Becoming

I. Between Becoming and Appearing, There Is Momentum

In the last chapter you touched the between, and you touched that directional force inside it—momentum. This chapter fixes its eyes on this momentum alone, because it is the most important layer for understanding this whole changing world. If you cannot see it, your eyes hold only two things: on one side, that unfathomable root you cannot touch; on the other, these concrete, visible myriad things before you. The root is too far away, the things too many and too scattered—and between the two of them, you can put your strength nowhere.

But in fact, between the root and the myriad things, there is one more layer. That layer is momentum.

Let me take you forward along the feel of the last chapter. You already know: between two ends there is tension; tension has a direction; that direction is momentum. Now think bigger: it is not only between your two hands that momentum exists—between all the divided ends of this world, there is momentum. Between cold and hot there is momentum, and so there is wind; between high and low there is momentum, and so there is flowing water; between much and little there is momentum, and so things flow toward evenness; between love and fear there is momentum, and so people do things even they never expected. The whole world is full of divided ends, and so it is full of momentum. All this momentum, woven together, is the shape of the world’s changing.

Then on which layer does momentum sit? In the middle, between the root and the myriad things. Look: at the very bottom is that becoming, the root—the source of everything, but too fundamental for you to grasp directly or to predict. At the very top are the myriad things—one concrete event after another, too many, too scattered, too contingent; you cannot hold them or calculate them either. But the middle layer—momentum—is different. It is more concrete than the root: you can feel it—the wind is about to rise, the water is about to flow this way, this relationship is straining wrong—you can feel it. And it is more regular than the myriad things: you cannot say which leaf will fall first, but when autumn arrives and the momentum is set, you can say with certainty that the leaves will fall.

This is what this section establishes: between becoming and appearing, there is momentum. From becoming (the root) to appearing (the myriad things), there lies the layer of momentum in between. Momentum is the directional straining of the root, at the point when it is about to appear as the myriad things but has not yet fully appeared. You cannot grasp the root, and you cannot calculate the myriad things to the end—but you can read momentum. Once you can read momentum, you stand at the most useful position between the root and the myriad things: looking down, along the momentum you can feel the pulse of the root; looking up, along the momentum you can foresee where the myriad things are heading. This layer is where a person can truly put strength to use: you cannot alter the root, and you can never chase down all the myriad things—but in the momentum, you can go with it, borrow it, and nudge it lightly.

II. Inchoate Becoming · About to Be Born

Momentum strains, wanting to carry the situation somewhere. But it does not drop the result in front of you all at once. It has one subtlest and most critical stage: the instant when it is about to appear but has not yet appeared. This instant is the hardest and most valuable thing in this chapter. Let me take you, slowly, until you touch it.

Let me have you do one thing. Right now, try to yawn—do not actually yawn; just notice whether, a very short instant before the yawn truly arrives, you can already feel that it is coming. At that moment the yawn has not appeared yet, but it is already on its way; you faintly feel that urge to yawn gathering below. That is the instant. The yawn has not arrived, but you know it is coming.

Try another, more precise one. Have you ever had a moment like this: a sentence reaches the tip of your tongue, but you have not said it yet; or a thought is about to surface, and you already feel it coming, but you still cannot catch what it is. That instant of about-to-but-not-yet—the words not yet out, the thought not yet formed, but the urge to come out, to take form, already stretched taut there. You can feel that something is coming, although it has not come.

This instant—about to appear, not yet appeared—I call it the inchoate. The inchoate is when momentum has been held to a critical point and is about to appear as one concrete event, but still lacks that final quiver. It is tiny—because the thing has not really happened yet; it is still only a thread of a beginning, a tendency on the point of moving without having moved. This tiny thread, about to be born without yet being born, I call inchoate becoming: it is already becoming, but becoming so faintly that it has not yet taken visible form.

Why is this inchoate so important? Because it is the only moment in the whole matter when things can still be nudged lightly. Once a thing has truly appeared, has become an established fact, no amount of force on your part can change it—the water has already been thrown. But at that critical point of the inchoate, the matter is not yet made, the momentum is still being held, not yet landed—and at that moment, one tiny nudge can change where it lands. To move a thousand pounds with four ounces—what you move is the inchoate. A truly good chess player does not strain his strength after the game has died; he drops one light stone on that inchoate moment where victory and defeat are about to divide. A truly sensible person does not fight fires after the matter has blown up; he makes one light move on that inchoate moment when it is still a thread of a beginning.

