Dev Bhagavān

Becoming Genius

Episode 0–Introduction

Transcription

Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān

Video Link: YouTube

Importance of Learning

Learning, training and education are probably the most important factors that determine success and happiness in life. Whether it’s ordinary education—reading, writing, arithmetic and all of that—or highly advanced training in some science or engineering discipline—or training in enlightenment and Self-realization—the ordinary educational system has let us down.

It doesn’t teach skills, it only teaches how to give right answers on tests. So you wind up graduating from school, only knowing how to get through school. And then you hit the real world, and it’s another story. What is needed to rise above the current crisis in education, in leadership, in trust, and in self-realization, is a new kind of education—not ordinary schooling, but experiential learning that teaches real skills.

Learning by Being

We cannot master a subject without doing it; and we cannot do the subject without being it. That’s where our Western philosophy has let us down. Descartes’ idea of “I think, therefore I am,” is completely backwards. The Cartesian split between the mind and the body, between knowledge and action, is completely wrong. Why? Because real learning starts from being. We went over this in the previous videos in the Foundation Series, and we’re going to go into it much deeper in this series of Becoming Genius.

Because no one is born a genius—or you might say, everyone is born a potential genius—but why do some people realize it and others don’t? It’s simply because they are not becoming a genius. Of becoming a genius, I’m not going to say it’s easy—you have to know how. But once you know how, it’s simply a matter of the methodical application of certain principles, and we’re going to go into those principles deeply in this series.

If one wants to become a doctor, you have to enroll in medical school; you have to go through a lot of book-learning; and then you have to go through a lot of practical learning. Finally, you have to be approved, evaluated and stamped a doctor by a panel of judges, all of whom are practicing physicians themselves.

The same is true of enlightenment. You can study about enlightenment from books or websites, but unless you actually practice and become an enlightened person, you will not attain what you’re looking for.

This series of videos is how to become a genius in any field that you choose. Of course, we would rather that you become a genius in Skillful Living and realize the teaching of the Buddha, because that will give you the greatest benefit. So, what is Skillful Living and what is becoming a genius? Well, let’s talk about it some more.

Science of Becoming

So in other words, it’s very hard for us to learn new skills, because our idea of learning itself is backwards. Let’s go over the theory again: Being and Becoming. Becoming is the process of changing your being. Now, how important is being in learning and life in general? Most people think that having is the important thing. If I have something, then I can do something with it, and then I can think about it and then I can know something. And then maybe being is in there someplace, down near the bottom. But that’s not the way it really is.

The way it really is, is that being is fundamental. If you have the being of, let’s say, an artist, then you automatically know how to express yourself, and you can think in terms of your artistic media and disciplines and so on. And then you can easily do your art, and then you can have the things that come from doing your art.

Or if you are interested in leadership, by having the being of a leader, automatically the doing, having and so forth of a leader will come to you. And with regard to enlightenment, if you can synthesize the being of an enlightened person, then automatically all the rest will be added to you.

In other words, being is senior to everything else: change your being and you change your life. If you want to change your life—if you want to learn something or become something—then you have to change your being.

And of course, the problem is we haven’t been taught about being. We don’t understand much about becoming. These are foreign words to us, because our educational system has buried topics having to do with ontology, ontics, phenomenology, experiential learning and so on. They have put them away where we can’t get at them, where we have no access to them, where we don’t have the vocabulary to even approach them. And mainly they have been relegated to the graduate and postgraduate levels of education.

So very few people get that far, therefore very few people know about issues concerning being. What to speak of becoming; becoming is very esoteric. Really it’s only covered nicely in the teaching of the Buddha. That’s why we source everything from the Suttas: the Theravāda Suttas, which are the original teachings, the original sermons, actually, of the Buddha to his monks.

What is Becoming?

Now what is becoming? The dictionary defines becoming as a verb, meaning:

“Begin to be; grow to be; turn into; (of a person) qualify or be accepted as; acquire the status of.” And the example they give is, ‘she wanted to become a doctor’.

Well again, if you want to become a doctor you have to go through the process of becoming a doctor. It’s not easy; it takes a lot of work. Anything in life worth doing, is worth doing well; and anything in life that’s worth doing well, is worth becoming a genius at, becoming a real expert at it.

