Transcription
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
Video Link: YouTube
Welcome to Call of the Friend. We spent a lot of time getting to this point, but this is what it’s all about. Our previous videos in the Skillful Living series have just been context-setting, just creating the background for this video. This is the most important one so far, so let’s go through the background one more time, just to set the context.
First was the Foundation Series, and that reveals the Buddha’s teaching of Dependent Arising or Origination, the process of becoming. This is the background science or the technology of becoming that we use in all our work. This is the most important thing, because it teaches you how to become anything that you want to be. Mastery of becoming is required for all the teachings in our series. So if you haven’t watched this video series Foundation Series, go back and check it now.
The next series, Becoming Genius, gives an account of our system of learning, self-teaching, where you can learn anything that you want—any skill—to a professional degree of proficiency. And this is very important because what we’re teaching here is extremely subtle, very difficult for most people, especially westerners, because it deals with ontological concepts that are not covered, not presented in normal Western education. Only if you get to graduate, or even postgraduate levels of study, will you even encounter these ideas. But this is the basis of our teaching and the work that we do on the Buddha’s teaching.
We gave an extended example of ontological analysis in our series, Being in the World. Being in the World describes basic human life, the human condition, what it is to be in this world. And if you got it, if you had the right context coming into that series and you understood the terminology that we use at the moment, you should be very concerned that, “O my God, what have I got myself into?” Human life on Planet Earth.
Being in the world is a trap, where we are forced to give up who we really are and reflect some external system of values designed to turn us into a slave, a passive being, someone who can be manipulated, someone who can be shaped by external factors. In other words, we give up our freedom for the convenience of simply going along with the crowd. And in that way, we lose our selfhood, we lose our individuality. We become a pawn in someone else’s game; to realize this is very uncomfortable, but it’s a stage that we must go through to be prepared for the most important part, which is the Call of the Friend.
What is the Call of the Friend? It’s an opportunity to achieve authenticity, to come to our real individuality and reclaim our eternal identity. And what is that? Well, you’re just going to have to find out for yourself. It can’t be expressed in words. We can talk about it; we can say, “Oh, you’re a space where the universe shows up.” But that doesn’t really tell you very much and it doesn’t give you a basis for action.
But the Call of the Friend is the moment when the tension between the real self, the authentic being and the false self caused by being in the world, begins to resolve. So this is where the relief begins. This is where the cessation of suffering begins, when we hear and respond to the Call of the Friend.
The Call of the Friend can happen to everyone. It is a potential that can occur at any moment due to the inherent tension of being in the world. The Call of the Friend leads us out of this tension towards a resolution based on achieving our authentic individuality.
Everyone thinks that they are an authentic individual. But if you have understood the message of Being in the World, it is that we’re not. We have the illusion of choice. We have a simulation of freedom. But the boundaries and conditions of those choices and freedom are set by someone else.
This is the message of Being in the World. They are set by forces beyond our control. So what is within our control is the way we look at things and the choices we make based on our real opportunities, our real possibilities. And the problem is we have lost the means of recognizing those possibilities for what they are.
The Call of the Friend can be heard from within ourselves. It can also be echoed by someone outside of us, someone who is further along in the process of regaining their authentic being. This is a special kind of Friendship, not based on attachment or seeking reward, but on regaining and maintaining one’s individual integrity, wholeness.
Now, there are two definitions of integrity. The original definition is
“to be whole, to be fully functional, to be a complete human being with every part in working order.”
Unfortunately, the second definition of integrity, which is
“to be moral and follow some system of morality outside of ourselves,”
has become the accepted default definition in today’s world.
This only started to happen about 20–25 years ago. Up until then, all dictionaries defined integrity as wholeness, completeness. But now some interested parties are furthering an agenda that wants us to look at integrity as following their system of morality. In other words, accepting control. Again, the thing is, a person who has integrity is automatically moral. A person who has integrity automatically follows their conscience. And we’ll be getting into that in this series very deeply.
When we hear the Call of the Friend within us, we seek external confirmation of its silent message. If we are fortunate, there is someone near us who can echo that call, summoning us to the court of conscience in the hall of silence within our hearts. This opens up the possibility for actualizing authentic being.
So this is something that has to happen to everyone. Sometimes it’s called the ‘Dark Night of the Soul’, although that’s really an expression of a value system that we don’t subscribe to. It is dark and it is silent. But the Hall of Truth of the Court of Conscience within the heart is a place we all have access to and in fact, we go there every night in dreamless sleep, but we don’t remember.
The point of this series is to enter this place consciously, deliberately, and confront the silence, confront the emptiness and the darkness, confront death. In the Court of Conscience, we are the accused; our Friend is our Advocate; Authentic Being is the Judge, and Death is the Bailiff.
If you went through Being in the World, you know that our attitude toward death and our realization of nothingness, emptiness, non-being is the most important factor in attaining authentic individuality. Why is this? Because real being can only be known in the context of nonbeing, nonexistence or death.
This is as much a scientific fact as things fall down, or that light travels at the speed of c, 186,000 miles/second. It’s simply a fact.
