..the first and original activity of life is always spontaneous, effusive, overflowing, a liberal expression of pre-existing energies....Life is the free occurrence...

When you are not be-ing who you are, the sustainability of be-ing is an issue.

When you are be-ing, you know you are be-ing. There is only be-ing. There is no-thing to sustain.

To say, then, that the animal lives not from itself but from what is other than itself, pulled and pushed and tyrannized by that other, is equivalent to saying that the animal is always estranged from itself, beside itself, that its life is essentially alteraci?n ? possession by all that is other.

As we contemplate this fate of unremitting disquietude, there comes a moment when we say to ourselves, "What a job!" Whereby, with complete ingenuousness and without realizing it, we set forth the most essential difference between man and animal. Because the expression means that we feel a strange weariness, a gratuitous weariness, occasioned by our simply imagining ourselves forced to live as they do, perpetually harassed by our environment and tensely attentive to it. But, you will ask, does man perchance not find himself in the same situation as the animal, a prisoner of the world, surrounded by things that terrify him, by things that enchant him, and obliged all his life, inexorably, whether he will or no, to concern himself with them? There is no doubt of it. But with this essential difference?that man can, from time to time, detach himself from his surroundings, ignore them, and subjecting his faculty of attention to a radical shift?incomprehensible zoologically?turn, so to speak, his back on the world and take his stand inside himself, attend to his own inwardness or, what is the same, concern himself with himself and not with what is other, with things.

In words which, merely having been worn by use, like old coins, are no longer able to convey their meaning with any force, we are accustomed to calling this operation thinking, meditation, contemplation. But these expressions hide the most surprising thing in the phenomenon: man's power of virtually and provisionally withdrawing himself from the world and taking his stand inside himself?or to use a magnificent word which exists only in Spanish, that man can ensimismarse ["be inside himself"]. (pp. 17-18)

In many of Heidegger's later works, he returns to the Pre-Sokratics for a "closer" approach to being, a word which for him has become an empty word that carries the baggage of too much philosophical tradition. For example, in What is Called Thinking? (lectures from 1951 and 1952 that Ortega would not have known about) he provides an translation and interpretation of Parmenides saying "One should both say and think that Being is." Nor was he aware of Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics (lectures from 1935, published in 1953, first translated into English in 1959).

It may be relevent to note that on reading Zen master Dr. Suzuki, Heidegger commented, 'If I understand Dr. Suzuki correctly, this is what I have been trying to say in all my writings.'

I wonder if Dr. Suzuki would have said that upon reading Heidegger?

In this passage, there is the idea of 'be-ing' as a dynamic state or relationship rather than as a given object or static entity; so 'being-as-becoming'. I am reading a text at the moment which posits life as a complex of relationships on the border between stasis and chaos; it is the interweaving of these two aspects or poles which creates the 'woof and warp' of our existence; stasis, on the one hand, in which nothing ever changes, and chaos, on the other, where nothing is ever the same. Of course in reality we find order in chaos, and on the other side, chaos continually threatening order. Of course, neither can win. I am reminded again of Heraclitus 'Strife is the father of all things' and of the emblematic Ying/Yang of the Tao (richrf where are you).

I am reading History as a System. One of the first ideas in it is the exuberance of creation; the idea that life itself effortlessly give rise to an infinity of forms:

The word that springs to mind is the pleroma.

The 'static aspect', by contrast, may indeed be that very tendency in Greek thought which gave rise to the wretched idea of Substance, which was to become, of course, Matter. Aha! So there is the culprit.

In order to speak, then, of man's being we must first elaborate a non-Elatic concept of being, as others have elaborated a non-Euclidean geometry. The time has come for the seed sown by Heraclitus to bring forth its mighty harvest.

I mean this is an interesting point but as a critique on Heidegger it fails hard.

In order to speak, then, of man's being we must first elaborate a non-Eleatic concept of being, as others have elaborated a non-Euclidean geometry. The time has come for the seed sown by Heraclitus to bring forth its mighty harvest.

By the way, you forgot that other culprit, the magnificent, but in its way equally wretched, idea of Idea.

Longknowledge;

What I am saying has nothing to do with the "inside world" or the "outside world." The "inside world" IS the "outside world". There is no "inside", "outside", or "pretending." There is only be-ing.

Humans have the capacity to "show up," to be present, but they don't have the ability because their "false god" is the "Subject-Object" mis(sed)-representation of life. The "subject-object" is only a representation, a semblance, IT IS NOT LIFE! You can spend a lifetime dredging up mountains of evidence to substantiate the existence of the "subject-object" relationship and the people around you can do the same thing and the "subject-object" will still only be a semblance, a real semblance but still a semblance.

Until you make the "leap of faith" into be-ing what I am saying will only be a hint, something that will gnaw at you and show up as "there must be "more" to life."

Dasein