And we’ll define genius in a moment, but for now try to understand that anything worth doing in life is going to be a struggle. It’s going to be a lot of work; it’s going to require a very strong commitment, an intense amount of labor and attention from you.

So we’re talking about becoming. OK becoming is a necessary thing for learning, but how do we become?

The Buddha tells us. He defines becoming as follows:

“Kamma is the field, consciousness the seed, craving the moisture. The consciousness of living beings is tuned to a refined property. Thus there is the production of renewed becoming in the future. This is how there is becoming.” —Bhava Sutta (AN 3.76)

So the Buddha, as usual, gives us a deeper view of becoming than the dictionary. He tells us how there is becoming by tuning the consciousness to a refined quality.

If you understood this statement, it’s like E=mc2. If you understood E=mc2, you could go into the lab and cook up an atomic bomb. Well, if you understand this statement, “The consciousness of living beings is tuned to a refined quality,” you could become anything that you would like to become, in this world or beyond it. This is the secret, and we’re going to be explaining this secret elaborately in this video and the ones following.

What is Genius?

Now let’s take a look at genius. Everybody knows the perfect example of genius: Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein was already a genius by the time he was 16. He was already doing original work in a very, very esoteric field of Nuclear Physics. How did he get like that? Was he born that way?

Some people might want you to think so. But I disagree. I was also doing advanced work in physics at the age of 16; in fact I was offered a full scholarship to MIT in Nuclear Physics—which I turned down. But why did I get that scholarship? Why did I get perfect scores in all my College Board examinations?

I looked into this, because people asked me—my disciples especially, my students asked me—“How is it that you know all these things? How is it you can do all these things?” I can fly a light plane, I can swim and run, I was a really highly trained yogī and other athletics, and I did so many things in my life that most people don’t even start to do. I was an expert symphonic flautist, I was an expert jazz composer, and so many other things; I wrote dozens of books, and so on and so on.

How did I do that? Well, when people started asking me, I gave it some thought. How did I do that? And the result is what you’re getting in this series: how to become genius.

Becoming a Genius

Becoming a genius is something you do; it’s not something you are, in the beginning. You have to cultivate it; you have to work to get it. But luckily there is a method that you can follow. It’s not easy. It will take a lot of work, and a lot of that will be dry, plodding, methodical work.

But if you follow this method I guarantee you, you can become a genius at whatever you want to do.

So what is a genius? Well again, the dictionary defines genius as a noun meaning, “Exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability; a person who is exceptionally intelligent or creative, either generally or in some particular respect.”

The example they give: ‘a musical genius’. Well I disagree with this definition because it says ‘other natural ability’. But I don’t think the abilities of a genius are natural. I think the ability of genius is cultivated, and it’s cultivated in a very specific way, having to do with the meaning of terms.

And we’ll get into that when we describe the four levels or four steps of the process of becoming genius.

Now we can define becoming genius as follows:

“Becoming Genius utilizes concepts derived from the teaching of the Buddha and other spiritual disciplines, as well as advanced concepts in science, education, ontology, semantics, software and systems theory, to master any subject so thoroughly that it results in a permanent change in being; so that whatever you master becomes your spontaneous, natural self-expression.”

Now this is the natural part about being genius: by the time you become the master of a particular subject or activity, it is natural to you to act as a master in that field. You don’t have to think about it; there’s no planning, thinking, calculating, scheming. You don’t need to take a break and say, “OK what am I going to do now?” It arises spontaneously from your being. That’s the whole point of Becoming Genius.

Mastery

So when we say ‘a genius is someone who has achieved mastery in a particular field’, what do we mean exactly? Well, the meaning of mastery is far more than mere mechanical or technical proficiency. When you master something it becomes your being—who you are, your natural self-expression—not something you merely know about. Whatever you master becomes effortless to use; you don’t need to remember and apply it; it becomes your natural spontaneous self-expression—without thinking or calculation.

This level of mastery comes from our unique ontological model and experiential methodology. The model of being and becoming used in our course is derived from Buddha’s theory of Dependent Origination (paṭicca-samuppāda).

And we’re going to go into this in detail in our upcoming videos. You will learn how to use Dependent Origination to become whatever it is that you want to be. And if you want to master a particular field, how to become a master of that field. And if you’ve attained that, then that field is completely open to you; whatever you want to do you can do at the highest level.