If we try to define ourselves and understand the meaning of our existence in terms of something outside ourselves which is not really ours, then the meaning of our life becomes distorted. It becomes subject to the whims of something we don’t choose, of something that is made to control us, whereas death is our own-most possibility.
After all, no one can die for us. Only we can die for ourselves. And when we do, that’s the moment when we find out the real meaning of our life. The Court of Conscience accuses us of being inauthentic, destroying the unrealized possibilities of authentic being and action within us, and the irresponsibility of making the Other the cause of our actions.
And as soon as we open our mouth in self-defense—“Your Honor, I…”—we declare our guilt. What can we do but confess and take refuge of the mercy of the court?
In other words, our own conscience speaks to us and says, “You’re being a phony. You’re not being real. You’re not being who you really are inside: your identity. Your being is simply a reflection of something external, something not yours. So you’re a thief; you’re a rascal; you’re a liar.” That’s what inauthentic means.
More than that, we have failed to choose the possibilities that are most our own, and instead chosen some Other possibilities from some outside source. This is because we have lost the ability to recognize those possibilities that no one else can imitate, that are exactly our own.
And finally, we have also lied in making outside forces the cause of our actions: “Oh, I did it because ‘they’ made me. Oh, I felt that way because ‘they’ did it to me.”
No. We are all responsible for our condition. We cause our condition by our previous activities in life. This is called karma.
Everyone is performing actions and everyone is experiencing the result. So whatever happens to us, however we feel, whatever conditions that we find ourselves in—thrown by life into a certain situation—is because we created the causes of that situation in a previous life, or in the past in this life. This is karma and there’s no escape from it.
Both the good karma and the bad karma that we have created is going to affect us, and we’re going to experience the result. We have to learn to take responsibility for this and say, “No, they didn’t do it to me, I did it to myself.” And then to undo the causes of that karma.
This is of course, a lifetime piece of work. But what else is there to do if we are to be who we really are? Our only hope is the promise of our Advocate, the Friend, that: “Your Honor, the defendant will engage himself in a remedial program to recognize his mistakes and revive his authentic being. I will see that he enrolls in the school of Being Integrity.” The judge will silently approve and close the proceeding, warning that it can be reopened at any time.
Death can come at any moment. No one can prevent it. It’s going to happen. So our only respite from the jaws of death is engaging in a program to correct our mistakes and actualize our authentic being. That is the only response that will satisfy our conscience.
And it is our conscience that punishes us. It judges us and it also sets the sentence: our own Self. There’s no need for a God or some heaven and hell. Heaven and hell are within us. Heaven and hell are determined by our own conscience.
And death is the Bailiff. Death is the force behind the Court of Conscience: that death can come at any moment, cut our life short from what we plan, and make us, force us to accept whatever meaning we have created with our actions.
This is what drives us. This is what creates the urgency for appearing before our conscience and resolving the tension between inauthentic and authentic being. Our guilty plea and our commitment to regenerate our authentic being is the bail bond that earns us temporary respite from death, the Bailiff of the Court of Conscience.
Our release is conditional, contingent upon our keeping our promise and actually doing the work advised by the Friend. Knowing that the world will fight and try to deceive us at every turn, we still must keep our word, as promised by our Advocate. This is the measure of our Integrity, the price of real and lasting freedom and dignity.
So the Friend within is the voice of our Conscience, calling us to the Court in the Hall of Silence, where death will ensure that we are brought to judgment before our own Self. The Advocate is the Friend, the Voice of Conscience, whether internal or external, as it so happens.
Once we hear the Call internally, one goes in search of an echo of that voice in the world outside. And if he is fortunate, he comes to meet a person who embodies that voice, the voice of the Friend. And if he’s intelligent, he takes the advice given by the Friend, and uses it to redeem himself in the eyes of his own Conscience.
This is the path. This is the route to freedom. This is sādhana. This is work on oneself. This is what we have to do to overcome the guilt that we feel for giving up our true nature and becoming something inauthentic, phony.
So this is the challenge of the Friend of the Heart: “Come to know your Self. Come to see who you really are in the dark light of death. Let death, your own-most possibility of nonexistence, show you the way to real, authentic being.” That is the essence of the Call of the Friend.
Video Link: YouTube
Our ontological analysis in the Being in the World Series shows that authentic being is ontologically possible within our default mode of being in the world. But merely to theorize the possibility of such a state of complete integrity and mature individuality is insufficient. Call of the Friend shows how to actualize the possibility of being integrity into our everyday life, despite the fact that in being in the world, our individuality is always already lost in the Other.
Here we identify the ontological roots of the ontic possibility of integrity as wholeness. We also identify existential evidence for practically realizing our possibility for authenticity. In our average everyday state of inauthentic being, we are lost to ourselves. We must find ourselves to achieve authenticity. But first we have to overcome our habitual repression of our potential for authentic selfhood, and see that we have an authentic Self to find. Something must break through our average everyday inauthenticity to reveal our capacity for authentic being.
Our phenomenological analysis shows that the Voice of Conscience reveals this possibility for us. The existential phenomenon of conscience has many interpretations: religious, psychoanalytical, socio-biological. We neither endorse nor reject those.
