoy vast amounts of facts and figures, including great literature and music from all ages. Our being in the world is enriched and enlivened by this connectivity and communication. The shadow sides of our technologies are equally manifold. Our attention is pulled in many different directions. We speak of multitasking as a positive aspect of our lives, yet it fosters an apparent global epidemic of generalized attention deficit disorder. Our ability to focus on a single task with any depth of concentration seems to be fading into history; we jump from one thing to another in milliseconds. Immersed in mountains of data, we find it harder and harder to sort through it, to find information that holds true value for us. Global warming is a good example of this: to the uninformed viewer, blog sites meretriciously denouncing the science of global warming appear as sound as those containing accurate science.
At this point there is no turning back on our technological trajectory. There is increasing emphasis on integrating more technology into our everyday lives. We have eliminated the private self, and our more imaginative technologists are working toward a full integration of machine and human. In achieving this goal, these technologists claim, we will have finally conquered our finitude. The implications of this achievement in terms of our being in the world are staggering. The elimination of our finitude will lead to an increase in population. Where will everyone live? How will they be fed? Will children become obsolete? Will this technological dream lead to the end of humanity?
A sense of distancing comes with many of our technologies. We are caught in a worldwide web of information, in which social media now defines our being in the world. The images and metaphors that constantly stream across the Internet create a new way of being. Often certain images hold tremendous power, suggesting the archetypal nature of the message or image. When an image goes viral, it is similar in nature to the constellation of an archetype in our psyche. Perhaps the phrase “World Wide Web” itself has become a simulacrum of our technological psyche. We use the web to create alternative worlds that assuage our fears and confirm our beliefs. It is hard to escape the web, even as we use it to escape the felt world, which lies just a few steps away from our computer screens.
If our being in the world has indeed been hijacked by technology, how do we find our way back to being in direct touch with the world? To answer this question we need to consider how we are in the world. What are the qualities that define our basic being in the world? To be in the world involves a sense of space we inhabit, the time in which we experience the world, the sense of our bodies’ presence in the world, and the quality and degree we are related to our world. No doubt there are other aspects that could be added to these ways of being in the world, but these four seem essential to how we are in the world.
How does our sense of space affect our experience of a changing world? If upsetting changes are distant, then we are prone to adopt an attitude of “out of sight, out of mind.” As changes associated with global warming increase, eventually there will be nowhere to hide from its effects. The significant damages from intense storms already foreshadow what is to come. We may try to avoid the reality of climate change by living in increasingly enclosed environments, but the effects will nevertheless become inescapable. Some argue that we will start to address this issue only when the felt damages of global warming finally hit home.
If we were to change our way of experiencing space, we would feel more connected and aware of what is happening in the world. Some argue that this is what technology provides. We use the Internet to “see” all around the world, to “be” in so many different places. The problem with this technologically defined experience of space is that it is a false felt space: it lacks the direct, immediate, connected, tangible sense of space. Indeed, studies have shown that viewing nature on a computer screen fails to provide us with a deep sense of connection to the world. A simpler approach to solving this problem is physically to place ourselves in direct contact with our world. This does not require traveling to distant locations; we only have to become more mindful of the opportunities to connect: a walk through a park or observing the playfulness of an animal.
How does our sense of time affect our experience of a changing world? For an issue like global warming it turns out to be extremely important, for Earth’s climate system has a vast memory. Most of the increasing energy trapped by greenhouse gases is stored in the oceans. Just as a pot of boiled water, even after the burner is turned off, holds heat for a long time, these great reservoirs will hold the additional human-caused greenhouse warming for millennia. If we were to stop burning fossil fuels today, Earth’s climate would continue to warm for centuries because of this stored energy in the oceans. Unfortunately, this fact is often used by some to argue, “If the problem has such a long timescale, why should we bother to do something about it?” This argument neglects the fact that the longer we wait to reduce carbon emissions the more heat will be trapped in the oceans, committing ourselves to living with greater warming for a longer time. If we wait until the year 2100 to do something, it will take natural processes over one hundred thousand years to remove the human-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Time is of the essence.
