Being

In your moment of tracing the base color of life, and restarting the happening

Scripture

Primordial energy is surging; awareness is in its first budding.

True being is without beginning; Being from the beginning is round and complete.

Though wave after wave breaks, the body of water is the same.

Sea-foam is gathering, not yet telling east from west.

Wenzi · On Being

You swim desperately upstream against the torrent of time, your fingers trying to dig a clear “I” out of the chaos. The water pressure squeezes your chest, while that source of light called “home” drifts further and further away. Until the instant your strength gives out, the instant your lungs are about to burst—the scripture catches your back at this moment: “Primordial energy is surging; awareness is in its first budding.”

Stop struggling. Feel this moment. That burning expansion and contraction in your chest—this is primordial energy. It has never stopped; it has always been surging—surging into this very brute force of your “swimming back upstream.”

Notice this moment. That “knowing” which knows it is suffocating, which knows it is searching—this is awareness in its first budding. It has never slept; it has always been budding—budding into the source of every movement of your searching.

And so the digging of your fingertips loosens. A deeper knowing floats up from the taut sinews: “True being is without beginning; Being from the beginning is round and complete.” True existence has no first notch. It is a ring biting its own tail. The “original face” you seek is not some dent your fingernail scratched into the ring—it is the whole ring itself, seamless, lacking nothing, never broken. Your gaze has stuck to a single mote of dust, mourning its incompleteness—forgetting that the whole ring has always been wrapped, complete, around your life.

At this moment an image unfolds in your oxygen-starved vision: “Though wave after wave breaks, the body of water is the same.” Look at the sea. Ten thousand waves, rising and breaking, each with its own story. But all of them are water. Your joys and sorrows, your stories, your identities, are waves of different shapes. And beneath all the clamor and all the silence, bearing everything, digesting everything, is that undivided, vast body of water.

The “origin” you trace upstream is not in the first wave—it is right here, in the water that is the essence of every wave.

What breaks is the appearance; what is whole is the water. Your being is that body of water, passing through a dream called “wave.”

At last, it brings you back to the earliest scene: “Sea-foam is gathering, not yet telling east from west.” The earliest shape of life is a patch of sea-foam in the sunlight—chaotic and bright. No division, no direction—only a gentle chaos holding all possibilities. The base color of your life is the abundance of this chaos.

In that “not yet telling,” the myriad things are undivided—and you, in that pure expanse of living energy, are surging.

Now, release the hand choking time by its throat.

What you are breathing is primordial energy. What you are right now perceiving is first awareness.

You are not that wave which will one day break; you are the deep ocean bearing ten thousand waves.

And the earliest face of that ocean is exactly this foam-light of no good and no evil, no I and no other—only one expanse of living energy, surging.

Being-Origin is not that you have returned home. It is that you have discovered you never left home—this home is the rise and fall of every breath of yours, the arising and perishing of every perception of yours; it is you, as the boundless body of water, at this moment, gently curling up a wave named “I.”