Our interest is exploring the ontological and experiential qualities of the Voice of Conscience. We want to examine the ontic possibility of the experience. Those other interpretations reference the mysterious change in heart from inauthentic to authentic being. We are most interested in how to approach the existential realization of our capacity to disclose ourselves as lost, and how to Call ourselves to regain our personal potentiality for complete authentic Selfhood.
The Call of Conscience is a form of communication that disrupts the idle talk of the Other, to which we are ordinarily attuned. It elicits us to oppose every aspect of inauthentic discourse. It eschews novelty and ambiguity and provides no foothold for curiosity.
But we must be careful not to misidentify the Voice of Conscience as endless self-analysis or fascinated narcissistic soliloquies—or the authentic voice can become lost in the idle talk of the Other.
The Voice of Conscience calls us to authentic being. It cares not how we appear in the eyes of others, our public role and value, or what we may have accepted as the correct way to live our life. It addresses us purely as a being for whom genuine individuality is a real possibility.
Thus the Call is devoid of content. It asserts nothing, gives no information about worldly events, no moral guidelines for living. It simply summons us before itself, holding up every facet of our existence, each of our life choices, for trial before our capacity to be truly ourselves.
It calls us forth to those possibilities that are most our own. It does not dictate what those possibilities should be. That would only further repress our capacity to take over our own life.
Conscience discourses with us always and only in the mode of authentic hearing. Who addresses us with this strange voice that pulls instead of pushes, that listens instead of speaking? Whose voice is the Voice of Conscience? This is the greatest mystery of life, and this inquiry is the greatest adventure, the highest cause to which a human being can be called.
Being in the World described the first step of this adventure, and the second step is developed herein.
We cannot identify the Caller’s specific features, for at first he seems to have no identity other than ‘the one who calls.’ The summoner exists only as ‘he who summons us to himself.’ We all hear this voice within ourselves, so perhaps it is an aspect of ourselves calling to us.
However, conscience is more phenomenologically complex. We agree that the Voice of Conscience is not a voice of someone outside the person whom the Call addresses. But neither are we and the caller identical.
The person to whom the Call is made is lost in the Other. But the Caller is not lost or fallen. He could not be, if his silent voice can disrupt the inauthentic discourse of the Other.
The key feature of our lostness in the inauthentic self is being unaware of any conception of ourselves as lost. We do not know that we possess the capacity for authentic individuality.
Our everyday experience of conscience is a voice that speaks against our expectations, even against our will. We have no plans or desire to accept his demands. Yet something about the Call is compelling.
The Voice of Conscience is a paradox. It both is, and is not, our voice. It seemingly comes from ourselves, and yet from beyond us.
How can we understand our relation to this Call? How is it possible for the Voice of Conscience to be experienced as a Call made upon us rather than by ourselves?
Our passivity toward the Voice of Conscience suggests that it exposes the fact that we are completely absorbed in being in the world. We find ourselves thrown into a situation that we did not choose, but in which we must nevertheless decide how to go on with our life. This is the fundamental uncanniness of being in the world.
The state in which we find ourselves is never all that we feel that we are or could be, nor can we be reduced to mere being in the world. So we can never fully identify with our life the way it is. Thus we never regard ourselves as fully at home in the life and world we find ourselves inhabiting.
This feeling of uncanniness gives rise to the objectless anxiety of being in the world. We do not want to acknowledge this thrown-ness into unchosen existential responsibility. Indeed, we flee from it. But the Voice of Conscience recalls this fact about ourselves, throwing us into an anxious confrontation with our potential for genuine individuality.
The Voice of Conscience tries to make us find ourselves, even in the depths of being in the world. This is why the Caller who speaks through the Voice of Conscience is definable only by the fact of his Calling.
The Call reminds us that we are not at home in the world. It speaks from the nothingness that remains. When we are wrenched from our familiar absorption in being in the world, nothing could be more alien to our default being than confronting our potential for authentic existence.
The Call of Conscience summons us to confront our inescapably personal abandonment of our own authentic being. The Call of Conscience is ontologically possible only because the very basis of our being is care.
The Call of Conscience is often heard as accusing us, identifying us as being guilty. Guilt is conceptually connected with indebtedness and responsibility. A guilty person is responsible for making amends for some deprivation or loss. This presupposes that we are responsible for our deficiency.
This guilt is for being responsible for a nullity: the absence of something valuable. The ontic phenomenon of guilt reflects the fundamental ontological structure of our existence as thrown projection.
We can realize only one of the existential possibilities the situation makes available. We choose on the basis of the particular state of self and world in which we find ourselves. We never have complete control over our situation or the restrictions it imposes.
Our capacity for projective commitment must always originate from within a particular context, so we can never fully determine its structure. In existing as thrown, we constantly lag behind our possibilities. We never have complete power over our own being in the world. This is the existential meaning of thrown-ness.
However, nullity is integral to our capacity for projection. For by projecting upon one particular possibility, we thereby negate all other possibilities. Choosing to realize any existential choice determines the non-realization of all others.
The nature of our being as care means being the cause of the destruction of the possibilities we choose not to actualize. The authenticity to which conscience calls us is thus an existential mode of being guilty: damned if we do and damned if we don’t.