Look back at the troubles you have been through: almost none of them dropped on you suddenly. A relationship that walked to its end—looking back, there were countless inchoate moments: those small feelings that were never caught, those swallowed words, those little frictions you could not be bothered to trace. While they were still inchoate, one light move from you would have dissolved them—but you did not see them, and let them one by one be held into momentum and appear as that situation which can never be returned to.

Some bodily troubles are the same: before they truly appear, there may already have been subtle changes and signals for a while.

People who live well, who lead well, who care for their health well, have their entire skill in one place: while a matter is still inchoate, still not yet in form—they sense it, and catch it lightly. Once it has appeared, all effort comes too late.

Then how do you catch this inchoate? This brings us to a distinction you must be clear about: sensing—not calculation.

Calculation is you standing outside the matter, taking past data and known regularities to extrapolate what will happen next. It handles what has already appeared, what has already taken form. But the inchoate has not appeared yet; it is still a faint something, on the point of moving without moving—you cannot calculate it, because it has not yet become calculable data. Then what do you rely on? Sensing. Sensing is not standing outside and calculating; it is putting yourself into that between, into that momentum, pressing close to it, and feeling which way that about-to-move-not-yet-moved force is being held. Just as you feel the yawn coming, feel the words at the tip of your tongue, feel a relationship straining wrong—you did not calculate it; you pressed close to that momentum and sensed it.

Saying “sensing” still leaves you one layer away. Let me have you use it once, on the spot, and you will understand what it means to nudge at the inchoate. Next time an emotion rises in you—say, a flare of anger, a wave of irritation, an impulse about to burst out of your mouth—notice that earliest instant: the fire has not yet caught; there is only a thread of it. The words are not yet out; there is only the urge to say them. That thread is the inchoate: the matter is not yet made, only about to be made. Most people only react after the fire has grown into a blaze and the words have been thrown—and by then it is too late; the momentum has already appeared as an established fact, and all you can do is clear up the wreckage.

But if, at that earliest thread—at the inchoate—you can just lightly, without force, look at it once: not suppressing it, not indulging it, only noticing that it is rising. Try it and see what happens: that fire very often loosens, dissolves, turns, in the very instant you look at it. You did not wrestle with it, you did not press it down with force—you only touched it lightly at that instant when it was about to be made and not yet made. This is four ounces moving a thousand pounds: what you nudge is not the fire already blazing, but the inchoate of the fire not yet lit. The same emotion—handled after it has appeared as a blaze, it costs the strength of nine oxen and two tigers; sensed lightly at its inchoate, it costs almost no strength, and its direction changes. With this one act, you have not merely known about sensing—you have used it.

This is what this section is: Inchoate Becoming · About to Be Born. Before a thing truly appears, there is first a faint something about to be born but not yet born—an inchoate. The person who can read this inchoate, who can sense this faintness, can lightly nudge the matter before it settles. This is no supernatural power; it is the skill of putting yourself into the between and sensing, pressed close to the momentum. The more you can quiet down and empty out (remember Born from the Empty), the more you can sense that faintness; the busier you are calculating, the more you try to fit the past’s experience over it, the less you can sense it—because it is not in the past’s data at all; it is in that about-to-move-not-yet-moved momentum of the present.

You must distinguish this: momentum is not one specific event. What the ancients truly read was never which event would certainly happen tomorrow, but which square this change has walked to. The moon about to be full and not yet full—one square; the water about to brim and not yet brimming—one square; the human heart about to stir and not yet stirred—also one square. To sense momentum is not to calculate the future into a dead timetable; it is to feel the phase of change. Events are the results that have appeared; momentum is the grain of change while it is still changing, about to be made and not yet made. So true sensing is not estimating events—it is pressing close to the change of change, and knowing where it is next being born.

