The Sphere of Being
Amwell 30.12.1950
It is necessary to understand that the conception of being is not
easy to grasp. In one of the formulations about being given by the
Work it is said that your being attracts your life, but this
formulation, like most of the other formulations in the Work, has
great density of meaning - that is to say, one cannot understand it
superficially, because meaning after meaning will appear to you, the
more you reflect and study what being is and especially in yourself.
The study of your own being is essential to working on yourself. I
mean, you cannot ignore your being and take it for granted and yet
say that you are in the Work and doing your best to work on
yourself. Such an attitude is sheer nonsense. As O. said, quoting
Solovyev: "Everything has its being, a stone has its being, a flower
has its being, an animal has its being, etc." That is of course
quite true, but what do we mean when it is said that a stone, a
flower, an animal, has being peculiar to itself? Then again, what do
we mean when it is said that our being attracts our life ? Here, for
example, is a person who attracts people of a certain kind. What is
it that attracts these people? What attracts these people is that
person's being. Of course we do not see it in this way. We may,
under certain circumstances, think it is unfortunate that this
person attracts these people. What we do not understand is that the
sphere of this person's being attracts only certain things and
repels others. But at first we have no idea of this and even
complain about it.
Now let us think that being exerts a certain sphere round it. This
sphere has its own kind of intelligence. Let us take, for example,
the sphere of being of a pigeon. Included in this sphere of being is
its power of finding its way back from great distances. Or again let
us take the sphere of being of a dog; it can pick out its master
from among a crowd of people or it can find its way home when its
master cannot. This belongs to its sphere of being. Or take a bird
that builds a complicated nest, brings up its young, and then
migrates to Africa. All this belongs to its sphere of being. Every
animal possesses a sphere of being which is, so to speak, its life,
and through which it is acquainted with regions of the world that a
man does not know anything about. Then also in connection with the
particular sphere of being with which they are endowed they have
their own forms of happiness, their own forms of pain, distress and
so on. We must imagine, therefore, in reflecting on what being
means, that it is something that surrounds a person like a sphere
and brings about what happens to him. Of course, if a person is
placed in a nunnery or a monastery he is cut off, to some extent at
least, from the sphere of attraction that his being would exert when
he was in life, and so one realizes that such isolation has its
origin in the idea of changing being almost by brute force. Whether
such discipline has its effect I cannot say. It may be so in certain
circumstances. In the Fourth Way the method is different. In the
Fourth Way it is knowledge that must precede change of being. That
is, through knowledge of one's being one can begin to separate from
certain elements in it, so that eventually one has changed being so
that it does not attract the same things as formerly. But this
meta-morphosis only begins through metanoia or change of mind,
because, if there is no change of mind or new knowledge, there can
be no meta-morphosis or change of being. If we could see being
through some spiritual vision, we would see clearly that certain
elements in being cause all the trouble that a person complains of.
In spiritual vision we would see, as it were, that something was in
the wrong place, or that something was exaggerated very much or
something lacking, and we would also perceive that as long as this
construction of being remains as it is it will increasingly attract
what it has attracted in life. Here is a man, for example, who gets
violent, who is very proud, and so also very suspicious, who exalts
himself in his own estimation and so feels he is surrounded by
enemies - in such a case we would with spiritual vision see that the
trouble lies in the structure of his being and the sphere it exerts
on everyone around. All animals, insects, and so on, have
intelligent spheres of being and attract the life that they are
supposed to lead. It is only Man that has not an intelligent sphere
of being and that is why he must study his being and learn to
attribute to himself any unpleasant things that recurrently happen
to him and not blame other people, which is the mechanical thing to
do.
How then can we change being? By applying the knowledge of the Work
through self-observation to ourselves. And remember that you do not
change by being told what to do. You can only change through seeing
what you have to do when you realize what your being is like.