Experiential Learning

We mentioned experiential learning. Well, what is experiential learning? Becoming Genius will not be easy because we will critically question your habitual ways of learning and point out what is holding you back. You need full participation to get the promise of Becoming Genius: you have to make it part of your experience.

So in other words when we read something to you, or when we say something to you in these videos (You should view this video over and over again, by the way.) and each time we introduce a new concept you should stop the video, look into yourself and recall a time when you experienced something like that in your life. Or if you never have experienced something like that, you need to identify that too.

If this is a completely new concept that has no equivalent in your experience, then you should be very attentive to it, because this is something beyond your previous level of being.

We offer a radically different approach to learning. To get the full value of this you must discover for yourself the experience of what we present. The experiential method is designed to provoke you to transform yourself into the genius you potentially can be.

In other words, I can’t do it to you; you have to do it to yourself. You have to work out these ideas in your experience. And the primary thing that’s holding you back, is that you don’t know the definitions of the terms that we’re using to describe our method. And we’ll go over this in great detail coming up in the videos.

Finally, experiential learning is not merely knowing about a subject, but transforming your being into a master of the subject: a genius.

Communications Cycle

What am I doing when I’m trying to communicate with you? I have an idea, or a memory, or an experience, or a state of consciousness, or some information that I want to get across to you. And I want to have a copy of the information in my head wind up in your head. How do we do that?

We take a language that we both understand, and I encode my thoughts into the language. The language is not the same as the thought! It’s a code. When I say ‘dog’, everyone thinks of a dog, a four-footed furry animal, and all the qualities of a dog, and so on.

What? Is the word ‘dog’ equivalent to a dog? No! Although you have been taught that in school. If somebody asks, “What’s a four-footed furry beast or the best friend of mankind?” Well d-o-g, and you write that in on your test, then you get approval for that. But no—knowing a dog, having a dog for a pet, living with a dog and so on… I should have used cat, that would be a better example, I like cats a lot more. Living with a cat is a whole different experience than simply knowing about cats.

So if I say the word ‘cat’, it means I’m thinking of a cat, and I have encoded that thought in a word. Now I’m going to speak that word ‘cat’—it goes across to you, you hear it in your ear, and it goes into your brain—and you decode it into what you know of cats, into your experience of cats.

Your experience might be completely different from mine. Maybe you had some mangy old alley cat who gave you fleas. I have a pet Lion; so my different experience of cats is going to give me a completely different idea. And when I say ‘cat’—the general word ‘cat’—that gives me a different impression, a different idea, a different concept than a person who only knows house cats, for example.

Or, one time in India I ran into a wildcat in the mountains. Now this is a cat, but it’s not like a cat that most people know. So, my idea of cats is probably a lot bigger than most people’s idea of cats. My experience with cats is a lot bigger than most people’s experience too. So when I say ‘cat’, I have a different meaning than most people will have when they decode that word into their own experience.

So that’s why we need to make such detailed explanations of everything, because every single word we use is defined in a particular way according to our intention. And in order for you to get what we’re talking about, the same idea has to come up in your mind when you decode what we say.

That means we have to qualify everything; we have to be very careful about the words we use, so that you can get the exact same idea that we have. This is called duplication, and it is the principle of communication that we use to impart this teaching.

Becoming (Dependent Origination)

Video Link: YouTube

Now let’s talk a little more about becoming. Becoming is actually the subject of the First and Second Noble Truths of the Buddha. There is suffering, and there is an origin of suffering. And here is the origin of suffering in a diagram of Dependent Origination.

1st and 2nd Noble Truths

It begins with ignorance, and then it goes through all these other stages until it finally reaches suffering. So this is how suffering comes to be.

3rd and 4th Noble Truths

But there’s also the Third and Fourth Noble Truths of the cessation of suffering, and the Noble Eightfold Path, which is the method or the way to the cessation of suffering.

Now, even if you don’t know about Dependent Origination, you’re actually using this all the time. The Buddha got this theory from observation. He was watching people, he was watching himself, and how we become something at every moment. Every moment this process is going on, on different scales. Sometimes it can happen in a matter of microseconds; other times it can happen in minutes or hours, or days or weeks, or maybe even many lifetimes—that we go through these different stages, and we become different things, according to our intentions.

