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Doing and Being One of the hardest things for people to learn, and perhaps one of the most important, is to know when to do and when to be. These opposites manifest in a number of way: Active / Passive Male / Female Yang / Yin Talking / Listening All to often people act when they should observe. For some people, being passive is one of the most difficult things to learn. They always want to intervene. The modern tendency towards political and religious evangelicism demonstrates this. Political activists want to change the behaviour of people without necessarily understanding them. They act on their emotions. There's an expression ‘Evil triumphs because good men do nothing’. This is a call for action. If there is something you don't agree with than you should do something. The emphasis here is on ‘doing’. Of course this directly contradicts the attitude of tolerance. What I consider evil someone else may consider the correct thing to do. They may consider me as being evil. This is how wars start and thus the people who claim to be lovers of tolerance promote intolerance, and those who claim to love peace, promote war. Our society is based on ‘doing’, on activity. There is no understanding of just ‘being’. This is a manifestation of our masculine-based thinking, along with logic and rationality. There's a saying: ‘Action without thought is blind, thought without action is lame’. Young people especially are prone to act rashly without thinking. Thinking in the way it is usually taught nowadays, however, is really a kind of action. It is an active process of calculation or envisaging various scenarios in your mind. I've mentioned many times previously the importance of stilling the mind. In that way ideas that originate outside of you can come into your mind. The stillness plants a seed and then you must nurture that seed into actuality. This is the balance of being and doing. To many people, particularly young people, to not be doing something is to be bored. Kids have to be kept occupied. Usually this activity is organised: sports activities, learning an instrument or other extracurricular activity. Parents consider it their duty to keep their children busy. There is no opportunity for children to use their imagination. I've mentioned before (‘Scepticism and Anosognosia’) the importance of developing imagination in children. Children who don't have this opportunity become sceptical and are limited to logical thinking. Children should learn that boredom opens up a window that has the potential to yield rich imagery but first the feeling of boredom has to be replaced by stillness. Out of the silence comes a seed, the developed person is able to nurture that seed into an idea and then put it into practice.