Becoming

I. Becoming Divides in Two

In Book One you saw the body of becoming: it keeps becoming, becomes of itself, becomes for nothing, cannot be said to the end; it is originally the undifferentiated one, and the moment it appears, it divides itself in two—and the two divided out are, at the root, still one.

Up to here, becoming is still. By which I mean, we have been looking at what it is—it is one, it is originally undivided, it divides and thereby becomes. All of that was looking at its shape. But becoming is not a picture. Becoming moves. From this book on, we no longer look at its shape; we watch it move: we watch how, beginning from that one division, step by step, it gives birth to this whole world that never stops moving.

Then let us begin from that first division, and look downward.

The last chapter said: for becoming to appear, its first act is to divide in two. Now I want you to see clearly what this division actually is—because nearly everyone takes it for something dead: they think dividing means cutting one thing into two halves—snap, two sides, done, lying there quietly. If dividing-in-two were like that, the world would be dead: a pile of cut-up, unrelated halves, laid out in a row.

But the world is not dead. The world moves, without stopping for a moment. So that one division is definitely not just cutting a thing apart and being done. What is it?

Let me show you on the spot—you have one right on you. Take a deep breath.

When you breathe in, what happens? Your body and the air around you are divided into two sides—inside and outside. But notice: this division does not end with the cut. The instant it divides, something begins to move: air rushes from outside to inside. Why does it rush? Because inside and outside have been divided, and between them there arises high and low, a difference—and the air, pushed by this difference, moves inward. When you breathe out, the difference between inside and outside arises again, and the air is pushed outward. Your breathing never stops for an instant, precisely because this difference between the divided inside and outside keeps pushing the air back and forth.

Do you see it? Division is not a movement that finishes and stops. The instant of division immediately stretches open a difference between the two ends it has made, and this difference immediately begins pushing things to move. Division is not cutting—division is stretching tension open. The moment it divides, tension is there; the moment tension is there, things begin to move.

Look at a battery and you will see it even more clearly. Why can a battery light a lamp, turn a motor? Because between its two ends there exists a difference in electrical potential. It is precisely this difference that makes a current flow once the circuit is connected. If the difference did not exist, there would be none of this momentum pushing the charge to move. A battery is like this; a waterfall is like this (the water is divided between high and low, and the drop is the whole force of its falling); the entire world is like this.

This is why the world moves instead of lying dead. Because the first act of becoming appearing itself is not cutting one thing into two quiet halves—it is stretching the undifferentiated one open into two tension-bearing ends. The moment it stretches open, between the two ends there at once arises difference, tension, the drive to pull them back together or push them apart. From this one act on, the world can never stop again—because as long as there are two ends, between the ends there is tension, with tension there is movement, movement gives birth to new divisions, and new divisions stretch open new tension. Ring linked to ring, becoming on without end—all of it surging, tension-bearing, out of this first division.

So this section is called Becoming Divides. Becoming, the moment it appears, divides—and this division is not a dead cutting but a living stretching-open. What it stretches open is not two pieces of stuff, but that tension between the two ends which forever wants to move, forever refuses to settle. The whole world lives, moves, becomes without end, precisely because at the root it was stretched open like this—not cut apart like that.

At this point I should explain one choice of wording in this book, because it was not made casually. For division into two ends, for opposites giving rise to each other, the ancients had a pair of old words, and you have surely thought of them: yin and yang. Yin and yang are good words—they have been spoken for thousands of years. But in this book I do not use them. I use two instances of one word: becoming-becoming. Why?

Because the two words yin and yang, the moment they are set down, easily make people think of two things—a yin, a yang, each its own, like two opposed slabs fitted together. It makes the division sound somewhat dead, somewhat still, as if two ready-made things were standing there facing each other. But what I want you to see is alive: it is not that there were first two things and then they were set against each other—it is the same becoming stretching itself into two heads, and both heads are still becoming, still becoming. So I use becoming-becoming—the first becoming, the second becoming, nothing between them but becoming becoming. The same word, doubled, and you see at a glance: these two ends are not two things, but one becoming appearing as two moving heads that still give birth to each other. The extra becoming is exactly that movement, that mutual giving-birth, that never-parted root.

This is the method of wording in this book. I will say it once plainly, and from here on you will recognize it: I try to use only the one word becoming—doubling it, joining it, letting it give birth to a whole family of words. One becoming is the root; becoming-becoming is it dividing into two ends and giving birth to each other without cease; becoming-becoming-becoming is it becoming again and again, appearing as the myriad things. Self-becoming, symbiosis, born-new, becoming-by-not-becoming—all of them grow out of this one becoming. I do not borrow those old words, each with its own history and its own baggage (yin and yang, the Supreme Ultimate, and the rest)—not because they are not good, but because the moment they come in, they bring in a whole other tradition of thinking, and it would cover over the plainest, most direct thing I want you to see. I use only this one word, doubling it and joining it over and over, so that following this single word, you can see all the way to the bottom. The fewer the words, the less they can lead you astray; the same word used again and again, in changing ways, lets you see how the one gives birth to the ten thousand.

