Being Adam

According to St. Augustine, humanity is "condemned clay".

No wonder there's a city in Florida named after the guy.

I take a lighter look. Humanity is Puritanism with a sense of humor.

And it is composed of human beings being human.

We don't refer to ourselves as human doings although the flip side "doing human" has a certain metaphyscial resonance.

The implication of "doing human" is that we are infinite spirits "doing" a human experience rather than finite humans having a spirtual experience as we take our terminal little sojourn between infinities (and infinitives) that we call existence.

And since, according to our own self-imposed taxonomy we are "beings" rather than "doings", the primary verbs in our languages are verbs of being rather than verbs of action.

For example......

Let's go back four thousand years when dinosaurs were still attempting to devour Adam and Eve.

One September morn, Adam was hightailing it through what once was Eden with a ferocious velociraptor in hot pursuit.

Adam thought to himself "I am running" as he fled for his life.

let's look at this thought for a second.

Even in the midst of the most dramatic action....running...the action itself is turned into a gerund connected to the personal through the link of the verb "am".

By thinking the word "am" in the midst of this particular panic.....Adam is coming to grips with the fact that his very existence in the present tense (am) is equal only to the running that he is doing.

Verbs of being link the subject with whatever comes after the subject although in this case, the subject of the sentence...Adam...is doing whatever he can to avoid being linked too personally with the particular starving raptor that is following him.

He wants to stay first person, present tense.

He wants to avoid becoming third person past tense as subjunctively could be described by Eve when she might moan to the unsympathetic Serpent...."Adam was running his behind off but he was too slow and the velociraptor ripped his behind off before devouring him"

Our general states of being are inclusion, exclusion and toleration with most of our time being spent in toleration.

In the case of Adam and the dinosaur, the dinosaur is attempting to include Adam as part of his food chain and digestive process which also eventually includes exclusion.

Adam, on the other hand, has learned from experience to tolerate the dinosaurs, when to avoid a terminal inclusion...he has to get very much in the present and take his being into action.

Action and being work together as commonly as collaboratively as. for example, inclusion and toleration.

Verbs of being take precedence however.

The condemned lump of clay that is Adam won't be running too far if he is included by the dinaosaur
and
ceases
to
be.