Transcriptions
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
Video Link: YouTube
Namaste, and welcome to the next episode of the Esoteric Teaching, The Anatomy of the Fall.
Now for those who missed the previous episodes, let me review really quickly what the Esoteric Teaching is. Esoteric means:
intended for, or likely to be understood by, only a small number of people with specialized knowledge or interest.
The Esoteric Teaching is intended for those who are determined to attain complete Self-realization. And how does it do that? The Esoteric Teaching is the Absolute Truth: the origin and destination of all authentic spiritual and religious paths, and the context that gives them meaning.
So last time we went over the meaning of context, and how context gives meaning to meaning. So this is what the Esoteric Teaching does: it creates a universal context within which any spiritual or religious path acquires more meaning, greater significance, and hence greater value.
So by putting any spiritual method through the context of the Esoteric Teaching, we can better understand how it fits in the overall Fall and Return, the Path.
Today we’re going to talk about the anatomy of the Fall, and this is part of the Ontology of the Life Cycle.
Now again, let’s review really quickly. The context and meaning of the Esoteric Teaching is basically the duality of the Fall and the Path. Ordinary life leads only to death, but spiritual life leads to enlightenment, which some people say is eternal life; I would say it’s the life of eternity, which is a subtle difference, but a significant one.
So these two paths, the Fall and the Path, the Return, have been divided into six basic stages. Now where does this idea come from? It comes from the core of the Buddha’s teaching.
Very often we have heard the expression, the Middle Way. But what the Buddha actually meant by the Middle Way is called paṭicca-samuppāda, or Dependent Origination.
And here we have a graphic from one of our earlier series on the Buddha’s teaching, which shows the twelve steps of the Fall and the Path. Now this is specific to the Buddha’s teaching.
So in the Esoteric Teaching in general, we simplify things and we only use a few stages so that it’s more clear and easier to understand. But today we’re going to go into the details of how the Fall begins, and how it progresses through the different stages shown here and in the other diagram of the Esoteric Teaching.
We’re going to be concerned with the first ten steps because these are the steps that determine basically our experience in life: How the body and the mind are formed, how they grow, and then how they dwindle and disappear, and then what happens next.
The first stage is called ignorance. And what does that mean? There are specifically three forms of ignorance that we’re concerned about here.
The first type of ignorance is ignorance of the consequences of our action. In other words, driven by lust or desire, we want to move into manifestation. We want to take a form. We want to become embodied. We want to live, in other words. And due to the delusion, which is the third form of ignorance, we think that the body and the self are one. But they’re not.
Due to this ignorance, we suffer. It is only due to these three causes, that is:
This delusion stays with us until the highest stages of the Path of Return.
So these are the causes, the root causes. And then what happens? Fabrication.
Now, we talked about fabrication in a previous episode on the Root Sequence. I think it’s in another series; but hey, you’ve been watching all of our past videos, right? That’s necessary to understand what we’re talking about, because everything we say is building on the previous series. So if you haven’t watched them, you’re going to miss a lot.
So fabrication comes from the root series, the mulāpāriyāya, sometimes called the Root Sequence. And it’s basically the creation of the ego. How is ego created? Well, there are basically six steps, and that’s a separate subject we’re not going to go into because we’ve already covered it in detail elsewhere.
But you should know that this stage of fabrication is the creation of the ego, the creation of the material identity.
Then what comes next? Consciousness. This is not pure consciousness. Consciousness is always consciousness of something. And in this context, consciousness means awareness of the body and the senses.
So how can the body and the senses be conscious? They’re not. Only awareness, or the Self with a capital S, is actually aware. But when the awareness or the Self gets mixed up with the material body, then we get consciousness.
Consciousness of the senses. And what are the senses? Basically sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and the mind.
So when we start to become aware of these things as a result of the fabrication, the fabrication is a way of creating new thoughts that bind us to the material manifestation and induce our experience through the senses.