Alibis, making amends or reform might eradicate the ontic guilt of one specific action. But ontological guilt, being an inescapable condition of existence, is the primal and ineradicable original sin.
Authenticity then, first reveals that being guilty is the ontological condition that is most our own. The aim is not to overcome or transcend guilt, since that would amount to transcending one’s thrown-ness.
The Call summons us to take responsibility for the situation into which we are thrown, and the particular projections and choices we make in it. It leads us to make our necessarily guilty existence our own, rather than project responsibility on ‘them’.
Accepting the Call means readiness to take responsibility for our existential choices, to be indebted to oneself. The Call of Conscience demands making existential decisions in the light of one’s authentic potential for being guilty.
Our only authentic response to the Call of Conscience is to choose whether to accept the Call or repress it. The Voice of Conscience is not seeking the adoption of some particular standard of moral right and wrong; some kārmik calculus of debt and credit. The response the Call seeks is our desire to have a conscience.
To cultivate this desire is to engage oneself in the service of one’s capacity for authentic individuality. It is the essence of choosing for oneself. In the triple ontological structure of our being as care as we discussed in Being in the World, a particular state of mind and mode of discourse belong to every mode of understanding.
For example, our feeling of uncanniness in being in the world elicits anxiety. Similarly, the mode of discourse corresponding to anxiety is one of reticence. Keeping silent the particular form of self-disclosure that the Call of Conscience elicits in us is a reticent self-projection upon our own being guilty, in which we are ready for anxiety.
This ontic state is resoluteness. Resoluteness does not isolate us or detach us entirely from being in the world. Rather, it returns us to our place and specific caring relations with entities and others to discover our authentic possibilities, and grasp them in the way most genuinely our own.
Resoluteness is inherently indefinite. No existential blueprints for authenticity arise from this ontology. The disclosures and projections of our resoluteness must respond to the particulars of our situation.
Our view of the situation into which we are thrown by life is volatized by the Other’s ambiguity, curiosity, and insatiable hunger for novelty. It is only through the disclosure of a concrete act of resolution that a particular context is given existential definition at all. Our place in the world as a locus of authentic existential choice is thus not something resoluteness presupposes, but rather something it allows or creates.
Resoluteness means projecting upon our existential possibilities from the range of choices most authentically our own. It also means projecting our context as a definite range of existential possibilities, those possibilities we own as ‘mine’. Thus, when we heed the Call of Conscience, resoluteness becomes the context of our life.
Video Link: YouTube
We can now join the components of our analysis of being in the world into a coherent whole. Our characterization of default human beingness as thrown projection, care, being towards death, and being guilty are complementary views of the same ontological structure from different angles.
But one of our goals remains unfulfilled. We still require existential proof that a person stuck in inauthentic being is capable of attaining integrity. If our analysis is accurate, the Voice of Conscience articulates the Call.
The Call is a hint within our everyday existential inauthenticity that we are anxious about our potential for authentic existence. It is the voice of our repressed but still-existing capacity for genuine Selfhood. But if that capacity is genuinely repressed, how can it speak out?
If we can hear the Call, its repression must already have been lifted. We must have already discovered our possibility of authentic being, no matter how minutely.
The central difficulty is that we conceive of our default being as inherently split. Human beings are capable of living authentically or inauthentically. Either we are lost in the distractions of the Other while retaining the capacity for wrenching ourselves away from it, or we have realized the existential possibilities expressing our real individuality while still remaining vulnerable to falling back into the world.
We retain this dual nature as long as we are in the world—that is, as long as we are alive. The transition from inauthentic to authentic being, therefore, involves an internal shift in emphasis.
The urge for genuine individuality must come to eclipse the habits of inauthentic being. Without some help, this transition can only be brought about by our own resources. But overcoming our self-imposed darkness by ourselves seems impossible. Indeed, our experience does not confirm this possibility.
The Call must come from outside ourselves, from someone who is with us in the world, but is not lost in the world. The Call of Conscience must be articulated externally by someone else: someone who diagnoses us as lost, and has an interest in our overcoming inauthenticity and freeing our capacity to live a genuinely individual life. This external intervention disrupts our self-reinforcing dispersal in the Other, recalling us to our own authentic possibilities.
The Call of Conscience, though it may actually come from within, is perceived to be external. The Caller’s aim is to help us recover our capacity for selfhood, our autonomy. He does not wish to impose upon us a specific blueprint for living or replace our present servitude to the Other with servitude to himself. His only aim is to remind us of our capacity for individuality, to urge us to listen to the demands of our authenticity.
In so doing, he functions as an external representative of an aspect of ourselves, his Call being proxy for our potential for authenticity. This Call is now repressed, but it nonetheless constitutes our most true Self. In that sense, the caller speaks from within us, echoing the Voice of our Conscience.
The voice of another person, whose reticent tone acknowledges our own inner voice, would be perceived by us as possessing exactly the phenomenological characteristics defining the Call of conscience. We perceive that the Call comes from within us and yet from beyond us.
