What is Becoming? What is Being?

One of the most reliable participants of this blog, Michelle, sent me an excerpt from Appendix G of Abraham Maslow's "Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences".  I believe this is the same Maslow who developed the Hierarchy of Need.  Anyway, this excerpt dealt with his attempt to describe the characteristics of Being, what he calls B-Values.   This got me to thinking...

I find that I need to sync with the “voice” the writer uses, especially when reading philosophy.  When I started reading the section, at first I thought I wasn’t going to make it.  Choppy sentences, half statements, and repeated phrases all leave me cold, often.  When I got to the 14 points and he offers what is essentially a “definition by thesaurus” I needed to scan ahead to see if it was going to make any sense.  I then went back and read through the words, and I started to get into his head a bit. 

The Becoming/Being process isn’t intuitive for most people, and it took me a long time to take the concept seriously.   The final paragraph in this section deals with this, of course.  Joining with the universe on a primal level and being fully human are not my personal definitions for Being, but they are certainly lofty ideals.  My favorite statement in this arena is “become who you are”.  This is the essence of Becoming, to me.  I believe that when we are in harmony with our personal essence, we can just Be, as in Be Ourselves.  This is Being.  Becoming and Being.  Finding harmony in our essences.

I looked up the origin of Becoming, and found this:

In the philosophical study of ontology, the concept of becoming originated in ancient Greece with the philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus, who in the sixth century BC, said that nothing in this world is constant except change and becoming (i.e., everything is impermanent).

As usual, all of modern philosophy is but a footnote to the Greeks.