Becoming

I. Becoming Is Originally Undivided

In the last two chapters you saw becoming: it keeps becoming, becomes of itself, becomes for nothing, and cannot be said to the end. Now let us come a little closer and ask a question you have not asked yet, but are about to: before becoming gave birth to the myriad things, what was it like?

You will certainly imagine it like this: in the very beginning there was a becoming, not yet moving; then it moved and gave birth to the first thing, then a second, a third, more and more, until at last it gave birth to this whole world of things. You imagine a starting point, a process going from one to many.

Let me show you where this picture goes wrong—wrong at a deep level, and this error is the key to everything that follows.

Close your eyes for a moment, and do not think of anything in particular. Not a flower, not a person, not any concrete thing. Try to stay in that state where there is no particular thing at all. Stay there a moment.

While you stay there—has anything gone missing? No. Becoming is still here. The one that can sense, can be, can stay here—is still here, not one bit less. It has simply not appeared as any particular thing. This state is full—nothing is missing; the whole of becoming is here—and yet it is undifferentiated: it has not divided into this and that; there is no difference between flower and person, no difference between you and me, no difference between one and two. It is one—an undivided, whole, undifferentiated becoming.

This is what becoming is like in itself: originally undivided. Before it appears as the myriad things, it is not an emptiness waiting to give birth; it is a full, whole, yet undifferentiated one. The myriad things have not divided out of it yet, but the whole of becoming is already there, lacking nothing.

So now you see where the error lies: it is not that there was first a tiny becoming, and then it slowly gave birth to more and more things, from few to many, from one to ten thousand. It is that the whole, undivided becoming was already entirely there, and then it appeared itself as the myriad things—not adding something from nothing, but the undifferentiated one appearing as a thousand-fold variety of the many. Becoming does not grow from a single seed into a great tree, getting more and more; becoming is that whole one, already there, dividing itself out as the ten thousand.

Remember this one thing—it is the doorway to the next step: becoming is originally undivided. Before any two, any many, divided out of it, it is the undifferentiated, whole, full one. It lacks nothing; it has simply not divided yet.

II. Dividing Is Becoming

Becoming is originally undivided—it is one. But open your eyes, and the world you see is all twos: where there is up there is down; where there is inside there is outside; where there is you there is me; light and dark; life and death. Nothing stands alone, without its opposite. How did this world full of distinctions and oppositions come out of that undivided one?

Do not rush to ask how it came. First ask the sharper question: why did it come at all? That undifferentiated one sits there perfectly well, round and full, lacking nothing—why does it not simply stay that way forever? Why must it divide, appear, and stir up this whole world of distinctions, oppositions, life and death? For thousands of years countless people have asked this question, in countless forms: why does the Limitless not remain the Limitless, and give rise to the Supreme Ultimate? Why does the Dao not remain the Dao, and give birth to the myriad things? Why does the perfect one break its own perfection?

The answer I give you is the root of this book: because it is becoming. The nature of becoming is to become, not to stay put. A truly living source cannot remain there, undifferentiated and unmoving, forever—to keep still forever, giving birth to nothing, would be no different from death, from nothing (remember Chapter 1: an “it” that does not become is indistinguishable from nothing). If it is to prove itself alive, prove itself being, it must become; and the first act of becoming is division. So it is not that it threw away a fine perfection to go dividing; it is that it was becoming all along—becoming must appear, and appearing must divide. Division is what its being alive looks like, not a rupture of its perfection. If that one never divided, it would not be a living source but a dead circle. It divides precisely because it is alive.

The answer is: for becoming to appear, its first act is to divide itself in two.

See whether it could be otherwise. That undivided one—if it never divided, what would happen? It would remain forever that full and undifferentiated one that has appeared as nothing, and it could give birth to nothing. Because for a thing to appear, it must be separated from the rest—for an up to appear, there must be a down to set it off; for a light to appear, there must be a dark to divide it out; for any “this” to appear, there must be a “not-this” to bring it out. Without the opposite there is no this side; without dividing in two, nothing can appear.

Let me show you on the spot. Look at anything in front of you—a cup. Why can you see the cup? Because it is separated from the background behind it—cup is cup, background is background; it is because of this boundary that you can see the cup. If the cup were completely fused with everything around it, without the slightest boundary, you could not see it at all—it would dissolve into the blur. You can see any thing only because it has been divided from what is not it. Division is the precondition of appearing. Without division, nothing can appear.

So for that undivided one to appear, to give birth to the myriad things, its first movement can only be: divide. Divide itself into two ends; with this end and that end, with this and not-this, the world can appear out of the undifferentiated. This first division is the first movement of becoming. I call it dividing-in-two.

Now I want you to stop, because the next thing is the most underrated and the most extraordinary thing in this whole book. You are so used to two that you have never felt there is anything special about it. But listen: this first division does not just divide out up and down, light and dark. It divides out everything.