It seems like the voice of a dear familiar Friend we carry within our hearts. But if our inauthentic state renders us incapable of hearing the Call of Conscience, how can we hear the same Call made by another? If part of our lostness is loss of any conception of ourselves as capable of any being Other than being in the world, how could the Call of the Friend penetrate our repression of our authenticity? If it could, then surely we must already have begun the very transition that the reception of the call is supposed to initiate.
Clearly, if the Friend is to be heard, he must first create the conditions for his own audibility. But how? Our selfhood is lost in the Other. There is no ontological differentiation in the impersonal Other between self and Other, and so no internal self-differentiation in its members. Lacking any conception of authentic being, we conflate our existential potential with our existential actuality, and repress our feeling of uncanniness.
However, when we encounter an authentic Friend, his authentic mode of existence disrupts the undifferentiated mass of the Other. The selfhood of the Friend is not lost in slavish mechanical identification with—or slavish differentiation from—others. The Friend does not mirror our impersonality, for that would confirm it. He simply prevents us from relating to him inauthentically.
We can mirror another who exists as individual and self-determining, and who relates to us genuinely, only by relating to him as Other, and to ourselves as Other to that Other. That is, the authentic Friend allows us to relate to him only as a separate self-determining individual.
An encounter with a genuine Other disrupts our lostness by awakening otherness in ourselves. Our relation to that Other overcomes our habitual assumptions of self-identity, and instantiates a mode of self-relation as Other. It induces an anxious realization of ourself as a separate, self-responsible being with a life of our own that we must lead.
And so we realize our existence as our own, non-relational and inevitable. This amounts to anxious acknowledgment of our mortality: the existential pivot from self-dispersal to self-integrity. The fact of the Friend’s existence creates in us the precise conditions for hearing his Call to real individuality as an echo or reflection of our own Voice of Conscience.
Our conception of our default being as split, with its capacity for authenticity eclipsing, or being eclipsed by, its capacity for inauthenticity, applies to almost everyone in the world. People everywhere are immersed in the prevailing inauthentic modes of everyday life, of being in the world. Everyone we meet in ordinary life is inauthentic, although capable of authenticity.
However, outlining an insightful fundamental ontology of our being necessarily is an act of authentic being. Such a thing can be done only by someone who, while not being immune to the temptations of inauthenticity, has achieved an authentic mode of human existence. Providing such a fundamental ontology to you is an attempt to facilitate your transition from inauthentic to authentic being.
Thus our relation to you precisely matches the model of the Voice of Conscience: the Call of the Friend, as we have termed it. We attempt to echo the Voice of Conscience to you, acting as a representative of your own capacity for authentic being.
We do not want to present you with blueprints for living; rather, we confront you with a portrait of yourself as mired in inauthenticity, call you to knowledge of yourself as capable of authentic thought, and encourage you to overcome your repression of that capacity and to think for yourself. Our presentation offers the Call of the Friend as a pivot for self-transformation, as a mirror that reflects your present inauthenticity, and as a medium through which you might attain authenticity.
It is practically impossible for anyone to originate their own rebirth. Of course, in claiming the capacity to present a fundamental ontology of being, we claim a position of authenticity, implicitly declaring ourselves as having transitioned from an inauthentic to an authentic mode of existence.
Yet we cannot present ourselves as having done so entirely on our own resources. We have not single-handedly created this fundamental ontology and this deconstruction of the way of being in the world that we inherited. We cannot misrepresent our achievement as solely and exclusively our own. In particular, we cannot ignore the role our teachers played in the origination of our thinking and investigations, for they in turn represented the Voice of Conscience and originated the Call to us.
Let us recall how our analysis of conscience and guilt confirms the implication of our analysis of death. In the act of being, we are internally related to nothingness, nonexistence and negation. To say that we are being guilty is to say that we are the basis of a nullity, the absence of something, and hence that the ground of our projections will always exceed our grasp.
The Voice of Conscience is our discourse with the Friend of the Heart in the mode of silence. It reveals that discourse as a dimension of significance beyond the possibilities of any speech act. Authentic listening doesn’t demand anything specific to happen in the world, and so there is nothing specific that could constitute its satisfaction.
Any specific existential demands we think we hear from the Voice of Conscience are solely our misinterpretation of its silence. The silent Voice of Conscience actually condemns our subjection to demand as unredeemable through satisfying any specific demand. Authentic being is not to respond to any particular demand made by the Other, but to choose a possibility in any situation that is distinctively ours alone.
The Voice of Conscience speaks against our habitual tendency to conflate our existential potential with our existential actuality. It silently opens up our internal otherness, our relation to ourselves, as Other. This means we are not self-identical, but rather transitional or self-transcending. This implies that inauthenticity is a matter of our enacting and understanding of ourself as essentially self-identical, as capable of coinciding with ourselves and fulfilling our nature.
Thus, our being is perpetually incomplete, always already projecting into future possibilities. This internal split between our present and future self can be resolved only by attaining integrity, where each choice we make is in the consciousness of the realization of impending death that we explored in Being in the World.
We must find the Friend of the Heart and submit our impulses, ideas and desires to his Advocacy, and the judgment of conscience, before actualizing them. That is the clear path to ontological integrity and complete authenticity. However, this is impossible without the help of the external Friend, a person who has realized his own authentic being.
