Being and Non-being

Marathons aren't real, my wife has a sharp elbow, and why reality is not what you think

As I write this I have a sore lip from being elbowed in the face by my wife. No, we are not having domestic issues. It happened last night while we were sleeping. My face had slid off the pillow and lay close to her arm when she suddenly flinched in the midst of a nightmare catching me in the upper lip with her elbow. It wasn’t the most pleasant way to be woken up - but in her defense it was an act of self-defense to ward off an intruder who had entered her home (in her dreamscape). It just so happened that in the real world that intruder was my face.

I have often mused on how dreams and thoughts are not all that different from one another. They both require the construct of an alternate space and time reality as well as the construct of a first-person inhabitant of that reality. And the nervous system is not always able to tell the difference between this alternate reality and the base reality in which it exists. This is not unique to just us humans by the way. Watching my dog sleep, I find myself wondering what he is dreaming about when I see his body jerk, or his paws twitch as if he is running, or when he whimpers. His nervous system is possibly also responding to imagined threats.

We seem to straddle two dimensions of reality at all times. That of being and of non-being. Being is the dimension of what-is, whereas non-being comprises the dimensions of what-was and what-could-be. Non-being is that space where things don’t exist yet or anymore. It is a realm where nothing ever exists, there are only potentials and traces. And of the two, it is the former that we take for granted as a given - yet it is the more mysterious. It is the one we actually know the least about.

Everything we call ‘knowledge’, as a human race, is actually about the realm of non-being. This may seem like a radical statement but let me demonstrate why this is. Consider our basic model of the universe - one that practically all 8 billion of us agree upon regardless of what belief system we come from. That model says that we live in a spacetime universe guided by causal relationships. We believe this not just intellectually - it is ingrained in our biology. The model attempts to describe the realm of being - but it really constructs a realm of non-being. For there simply in no time in the realm of being for causality to exist.

Being is here, now, immediate. In the realm of being there is ONLY what-is. What-was and what-will-be have no reality. So, if I see the sun at a 30 degree angle to my line of sight right now. And I check again in a few minutes and it is at a 32 degree angle. The only reality is that the sun is at a 32 degree angle. The fact that its position was two degrees lower a few minutes ago, is meaningless because that information belongs to the realm of non-being. It isn’t real now.

Causality requires at least two events that follow each other in time. Yet, in the realm of being things can only coexist. They cannot pre-exist. The moment one event ceases it has no reality. The only reality is that of the event happening now. If this is true, it radically alters how we understand attention, knowledge - and even what we call the self.

Let me illustrate this with the analogy of a marathon runner.