Think what would happen without this one division. Without division there is no difference between this and that; without difference there is no distinction; without distinction there is no judgment—you could not say this is right and that is wrong, because there would not be two things to compare. Without judgment there is no thought, no choice, no knowing. Look deeper: without the division between you and not-you, there is no self—what is the self? The self is that one cut that divides the world into me and not-me. Without the division between knowing and not-knowing, there is no questioning—you would never reach for what you do not know if there were no boundary between knowing and not. One sentence: without this first division, no wisdom could ever run; nothing could be known, distinguished, thought, loved, or hated. The entire world that can sense, know, and live stands up out of this one cut.

So dividing-in-two is no small matter, not some casual move becoming makes in passing. Dividing-in-two is the master switch. It is what splits that undifferentiated one—full but unable to run—open into a world that can distinguish, can know, can give rise to wisdom, can come alive. The root of wisdom is distinction; the root of distinction is this first division. That you can read this sentence, understand it, think, and become a you that can think and love and ache—you owe all of it to this first cut. It is the beginning of everything; every possibility comes out of this one split.

And this split is itself becoming. This is the name of this section: Dividing Is Becoming. Division does not sever becoming; it does not smash the one to pieces. Division is becoming appearing itself—the way becoming appears is division. So the two ends of the division never really part: they are the same becoming, appearing as two ends. Up and down are the same becoming appearing as two ends; light and dark are the same becoming appearing as two ends; you and I are the same becoming appearing as two ends. They look like two, but at the root they are one; they are divided, yet it is the same becoming doing the dividing. Division is the first sound of becoming—and inside that first sound, everything that comes later is already hidden.

Let me show you one more thing you use every day without ever asking what it is at the root: speech, language. Every word that leaves your mouth is, at its root, a cut. When you say “this is a cup,” you cut this lump out of everything that is not a cup, circle it, and give it a name. When you say “red,” you cut red out of not-red; when you say “I,” you cut me out of not-me. A word is a boundary. Learning to speak is learning to take cut after cut and slice up the world that was originally undivided—cutting out countless names, countless thises and thats. Language is dividing-in-two, grown in the human mouth and the human mind into a whole system of knife-work.

This knife is humanity’s greatest power—and its deepest cage. Its power: it is because of this knife-work that humans can think, can calculate, can put the world into order, can pass experience to one another, can pile up an entire civilization—all of it the work of division, the brightest lamp that the master switch of dividing-in-two has lit in the human. Its cage: the more you use this knife, the easier it is to forget that everything you have cut apart is, at the root, the one that was never divided. You cut the world into words, names, thises and thats, and then you live among the slices, believing the world was always this way—piece by piece, cut off from each other. You forget that the boundary between the mountain and you was drawn by you; you forget that the boundary between me and the world was drawn by you. You are locked inside the grid your own knife has cut. Language lets you see the world clearly—and stops you from seeing the undivided whole.

So the truly clear-sighted person holds both ends: he can use the knife—when division is called for, he divides cleanly and speaks plainly, without the slightest confusion; and he can lay the knife down—knowing in his heart that all this division is for appearing, for use, and that at the root nothing ever truly parted (remember: undivided, yet dividing). He lives inside division without being trapped by it. This book is written the same way: I show you things word by word, cut by cut, but every so often I remind you—everything I have divided out is, at the root, the same becoming. I use the knife and tell you, as I use it, how the knife works—so that my words do not lock you into a new cage.

III. Undivided, Yet Dividing

The last section landed on something that looks contradictory: the two divided out are, at the root, still one. This section will say that apparent contradiction through to the end, because it is the most crucial pivot of the whole book. Get through this gate and everything after it opens; fail to get through, and everything after it twists.

I will not lecture you first. I will ask you one question. Answer it on the spot—do not think too long, answer by intuition:

This world, in its essence—is it one, or is it two? Are the myriad things, at the root, one body—or is the world originally split, opposed, each thing its own? Choose one.

You have chosen. Whatever you chose—one, or two—now I want you to look at the move you just made.

What did you do in order to answer this question? You divided the answers into two: one, or two. Then you picked one of the two and rejected the other. Do you see it? To answer whether it is one or two, your method was to divide it in two and then choose one—you are using two to answer the question of one or two. You want to step outside the opposition to give an answer, but the moment you open your mouth, you are using the opposition. You cannot pull yourself out. Every thought you have is this-versus-that, right-versus-wrong, correct-versus-mistaken; your entire thinking runs inside two; there is no way for you to think in a non-dividing way, because thinking itself is division.

Now you are stuck. You want to answer whether it is one or two, and you discover that even the act of answering cannot step outside two. This being-stuck is right. Stay in it, and I will tell you what it shows.