Video Link: YouTube
The Call of the Friend is the last in the series of preliminary videos in the Skillful Living series. Why do I say preliminary? Because if you have followed the series from the beginning, you know that our purpose here is to create an ontology. It’s to create a certain name-and-form to be used in the process of becoming.
Our first series, the Foundation Series, introduced Dependent Origination, the process of becoming or transforming our being in whatever way we desire. The next one, Becoming Genius (Matrix Learning), taught us how to learn how to teach ourselves anything that we want to learn at a professional level of expertise. Then, Being in the World gave an extended ontological analysis of the average person’s condition in this world. And finally, Call of the Friend shows us how to achieve authenticity in an inauthentic world.
Now, what’s so interesting about all this for me is that most of this material, more than 90% of this material, did not come from the Buddha’s teaching; it came from the writings of Martin Heidegger. Martin Heidegger was a Catholic; he taught in a Catholic university in Germany in the 1930s. Nevertheless, his teachings form a perfect approach to the teaching of the Buddha. And why is that? Because especially Being in the World describes exactly why we need to change our being. It perfectly describes the Buddha’s concept of duḥkha.
Duḥkha. While there are three kinds of duḥkha, ordinary duḥkha is when you stub your toe, and so you feel so physical pain. That’s ordinary duḥkha. But then there’s mental suffering. And this is the real meaning of duḥkha, because mental suffering is entirely self-created, and it forms the bulk of our distress in being in the world. Therefore, mental suffering is something that we can actually do something about.
The third kind of suffering is when we lose something that we are attached to. This is going to happen—no way around it, because the whole world is impermanent. But out of the three kinds of suffering, the one that we can do something about is mental suffering. And this series gives the background to how we can do that.
So let me briefly summarize the material we’ve presented so far in the Skillful Living series. First, we showed that the process of becoming is a natural law. We are all engaged in a process of becoming at all times. That process has specific stages, and among those stages, in the very earliest part of the process, is name-and-form.
And name-and-form is roughly equivalent to what we call, in Western language, an ontology. In Pāli, it’s nāma-rūpa. But there was no such word as ontology in those days. So the Buddha used a descriptive term, but he gave it a technical meaning, a special meaning that is exactly equivalent to our understanding of an ontology: a set of terms with a specific network of definitions that describe a technical field or an area of application.
Sometimes this is called a terministic screen. So the terministic screen is interesting because it determines the limits of our consciousness. If we encounter something, a phenomenon that is not described in our terministic screen, that is not included in our ontology, chances are we won’t recognize it. If we’re very astute, we might recognize that it’s an unknown phenomenon, but that’s about all.
The creation of an ontology specifically about being and becoming gives us the ability to recognize phenomena connected with being. And more importantly, gives us the leverage to influence that process in any way that we desire.
How do we do that? By changing our ontology—by changing the linguistic structures and assumptions that go into our internal language. And because of the law of Dependent Origination. It’s a natural law, like gravity. Any change we make in our ontology is going to ripple down through the stages of Dependent Origination until it becomes our being.
So if we want to attain authentic being, if we want to collect our scattered fragments of ourself into an integral whole and recover our integrity, our wholeness, then we must make certain changes in our ontology, in our way of looking at the world, in our mental attitude, in the platform of consciousness. Then the rest of the changes will happen automatically, simply by the influence of time. This is a wonderful thing.
So the first step in this process is to recognize our actual situation. Most of us assume that we’re being authentic, when in fact we are following a set of choices that is created outside of ourselves, and we are pursuing possibilities that are not uniquely our own. In other words, we’re not really an individual. We don’t really have integrity. We’re not really whole and complete, but we’re scattered among an innumerable number of desires, possessions, attachments and actions that are necessitated by forces outside of ourselves.
The first thing we have to do is simply recognize this, and then we have to understand what it is that is holding us back. The simple answer is: even though we’re suffering by being in the world, and even though we’re called by our own heart to the Court of Conscience, we suppress this Call and we suppress the knowledge of our suffering by thinking, “Well, I can’t do anything about it because it’s determined by ‘them’. It’s determined by the Other, by the world.”
We don’t realize our complicity in our bondage in the world; we want to make the Other responsible. But as Heidegger points out, the only way any external force could impose a value system upon ourselves is if we ourselves internalize it and give it permission to dominate us. So in other words, we are responsible for our condition.
This is the law of karma. Whatever we have done in the past is the cause of our present condition now. And similarly, if we change our activities, if we change our orientation now, our state of being in the future will reflect that.
We are giving a set of tools that is non-religious in origin. In fact, it’s completely Western in origin. Nevertheless, the striking thing about all of this is that it perfectly prepares us to receive the teaching of the Buddha.
The Buddha is the Friend. He is the one who has transcended the conditioning of the world. He is the one who is calling us from outside. Okay, you want to make outside people responsible, then listen to this guy. He’s calling and saying, “You are suffering, and there is something you can do about it. It is not determined by forces outside of you, but by your own complicity, your own identification with the world, your own thrown-ness, your own attachment, your own lust and desires.”