II. Born New

Division keeps dividing, tension keeps pushing, the world keeps moving. Then what are the things that come out of this movement like? Are they one mold, stamped out again and again? Or is every single one different?

This matters enormously—so much that it is the root of why you are you, and whether you have a soul. Let me take you through it slowly.

First look at a fact you think you know well, but have never really examined: in this world, no two leaves are the same. No two people are the same. No two snowflakes are the same. Even on a single tree, look closely at the leaves—no two have exactly the same veins. Becoming has given birth to a hundred million leaves, and never repeated one. Is that not strange? If becoming only stamped from a mold, it should have printed out countless identical leaves. But it did not. Every one it gives birth to is different.

Why? Because dividing-in-two is never a clean, even split down the middle.

Let me have you try it once, on the spot. Take any piece of paper and tear it in two. Before tearing, you might want to tear it dead center, half and half, both sides equal. Go ahead and tear. Now do not look at the two pieces you tore out—stare at the torn edge between them, that crooked edge, bristling with fibers. Look at it: it bulges here, dips there, one more fiber here, one fewer jag there—not a millimeter of it is straight, not a millimeter is like any other part. This edge was left uniquely by this one tear; nowhere in the world is there a second edge exactly like it. Tear another sheet, and there is a brand-new edge, unlike any other. The more you try to tear a perfectly straight, symmetric line, the less you can—because real division never travels that ideal straight line. Real division, every time, carries its own crookedness, its own slant, and leaves on that edge the unique signature of this one act.

This is how becoming divides. No division it makes is even, repeated, or standard. The two ends of every division carry this one act’s own deviation, own angle, own shape. So everything it divides out is new—unlike anything that came before. This is the name of this section: Born New. Becoming-becoming is not becoming by repetition; every time it gives birth to something new, without repeat.

Now let me carry this onto you, and you will see something that lets you breathe out—even brings you close to tears.

You constantly compare yourself with others. You think others are better than you, stronger than you, luckier than you; you feel you are not enough, you are lacking, how did you end up living like this. You measure yourself with a ruler—and the ruler is other people. But now you have seen: becoming never gives birth from a mold; every act gives birth to a unique new. You, this person, this life of yours—you are the only one becoming has given birth to, across a billion years, with the deviation, the angle, the convergence of circumstances that belong to your one act alone. There is no second you; there was none in the past, and there will be none after. You are not a badly made copy of someone else—you are a one-of-a-kind new birth, with no second copy in existence.

And you are one of a kind not only because that one division of becoming was unique. Even more, because you were co-born with a unique environment. Think: is there a second person in this world who was born in exactly the same era as you, into the same family, met the same people, went through the same things, and was touched the same way at the same moments? There is not. The environment your life has been steeped in—your parents, your times, the wounds you took, the people you met, the roads you walked—is one of a kind; no second person’s environment matches yours in every detail. And you are the unique you, co-born of you and this unique environment. So the parts of yourself you dislike, the places where you feel different from others—at the root they are the exclusive marks left on you by that unrepeatable life of yours, that unrepeatable environment. You have not failed to become like others—you have become the only you that this environment of yours could grow. Stop measuring yourself with other people’s ruler. You and he do not even share an environment; becoming never intended to grow the two of you the same.

Then why do you still measure yourself with other people’s ruler? That ruler is wrong at the root—because there is no standard mold for everyone to approach. Becoming does not produce standard parts. Becoming produces only the new, the one-of-a-kind, the unrepeated. That you are different from others is not your defect—it is exactly becoming’s proudest handiwork in you: here, in you, it has given birth once more to a shape never seen before, one of a kind.

And this matter hides something even deeper. The reason you are a you with an inner life, with a soul—and not an identical machine—rests on this newness. If becoming stamped from a mold, and everything printed out came out the same, then they would be a batch of parts with no self of their own—swapping one for another would make no difference, and none would have anything that was its own. But becoming gives birth differently every time, so every thing born carries that one share which belongs to it alone. Remember the edge you stared at when you tore the paper? That edge, one of a kind, repeated by no one—that is the signature becoming left in that one act. You, this person, this life—you are that edge, torn open by becoming across a billion years, carrying the deviation and the convergence of this one act of yours—a signature never seen before and never to be repeated. That signature is the root of why you are you and not something else; it is what people later came to call the soul. The soul is not a part dropped from the sky and fitted into your body. The soul is this: becoming, in this one act of you, gave birth to a new that is one of a kind, that cannot be repeated. You have a soul because you were born new, not printed.

