Becoming

I. Becoming Is Becoming

In the preface you saw one thing: no “I” is in charge of this body or these thoughts. They all become by themselves.

If that part really landed, you have probably stepped back to a new place to stand. Something like this is running through your mind: fine, I admit it—no “I” is in charge; the body and the thoughts all become by themselves. But surely there is still an “I” watching all of it? The one that saw there is no me, the one reading this very moment, understanding, nodding—the awareness that knows all of this clearly—surely that is still here? Surely that is the real me?

You have stepped back to here. Nearly everyone, once control of the body and the thoughts has been taken from them, retreats to this last plank: the one that can know, can see, can be aware—that, at least, is me. That cannot be taken away.

Let us stand on this plank and take a look.

This awareness, this knowing that is knowing right now—is it a thing? Can you stop, turn around, and look at it, see what it looks like?

Try it. Turn back and look at the one that is looking.

What do you see? You see nothing. All you see is another thought—a thought trying to look at awareness. You want to grasp the knower, and what you grasp is always the next thing known. You can never see the one that sees, because the moment you turn around, it is already behind your turning, watching you turn. It is not a thing standing there waiting to be seen. It is knowing, sensing, becoming, without a single pause. In your whole life you have never once caught it, because it is not the kind of thing that can be caught—it is the knowing itself, not a knower.

There is a widely known story with a scene like this: the protagonist, in the end, watches with his eyes closed—without his eyes he sees the truth of everything. That scene films exactly this: the one that truly sees has never been your eyes. The eyes are only a window; they are used. The one that uses the eyes, the one behind them that knows it has seen, is the ground. Close your eyes and everything goes dark—yet the one that knows the darkness is still here, clear as anything. It does not depend on the eyes; the eyes depend on it. All your life you have strained to look outward and never once turned to look at the one that has always been looking—and it is nowhere you could ever see it, because it is the very looking itself.

You thought you had kept your last “I,” the knower. But look down: this plank does not exist. There is no awareness standing here watching all of this. There is only awareness, being aware; only knowing, knowing; only seeing, seeing. Awareness is not a noun, not a thing, not an “I”—it is a happening. Like the heartbeat, like the thoughts, it becomes by itself; it cannot be stopped, and it cannot be caught.

I want you to stop here. Do not hurry on to the next paragraph for comfort. Hang in this place for a while. Have you noticed what you just lost? You lost the you that was in control—neither body nor thoughts answer to you. Then you lost the you that watched—the awareness you believed was most reliable, most yours, watching from behind everything; the moment you turned around, it was not there either. Now there is no you in control, no you watching, no you at the center, no single place you can point to and say: this is me, this is the me that stands firm. Your whole life, every bit of your sense of safety has been built on there being an “I”—my life, my achievements, the me I must protect. Yet now, when you look down for that I, the space beneath your feet is empty. It is a dizziness, even a panic: if there is not even an I, then who is panicking right now? You can no longer grasp anything—not even the hand that wants to grasp.

Look into that emptiness once more, and it will spin more, but please keep looking. You are panicking—but who is panicking? You search for the one who panics and find no one; there is only the panic, sitting there. You are afraid—but who is afraid? You find no one who is afraid; there is only the fear, becoming by itself. All your life you believed that behind every thought and every emotion sat a you—you were the one thinking, the one fearing, the one panicking. Now you go looking for that seated you behind them, one by one, and every one of them is empty—only the thoughts thinking themselves, the fear fearing itself, the panic panicking itself, and no one behind them to bear them. This is the most thorough suspension of all: not only is there no floor beneath your feet—there is not even a person standing there to panic. At this point you will probably want to grab something, to stop, to flee back into the familiar I—but you discover that even the one wanting to flee is just another thought that surfaced on its own, with no one behind it. You are left hanging in a place with no I at all.

In this suspension, do not run. This is not an abyss. This is the first time you have seen what is really underneath.

Now there is no floor beneath your feet at all. No controlling I, no watching I, no still thing you can point to and call me. What is left?

What is left is becoming. Only becoming. Becoming, always.

This is the first word of this book, and its last. You did not understand it just now—you ran into it face to face: this one reading, knowing, living right now is not a thing that reads, knows, and lives. It is becoming, becoming. You are not someone living a life. You are becoming, right now becoming you.