There is a law: the Law of Dependent Origination, the law of kamma or karma, and this is how that law works. It doesn’t require some external authority, like a God who looks over your shoulder every minute and writes down whatever you do. It’s a ridiculous idea—who would want to do that? No! The law of kamma works through our own being; it works through our own brains and the laws of nature. It’s just that Western science is not aware of these subtle laws of being and becoming. If it were, then we could easily turn this into a very scientific theory and prove it—which, actually, the Buddha has already done.

Overcoming Suffering

So let’s take this wisdom and use it to overcome the problem of suffering. Most people misuse the process of Dependent Origination. And so when they become something, it winds up in suffering. And when they get to suffering they say, “Oh no, I don’t want this suffering! I’ll become something else, and that way I won’t suffer…”

So we go back to the beginning, still ignorant of the Four Noble Truths, still ignorant of the Laws of Dependent Origination and so on, then they start the whole thing all over again. And that’s why there’s reincarnation. That’s why people go “round, round, do it again. Wheel turnin’ round and round—and go back, Jack, do it again,” until you’re sick and tired of it!

And that’s when you approach the teaching of the Buddha. You say, “OK, I’m tired of the suffering. I want it over, I want it finished,” and at that point you become a candidate for the Eightfold Path.

That’s why, in our process of Skillful Living, we make frequent references to the teachings of the Buddha. Now times have changed since he gave this teaching, and people’s lives are a lot different now than they were then, at least externally. However the principles of becoming are still the same, and so we’re going to use these principles, so in the beginning you can achieve satisfaction of being whatever you want, becoming a genius in whatever field you want, whatever your interest is, and attaining satisfaction in life. And from there we’ll go on up the Eightfold Path.

The Process of Becoming

ProcessOfBecoming

So for our purposes, for applications like learning and leadership, we’re especially interested in this part of Dependent Origination, which we can call the Process of Becoming.

The Process of Becoming, as you can see, begins with Fabrication and it goes through all these other stages down to Birth. Now this can be literal birth, or it can be the birth of an identity; it can be the birth of a self, a way of looking at yourself or life, a point of view or a feeling or anything else.

For the purposes of investigating learning as a process of becoming. however, we will divide the stages a little differently than the Buddha did, because his purpose was to bring people right on to the Eightfold Path. First we have to cure your learning disabilities. And then we can worry about the Eightfold Path because if not, you’re not going to be able to understand it.

So we’re going to work on curing your learning disabilities using the Buddha’s technology, so that you can attain the success in life that is being denied to you by your mis-education, by your wrong training, by your years of wrong living and bad experience in this world. We’re going to turn that around; and we’re going to show you exactly how to do that.

Four Stages

Video Link: YouTube

So the method that we use in becoming genius has four stages. For any given subject the first stage is duplication: making an exact copy of the source materials. If for example we’re going to learn about music, well, we have to go to a book on music and then make an exact copy of that knowledge in our own minds.

Or if we’re going to learn about learning, like we are now, you have to be able, and willing also, to make an exact copy of that knowledge in your own mind. And then we can talk meaningfully; then we can have real communication. Then we can actually transfer the understanding that we have, and the abilities that we have, to you. And then you can exercise and learn those abilities yourself. Or I should say, teach yourself those abilities, because that’s what we’re really talking about here. This is the method of Self Instruction.

The second stage is understanding. And I define that as systems thinking through logic. What does that mean? Systems Thinking is a discipline of thought where one makes a dynamic working model of a subject in one’s mind. You know, having duplicated the subject matter, then one puts it into a model—a working model that works the same way as the thing you’re studying itself.

That allows you to predict the results of any action by playing with the model. This is how Einstein invented relativity. He made what’s called a Gedankenexperiment: a thought experiment. He set up an experiment in his mind. Einstein came up with Relativity without ever going into a lab! He didn’t do it by experiment; he did it by thinking. He had such a perfect model of the universe and the laws of nature in his mind, that at least as far as motion and time and things like that, he was able to model them perfectly, and see “Well what if? What if we did this? What if we did that. What we had something moving near the speed of light? What would happen? What would happen to time and distance, and all these other things?” And he came up with Relativity just by thinking about it. You can do that too.