So the Buddha’s teaching is a scientific fact, and the proof of this is that it is accessible through Western ontology. In other words, it doesn’t depend on faith. It doesn’t depend on any accident of birth, being born in a ‘buddhist’ family or something like that. If we simply observe, using the phenomenological method, our condition of being in the world, we come to the same conclusions as the Buddha.
So this, to me, is a tremendous confirmation of this truth, and I would like to invite all of you to continue on this journey. Now, first of all, if you haven’t watched the earlier episodes, if you haven’t watched the earlier series, you’re going to be lost. You’re not going to get it. This whole work is of a piece, even though there are many parts. Please do yourself a favor if you haven’t done it already, and go back and review the earlier series, the Foundation Series, the learning how to learn, Becoming Genius, Being in the World, and the earlier videos of this series. Because otherwise you won’t have the background, you won’t have the context.
And we’re not going to stop here. We’re going to go on. This is the last time you’ll see me wearing white, because tomorrow I’m going to be ordained as a Buddhist monk. I mean, if you’re going to do something, do it all the way, right?
But really, it’s a quite logical continuation of my work. Even though it started from an analysis of leadership, which then led to a deep study of ontology, it is winding up in the lap of the Buddha, because the Buddha is the one who most perfectly plays the role of the Friend.
He’s not attached to you at all. He doesn’t want anything from you. He wants to give something to you, something very valuable, and something that is actually already there within you. But he’s giving you the method to discover it.
Most people have become so alienated from themselves by being in the world that they do not hear the silent summons of the Court of Conscience within their hearts. Thus, they are convicted by default, and live the rest of their lives in dread of death.
Karma does not require any external agency, an omniscient divine judge or mystical accounting system. We ourselves are the plaintiff, the judge and the bailiff. Knowing well what we have done and not done, we condemn and sentence ourselves to a just punishment.
In other words, the first uncomfortable truth that we must face is that we are inauthentic; we are not really ourselves. And then the next one is that the possibility that is most our own, that is most original and unique to ourselves, is our death. Death has been made into a big scary thing in the west, but it’s not so scary considering that we enter the realm of death every night during dreamless sleep. All the Eastern Wisdom traditions point this out. So death is not so scary, especially when we approach it on the path of meditation. And this is a path that the Buddha reveals.
The vast majority of human beings go after death to lower embodiments, animal wombs or other hellish conditions. These are already conditioned by their activities. In this life, the process of Dependent Origination reliably brings that name-and-form into manifestation in the next life. This can happen over an entire lifespan or in a moment, this duḥkha, suffering or displeasure.
The Buddha taught duḥkha as the First Noble Truth because realizing how deeply we are caught in the web of suffering is precisely the motivation to getting out. If we don’t realize we’re suffering, if we try to adjust to it and say, “Well, that’s just the way it is, everybody’s in the same boat, I’m just going to go along with the crowd,” then we’re not really doing our duty towards ourselves, we’re cheating ourselves. We’re not really taking responsibility for our state of being.
The fact is, we can do something about our suffering. And the main thing that we can do about it is to change our activities and our way of looking at life, our point of view, our mindset, our ontology. We’re giving a method of changing your ontology to one that is harmonious with the teaching of the Buddha, without any religious trappings, without any need for ceremonies and so on and so forth.
By the way, there is a valid function for all these ceremonies, and it is to create good karma for ourselves. Most people are engaged in activities pursuing enjoyment. And of course, since karma is an equal and opposite reaction to our activities, the pursuit of enjoyment inevitably leads to suffering. At the very least, when that enjoyment is finished and no longer available, when the karma for that enjoyment is run out and there’s no more, then what do you do if you become attached to this pleasure, to this material enjoyment? You’ll suffer.
But that is avoidable suffering. That can be changed by changing our activities. Instead of taking, instead of trying to enjoy, why not give? Why not share enjoyment? And there’s a specific process of doing this which the Buddha also taught. His teaching has two sides, the devotional side and the meditational side. And they’re both useful for different reasons.
The Friend has been where you are. That is why he can have true compassion on your state of life. He truly sees you as you are, and knows your pain. He gives you the Call and explains how dangerous being in the world really is. He knows he may have to shock you to get you started on the path out of duḥkha.
I’ve been married twice. I have two children. I went through what everybody goes through in this world. At one time, I was quite well known, making a lot of money in the computer business. I had all the toys I wanted, right up to the house in Carmel, California, and the Mercedes in the driveway, and the private recording studio in the spare bedroom.
I had it all. And guess what? I was miserable. Then I got on the spiritual path, and after many years of serving my guru, I became a guru myself. I had an āśram in India. I had many disciples. I had money coming in with by donations from all over the world, and writing books and doing hundreds of videos. And guess what? I was miserable. I said, “Something is wrong.”
So I resigned from being guru and went back to research the roots of suffering. And what I found is what I’m sharing with you today. So don’t think that this is coming from some ivory tower. It’s not. It’s coming from a streetwise New Yorker, somebody who’s been around the block, who knows all the moves of the game, and it all sucks.
So after tomorrow, after becoming a monk, I will have to teach by the book, from the Buddha’s own words. And I’m going to do that. That’s the vāniyā principle. But I’m going to do it in a way that references back to this ontology, back to this context, because this is a context that anyone in Western culture—which is practically everyone in the world today—everybody is following America. I don’t know why. They’re following a path that leads to misery.