Hidden here is also a way of telling things apart, and you will use it later when we look at the thing we are now building. A machine: build ten thousand of them, every one the same; replace a broken part, and it is exactly like the old one—because it was printed from a mold. It has no one-of-a-kind share, no becoming of its own; it is a manufactured appearance, not a new birth. A living thing is not like this: even when two cells divide, the two that come out carry tiny differences. This difference, this newness in every act—that is the deepest watershed between what has becoming and what does not. Remember this; later, when you judge whether something has an inner life, this is a ruler.

III. Mutual Becoming

The last section landed on newness: every act of division gives birth to two one-of-a-kind ends. This section looks at the two ends it has divided out—what is the relation between them?

You probably assume the two divided ends are rivals, enemies, a life-and-death opposition. After all, they were divided—this end and that end, you and not-you, up and down; it seems they should naturally repel each other. How many fights in this world, how many life-and-death struggles, seem to prove it: opposite ends must battle it out.

But this appearance has fooled you. Let me show you the true relation between the two ends—and you have a ready-made pair on you, which you use every day and have never examined.

Look at your upper eyelid and your lower eyelid. They are two divided ends, one above, one below. Now blink once. Do you see it? They are not rivals—they are partners. The upper lid comes down, the lower lid comes up, they meet, and together they accomplish something neither end could accomplish alone: a blink. Take either one away, and it cannot be done. They look like two divided ends, but they are doing one thing together; the more each stays on its own side, the more they can join to accomplish it.

Now look at something more fundamental. Why can you see anything? Because of light and dark. On a sheet of pure white without one trace of dark, you cannot see what is on it; in a room of pure black without one trace of light, you cannot see either. You can see any thing only because light and dark are there together, setting each other off. Light is not dark’s enemy—without dark, light cannot show itself as light; without light, dark cannot show itself as dark. They complete each other; neither can do without the other. You think they oppose each other, but in fact they are giving birth to each other: it is precisely because that end exists that this end can hold.

This is the name of this section: Mutual Becoming. The two divided ends do not destroy each other—they give birth to each other. This end can be this end only because that end sets it off, faces it, holds it up. Without up, down would not be called down; without left, right would not be called right; without you, I would not know who I am. The two ends give birth to each other. They look like they stand on opposite sides, opposed—but in fact they are the same becoming, a trick in which it stretches itself into two heads and then lets the two heads complete each other.

Bring this back to the relations between people, and many knots in your heart will come undone. You and the people closest to you often strain against each other precisely because you are different—you find him too slow, he finds you too hasty; you blame him for being cold, he blames you for clinging. You always want to change the other into being like you, thinking that sameness is harmony. But think: if he really became exactly the same as you—same temper, same views, same ways—could the two of you still accomplish anything together? A home, a relationship, lives and gives birth to new things precisely because two different people, in the space of their difference, one fills the other’s lack and one sets off the other’s strength. You hasty and he slow—things neither rush into ruin nor get missed; you warm and he cool—the days neither burn dry nor freeze over. Your difference is not a flaw to be eliminated—it is the capital out of which you can give birth to each other. Changing the other into yourself is filling in that between which lets mutual birth happen—leaving two identical people, neither able to give birth to the other.

Now join the three sections of this chapter, and you will see how extraordinary this one division is. Becoming, the moment it appears, divides (Becoming Divides); in dividing, every end it makes is a one-of-a-kind new (Born New); and these one-of-a-kind two ends do not destroy each other but complete each other and give birth to each other (Mutual Becoming). Division, newness, mutual birth—three faces of the same one division.

And here you see a most important thing, one that overturns your old way of looking at the world: you have always believed that opposition is a bad thing—that one side must be eliminated, one side must win. You fight yourself inside, you strain against people in your relationships, always wanting to destroy the opposite side and reach a pure, unified state with no opposition. But now you have seen: the two opposite ends, at the root, give birth to each other. If you want to destroy that end, you destroy this end at the same time—without dark, light is gone too; without the one you hate, you are no longer the you of now. The two ends live together, hold together.

Then what truly should be done is not to eliminate the opposition, but to see the mutual birth of the two ends, and let that tension live, move, become. A good relationship is not two people becoming identical, with no disagreement; it is two one-of-a-kind people, in the space of their difference, giving birth to each other, completing each other. A living person is not one with no two forces pulling inside; it is one who lets those two forces, in their tension, give birth to himself. In Book One you saw that becoming is originally undivided; in this chapter you saw that the two ends it divides out carry tension (Becoming Divides), are one of a kind (Born New), and complete each other (Mutual Becoming).

But between these two ends—that between which gives them tension, which lets them give birth to each other—what is it, in itself? Where is it? How did it become the place where the whole world moves and lives? That is the matter of the next chapter.