Transcription
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
Video Link: YouTube
Metacognition is the final stage of our process, our four-step process for Becoming Genius. Just to remind you quickly, the first step is duplication: making an exact copy of the source for any given subject. The next stage is understanding: systems thinking through logic, and modeling cause and effect. Then there’s ontological analysis: contemplation of the abstract relationships among the entities in your subject. And finally metacognition, the realization of a new state of being.
Being-and-becoming is the root and the foundation of all our work, because the Buddha revealed the process of becoming, since then it has been possible to apply this science to any subject. It’s kind of a mystery to me why it’s taken so long for anyone to see this; but you could use the Buddha’s science of becoming to become anything at all—anything whatsoever that you can imagine.
Now let’s go back a little bit and define some of our terms, refresh our memory about the most important terminology we use in this series. The definition of ontology is from the root onto from the Greek ὄν, ὄντος—being, that which is; and -λογία—science, study or theory.
So ontology is the theoretical, philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. In other words, your ontology contains all the categories of being in your reality. Generally speaking, if you encounter something that is outside of those categories, you’ll perceive it as something else—something that is within your categories. There are so many examples; I’m not going to go into that here.
But perception is very tricky, because most of us do not have a complete ontology; our ontology is missing pieces, especially concerning our own self, and being, becoming and like that. So we have these huge blind spots. Our culture reinforces these blind spots by making us always look outward through the senses. Compulsive extraversion is taught in school, and anyone who does not follow this programming is basically punished.
Now, ontology is the study of the theory of being and becoming; but then the study of the experience of being and becoming is ontics. And ontics is defined as an adjective, or ontic—ontics is the science derived from it—from the Greek ὄν, again, the ὄντος, being, ‘that which is’. So it means whatever is physical, real or factual existence. Ontics pertains to what actually is present: phenomena, as opposed to the nature or properties of that being, which comes under ontology. You could say that “ontics is experiential ontology” or “ontology as phenomenology,” as Heidegger so famously put it.
We’re going to go deeply into Heidegger’s ontology because Heidegger’s ontology was based completely on phenomenology, and it gives amazing insight into our ordinary experience. And, it’s also an excellent approach to the Buddha’s teaching, because the Buddha used a similar method, where he simply observed his own experience, and from that he was able to abstract or analyze so many ontological laws.
Now this episode of Becoming Genius is about metacognition, and metacognition is a very special thing, something that is missing from most of our ontologies, but it’s absolutely important, which you can understand as soon as we define it properly.
First let’s define cognition. Cognition is a noun,
1. The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience or the senses.
And the second definition is a result of this:
2. A perception, sensation, notion or intuition.
So cognition refers to the mental process of awareness. And a cognition is an instance of that process; in other words a becoming aware of something. When we become aware of something that we were not aware of before, that is a cognition.
It sounds very mundane when we express it that way, but cognition is accompanied by a certain feeling. It’s that feeling of the light going on: “Oh, I never knew that before!” a feeling of wonder, a feeling of amazement at the nature of the universe, that could hide something from us and make us unaware of it for so long, and now we’re aware of it and everything looks different this is cognition.
Metacognition is a noun, meaning awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes.
So metacognition is cognition about cognition, or knowing about knowing. In other words, it’s very close to ontology. It can take many forms; it includes knowledge about when and how to use particular strategies for learning or problem-solving.
And that’s exactly what we’ve been talking about in this series on Becoming Genius: a particular strategy for knowing, a particular approach to solving the problems of learning. How do we get to understand things?
Finally there are two components of metacognition: knowledge about cognition and regulation of cognition.
Now obviously this is something that applies to everybody. Everybody has cognitions. If you’ve ever learned something, that’s a cognition. And if you’ve ever studied how you learn about something, that’s a metacognition.
Why they don’t teach this in school is absolutely beyond me. I wish I had this knowledge when I was 14 or 15 years old, it would have changed my life. I wouldn’t have had to spend so much time unlearning the wrong things that I was taught in school. But we already know: school is not about learning. School is not about teaching you to be a full human being; school is about making you an obedient slave to the governmental and industrial society.
So try to forget everything you were taught in school about learning, because most of it is junk. In fact, all of it is junk because it’s put in the wrong context. To learn in a context of social control means learning about social control: how to adapt to it, how to get through it, how to get through the day at school or at work.
And this is not really what school should be about. School should really be about learning how to learn. But learning is the last thing they teach you in school. In fact, only if you go to a very good graduate program such as Harvard, will they actually sit you down and teach you how to learn.
