Fen / Differentiation Fēn · Fen / Differentiation

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.

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.