To be, or not to be, that is the question. – William Shakespeare

Indeed, this is the biggest question in one’s life: In this moment, am I awake or asleep? Where do I want to be, in a state of awakening or in a state of sleep? Am I present to what I am seeing, hearing, doing, saying in this moment, or am I in a different world? In the world of imagination with innumerable unwanted thoughts that keep assaulting my mind? Many spiritual teachers, sages, saints, poets, and artists went through these burning questions. Many have struggled all their life to try to stay awake and create being.  ‘Being’ is an attribute of the soul, third eye.  Only the soul can BE. Our body, that is a machine, can’t. 

All that God is, is being – Meister Eckhart

But how do we create being? 

One outstanding example of creating being lies in the story of Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. This section of the Mahabharata, a remarkable epic in the Hindu tradition, shows the prince Arjuna facing a war against his own relatives. Seeing his relatives, he found himself in crisis and refused to fight. He could not understand why it was necessary, and did not have the being to face it. At that point his charioteer, Krishna, an incarnation of Vishnu, started teaching him and revealing him the truth. The truth was necessary because being and understanding grow together and depend on each other. According to one’s own being, one has the capacity to understand. And understanding is necessary to create new being.

The true use of knowledge is to draw the soul towards being – Plato

At that point, Arjuna didn’t have the being to fight. Why was he in such an absurd situation, to wage war against his own relatives? He lacked higher understanding. As Krishna started to reveal his divinity, light came to explain to Arjuna why he was there.  

When a man gives up all desires that emerge from the mind, and rests content in the Self by the Self, we call him a man of wisdom. – Bhagavad Gita

In reality, this situation was a test for Arjuna. He had to let go of all the ‘I’s coming from his machine. Krishna revealed to Arjuna his divinity to help him see something much higher, the divine world. He gave him a glimpse of eternity, a gift that infused him with higher knowledge. This brought Arjuna to a higher state and awakened him, making it possible for him to overcome all his doubts and fears. In this way, his new level of being arose to sustain him in facing the challenge in front of him.   

When the infinite enters wholly in, the human drops away; what is left is the having arrived, the being! – Rainier Maria Rilke

One does not attain the eternal by rites and rituals, pilgrimages, or wealth; one attains it only by the conquest of one’s mind – Yoga Vasistha

Acquiring relativity–relating to what is higher and what is the higher right in our choice of actions–our level of being grows. The effort to remember that we have the choice to act from our higher centers creates being. Acknowledging that there are higher forces guiding our life helps to establish our connection with the divine. This makes it possible for divine light to shine on us, and for us to overcome the heavy world of our machine and enter the realm of higher states of being.

Remember that we are changing from being machines to becoming angels. That is why awakening is called the ‘impossible dream.’ – Robert Burton

The author is an educator who has been studying the Fourth Way since she was a young woman living in Rome. For further articles in FourthWayToday.org from this author, see: https://fourthwaytoday.org/author/grazia-m/.