So this is one of the great unknown things about our society: that metacognition, the study of how we cognize things, how we become aware of things—in other words how we learn things, how we have new experiences—metacognition is itself a science. And it’s very close to ontology because it’s about the meaning of meaning. How does meaning get its meaning? Who decides what the definitions of the words are?
When we create a science by ontological analysis, that is the point at which the definitions for the terms are created. And that in turn creates the consciousness with which everyone is going to look at that thing, and determines what it actually means. This is part of the process of being and becoming. And we’ve gone over this before many times, but I want to go through it again, because it’s so important.
Dependent Origination is the process given by the Buddha describing the process of becoming. It has 12 stages or steps, and these steps are subtle in the beginning, and gross at the end. Our chance to influence this process is better in the beginning, when things are subtle, than at the end, once they’ve become manifest and they already have a certain momentum.
We invest so much effort in proper use and understanding of language and terminology because the feedback loop between consciousness and name-and-form is the most sensitive point in the process of becoming. Communication depends on language; therefore we can be conscious of something only if we have a description of its name-and-form in our ontology.
What is consciousness? Consciousness is you communicating with your senses, or your senses communicating with you. For this, language is required. Let me give you an example: we just introduced you to the term metacognition. Have you ever had a metacognition? Probably not, unless you’re already studying this stuff; unless you’re already involved in studies on ontology and so on.
Why? Because you didn’t have the term in your ontology. Without the term, you’re not on the lookout for it. So even if it happened to you—even if you had experienced a metacognition in your life—you wouldn’t have the name for it, so you wouldn’t retain the sense data that comprises that experience. It would go in the garbage heap of irrelevant experiences. We all have one.
We take things that come in through the senses, and we classify them in different categories: no, this is useful; this is important; this is pleasurable; this is displeasurable. And all the way at the end there’s a trash bin for the perceptions that just don’t matter at all.
So what happens when we have an experience, but we don’t have that experience in our ontology, is that it goes right in the trash and we never think about it again. We don’t try to remember, it we don’t classify it or try to extract meta-knowledge about it; we simply forget it.
So you may have had cognitions and metacognition—certainly everyone has—but without those categories in your ontology, you won’t value them properly. Metacognition is the most valuable type of experience you can have, because it leads to expanded being.
Now here we come to the part where we talk about what we’ve been doing all this time. What we’ve really been doing is creating a context: creating a context that gives you the being of a genius. That’s what an ontology is: an ontology is just a context for our experience. It’s a background, against which the foreground of our experience is interpreted in a certain way.
Just like we made the point in one of the earlier videos, if you’re looking for a black cat in a dark room at midnight, you’re not going to find it. But the same cat in this brightly-lit room with white floors shows up immediately. If you have the right context, your experiences will show up very clearly. If you don’t have that context, if you don’t have that background, you’ll miss it.
So everyone has the potential to become a genius. Everyone has the ability to become much more intelligent than they already are. The difference is context. So let’s define context very quickly.
Context is a noun, meaning the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.
Context is the background against which the meaning of something becomes apparent. And if we take something in the wrong context, we get the meaning wrong; we misunderstand, and that leads to suffering later on.
Now let’s go back to Dependent Origination. The first step is ignorance. What is that ignorance? We take the fact of our existence, and we put it in the wrong context. Therefore we misinterpret what is happening to us by being alive, and because of that we make so many other mistakes that wind up in suffering. So to correct this mistake means taking the fact of our existence and putting it in the proper context. What is that context? The Four Noble Truths of the Buddha.
Let’s go on. Meaning is dependent on context: the background, environment, framework, setting or situation surrounding an event or occurrence. Of course this includes cognition.
So when we have a cognition, the background or the framework is the context that gives us the meaning of that cognition. If we put a cognition in a wrong or insufficient context, then it’s likely—in fact it’s almost certain—that we will misjudge the meaning of it, and that we will not be able to get the full value of that cognition.
So the art of creating context is how we give meaning to our experience, and how we actually realize the knowledge that we get from our cognitions.
Now what we’re doing in this series is creating the context of a genius. The material in this series gives you the opportunity to create for yourself a Context that has the power to give you the Being of an authentic Genius, and the actions of the effective exercise of genius, as your natural self expression. This context will also give you access to removing whatever constrains your natural self-expression as an authentic genius.
So there are three things here. There’s the context, the background, the framework against which you—the second thing—have your experience of life and determine its meaning. And then there’s a third thing: that this context also gives you the ability to remove whatever is constraining you from manifesting the full qualities of genius.