Hidden here is a deeper principle, the one on which nearly everyone who tries to calculate the future to its end has crashed: this momentum is not merely hard to calculate now—it is impossible to calculate to the end, at the root. Why? Suppose, hypothetically, that one day someone really built a model that could calculate all change, all momentum, everything about to happen—to the end, to the death. What would that mean? It would mean there is a final, never-again-changing rule covering all change. But do not forget: the nature of becoming is never to close its mouth, to be able to give birth to new forever (remember?). A world that could be calculated to the end is a world whose mouth has been closed by that final rule—and ceaseless becoming dies in the hands of that rule. So calculable-to-the-end and ceaseless becoming cannot both be true at the root. If you want this world to be alive, still becoming, you must accept that it cannot be calculated to the end. Uncalculability is not your incompetence; it is the opening this world must keep, in order to keep itself alive, able to become onward. Every person in history who claimed to calculate heaven’s secrets to the end finally fell on that one layer of change he had not calculated—not because he was not clever enough, but because he was attempting something this world does not permit at its root: to calculate the living into the dead.

So uncalculability is not only the boundary of our ability. Uncalculability itself is one of becoming’s shapes. A thing still becoming must necessarily have a part not yet settled, not yet fully appeared, not yet closed by any rule. See this uncalculability as part of becoming, and you will no longer affirm ceaseless becoming on one side while secretly hoping on the other that one day it can be calculated to death. Sensing can grow deeper and deeper, description clearer and clearer—but that living opening not yet spoken to the end is exactly where becoming is still becoming.

III. At the Fullest, Becoming Returns

Momentum moves, and makes things appear; a thing appears, walks to its end—and then what? This section speaks of the last, and deepest, grain of momentum. It will untie something that has bound you for a long time: what, exactly, is the relation between change and the unchanging.

Observe momentums that keep developing, and you will see one grain appear again and again: a direction taken to its extreme is often already gestating its own turning. The moon rounds and then wanes; the water rises and then falls; a fashion at its most flourishing has often already begun to gather its opposing force underneath. I call this grain: at the fullest, becoming returns—at its fullest, becoming is often the beginning of the turning, and this return may again become the beginning of a new round.

This grain of becoming, flourishing, turning, and returning appears again and again in nature, in human affairs, and in history.

Once you understand this one grain, you will look at your own rises and falls differently. When things go well for you, do not let triumph go to your head—momentum at its fullest turns back; climb too high, and the next step is the turn back. When things go badly, do not despair—decline at its extreme is the return, the place where a new round is about to rise. The darkest moment is usually the night before dawn. The favorable and the adverse in human life were never a straight line running one way to the end—they are round after round, a circle. The one who cannot see this loses himself in triumph and collapses in adversity, dragged up and down by that momentum, his heart flying to heaven and plunging to earth. The one who sees it knows to rein in when things go well, and knows things will return when they go badly; he does not wrestle with that round, because he knows it is a round, not forever—he sits at the position where he can watch round after round, and he stays steady.

Go one layer deeper, and you will see something that at first you cannot think through, but which opens wide once you do: this round after round of arising and perishing, this formation, continuance, decay, and emptiness with its beginnings and ends—is not a defect, and not someone’s clever arrangement. It is simply what becoming looks like as it appears: becoming already contains perishing within it, and perishing already contains the next round’s becoming. You have probably always felt that the best existence would be one that never perishes, that always is, that never declines. But think carefully: a thing that never perishes, never ends, with no head and no tail—can it still give birth to the new? It cannot. It is precisely because there is decline, and end, and the closing of one round, that room is made for a new round to be born. The flower must wither for the fruit to set; one generation must age for the next to grow tall; the old situation must scatter for new possibility to have a place to surface. Decline and end are not becoming’s enemy—they are becoming’s way of making room for the new (remember Born from the Empty: without emptying out, nothing new can be born). So this round after round of arising and perishing is exactly what ceaseless becoming looks like—becoming contains perishing, perishing contains becoming, round after round, with no one designing it; it is so of itself. The end you fear is actually a necessary link in ceaseless becoming: without that end, there is no next beginning. If a thing truly never died, it would become a dead thing frozen there, unable ever to give birth to the new. That it can die is what lets it become; that it has an end is why it never ends.