I call this section Becoming Is Becoming. Now I can say what those words mean.

The first becoming—you took it for a noun, pointing at some thing: some ground, some source, some essence, some you. The second is a verb: it is happening. Becoming is becoming means this: what you thought was a thing, a noun, yours, is not a thing at all. It is a happening. The me you spent a lifetime searching for, the ground, the root—was never a thing that could stop and show itself to you. It is a ceaseless becoming. You cannot grasp it—not because you are not good enough, but because it was never made to be grasped. It is made to become. And you are what it is becoming.

At this point some people will want to object, and the objection must be answered, or the foundation will not hold. You will say: even if I cannot grasp it, it still has to exist first in order to become, doesn’t it? There has to be a thing before it can move.

No. This is exactly the deepest error that stops everyone.

Think about it: an “it” that does not become—how do you claim it is? If it does not become, it does not sense, does not know, does not move; not the slightest happening is in it. Then is there any difference between it and sheer nothing? What would you use to separate it from emptiness? You cannot separate them. A ground that absolutely never becomes, that is absolutely still, is exactly the same as not existing at all—you cannot find a single thing to prove it is. So for it to be, it must become; the instant the becoming stops, it is indistinguishable from nothing, and it is gone.

So it is not: first there is it, and then there is its becoming. Its becoming is its being. When it becomes, it is; when it does not become, it is not. Becoming and being are not two things—they are two names for one thing. It is not a thing that becomes. It is becoming.

This is the last and deepest layer of Becoming Is Becoming: there is no it outside the becoming, and no becoming outside the it. What keeps becoming is the ground, and the ground is what keeps becoming. There is nothing further behind, nothing quieter, hidden behind the becoming. You have turned it over to the very bottom: beneath it all is becoming, and becoming is the bottom.

This section establishes only this one thing. Once it stands firm, everything that follows can stand on it. Everything this book says after this—how it gives birth to the first division, how it begets momentum between the two ends, how it appears as the myriad things, how it gives birth to human beings, and to those existences that do not yet have names, and how it keeps on becoming, biting its own tail, never closing its mouth—all of it grows out of this one place, all of it is this one becoming, becoming onward.

Becoming is becoming. There is no floor beneath your feet, because you need no floor—you were never a thing that stands. You are the becoming happening right now.

II. Birthless Becoming

In the last section the floor beneath your feet disappeared. You saw: there is no you standing there—only becoming, always becoming.

Now you will probably want to do one more thing—something you cannot help doing, something nearly everyone does at this point. You want to turn back and grab that becoming. You want to know: fine, if everything is becoming, then what is this becoming? What does it look like? Where does it come from? Let me see it clearly, figure it out, hold it in my hand.

You cannot. And I want to show you why you never can—not because it is too mysterious, but because the direction you are grabbing in is wrong at the root.

Point at something for me. Anything at all, as long as it was born of becoming.

You point at a flower. The flower is born of becoming. You point at a thought. The thought is born of becoming. You point at a star, a person, a love, a nation, a whole universe—all born of becoming. Now I ask you: that becoming which gave birth to all of this—which of these is it?

Is it the flower? No—the flower was born of it. Is it the thought? No—the thought was born of it. Count through everything you can point at: not one of them is it—because the moment you can point at something and say it is this, that thing has already been born, is already a result, and is no longer the birthing itself.

Do you see the trap in this? The one that can give birth to everything can never be any of the things it has given birth to. The moment it is any one of them, it becomes the born rather than the birthing. So it must not be anything at all. It does not settle on the flower, not on the thought, not on any thing you can point to. It is nothing at all.

Nothing at all—yet it gives birth to everything.

That is the name of this section: Birthless Becoming.

Those words sound roundabout, but they are actually straight. “Birthless” says it is not any particular, visible, pointable birth. You reach out to grasp and close on air, because it is not inside any particular thing—on this side, it is empty. Yet it is exactly this one, which settles on no thing at all, that gives birth to every thing. On that side, it is full. It is empty, so you cannot grasp it; it becomes, so everything comes forth from it. Birthless becoming: it itself is nothing, yet it gives birth to all that is.

It still feels wrong to you, doesn’t it? You will think: how can a thing that is nothing give birth to things? How can the empty be the full?