It shows this: you cannot pull yourself out of duality, not because you are not clever enough, but because duality is the fundamental way you can think, distinguish, and be a you at all—exactly what the last section said: the first division is the master switch of all wisdom, your whole person is built on that cut, so of course you cannot pull yourself out of it. And at the same time it shows a deeper layer: the reason you get stuck is that you are treating one and two as two mutually exclusive answers, as if you could only have one of them. But they do not exclude each other at all.

Look at your own two hands. They are two, are they not? Left hand, right hand—two, divided cleanly. And yet they are one, are they not? The same you, the same body, grown from one bloodline. Are your two hands one, or two? You are stuck again—because they are both two and one, and both are true at once. Seen from the divided shape: two. Seen from the root: one. It is not that two is false and one is true, nor that one is empty and two is real—it is that the thing itself is one on one side and two on the other, both holding at the same time.

This is undivided, yet dividing. Becoming is originally undivided—one—and that has not changed; yet it has appeared as two, and that is also true. The one did not disappear because it divided into two, and the two did not become unreal because at the root it is one. It is the undivided one, and it is the divided two—at the same time, together, real. It divides, and has never truly parted; it is two, and has never stopped being one.

The reason you got stuck just now, the reason you insisted on choosing between one and two, is that you fell into a pit that countless people have fallen into for thousands of years: believing you can have only one of them. Either say the essence is one and the opposites are illusion, which must be transcended, dissolved, and left behind for the return to the one—this is the path many spiritual practices walk. Or say two is what is real, the world is division and opposition and life-and-death struggle, and one is a comforting lie—this is what many people struggling through the world believe. Both paths are wrong, and wrong in the same place: both believe you must choose. But your two hands have already told you: you do not have to choose. It is undivided, yet dividing—the one is right inside the two, and the two has always been the one.

Once you are through this gate, you will see the world with different eyes. You see two people quarreling, two opposing nations, two thoughts inside you pulling you apart—you will see that they are two, truly in opposition; that is no lie. But at the same time you will see that they are two ends of the same becoming, never parted at the root. You will neither naively say we are all one body, why fight—nor despair and say the world is nothing but life-and-death struggle. What you will see is this: undivided, yet dividing—the one always inside the two, the two always the one.

We are coming to the close of Book One. But before I close it, I must stop you, because this is the moment when things most easily go wrong. You have followed me and seen becoming—so fundamental, so everywhere, so able to explain everything—and it is very possible that without noticing, you have begun to enshrine this becoming: to make it the highest thing, a master behind the universe, a bigger and deeper me—and to start wanting to grasp it, to rely on it, even someday to preach it, to use it to press others down, to prove you understand more than others.

If that thought has arisen, you have fallen back again—you have simply replaced the me with a bigger idol called becoming, and gone on grasping. So let me say it plainly: when I say becoming, I am not giving you a new god, a new essence, a new thing to worship or to grasp. The word becoming, from beginning to end, is only a finger, used to lead you out of your attachments—out of the me, out of awareness, out of the source, out of emptiness, out of existence. What it points at has always been on you; it is not in the sky, not far away, not something higher than you. The moment you begin to worship becoming, to talk about becoming, to press others down with it, to use it to look wiser—you have already left becoming. Because true becoming needs neither your belief nor your protection; it is right now giving birth to the thought that wants to enshrine it, and it will also give birth to the moment you let it go. Becoming is not for you to grasp—it is for you to recognize yourself. Once you recognize it, the word itself can be thrown away—like the finger after crossing the river, you can set it down, because you have already seen the moon.

Here, the body of becoming stands complete for Book One. It keeps becoming, becomes of itself, becomes for nothing, cannot be said to the end; it is originally the undivided whole one, and its appearing is its dividing itself in two—this one division is the master switch of all wisdom and all things—and it divides without truly parting, two and still one. In the next book, we follow this first division downward, to see what arises between the two ends once they are divided. That is where this whole world of ceaseless becoming truly begins to move.

I speak of “body” and “movement” only so the words can go step by step. Do not really think there was first a still body, and only later its movement. The body is not something that exists before movement; movement is not something that happens only after the body. The body is the body only while it is moving; the movement is movement only as it never leaves the body. What I call the body of becoming is that never-leaving root by which becoming keeps becoming; what I call the movement of becoming is this root appearing as the myriad things.

Looking back over this whole book, we have really done only one thing: recognized the body of becoming. It keeps becoming, becomes of itself, becomes for nothing, cannot be said to the end (Chapters 1 and 2); it is originally the undifferentiated one, and the moment it appears it divides in two—dividing without truly parting, two and still one (Chapter 3).

This is the ground, the body, the entire foundation on which the rest of this book walks. Up to here, we have mainly been looking at what it is. From the next book on, we no longer look only at what it is, but at how it moves, how it appears, how it lives itself out into this whole world of ceaseless becoming.

Stop here. There is no floor beneath your feet, and you need none—you were never a thing that stands; you are becoming, happening now. Take a breath. In the next book, we watch it move.

Book Two · Ceaseless Becoming

The Movement of Becoming — watching how becoming goes on without end