Being Is the Body God Wears in This World
Why Being Is Not a Practice, but the Field from Which Everything Appears
This post grows out of work I’ve been doing with Cynthia Bourgeault’s course Practicing Living Presence: Discovering the Mind of Christ Within, which itself is a sustained engagement with Kabir Helminski’s book Living Presence. In particular, it draws from the chapter titled The Power of Being. What follows is not an attempt to define Being, because Being cannot be defined without being reduced. It emerged instead from noticing how often we treat Being as something we do, rather than something we enter. How easily we turn it into a project, a practice, a mood, or a spiritual achievement, and miss the more radical truth hiding in plain sight.
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Being Is Not Something You Do
The phrase “Being is the body God wears in this world” stops you if you let it. It refuses to stay abstract. It implies presence, texture, weight, immediacy. Not an idea about God, but a way God shows up. Not somewhere else. Here.
Most of us unconsciously assume Being is a kind of inner posture we adopt. We imagine it as something we summon through effort: quieting the mind, regulating the breath, adopting the right stance. But that assumption already puts us in the wrong relationship to it. Being is not something you perform. It is a field you fall into when you stop bracing yourself against existence.
The Electromagnetic Field of Love
Think of an electromagnetic field. You do not turn it on by trying harder. You move into it. And once you are inside it, everything behaves differently. Iron filings align. Currents shift. Forces that were previously invisible begin to exert influence. Being functions the same way. It is not a thing among things. It is the underlying coherence that allows things to appear at all.
Helminski describes Being as the great electromagnetic field of love. That metaphor matters, because love here is not sentiment. It is attraction, cohesion, participation. A field that holds without gripping. A field you cannot stand outside of, only ignore.
White Light and the Prism of Experience
This is where the prism metaphor helps. White light passes through a prism and becomes color. Red, blue, green, violet. Each wavelength distinct, measurable, nameable. But none of those colors exist independently. They are not competing realities. They are differentiations of one light.
Being is the white light. Everything we experience, bodies, emotions, thoughts, identities, events, is refracted presence. The problem is not that we see color. The problem is that we forget the light.
We live as if the colors were separate sources. As if happiness, grief, success, failure, intimacy, loss each had their own independent substance. So we chase one and flee another. Prefer blue to red. Want violet without yellow. But all of it is light, bending through conditions.
This is why Being cannot be possessed. You cannot grab white light by clutching a single color. The moment you try to hold it, you’re already working at the level of refraction.
The Point That Belongs Entirely to God
Thomas Merton spoke of this as the point vierge, the non-dimensional point at the center of the soul that belongs entirely to God. Meister Eckhart called it the ground of the soul. Helminski calls it Being. Different languages circling the same reality: there is something at the core of you that is not an object in your experience but the condition for experience itself.
This is why Being feels strangely like nothing and everything at once. It does not announce itself with fireworks. It feels more like falling backward into water you didn’t realize was holding you.
Action With Being, Action Without It
When you touch it, even briefly, the quality of action changes. Not because you are calmer or wiser or nicer, but because action is no longer driven by the frantic need to secure identity. You are no longer acting from lack, but from contact.
This is where the phrase “Being is the body God wears in this world” becomes more than poetry. If Being is God’s body, then everything that exists is occurring within God, not merely created by God at a distance. Life itself is the sacrament.
Can Anything Fall Out of Being?
And that raises an unsettling question: can anything fall out of Being?
We live as though it can. We fear abandonment, annihilation, meaninglessness. We construct elaborate psychological selves to defend against the terror of falling away. But if Being is the field in which existence happens, then even death cannot eject you from it. Forms dissolve. Colors recombine. But the light does not disappear.
This is why Being is inseparable from mercy. Mercy is not God overlooking your failures. Mercy is the fact that existence itself continues to hold you, regardless of your success or collapse. The field does not withdraw when you falter. It does not punish refraction.
The Subtle Violence of Using Being
The tragedy of most spiritual practice is that we try to use Being to fix our lives. We approach it as a technique for stress reduction, emotional regulation, or moral improvement. And in doing so, we keep ourselves at arm’s length from the very thing we seek. Being is not a tool. It is the ground you are standing on while you reach for tools.
This is why Bourgeault emphasizes noticing the difference between actions done with Being and actions done without it. The difference is visceral. Without Being, activity becomes compulsive, scattered, force-driven. Even when it looks productive, it leaves exhaustion and damage in its wake. With Being, action may be quieter, slower, or paradoxically more decisive, but it carries a different fragrance. Less noise. Less violence.
Presence Is Not Passivity
Importantly, this has nothing to do with withdrawing from the world. Falling into Being does not make you passive. It makes you accurate. Action arising from contact does not need self-importance to fuel it. It does not need enemies to justify itself. It moves because movement is required, not because the ego is restless.
The Pulse of Consciousness
You do not stay in Being continuously. At least not at first. Consciousness pulses. You glimpse it. Lose it. Glimpse it again. That is not failure. That is how the field teaches you its rhythm. Each pulse weakens the illusion that you are the doer, the fixer, the manager of reality.
Eventually something shifts. You stop trying to be present and begin to notice that presence is already there. You stop asking how to enter Being and begin to notice that you never left.
The Only Real Choice
And that may be the most radical implication of all. Being is not waiting for you at the end of spiritual effort. It is what you are made of. What the world is made of. What God wears when God shows up as breath, as grief, as joy, as this moment, exactly as it is.
The only real choice is whether you will notice the field you are already standing in, or continue mistaking the colors for separate suns.
If you’re curious how this shows up in you, there are a few quizzes here :-)
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Repeatedly, spirituality echoes the truth: “you already are all you need to be.” And, repeatedly, I find myself saying, “Yes. I know that, but…”. Silly human.
Thanks for this!
'If Being is God’s body, then everything that exists is occurring within God, not merely created by God at a distance.' I am so glad I read this, I may have come to this by a circuitous route, envirotheological with added stops in folklore and the panoply of house and hedge gods but my thoughts have converged with yours but not as well expressed or as tidy. Thanks for the article, really very helpful.