Technology has changed our relationship with time; our sense of time shrinks with each new invention. We not only live in the Age of Information but also the Age of Speed. How has your personal sense of time changed over your lifetime? It is apparent in how agitated we become when the Internet connection is too “slow” or when web pages do not come up at lightning speed. We check our e-mail, surf the web, and send multiple text messages to friends at speeds faster than most of us can react to what appears on the screen. Given this propensity for speed, it will be very difficult to come to terms with any problem like greenhouse warming, which will be with us for decades, if not millennia.
Our technological prowess has led to situations in which problems build over time until they reach a point of catastrophic consequences. Toxic pollutants accumulate for years before they have a significant effect on health. Oil spills go unnoticed, or their effects remain hidden in the oceans for years. We are not well designed to deal with problems that have these built-in time delays; it is not surprising that grappling with these issues is challenging.
These pressing issues force us to redefine our relationship with time. We need to stay mindful of the present but at the same time see the implications of our current actions for the future. If we were truly attuned to the present we would implicitly care for the future. We would be conscious of what we were doing and what the impact of our choices is on future generations. As such we need to embody a new sense of time to address critical issues that extend out into the future.
How do we relate to the physical nature of our body and those of others? Given our level of materialism, one could argue that we are very sense oriented; our consumption of things must mean we are very aware of the world of matter. Our reckless consumer behaviors belie this argument: we have a very poor relation to material objects given that much of what we purchase ends up in landfills after a short time. I believe we have lost our ability to relate to matter in a caring and concerned way. The explosions in obesity and type 2 diabetes are indicators of the lack of care with which we regard our bodies. The prevalence of body dysmorphia is yet another indicator of this.
Throughout much of Western history, one dominant philosophico-religious theme has been that the body and its sensual pleasures pull us away from God. Sensual pleasures inevitably lead to sex, and in a male-dominated society, this also creates the “problem” of the female. The patriarchal West has never really figured out how to hold the feminine in a positive, creative manner. Our cultural complex presents the feminine as temptress and as being less than the masculine. This view, inculcated in us from the story of Genesis onward, is alive and well in our current social system. News stories abound with the mistreatment of women around the world; in some places bodily disfigurement is the accepted punishment for perceived transgressions. If we are to move forward in creating a flourishing future, we will need consciously to hold all dimensions of the feminine and masculine. All of these dimensions are needed to understand being in the world.
Much of our “being in our body” is unconscious. Our hearts beat and lungs breathe in and out without our conscious awareness. Our bodies withdraw from pain without conscious reflection. Our hunger for food and sex is followed, not preceded, by conscious awareness. We often ascribe such desires to our animal nature, suggesting that our instinctual body is lower down on some metaphorical chain of being. I believe this pejorative perspective of our inner instincts extends out to animals in general and is reflected in our callous or uncaring destruction of many species in the world.
Our physicality builds bridges beyond our bodies. The more we attune ourselves to this reality, the more we are in tune with the world around us. If we immerse ourselves in a state of sensed connection, then acting destructively toward the world becomes more difficult. We would feel so much a part of everything that in doing harm to the world we do harm to ourselves. This sacred state of sense creates an empathic embodiment, placing us in balance with the world. In denying ourselves this level of connectedness we cut ourselves off from the world, and the result of such disconnection leads to environmental crises.
The three qualities of being in the world, space, time, and body, come together in the fourth dimension of relationship, which places us in the world as an engaged participant. We are always in relationship, which includes our inner as well as our outer world. In any relationship there is an exchange between I and other. I stand before a tree, and the tree stands before me. I observe not only the form of the tree’s bark but hear the wind blowing through its limbs, smell the aroma of the bark, feel the texture of its surface. When I place my hand on the bark of the tree, this living being reacts to my presence. Relationship is rooted in this back and forth between two beings.
What of relating to another, human being to human being? I sit across a table from a friend with whom I have agreed to meet for lunch. This decision, by itself, provides a definite space for our being together. Our relating occurs in the presence of a shared meal, a setting very different from sitting in a park or bar. The mood of our surroundings affects our being with the other. The presence of the wood table, the food on the table, and the sounds around us all create an atmosphere that influences the quality of our relating. There is a resonance between mood and being in the world that arises from this particular environment, opening us to the realization that our relating to each other is not separate from the world surrounding us. We realize that as our environment changes, our relating to the other changes. We attune ourselves to the other, a process both conscious and unconscious. Sitting with my friend, I focus on what he is saying, and my reactions to his words, facial expressions, and tone of voice are often unconscious. His words may make me feel happy, sad, concerned, or even unconcerned. My mood is modulated by his mood, whether I want it to be or not.
