Being and Life’s News Release

“We think we are in control of our lives, but who’s really pulling our strings?”

August 22, 2005    

What do the following have in common: a man becomes tongue-tied when he asks a woman he secretly loves for a date; a country’s ethnic and religious violence escalates into a war of genocide; and a popular teenaged girl experiences overwhelming guilt and depression and then thinks about committing suicide because of them? In all these cases and others like them, the being within each of us—who we are before everything else—can be mostly if not entirely responsible for these emotions and actions.

The being in us truly is the engine of human existence because nothing has a greater influence on our own lives and on human life as a whole. But astonishingly, almost all of us are unconscious of our own being’s existence and of the being in anyone else.

Being and Life: On Becoming One’s Being (Ontology Press), a new book by Scott K. Smith, describes in detail the impact our being has on many aspects of our lives: on our emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and values. “Many people believe our deepest nature is the cause of our problems, but in fact it is our alienation from our being that is ultimately to blame. The more we understand the being that is in us,” Smith says, “the more we see that most of the problems of most of us come solely from our alienation from who we truly are. Whether we are conscious of it or not, our alienation diminishes our lives profoundly.”

Being and Life also explains what men and women think and feel as they become more their being, which is very difficult. The pain that comes with trying to develop a being-to-being relationship, the feeling that one is “not living fully in life,” the root emotional cause of the Cultural War: all of these emotions and understandings, along with countless others, spring directly from the sensing and then the misunderstanding of the being within us. Our being is responsible for the very best and the very worst in us, and the only way we can become it at its best is to understand it fully. For all of us as individuals, couples, and citizens, nothing is more important than ending our alienation from ourselves and from each other.

Being and Life (6"x9" trade paperback, 320 pages, $19.95, ISBN: 0-9718379-5-3) is available from bookstores (through Baker & Taylor), Amazon and other online sellers, and OntologyPress.com.

To schedule an interview or to request a review copy, e-mail us or call 530-389-2737 or fax 530-389-8458. For more media information visit our web site at www.OntologyPress.com.