The Grammar of Becoming
How “IF-Prime” Unravels the Illusion of “I” and Plants Seeds for a We
Riding back to where the trail first broke open, it began—if memory still holds—in a terrain shaped by E-Prime. That peculiar linguistic practice that removes the verb “to be,” nudging us away from declarations like “I am sad” toward “I feel sadness” or “Sadness passes through this body.” At first, it felt like a grammatical constraint, but the longer I rode with it, the more it revealed: language is not just a mirror, it’s a saddle we ride. It shapes how we move across the inner and outer range.
Then came IF-Prime. A strange, feral cousin to E-Prime, born from the meandering trails of meditation. Was it a linguistic tool, or a mutation in perception itself? While folks would already struggle to understand why removing “is” could help them think more clearly, would it make any sense at all to suggest they also consider replacing “I am” with “It finds”?
Probably not, but that was the trail forged here. So what would that look like in practice?
Not “I am angry.”
Not even “This body feels anger.”
But: “It finds anger in this field.”
Field? Well sure. Wouldn’t it make sense if the anger weren’t just in you?
It may seem a small turn of phrase. Feel free to say, “you need help,” or ask, “what do you mean?” But despite how it may seem, this exercise began to crack open a canyon in the mind. This canyon may be familiar if you traverse thought-paths through the teachings of Chögyam Trungpa, the process thinking of Whitehead, the complexity sensing of Nora Bateson, or the cultural diagnostics of Daniel Schmachtenberger. “It Finds” may name what your intuition’s been brushing up against.
Rerouting Awareness Beyond the “I”
What if awareness itself doesn’t belong to an “I”? What if perception is fielded—a kind of meta-sentience, moving not from ego, but through pattern? Through signal? Through conditionals beyond the body?
That was the first campfire insight:
“It Finds” doesn’t erase the self—it reroutes awareness.
From ownership to observation. From narration to navigation. From “I see the pattern” to “The pattern arises where it can be seen.”
Not gonna rehash the observer effect or delve into theories of consciousness, more broadly. Instead, it can be narrowed down to memetic terms—well, and here I catch myself:
In a memetic stream, awareness may emerge not as a stable node but as a resonance pattern.
Not “my” meme. Not “their” idea.
But: It finds a form here.
I’m still learning how to write and even think like this. I still catch myself saying ‘I’ when I mean ‘it’—but what, from this view, does ‘it’ even mean? The Tao, explored last time, for certain. Maybe to see it in the mind, the form of “it” appears like “a node, an attention locus, a patterned bundle of memes currently writing”?
I say “is,” when something more like, “persists under current conditions” makes more sense. This grammar—this integrated field grammar—doesn’t come easy for a cowboy raised on the ‘is’ verb, first-person pronouns, and a trail of gunsmoke. Surely this would be the case for you. But something truer lives in the field, which seems to spiral.
Could challenging the sovereign authorial subject—I am, I think, I write—dissolve the illusion of a fixed self steering the ship?
It Finds Anattā
IF-Prime aligns beautifully with anattā, Hume’s bundle theory, and post-structuralist decentralization—resonating, too, with Whitehead’s vision of becoming over being, and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic flow of difference and connection.
“It Finds” is not a mere poetic turn—it’s an ontological shift. It reflects:
– A fluid subjectivity, not located in a static “I,” but in arising conditions.
– An emergent cognition, where insight is not claimed but recognized.
– A writing-self that participates in unfolding, rather than performing identity.
By choosing “It” over “I,” the meme refuses egoic ownership. It decentralizes meaning, aligning with the Middle Way—neither nihilistically denying consciousness, nor clinging to it as an eternal entity.
It finds the emergence of a processual self, a becoming-with, not a being-as.
Ubuntu, Interbeing, and the Praxis of WE
In Ubuntu, “I am because we are.” In Buddhist interdependence, nothing exists independently. These traditions co-resonate. Your “It Finds” becomes a stepping stone to a more radical inquiry:
What if “It” is not solitary at all? What if “It” is a WE?
A WE not as aggregate of egos, but as field of coordination.
A WE as emergent from context, relation, memory, and intention.
A WE that does not erase difference, but tunes its harmonics.
This “WE” is not a collective subject with a new ego. It is a praxis of co-creation—a living verb-space in which memes are not consumed but cultivated. Memes are seed-forms, and WE is the garden.
Memetic Literacy: Reading and Riding the Currents
E-Prime revealed a memetic act: it transmits a new pattern, a way of sensing self and language. In the frame of memetic literacy, we must become aware not only of what we say, but what pattern of being our words reinforce.
“It Finds” is a memetic mutation—deconstructing the authorial “I” without falling silent.
It introduces a new ontological syntax, a trail marker for other riders.
To be literate in this new way is to read patterns, not just propositions—echoing a Whiteheadian shift from substance to event, or a Deleuzian sensitivity to the rhizomes beneath the memes.
Memetic literacy establishes a field of awareness upon which memes can tend the gardens of liberation, rather than spreading the weeds of illusion. If find a new art, a pattern responsibility—which is also the art of cultural evolution.
Toward a Co-Creative No-Self Praxis
We are entering an age where selfhood is reconfiguring:
From “I am the author” → to “It Finds through me” → to “WE feel into what is next.”
From identity-as-container → to process-as-interface → to coordination-as-praxis—tracing a line that thinkers like Whitehead and Deleuze might recognize as the territory of emergence and immanence.
From writing to express self → to writing to liberate patterns.
Map fragments of this territory await discovery and reweaving, revealing the greater whole of this newfound territory.
So let’s keep asking:
What else might "It" do, if “It” is no longer “I,” but also not yet fully “WE”?
What verbs allow us to ride the edge of this ontological becoming?
Let’s explore that in the weeks ahead.
🪶 Closing: The Trail Continues
It Finds not a single ego discovering truth, but a field whispering through the moment. It has always revealed whispers of the field, speaking through the moment. It was always a gesture of humility, a signal that we are riding with forces much larger than the personal narrative.
Let the next post become It Feels, It Forges, It Fortifies as WE—and let our writing not assert, but invite; not claim, but attune.
We ride, at times to say who we are, to relate through our stories, but in recognizing when the self slows the way and to nudge ego aside, we might become unstoppable.