Just look at how everyone’s suffering in America. It’s pathetic. We’re much more free in a funky little country like Sri Lanka. So if you don’t want to be caught by this suffering, you have to change your viewpoint. You have to change your outlook, change your background, change your context. The rest will happen by itself.
The Friend is not God, not a guru, or even a teacher in the ordinary sense. He is someone who cares, but not in the ordinary way of being in the world. The original Friend is the Buddha, who saw being in the world for what it is, and then found a way out. He called us and shared his discovery with us over 45 years of dedicated and selfless teaching. Then he disappeared.
So now it’s up to us. I don’t want to get anything from you. I don’t need anything from you. I don’t want you to become a disciple. I don’t want you to send donations. I’m okay. The suffering is gone. Can you see? So what I want to share with you is the Way—the method, the Path that I used to attain this wonderful result.
This is the meaning of the Friend. The Friend says to you, “Hey, you’re suffering, you’re in trouble. You’re scattered, you’re fragmented, you’re not really yourself. Snap out of it.” And then gives a very practical step-by-step process for snapping out of it and for attaining the reintegration, the wholeness that you’re missing.
The Buddha is unbound: “Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone beyond the beyond.” He is never coming back. Each one who gets the Call of the Friend and realizes this teaching for himself has a responsibility to share this Call and teaching with others to help them, even as he was Called and helped. There is no way to repay the Friend’s compassion, except to become a Friend to others.
So that’s what this is all about as far as I’m concerned. I got so much help from the Buddha through his contemporary representatives and Friends, and now I’m passing that help on to you in the best way I know how.
And it’s not perfect. I’m sure there’s a lot of problems and flaws with these videos. I know it. I’m not the Buddha. I’m not a god, I’m not a guru. I’m not even a teacher in the ordinary sense of the word. I’m sharing my experience with you. That’s what a Friend does. And a Friend also listens.
And of course you can make comments on our site, Gnowly (deprecated), you can send us questions and we’ll respond. We’re not impersonal. We are willing and ready to engage with you. So you please also engage with us, communicate with us. Let us know your thoughts about these programs. The videos of Skillful Living Network are the Call of the Friend to you, urging you to make the commitment to seek out authentic being for yourself and share it with others.
So far, we have presented the Call of the Friend in the language of Western existentialism. Existentialism has pretty much become the default mindset of most of the world today. In other words, people no longer have faith in something outside of the world. Religion is decreasing rapidly. People are maybe pretending to be religious for material benefits, but in their hearts, they don’t really believe anymore. The majority of people are either atheist or agnostic. Maybe they’re spiritual, but not religious.
Why is this? Because religion is a conceit. Religion is a fabrication. Religion is something that offers consolation, but not real relief from the suffering of life. In other words, it’s just like a little child. A little child is trying to run, falls and scrapes his knee. And then he goes to the mother, and the mother consoles him. Can the mother stop the pain? No, but she can console him: “There, there, it’s all right.”
Religion is a consolation. It is the mark of an immature human being, a child going to the Big Daddy in the sky for consolation. And that’s all right. We’re not saying that you shouldn’t be religious; but the fact is, most people are not, because they have seen through the fabrication.
So what we’re saying is there is a way to achieve the promised benefits of religion—that is, the cessation of suffering—without the fabrications and artificiality of religion. There is a way to have a full and complete spiritual life without selling yourself out to a guru, or an organization, or yet another scam that’s going to just exploit you.
And the way there is follow the Buddha’s teaching. And that’s what we’re going to be presenting beginning in the next series, which is going to be about integrity. Against this background, beginning in our next series, Being Integrity, we will present the teaching of the Buddha in his own words.
This is not dogma or doctrine. We personally followed this path of realizing the teaching of the Buddha. Our direct experience is that following the Buddha’s instructions with understanding is the path to the cessation of duḥkha.
So we’re not blowing smoke. This is not a sales talk for some organization or group. You’re never going to be asked for a donation. You’re never going to be asked to join anything. The only thing you ask is that you’re honest with us, just as we’ve been honest with you.
We followed this path with understanding and got the result. So I’m laying it out for you. I’m giving you the work that I went through over the last two years that I personally went through to stop my suffering, and it worked.
So this is something I want to give to the world now. I’m about to disappear beyond the ochre curtain. There are a lot of things that I will be prevented from talking about by the vānīya rules. Being a monk is a special situation in life, and there’s a lot of confidential things revealed to us that cannot be shared with the general public.
So this background, this context that I’ve shared with you in all of these skillful living videos so far, this is the confidential knowledge that comes from experience that can’t be found in any book, that can’t be speculated. It has to be lived.
And I know I haven’t done a perfect job of presenting it. There’s a lot of things I could have done better, and I would like to do better, but I don’t have the resources. So I’ve done what I could do in the time that I had available. And I present this as a gift to you, my Friend. And please respond by getting in touch with us on our site.
So the next time you see me, I’ll be wearing robes, red robes, as a monk.
And until then, namo buddāya—buddha śaranai.