Becoming : The Art of Life

'Three score years and ten' is said to be our alloted time in the school of life; seventy years in which to learn, grow, exprience and assimilate. It's not actually a long time unless you're fresh off the starting line!

The greatest gift we have as spirit-being-human is that of choice, and if nothing else, it is choice that determines every single moment of our time here. Choice is so powerful that when we run out of choices we die, because Death is our final choice; when all our options are used up.

Choice itself is interesting, as it stems from options available to us moment by moment throughout the day; and choice relies upon two primary illusions in order to work. Those illusions are here referred to as 'Yin' and 'Yang'.

Yin and Yang are possibly the most misunderstood concepts going, probably because it's easier to copy and paste our old friend the Yellow Emperor and his cohorts the Su Wen than it is to stop and think seriously about how we function.

My Chinese master and my acupuncture tutors all tried hard to instill in us, their problematic charges, the understanding that Yin and Yang are not 'absulutes'; in fact they can't be as they are in a never ending struggle of 'becoming'. When we understand this we can lose the outmoded western idea of opposites, we can stop taking sides with our ideas of positive, negative, good, bad, right and wrong; and the idea of simply Be-ing leads to Be-coming.

Let us expand a little here. The pictograph for Yin means 'shady side of the mountain' and for Yang, 'sunny side of the mountain'; and these two terms are interchangeable.

How so?

The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, so any view of a mountain will show the sun illuminating one side before the other. Yet there is no absolute Yin or Yang here for the sun does not stand still in the sky; and this is the lesson of Yin and Yang, that they are in motion with each 'becoming' the other in a constant dance of life.

There is no constant state of Yang or Yin within our bodies, if there was we would die as the 'Sheng' (feeding) cycle would collapse very quickly. An imbalance become progressively more Yang or more Yin, depending upon the condition.

The triplicity of Yin, Yang and Becoming is seen everywhere we look for we cannot escape the circle of life and it is this triplicity that gives us 'choice'.

A simplified example, you are hungry; therefore your hunger is an increasing state of yin because as you become hungrier you become more yin all the way to starvation and death.

Again, you are lying in the sun becoming hotter, increasingly yang; and the longer you stay there the hotter you become until the excessive heat kills you.

Therefore, life unchecked and without choice can be pretty hair raising in the survival stakes.

Each second becomes the next in a fluid motion that has no single point of stasis; we are not in a state of 'I am' but of 'I am becoming', there is no static moment in life or death as all is motion.

Entropy is 'becoming', something moving from one state of being to another; and the joy of understanding is that there is nothing 'good' or 'bad' involved. There is always a point when you can go no further in increasing a yang condition of being and it becomes an increasing of its yin condition.

Humans have many problems that originate in this cycle of action. Some people are great at starting new things, but never seem to complete them; others may talk of what they want to do but just can't get started. A lot of this is the result of the learning curve or 'gradient' that they choose.

The gradients of your life are made up of choices, choices you make for yourself; and depending upon your understanding of the importance of selecting the right choice lies the outcome.

Gradients are unique to your own life, they cannot be passed on 'in completeness' to someone else without the risk of the gradient being to easy or difficult to follow.

Example...

You wish to lose weight so you go look at available diets. The one you choose is 'how to lose a stone a week', hey great, now you can postpone losing that stone until the last minute. Now, you start the diet and the gradient is obviously going to be steep and if it reaches a point where the body believes it is going to die if this continues, then it will force 'you' to give in and rightly so.

The other diet is 'lose 2lbs a week'; hey that sounds lik a healthy way to do it. After 3 weeks you look at the scales to find a disappointing 4lbs lost and enthusiasm goes out the window. Too shallow a gradient.

The idea of 'becoming' slimmer should start with you mapping out what you are capable of choosing and why. From there the decisions should be graded to provide a comfortable move choice to choice that allows you to feel 'success' in each moment of becoming. That way you are gently following the sine wave with no effort and each choice is joyful.

Stuck in a rut, can't learn all those chords? Go back two steps and change the gradient, learn just one chord until you can play it perfect each time, then pick another.

I was an apprentice metallurgist when I met my Chinese master, he didn't know the word and so I did my best to explain it. He then gave me the simple answer, 'Ah, a student of becoming!'. Yes, I was trying to become a metallurgist. That moment had reprocussions many times in my life, whatever I set out to do I think of him laughing and wagging his finger, 'Ah, a student of becoming a ....'

You can be a 'student of becoming' in many things in the one moment, whether you are becoming healthier, calmer, wealthier or more knowledgable it makes no difference. Applying the same simple rules can help you make the right choice in the right way to achieve the right result.

Didn't Crowley state in his laws of magick that an act of magick requires you to 'be in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing with the right intention'?

Maybe he knew my teacher :)