I read an article today that introduced me to the notion of “total being.” It seemed like the sort of thing I should read on a day like today. The piece even opened with an image I know too well: that of a taxi weaving through the chaos of city traffic. I know this image because I’ve taken interest in the politics of urban mobility and spent many formative years of my life invested heavily in their pursuit, but I also know it more viscerally than that. It evokes a nightmare that would recur for the longest time. It doesn’t anymore, and yet, the image’s as vivid as any waking memory I have. It’s also a very real memory I’ve lived and written about before: cowering in the back of a taxi cab crossing Beirut’s sniper-lined divides.
The author used the image as a metaphor for the struggle to find calm and coherence amid the noise and disorder of modern life; he asks the reader to imagine meditating in the back of a taxi cab, and uses the implied impossibility of truly tapping into one’s center in such a situation as an extended meditation on what it means to live with a “mature” (his words) “way of being), or, you may say, integrated presence.
The piece had arrived in my inbox this morning, which some of you may know is my birthday, a day that, some of you may also know, has come at the back of several weeks of feeling fractured (I’ve called it “severed”) and pulled in many directions. And so, as you can imagine, the timing felt like a quiet summons. The piece seduced me with the promise of something that would probably feel very good right about now—the “study of total being.”
The author of this piece draws from Satish Kumar and Jiddu Krishnamurti, offering a vision of presence that is both grounded in the body and open to the vastness of being. I hadn’t heard of either and was fascinated when some light googling led me to a particular point of connection with one of them: Kumar is famous for his anti-nuke activism, which he embodied with his whole self, having embarked on a 12,000 mile peace walk from India to the four nuclear capitals of the world at that time (1962-1964): Moscow, Paris, London, and Washington, D.C. This has way more resonance today than many of us would like, but the author doesn’t mention any of that. Instead, he includes this fragment from Kumar’s book on “Radical Love”:
“Left palm represents the self; right palm represents the world.
I bring my two palms together and by doing so I unite myself with the world. […]
I let go of all expectation, attachment, and anxiety.
I let go of all worry, fear, and anger.
I let go of ego.
I breathe in. I breathe out.
I smile, relax, and let go.
I am at home. I am at home. We are at home.”
Sounds nice, doesn’t it?
As I read on, I wondered what my own intellectual interlocutors of late would be thinking. How does this ideal of “total being” hold up to the actual world that our right palm purports to represent? Can the fragments within ourselves ever be fused together? Tension and contradiction are not simply obstacles to overcome, but part of the fabric of life, after all.
The author used images like bowing and tying one’s belt in the martial arts as icons of the integrative presence he had in mind, but I kept going back to the back of that taxi. Isn’t the driver’s an embodied ritual of sorts? Doesn’t her weaving and threading through the tangled city—experienced as noise and interruption to the would-be meditator in the back seat—represent a dignity as embodied as the martial artist? Wouldn’t her entanglement in the world entail a kind of “total being,” not as perfect wholeness or serene stillness, but as fully facing up to the unruly and uncertain flow of life?
Perhaps true integration is not retreat, but an active presence in the storm, a way of being that meets chaos with full attention. I reimagined Kumar’s clasped palms as hands on a steering wheel, a gesture of navigation rather than withdrawal. Here, “total being” reveals itself as a practice of ongoing engagement, not detachment.
Left palm represents the self; right palm represents the world.
I bring my two palms to the wheel and by doing so I unite myself with the tumultuous world.
I hold on to anticipation, rhythm, and awareness.
I let go of control.
I breathe in. I breathe out.
Sometimes I smile, sometimes I relax, and always, I’m moving us forward.
I am not home.
I am going home.
We are going home.
“Total being,” from this lens, is an ongoing process of responsiveness and ethical engagement, not a fixed state of harmony, real or imagined. Fragmentation is both unavoidable and generative, demanding a permanent negotiation rather than final reconciliation—or, even worse, total disavowal and erasure.
Visions of ego’s dissolution are attractive, especially in days like these, but they are ultimately distractions from real ethical becoming; the image of the taxi driver’s continual interaction with forces beyond herself is much more generative than the struggle to center oneself in the back seat. It reminds us that presence is always relational and embedded in the world’s material flow.
In short, “total being,” if it’s to mean anything, can only unfold through the divided terrain, not outside of it. Anything else would be merely a seductive and self-satisfied delusion. It is a constant “going home”—movement without end.