The third stage is called analysis: the contemplation of abstract relationships. So we’ve duplicated the subject matter, we made a model internally in our own mind, and now we’re going to analyze that model and abstract the relationships among its pieces. This is an analysis of ontological relationships, and we’re going to get to ontology in a minute.

The fourth stage is metacognition. Metacognition is the realization of a new state of being based on the information that you have duplicated, modeled and analyzed. Metacognition is when the light goes on; when you finally say “Ah, I got it,” when your understanding transcends words and symbols and becomes a state of being.

That’s what it’s all about! That’s what we’re getting at, and these four stages show you how.

Levels of Being

I’d like to look at these same four stages from another point of view.

Again for any given subject, the duplication is on the mental level, the level of words and symbols. Here I am talking to you, and you’re hearing my words, and you’re decoding those words and you’re getting an idea of what I’m saying, just by the words and symbols: just by the words I’m speaking and the symbols that you’re seeing on the screen. That is an absolute necessity.

If you don’t duplicate, if you don’t make an exact copy, if you make a wrong copy, or an imperfect or partial copy of a piece of knowledge, You’re not thinking with all the information, not firing on all cylinders. So you’re not going to get the same result, you’re going to get some different result, and we don’t know what that’s going to be, but it’s not going to be the same as the original. So you have to start from a perfect copy: duplication.

The next stage, understanding, is on the intellectual level. This is where intelligence comes in. Modeling requires intelligence because you have to see, “OK this is the meaning of all these words and symbols that I’ve taken in and duplicated. Now, how does this actually work? When I tweak over here, what happens on the other end? What is the relationship of cause and effect? What controls what? What actually does the work here, and how does it work?”

Now this gets into the next stage, analysis. Analysis is the ontological level: what is the meaning of these relationships? What is cause, what is effect? What is a major quality and a minor quality? What are the different relationships between and among the various parts of my model? Finally, what does it all mean?

When you finally understand what it all means, then metacognition occurs. And this is the ontic level, the level of being and action. In other words, up until now we’ve been learning, but when you reach metacognition, you have reached mastery. You have become the thing that you’re studying; it has been absorbed into your being, now there’s no more need to think about it; you can just be it.

Mastery

You see? This is what we’re talking about: this is mastery, this is being genius. Becoming Genius, you have to go through these other steps. It’s a lot of work! I’ll be honest with you: it’s not for the faint of heart, it’s not for the lazy. You have to be ambitious; you have to be driven, you have to be passionate about something. Find something you really love, something that you love enough to do a lot of it, because that’s what it’s going to take to get you through all these stages—unless you’re extraordinarily intelligent, and you acquire this exactly by the book.

Now, if you can do that—if you can go through this process by the book, without questioning or doubting it, but just do it—you will find the speed of learning will increase by a factor of maybe a hundred? maybe a thousand? and the efficiency of learning will also increase. But most satisfying of all, the depth of learning will increase beyond your wildest dreams.

It’s one thing to learn that 2 + 2 = 4; it’s quite another thing to learn number theory, and why 2 + 2 = 4. It’s quite another thing to learn abstract mathematics and ontology, and understand why we need concepts like what is the meaning of those concepts, and what are the powers and abilities that come from having those concepts. When you get to that point, you’re ready to have a metacognition—which can’t be explained in words, by the way.

If you’ve never had this happen to you, it means you’ve never done enough of anything, you’ve never gone deep enough into anything to actually make it a part of you, to make it part of your being. You’re not ready for your being to change; you’re not ready to become a genius in that subject. But when you do, you’ll know it—believe me. Because it’s an extraordinarily profound and deeply affecting experience.

When I say the light goes on, I mean that quite literally. The mind becomes brilliant; it becomes effulgent. Suddenly you can see so many things you couldn’t see before. And this is true of everything, from riding a bicycle, all the way up to complete Enlightenment. So this is quite an adventure.

Becoming Skillful

Let’s review a few things about becoming skillful. The process of becoming skillful is a cycle with three stages: practicing, causing something to arise or to happen—in other words, doing something; increasing, developing it by repetition; and finally investigating, observing and reflecting upon the practice.