These rounds, seen on the largest scale—the whole world, the whole of history—are the same. Nearly every people, from ancient times to now, has faintly touched the same thing: this world’s appearing is not a straight line from one beginning to one final day, and then done—it is round after round. Some called them kalpa after kalpa; some called them age after age; some called them formation, continuance, decay, and emptiness. The words differ, but what they touched is the same: one round appears to its end, returns to the root, and a new round appears; each round has its own rising and falling, its gathering and scattering, its remembering and forgetting. This is what the ceaselessness of ceaseless becoming looks like on the largest scale—not being there unchanged forever, but becoming round after round. And each round’s ending is not lost in vain: it is one great emptying-back, making room for the next round. As for which round we are in at this moment, and which step of it we have reached—that, most likely, can never be fully known. Because each emptying-back erases most of the previous round’s traces; if nothing were erased, if everything were kept exactly as it was, it would not be a true emptying-back—the root would be stuffed full of an old account that keeps piling up and is never cleared, and ceaseless becoming would close its mouth again. Even this not-remembering is something becoming arranged, so that it could keep becoming onward.

Go ahead and spread that great picture of round after round before your eyes. One round of a world rises out of chaos, out of an undifferentiated whole: first division—heaven and earth divide out, light and dark divide out, the myriad things divide out; then growth—the myriad things multiply, sprout, flourish, richer and more complex; civilizations stand up, wisdom lights up, reaching a summit of splendor. But fullness is the beginning of the return: from a certain moment, that momentum turns downward and begins to scatter, to break, to decline; the splendor fades, little by little, until the whole round returns to a stillness, an emptiness, back to that undifferentiated root. And then? Then it is not the end—inside that emptiness, a new round begins to brew: again division, again flourishing, another summit, another emptying-back. Round after round, with no first round and no last round—because becoming never closes its mouth.

From ancient times to now, nearly every people that has seriously gazed at this world has glimpsed, dimly, this round after round. Some called one round a kalpa, saying how long a kalpa lasts, and when the kalpa ends all returns to emptiness and a new kalpa begins; some called it formation, continuance, decay, and emptiness, saying a world passes through these four stages—coming into being, abiding, decaying, and emptying into stillness—cycling without end; some said time is not a straight line but one great circle after another, head joined to tail, great ages succeeding great ages, and at each age’s end the sky topples and the earth splits, the old world returns to dust, and a new world is reborn from the ashes. Their words are a jumble, but draw out the thing beneath the words and it is the same: this world’s appearing is never a straight line from one beginning to one end and done—it is round, and round, and round again, being born and returning, returning and being born.

And that end of each round, that return to emptiness—do not see it as pure destruction, pure loss. It is one great emptying-back (remember those small emptying-backs in a person—weariness, sleep, desire returning to zero). One round of a world, hoarded to its last, becomes too full, too heavy, too rigid; the old things, the old arrangements, everything old, stop up becoming’s road so that nothing new can be born. At that moment, one great emptying-back clears it all, returns it to zero, empties it out—and only then does a new round have a place to be born again. So that seemingly world-destroying end is a thorough emptying that becoming must perform, in order to keep becoming onward and give birth to a wholly new round. As for which round of this headless and tailless cycling we are in at this moment, and which stretch of it—the early morning of a round just risen, or the dusk of a round about to end—that, most likely, we can never fully know. Because each emptying-back erases most of the previous round’s memory; if everything were kept as it was, account after account all recorded, it would not be a true emptying-back—the root would be stuffed and crushed by that endlessly piling, never-cleared old account. So even this not-remembering, this forgetting, is not a defect: it is the margin becoming leaves itself, so that it can begin again, cleanly.

Now I want to take you to the deepest thing beneath all these rounds. See it, and your fear of change will loosen by more than half.

You fear change. Everyone fears change. You fear loss, fear aging, fear that what you have will be gone, fear that the settled days will be broken. In your heart you always long for something unchanging to grasp, to lean on, to rest in. You have made change and the unchanging into two enemies: change is turmoil, a threat; the unchanging is stability, a support. All your life you have lived inside change, desperately trying to grab hold of one bit of the unchanging.