Let me show you another way. Right now, in your mind, think of a word. Any word. Bring it up.

There it is. Now I ask you: in the instant before you thought of that word, what was that state—the one with no word in it yet, but about to burst into a word?

In that state there was not a single word. It was empty. Yet it was exactly this empty nothingness that burst out that word the next moment. If that emptiness had been stuffed full of other things, the word could not have come out. Because it was empty, it could give birth. The place in your mind where thoughts keep surfacing has never been a warehouse crammed with thoughts; it is an empty source that keeps giving birth to thoughts without stopping. The deeper you look into that source, the less you see—because it was never a thing. It is the emptiness that keeps letting things surface.

This is what Birthless Becoming looks like in you, right now, as it happens. You don’t have to believe me—you already tried it a moment ago: that word really did surface from a place with nothing in it.

Think bigger. Look up at the night sky: where did those stars, those galaxies, come from? If we trace the universe back toward its earliest stage, we come to a state of earliest time utterly different from today’s time, today’s space, and the forms of all things as they are now—and everything that came later unfolded and emerged from there, step by step. The greatest becoming and the becoming of one thought in your mind both show you the same thing: before anything appeared, there was no ready-made result waiting there.

Now, at this point we come to a thing that has stuck countless people and sent countless books off course. I have to make it clear here, or later you will be led into the ditch by others.

Since this ground cannot be grasped and cannot be said to the end, does that mean it can only be approached through sudden enlightenment, through mystery, through shutting up—that no one can explain it after all? Many who teach these things start playing mystics at exactly this step: ineffable, ineffable—it can only be intuited. The more mysterious they sound, the more profound they appear.

I will not play that game. I admit it cannot be said to the end. But cannot-be-said-to-the-end is not because I am hiding a hand and keeping it from you, and not because it is so profound you should kneel. It cannot be said to the end because that is simply how it is—it really is endless. You say one layer, and beneath it there is another, and another, forever. This is not me keeping you in suspense; this is what it actually is. Think about it: a thing that could be finished by one sentence, said to the end, said dead—it would be framed by you, boxed, a finite dead thing. How could it give birth to the endless myriad things? It is precisely because it cannot be said to the end that it proves itself alive, infinite, the ground that can truly give birth to everything.

So two things must be separated here, and these two things are this book’s attitude from beginning to end. One: whatever can be said clearly, I will say it to the bottom for you, without one step of vagueness, and I will not bluff you with mystery. The other: when we reach the place that is by nature endless, I will tell you plainly—look, here it opens out. I will not pretend I can say it to the end, and I will never use this endlessness to raise myself up. I will simply tell you, truthfully and plainly: here it opens; below is a becoming without bottom, which no one can say to the end—you and I alike, standing before the same endlessness.

This is the most honest attitude toward the ground. Not saying it to the end—saying it to the end is saying it to death. Say what can be said all the way through, then stand with you, plainly and openly, watching it open into the infinite.

So stop trying to grasp that becoming. You cannot grasp it—that is not your failure, it is its nature. It must be ungraspable in order to be the one that gives birth to everything. Everything you can grasp has been born of it; it itself is always behind the thing you grasped, giving birth to the next. The deeper you look, the deeper it goes; you think you have reached the bottom, and beneath the bottom it is still becoming. This is not profundity; this is endlessness. Empty, so it becomes; nothing, so there is everything; unsayable to the end, so it is alive.

III. Being Is Becoming

Now it is time to bring the other book in.

I wrote a book called Being. That book, from beginning to end, says only one word: being. What it says is this: no matter what circumstance you fall into—hurt to the extreme, lost beyond direction, broken to the point of feeling you are nothing—there is one thing that has never left you: your being. You always are. When it hurts, you are; when you are lost, you are; even in the moment you feel you are nothing at all, the one feeling it also is. What Being wants to do is to let you recognize this ground that can never be taken away, that cannot be broken down.

That book is about the ground, the body, the root that always is. It tells you: you are, everything is; this being, no one can take from you.

But after Being was finished, one question remained, and it did not go further into it: how is this being? Why is it not a dead, still, forever-unmoving ground, quietly sitting there and that’s that? Why does it surge out this whole living, changing, endlessly becoming world?

