The world of becoming is always emergent. Can you sense this?
Being a zen student means to see the world as it is rather than the world I think it should be. The world-as- it-is is a world of change, a world of becoming. That means what happens next is not given or overdetermined by whats happening now. The phrase “becoming” is meant to steer us away from fatalistic, knee jerk assumptions about what we know, what social change is, and how many futures are possible.
Or, as Jane Hirshfield writes, “Zen pretty much comes down to three things—everything changes, everything is connected, pay attention.”
William Connolly’s brilliant book, A world of Becoming, is an academic/philosophical case for seeing the social change and transformation as an unfolding rather than an overdetermined set of outcomes. Emphasis on process, not on fixed outcomes. Process, which while still structured or held by certain logics, like capitalism, has futures. Emphasis plural. As such, it is an argument against the fatalistic determinism one sometimes finds in left and right materialisms, and even in zen practice.
We live in multiple and inter-connected worlds. Before Connolly, there are hints of his argument in philosophy, history, and literature. For example, in Symposium., Plato describes the world of becoming and the world of being. We exist in two worlds, a microcosm within a macrocosm. http://www.cyberpat.com/shirlsite/essays/plato.html
New York City, Hudson River Parkway.