For example, if I’m playing music, I’ll take my instrument and I’ll make a tone, or a scale or a chord. Or I’ll play a song. And then I’ll play it again, and I’ll play it again and again. And finally, I’ll sit down and I’ll reflect, and I’ll say, “Well is that good enough? Is that really what I want? Am I saying what I’m trying to say with this performance? Do I want to adjust things, or change the harmony, change the tempo? Or is it good enough? Or is it ever good enough?”

These are the questions you ask yourself when you’re investigating. Investigating is by far the most important stage of developing skillfulness. It means observing one’s experience, taking it to heart and reflecting on it wisely until you understand and perceive clearly all the phenomena involved in each step of the practice.

This is what it takes to become expert. If you don’t become expert in a field, you’re not going to reach the highest stage of becoming that thing. To simply learn how to play a couple of notes on a synthesizer or program a drum machine is different from becoming a really expert musician. Learning to quote from the scriptures is completely different from actually becoming realized like a Buddha. These are very different levels of advancement. You should not remain content with a superficial understanding of whatever it is.

If you’re going to become a leader, for example, become a leader of such power and depth that you don’t require any position in an organization. In fact, organizations will evolve around you, simply by your presence, simply by your being. Look at the Buddha: the Buddha gave up his position as a prince. He was offered leadership in two very important spiritual organizations—he turned that down as well. And he went off by himself, and he figured out by himself how to attain Buddhahood. And he did it.

And now look—there are whole countries that are run by Buddhism. And in the past, there was a whole empire in India—the empire of Emperor Ashoka—that was run according to Buddhist laws. Buddha himself had no position, wanted no position. But he was one of the greatest leaders in history. Or Jesus Christ, or Mohammed or any of the great innovators in science, or anything: they had no position, they had no title. They had no organization.

Einstein was just a kid working as a patent clerk. But because he was such a great scientist, because he was a great leader in his field, a whole discipline of Relativity, of atomic physics and so on, grew up around him. That’s the kind of leadership we’re talking about; that’s the depth of skill that we’re aiming for. And we don’t want to accept anything less—and neither should you.

Foundational Knowledge

Now finally I just want to review a little bit about Skillful Living. The process of becoming skillful should especially be applied to foundational knowledge. Skillful Living provides foundational knowledge of human life and beingness, as well as techniques for developing that knowledge to a high degree of skillfulness. Foundational knowledge is defined as follows:

These are all dangerous assumptions, because they can lead you to accept an idea on belief—on faith alone; without testing it, without examining the assumptions behind it; without experiencing it for yourself. Real learning only comes from experience. Book learning is just the appetizer.

I’m not saying it’s not important—it is. But book learning is just the prelude to actual learning, because learning requires growth of being. And this is the thing that ordinary education has ruined in everybody that I know, because ordinary education allows you to become a so-called ‘learned’ person—with a degree and all kinds of letters after your name—without changing your being.

And so they cheat us—they don’t force us to grow. And the hardest thing about spiritual teaching, in my experience, is getting students out of this habit, and actually getting them to grow: to seek out new experiences; to seek out new ways of being, develop hem themselves. Because no one can do that for you.

It’s like thinking for yourself: nobody can teach you how to think for yourself. Nobody, really, can teach you how to roller skate. Maybe they can set up conditions where you’re motivated to learn for yourself; that’s the best they can do. And that’s the best I can do, by making these videos, or by our Apprenticeship program.

You can become situated in a situation that motivates you to actually learn, to actually change your being. But that’s the best we can do. We can communicate to you what a metacognition is. We can talk about it, but we can’t actually give it to you by talking about it, because it can’t be spoken in words! It can only be experienced. But when you experience it, you’ll know it.

And you’ll say, “Whoa. You mean, I went through twelve years of school, or sixteen years of school or whatever it was, and I never had an experience like this. I never had a growing experience where I learned something about life so profoundly, so deeply.”

You can come here to Sri Lanka and go in a temple and study Buddhism for years and years, and never have a metacognition about it. It’s quite possible. That’s because academic learning does not give growth of being. So from the beginning, we are stressing growth in being: becoming. And in that way, we’ll get you really ready to have a metacognition, to bring being to realization of the subject matter, and become genius.