There is no efficient way to “be”. Being is not doing, and you can’t “not do” something efficiently. You can build a tree house more efficiently. You do absolutely nothing all afternoon on your back porch efficiently.
And you could say you are recovering. That you are resting. That you are making next week more productive because you are allowing your body and mind to recuperate now.
That is not what I mean. I mean being “lazy” as we latter day Europeans understand it.
And from this perspective progress comes from doing less. Perfection is pure awareness, without any discontinuity between you and everything else. You disappear.
Our would be rulers seek Total Information Awareness. This is what I believe the NSA calls it. They want to know everything about us. Not just the contents of everything we do on any form of thing that glows and runs on power, but our social networks, our habits, our personality profiles. They have detailed predictive indexes of any individuals they care about, as well as the masses as statistical groups.
But in all of this, NONE of these people has a clue about how to live, about what is worth living. They are doing the job of aggregating power efficiently, but all of them–to voluntarily participate in this madness–must be lost as human souls.
If I might abstract a bit, Being must make regular appearances in the process of Doing. If it does not, what you have is an efficient railroad track, that if I might indulge in mild hyperbole for a moment, always constitutes a personal Shoah. Your destruction is assured by the process.
But Being requires supports of some sort too. You have to do. Doing is the bones of the operation. Doing is the skeleton, what creates a something, rather than a nothing.
If you spontaneously entered into a profound mystic union yesterday at 2:15 in the afternoon, if time compressed infinitely for a moment, then expanded to the limits of forever, all between the 10th and 11th seconds of the clock, and you understood EVERYTHING, but then forgot it again on the 12th click, how would you know?
We seem to have bodies for a reason, and doing in the pursuit of being seems to be that purpose. I don’t really know what that means, but vaguer things have sold millions of copies worldwide.
I’m rambling a bit. Maybe it will be useful for someone. No, I’m not drinking. I decided to be good tonight.