So that leads to a kind of thinking called name-and-form. Name-and-form actually determines what we are going to be conscious of, and establishes the limits of our consciousness and the things also we’re not going to be conscious of.
So most people’s name-and-form does not really include spiritual things. And we see these people are more or less like animals. They’re in the vast majority, at least on this planet, and what they’re doing is limiting their awareness because they lack the terminology, the names, of the spiritual experiences, the spiritual phenomena. So that’s why in the beginning of the Path, study is so important, gaining Right View, and understanding of the subtleties of the mind and consciousness.
So name-and-form really means conceptual thinking, that our thinking is not free. It appears to be free, but actually it’s in a box, which is delimited by—guess what—the names and forms that we have on file in our ontology. Now we talked all about this in some of our earlier series. Hopefully you watched it because I’m going to move fast here so that the video doesn’t get too long.
So then the senses come into action, and the senses determine the type and quality of our embodiment. Just like a human body has a certain type of senses and a dog body has a different kind of senses. For example, their smell is much, much more sensitive than humans. So is their hearing, and so is their vision in certain frequencies of light.
So we have a human body that’s a certain quality of senses. Other bodies have different qualities, and this basically determines the experience of our life. Are we going to enjoy? Are we going to suffer? Are we going to be intelligent or stupid? Are we going to be lusty or pure?
This is all determined by the type and quality of senses that we create using the previous stages. Now before we move on, I should mention one thing: There is a very tight feedback loop between consciousness and name-and-form. This is how name-and-form can delimit our consciousness and certainly determine its quality and nature.
That if we don’t have a name-and-form in our ontology, in our description of reality, in our concept of what is, or what can be, then even if we experience something that’s outside those bounds, we won’t be conscious of it.
It’ll happen, but it won’t register. We won’t recognize it. We won’t classify it. And so we won’t be able to perceive it or act on it. And this is why people remain stuck in material life, that they have no vocabulary. They have no knowledge, what to speak of Right View, they don’t have any views on spiritual life except maybe to deny it.
And so they get into so much trouble because they don’t realize, again, the consequences of their actions, which is going to deny them access to the whole realm of spirituality. When the body begins to function in the womb, the senses come into contact with their objects and then one begins to receive data from the senses in the form of perceptions.
Now perceptions go through a whole processing in the brain. We don’t perceive the raw sense data directly because it would be too overwhelming. The senses produce a tremendous amount of data every second. I think I calculated one time that the eyes alone produce something like 10 gigabytes per second.
How are we going to parse all that? We don’t. What we do is, with regard to seeing, we build something in the brain called the visual cortex. The visual cortex acts to generate symbols for the things we see. In other words, we recognize objects and then we think with the terms.
We think with the symbols. We don’t think with, or even in many cases, we don’t even become aware of their actual original perceptions. But only, well, you know, ‘this is a camera.’ ‘This is my room.’ ‘There’s the window.’ ‘The light’s coming through.’
See, we have all these tags or symbols to recognize sense perceptions and simplify them down to a form of less data. So it’s easier to think with symbols. This is what happens with the senses.
Next, we evaluate those sense data, those symbols, and that leads to feelings. Feelings are either positive or negative or neutral. They’re pleasurable, displeasurable, or neither. So we’re always classifying our experience as to whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent.
Then we develop cravings. Now a craving is a desire for the future. And when we have something pleasurable, we crave it in a positive way: “I want more of that.” When we have something unpleasurable, we crave it in a negative way that, “O”h, I don’t want any of that. Make it go away.”
And of course, the same is true of clinging. When we cling to something… you know, normally phenomena come and go. But when we cling to something, we don’t want it to go. We want it to stay. That’s positive clinging. And negative clinging is when there’s something we don’t like, we never want to experience it. So that’s negative clinging or attachment.
And of course, all this does is make the mind stronger and stronger. And so whether we get what we want or we don’t, we become more and more attached to thoughts about it. And the mind becomes more and more in charge of our experience. And it becomes out of control.