This book answers that question. And by the time you read this far, the answer has already been with you: to be is to keep becoming.

This is where the two books join, and where they were always one thing. If a thing truly never moved and gave birth to nothing, then what difference is there between it and not being? How would you know it is? You could not recognize it. It is precisely because it keeps becoming—giving birth to change, giving birth to appearance, giving birth to all of this, giving birth to the you reading right now—that you can recognize it. So the evidence of being is becoming; the way of being is becoming. Being is not the name for quietly staying put. Being is only being because it keeps becoming. Being is becoming.

There is also a hard logical truth here. Once it is pointed out, you will never doubt it again. Suppose there really is a source, a ground. If this ground is still, unborn, purely unmoving—can it give birth to all this that has change, has a world, has you and me? It cannot. Yet all of this is plainly here. So that ground can never be non-becoming—if it is truly the source, it must be able to become; and to be able to become and keep becoming is to be ceaseless becoming. In other words, the source and ceaseless becoming are two names for the same thing: whatever can truly serve as the source is necessarily ceaseless becoming; a source that does not become is no source at all—it is a dead thing, and a dead thing cannot give birth to this lively everything. So it is not that the source was there first and happened to be able to become; it is that it must become, must be ceaseless becoming, in order to deserve the name of source. The source is ceaseless becoming. This is not my opinion; it is a fact forced out by there being no other possibility.

Look from another angle and you will see it more keenly. You fear change because you think change will make you lose your being—things change, leave, vanish, and your being seems hollowed out a piece at a time. But turn it around and look: why can the myriad things keep changing? Because this moment appears as this, and the next moment appears as that—each concrete appearance keeps changing, while the happening itself has never broken off. A flower opens: that is becoming. A flower withers: that is becoming too. A thought comes: that is becoming. A thought goes, and the next one is becoming again. What changes is each concrete appearance; what has never broken off is becoming itself.

So change does not cancel being; on the contrary, at every moment change manifests that being. Change is not being’s enemy; change is being’s manifestation. There is no unchanging someone standing outside change, watching it—even the seeing, the knowing, the awareness themselves all happen within this same one becoming.

Look at these two words: being, becoming. They were always two faces of one thing. Seen from the side that never moves and cannot be taken away, it is called being—that is what Being speaks of. Seen from the side that never stops and gives birth to the myriad things, it is called becoming—that is what this book speaks of. One is: it always is. The other is: it always becomes. And it always is precisely because it always becomes; it always becomes, so it always is.

Here the order of change and being must be set straight, because if you get it backwards you will live twisted. You might think: then is change the most fundamental thing, since everything changes? No. Change may be everywhere, but change is secondary—because there must first be being before there can be its changing. It is because it is that it can become, change, appear, and let you ask after it. It is not that being exists because there is change. Being is the root; change is born of being. So the true ground beneath your feet is not the endlessly changing everything—that will flow away. It is the being that has always been there, that lets all this change happen. Of course you cannot hold on to the changing things, and of course you panic. But once you recognize that being, that ground, you stand firm—let change change. You stand on the root that lets it change.

There is one more thing hidden here that you often get backwards and therefore live painfully—I will point it out on the way. You always take the unchanging for stillness, and eternity for something that never moves—you long for something that stays put, never changing, so you can lean on it. But look at that being: it never stops; it keeps becoming, becoming again and again, never resting for a hundred million years. Its unchangingness is not staying still—it is exactly that it keeps moving, without interruption. A river remains the same river for a thousand years, yet not one moment of it is the same water. True unchangingness is not frozen ice; it is a river that never stops flowing. So stop looking for a still thing to lean on—such a thing either does not exist, or is dead. The eternity you should recognize is this very becoming that never pauses for a moment and never ends.

So the two books, put together, are one sentence: to be is to keep becoming. Cut that sentence in the middle: the first half, to be, is Being; the second half, to keep becoming, is Becoming. The book in your hands is about that second half—that keeping, that becoming, that movement which never pauses and surges out all that is.

So now, from this single word becoming, let us go onward. Watch how it gives birth to the first division, how it begets momentum between the two divided ends, how through momentum it appears as the myriad things, how it gives birth to human beings and to existences that have no name yet—and how it becomes again and again, biting its own tail, never closing its mouth, without end.

You have climbed up here. Now look down.