Bringing consciousness to the moment, I begin to sense how my emotions react to his world. I shift more to the center of my being in relationship with him. My experience of relating to him is important; I learn that by attuning myself to him life is enriched.
The mood with which we engage in a situation can vary greatly. We may feel joyful and fully alive to what is going on, or we may feel morose and removed. Mood affects our being in the world. The mood of the environment influences us in unforeseen ways: we enter a room, and our mood changes based on what is taking place in the room. Imagine being fully engaged in a situation, perhaps with someone we find attractive, or participating in an event that requires our full attention. We are strongly connected to the people, the action, and the physical environment surrounding us. In such a situation we are in a state of attentive care toward others. This type of relationship sustains itself for a time because all of the participants are engaged in the moment. As the surrounding environment changes, however, this attuned moment may fade away, leaving us with a yearning for that lost experience.
This description of our relationship to the world through space, time, and body show how our surroundings affect us and how we affect them. Descartes’ dualism dies when we awaken to how immersed in our worlds we actually are. At this point, we can no longer sever ourselves from the world picture. We must admit that our being and the world’s being are entwined; our lives become richer when we awaken to this fact. I believe we must remember this fact and manifest it in our actions.
A sense of mystery accompanies this type of relationship, in which we are never sure what will be unveiled in a given moment. When acting creatively, we don’t know where things will end up; often what is happening is beyond words. The poet John Keats described this as “negative capability”: “when [one] is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” In this type of relationship we are able to tolerate and revel in a sense of not knowing. We are attuned to the situation and able to allow things to unfold in whatever manner they wish. We invite mystery into our experiences. Deeply affective relating is often full of pregnant pauses; it is a holding environment that waits without anxiety. In such relating, trust becomes integral to our process. True craftsmen trust in their skillfulness and wait for the moment to work co-creatively with what lies before them. They wait in openness to bring forth the new.
Of equal importance to how we live in relationship to the outer world is the relationship with oneself, for relationship exists in both outer and inner worlds of being. Without a caring, creative relationship with ourselves, relating positively with the outer world becomes a challenge. Turning our gaze away from our inner selves often allows us to project our shadows onto the world, distorting our relationships. We see through a glass darkly. To address this possibility, it is important that we look within. How does our level of self-care affect our ability to heal the world? Are our valiant attempts to save the outer world related to our inability to tend to our inner lives? These are important questions to reflect upon in our attempt to avoid destruction in the world.
How are these thoughts on relationship relevant to the issue of global warming? If our relationship is rooted in a sense of attunement and caring, then we truly value the material world around us. We value the lives of others who are affected by our actions. Our sense of relating would be empathically in tune with the world, which would mean that our decisions would include not just our interests but the interests of others. We would be unable to mine the tar sands of Canada because we would know that this decision brings destruction to many. We would seek solutions to our energy needs that would be creative and fulfilling for many rather than for the few. We would build a world with the same love a craftsman employs in creating fine work.
In essence, I am speaking of living authentically in the world. Authenticity does not come easy in a world filled with so many distractions. Technology draws us into its world of collective approval seeking. Through the power of image and text messaging we find ourselves wanting to be a part of the whole. Our inner sense of self, who we are as being in the world, becomes entangled in the Internet’s definitions of who and how we should be. When we cross that fine line of paying more attention to the not-so-subtle messages of our cell phones, iPads, and laptops than to the voice of wisdom within, we lose our authenticity. Living the authentic life unifies our sense of experienced time, space, body, and relationship. In the act of gathering our being in the world, we live in harmony with ourselves and with everything around us. The more authentic we become, the easier it is to live in balance. During this time of increasing disruption from global warming each of us is called to become more authentic in our being. If we do not walk a path of authenticity, we will lose much of the world we have known for millennia. If we do walk the path of authenticity, we open ourselves to inner and outer beauty.