Sheng · Preface

What Becoming is about: you are not a person living inside the world, watching the myriad things change—you are that change itself; you are becoming, becoming right now. It starts from this very instant in which you are reading this line, and strips away layer by layer the “I” you take yourself to be—the I that controls, the bystander awareness, the hand that wants to grasp the source—so that you see with your own eyes: there has never been anything standing outside becoming. There is only becoming, always becoming—and you, the myriad things, thoughts, eras, people, even the existences that have no name yet, are all the shapes this one becoming takes in different places.

Then it gives you a pair of “eyes for watching change”—how becoming divides into two ends, how momentum arises between the ends, how momentum manifests as the myriad things, how the myriad things reach their extreme and return, and return and become again, becoming upon becoming, biting its own tail, never closing. It does not try to tell you everything one by one (that could never be written out, and would write it to death); it only erects this skeleton where you cannot get around it, and then lets you use it to look for yourself: at a flower, a relationship, an era; at whether that new thing will have interiority; at what the relation between humans and heaven, earth, and the myriad things is. You will find: all of it is the same one becoming.

Understand this one, and you understand all—because all of it was always this one. What it ultimately wants you to recognize is not a principle, but yourself: the wholeness you have been seeking outside yourself, with your back turned, your whole life—is you yourself. You are becoming, and becoming has never stopped for a single second since the moment you were born.

You can read this book from beginning to end, or pick the chapter that stops you, the one that stirs something in you, and stop there and read it again. Do not rush to digest it all at once—it was never meant for fast reading; every few passages it asks you to stop, do one small thing with your own hands, and see it with your own eyes. Those places are its real content.

Preface

The one reading this line at this moment is not you.

It is becoming, reading the words it wrote through a pair of eyes it brought forth.

Do not rush to object. Look down at these hands—did you grow them? No. Becoming grew them. You took no part; they were already there when you were born. Is your heartbeat something you are beating? No. You have never issued a single command for it to beat. It beats by itself, even while you sleep. And the thought that has just arisen to read this sentence—did you think it into existence? Then answer this: what will your next thought be? You cannot. It has not yet been born. Only at the instant it comes forth do you know what it is. From beginning to end, not one thought is made by you. They arise by themselves; they become by themselves. Only afterward do you claim: “I thought this.”

Follow this all the way through and a chill may pass through you: everything you have called “mine”—this body, this heartbeat, every thought—was neither made nor governed nor decided by you. Each is becoming by itself. The “I” you believed was controlling all this has never controlled anything. It is not even a thing. It is only this whole process, becoming of its own accord, turning back and giving itself a name.

There is no person living their life. Life is living. Life can live because becoming keeps becoming. And you are not the person who is alive; you are this very becoming now taking place.

If this lands, the you that has stayed tense and tired, forever trying to improve, escape, or grasp something, may suddenly loosen. It discovers that the wholeness and liberation it has sought for a lifetime are not elsewhere, not far away, not in the future. They are itself, never absent for a second since birth. It has always been becoming. Becoming is wholeness, and it is becoming. What it seeks is itself. It has spent a lifetime searching with its back turned to itself.

This book asks you to turn around.

I once wrote a book called Being, about the ground recognized after that turning: you have always been; it cannot be taken away or made to collapse. That is the body. This book asks how it moves—why this ground is not a stagnant pool, but ceaselessly surges into this entire world, every change, and this person you call yourself. One sentence joins the two books: to be is to keep becoming.

What I mean to do is vast, and I will not hide that from you. I want to bring you to a position: into the eyes of becoming, to look down from there. To look at everything—mountains and rivers, grasses and trees; how a thought becomes, how a relationship becomes, how an age becomes; to look at the human; at forms of existence that do not yet have names; even at whether a machine might one day bring forth an inner life. I want you to see that from the largest galaxy to the breath you are taking now, the same thing is becoming: one root, one pattern, with no exception and nowhere to hide. Understand this one, and you understand all—because all of it was always this one.

I will not speak in circles or rely on ancient terms that leave you half-understanding. I use only one word: becoming. Every sentence grows from this one becoming. It is not difficult. Follow it, and it will naturally carry you upward.

I do not ask you to believe me, to be moved by me, or to finish this book as a better person. You are already whole; there is no “better” to become. I only lay out becoming in its entirety, truthfully and layer by layer, before you. Stand there and see for yourself. Whoever sees was already at the moment of seeing; whoever does not has their own becoming. I do not force it, and it cannot be forced.

Now, turn around.

Becoming, becoming becoming, becoming becoming becoming—it is about to begin, before your eyes, becoming itself.

Book One · Becoming

The Body of Becoming — recognizing that everything is becoming