Being, not having

I am just listening to Erich Fromm's The Art of Being - another free listen on Audible.

It relates a great deal to some of the things I have been mulling over during the past months.

He contrasts being with having and states that we are fixated on the latter in this consumer-led capitalist society. this make me think of what I have been thinking about the need to grasp and touch and possess animals. But he's also talking about having success and fame and popularity. I'd add the totting up of facts and information. It's a crisis of qualities being totally overshadowed by quantities.

Course, he's speaking an argument that I am already a fan of - and using other terms to make a somewhat similar point to that made by Iain McGilchrist is his analysis of left versus right hemisphere consciousness. The left being rationalistic, literal, linear and attending to what we seek to grasp, the right open to experience as well as seeing 'the bigger picture'.

Two things interested me greatly. One was that Fromm says there is a triumph of whim over will: we grasp what we want on a whim, rather than exercising true freedom of the will by attending to what might be meaningful, beneficial, enhance our ability to achieve our potential.

The other... I might have forgotten... ironically, I think it was about concentrating. Ah - a brief Google search and I have found it:

“People are afraid to concentrate because they are afraid of losing themselves if they are too absorbed in another person, in an idea, in an event. The less strong their self, the greater the fear of losing themselves in the act of concentration on the non-self.” ― Erich Fromm, The Art of Being

That made me pause for thought. The fear of losing oneself... it's odd as I am always seeking to lose myself! Everything I do, really, is in that quest - to find the thing that enables me to fully shed myself!

As I mentioned in the post about wandering in the wood, by fully attending to what is around me, my ego dissolves into the soil and the trees.

Like today, when I found caves in ash and sycamore...

...as I followed the creaturely path along the bank of the hedgeline.

This loss of self also happens in boxing, in chainsawing, in working on scripts, in conversation (sometimes), at the theatre, writing poetry, drawing (sometimes), yoga (occasionally), reading and listening to audiobooks (much of the time)... even in writing this... as I am not my 'ego' but... a river of ideas...

Anyway, a great quote from Fromm to finish:

“A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity,his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves.”

― Erich fromm, The Art of Being