How does that happen? Because a complete context, a complete ontology of being and becoming, will give you the background to see where you’re not being, how you’re not becoming what you fully can be. How do you determine that? Simply by your desire.
If you desire to become a genius musician, let’s say for example, and you find yourself stuck at a certain point, you’re going to look for what it is that is preventing you from moving beyond that stage toward the state of being that you have already determined as belonging to a genius musician.
Or similarly in Self-realization, if you’re stuck at a certain point and you can’t get beyond it in your meditation, let’s say, then you have to compare that with what you know from your ontology is the state of being of a Self-realized person.
So the creation of context is the art of fashioning your own being. It is the art of becoming. What’s really going on in the stage of name-and-form in the Buddha’s process of dependent origination, is building context, building a background for our experience. So if our context is very narrow—if, in other words, we’re constrained by ignorance—then our duty is to educate ourselves in the alternative states of being that we have not yet experienced, and to see ourselves, to envision ourselves in those states of being so that we can determine the knowledge, thinking, actions and havingness of that state of being.
As we discussed earlier in this series, this is the secret. So just like I said earlier, if someone understood E = mc2 they could go off and build an atomic bomb. If someone really understood the Buddha’s definition of becoming as the mind resonating with exalted qualities, then it would be so easy to just go on and become whatever you want to become. The problem is, no one has the context, no one has the background to understand that statement properly.
We’ve been cheated; we’ve been robbed of our true potential by a rotten educational system that is only designed to make us passive, obedient slaves. So you have to be able to go through and examine all those assumptions: about learning, about who you are, about what life is about, and reject the ones that do not serve you.
And that’s going to be the subject of our next series of videos. We will continue the ontological analysis of the Buddha’s teaching begun in the previous video; we will post discussions about it and the actual computer-readable OWL ontology files on our blog, ergontics.com. We encourage you to continue working on this analysis independently and to share and discuss your results on our site.
Being in the World, our next video series, will present an extensive example an ontological analysis of a subject that concerns and involves all of us: Being in the World. We will analyze the unique qualities of being in the world according to the ontological criteria and phenomenological methods given in this series.
In other words, we’re going to follow pretty much Heidegger’s model of his ontological analysis of Being in the World, but we’re going to add a lot to it. We’re going to extract from it the triples and the other elements that create the ontology of being in the world according to an expert ontologist.
So this will give us a view of being in the world that is significantly enhanced, compared to the typical average person’s view of being in the world. And we’ll start to see how the world affects us and in turn, how we can turn things around and become the masters of our own destiny instead of being controlled by the world.
Each section of the analysis will be accompanied by a detailed Study Guide giving directions for further observation and study. Needless to say a complete working knowledge and practical familiarity with the methods presented in this series will be necessary to follow the discussion in Being in the World.
So here we go again—I know you’ve heard it before—if you have not worked through all the exercises presented in this series, including taking whatever subject of your choice and outlining it, diagramming it, writing it out by hand, a narration of cause-and-effect, an analysis according to ontological principles of its principal entities and their relationships, you will not be able to understand what we’re doing in our next series, because every one, every series, every video goes a little bit farther toward an ultimate goal.
And that goal is to have complete control over our being and becoming. Once we have this, once we have our life in hand, so to speak—we again become the owners of our own life. We again become the leaders of our lives. To ‘lead your life’ means you are the leader of your life.
So the next series after Being in the World will be Leading by Being. And then we’ll approach the teaching of the Buddha in our ultimate series, which is called The Luminous Mind.
This is where we’re going. Where we’ve been is simply the fundamentals; but you must have mastered those fundamentals to understand the next stages in our path. So please, go back and watch this series from the beginning and watch the Foundation Series again too while you’re at it.
Try to understand our viewpoint; our viewpoint is that we know the process of becoming and we understand the nature of being. And by learning this process, we take back control of our being and becoming from the outside world. We become the masters of our fate and we can actually determine what we are going to become in the future, even in our next life.
So this is the result of studying this series, and I hope you stay with us. I hope you visit us at ergontics.com and join the discussion. It’s deep, yes. It’s difficult, yes. We recognize these things. It took me a lifetime to learn these things, and now I’m sharing with you all my secrets. So please go through it carefully, get the benefit and if you have any questions, make a comment on the blog. Ask me; I’m very happy to respond and to engage in a discussion with anyone interested in these topics. So budu śaranai; āūṁ namo buddhāya,