But look at that round after round just now: it keeps changing, does it not? Born, full, declining, returning—not a moment of rest. Yet it is exactly this ceaseless changing that itself has never changed. That rhythm of round after round, becoming and returning—for a hundred million years, it has always been this rhythm. The moon wanes and waxes, waxes and wanes, changing without end; yet this waning-and-waxing itself has not changed for a thousand ages. Do you see the paradox? The thing that keeps changing is exactly the thing that never changes. It is not that there is a changing world, and then an unchanging root hiding behind it—it is that this very thing that keeps changing, this ceaseless becoming, is itself the unchanging. Change is what the unchanging looks like; the unchanging is that it keeps changing.

This unties the knot between you and change. You have always wanted to pull an unchanging thing out of change to lean on—you cannot pull one out, because there is no unchanging thing hiding behind the change. The true unchanging is not behind change; it is right in the middle of change: it is this very ceaseless becoming, always changing, never pausing. You no longer need to fear change, and you no longer need to fish a straw of the unchanging out of change. Just recognize: this thing that keeps changing is the thing that never changes; standing inside change, you are already standing inside the unchanging. Change is not an enemy to flee—change is the eternal, unchanging becoming, in the act of becoming itself.

So the true way to meet this endlessly changing world is not to grab some unchanging thing and hold it to the death—you cannot hold it; any thing you hold, when its momentum reaches the full, will return and change. The true way is to recognize that you were always this ceaseless becoming itself, and then, along with it, round after round, to be born, flourish, decline, return—born again and again. You are not a victim dragged along by change—you are change itself. Meet change with becoming; with that you that has always been becoming, meet this world that is always changing—however much it changes, you are the one that is changing; however hard it returns, you are the one that will be born again. This is the last thing this book gives you: at the fullest, becoming returns; change is the unchanging; you are that becoming which keeps changing and therefore never changes.

And this turns the old saying—meet the ten thousand changes with the unchanging—back to its true meaning. People have always understood the unchanging as a fixed thing: a principle held to the death, an unmoved position, a rock that does not budge—thinking that if they hold it tight, they can meet every change. But any fixed thing you hold will be outlived and broken when its momentum reaches the full—take a thing that goes out of date to meet ten thousand changes, and sooner or later it can meet nothing. The true way to meet ten thousand changes with the unchanging: what is unchanging is not a thing, but that very capacity to keep being born. You are not guarding a rock—you are connected to that root which can forever give birth to a new response. When the ten thousand changes come, you do not fit an old method over them—you give birth, on the spot, from that root of ceaseless becoming, to the new response this change calls for. So the saying should be read: meet the ten thousand changes with ceaseless becoming. And what people call steadiness is not a still rock carried in the chest, but connection to that source which keeps becoming—a truly steady person does not panic before the greatest changes, not because he can hold on to something, but because he can give birth. Holding cannot hold; only becoming can meet.

Here Book Two ends. You have seen how becoming moves: it divides into two ends (Becoming Divides), the two ends one of a kind and completing each other (Born New, Mutual Becoming), momentum born between the ends (Symbiosis, Momentum Is Born in the Between), momentum born in the empty and about-to-appear at the inchoate (Born from the Empty, Inchoate Becoming), and momentum turning back at its fullest, round after round without end—and this ceaselessness itself is the unchanging (At the Fullest, Becoming Returns). In the next book, we watch how this movement truly appears as the myriad things—as mountains and rivers, as you, as those existences that do not yet have names.

Look back over this whole book: becoming is not still—the moment it appears, it divides (Becoming Divides); it divides out two ends that are one of a kind and give birth to each other (Born New, Mutual Becoming); between the ends is born the living between (Symbiosis); in the between is stretched the directional momentum (Momentum Is Born in the Between); momentum is born in the empty place and, at the inchoate, is about to appear without having appeared (Born from the Empty, Inchoate Becoming); at its fullest it returns, round after round without end—and this ceaselessness itself is the unchanging (At the Fullest, Becoming Returns). This book has spoken of movement, of how becoming becomes without cease. In the next book, we watch how this ceaseless becoming lands, and appears as this whole world before your eyes—with mountains and rivers, with you and me, and with those existences that have no name yet.

Stop here again. You have seen how becoming moves—division, the between, momentum, the inchoate, the return. Do not hurry onward. Let these live in you for a while. In the next book, we watch it appear as the myriad things.

Book Three · Becoming-Becoming-Becoming

The Transformation of Becoming — seeing the myriad things with becoming