So what is the result of all these steps? Becoming. Becoming means the whole process of building the embodiment, building the life, building the body that we are going to have for this particular lifespan.
And so when that process of becoming matures, it leads to death. Life is the major cause of death. You have to be born in order to die. You have to be in order not to be. These things are intimately related and they are a cause of one another. So these aren’t exactly opposites. Birth and death or life and death are complementaries.
Now the interesting thing is that the Path is also a process of becoming. And as we showed earlier, there is a correspondence between the stages of the Fall and the stages of the Path. And so that’s why we need to understand in detail how the Fall happens, so that we can use the same process on the spiritual Path to get out of it.
So what happens after becoming? Then it’s birth. Birth means the body comes into contact with the world. And when that happens, suddenly we are visible to others. Before that, when we are in the womb, we are not visible. But when we become accessible by means of the senses in both ways, we see the world and the world sees us. Then this is called birth.
Now of course the birth happens at the beginning of life. But it’s also happening all the time. In fact, all these stages are happening all the time because the process of becoming is ongoing.
So we can look at it as we have been so far in terms of the timescale of a whole lifetime. Or we can look at it in a smaller timescale so that we can see actually the process of becoming is going on all the time. All these stages are happening simultaneously on different timescales. And if we observe ourselves, we can see this process going on.
We get an idea, something that we want to be or have or do, and then it develops through these various stages—name-and-form, consciousness, senses, clinging, feelings, all these stages. And finally, it takes birth and we actually have the experience or we do the thing that we’ve been thinking about.
So in other words, this process is a very general model of how becoming happens on all scales. And for that reason, it’s extremely important.
Now where were we? Oh yes. So after birth, then there’s the stage of growth, which can be divided into basically infancy, childhood and pre-adolescence, young rascals. And in this stage, we are gathering both matter, making the body bigger and bigger, and information. We’re primarily interested in learning what is the world, what is life, what we can and can’t do, and so forth.
Then we reach adolescence and sex comes up. And this is a big deal, of course. It’s a huge thing in everybody’s life. Because nature maintains the species through reproduction, therefore nature makes sure we have a very strong sex drive. And this becomes a major psychological motivator and dynamic in life.
Next, there’s work. The results of sex are children. They require work to maintain and grow. So we become parents. We go through many years of striving for economic security and material wealth.
So because of this, we often feel trapped, like we are the victims of our previous actions. And this is absolutely true. This is really the case. Out of ignorance, we want to engage in sex and experience pleasure. And then when the results come, inevitably, we are responsible for them. And that’s not so much fun, is it?
Finally, at the end of life, there is decay. The body is getting older all the time, and it gradually loses strength and other faculties until it becomes basically inoperable or unsupportable.
And then this we call death. The body becomes ill and its existence can’t be sustained anymore. So of course, we have a whole cultural set of behaviors around death. We symbolize it; we make it a very mystical thing. But there’s actually nothing really special about it. It happens all the time on a smaller context. It’s just that at the end of life, the whole body has to go because it can’t function anymore. But this is a normal thing. And if we have a good spiritual development, we can deal with it without being disturbed.
Then what happens? Well, there’s a period called the interlife. And in the interlife, one goes through a set of dreamlike experiences where one may have a heavenly or hellish or sometimes both type of experience between one physical life and the next.
And what happens with this? It gives us a sense of regret that, “Oh, I could have lived in such a better way. I could have done so many things that I wanted to do or I didn’t have to do so many things that have negative consequences that have led to a painful interlife experience.”
And so we get a sense of regret. And this leads to a desire or an aspiration for the next life, what I want to be and become in my next life. And that goes completely around the circle back to gestation and the creation of a new cycle of the Fall.
This is how most people live, life after life after life. So if we have any intelligence, we will want to break this cycle and begin the next stage of evolution of consciousness called the Path, which leads ultimately to enlightenment.
ĀŪṀ Tat Sat. ĀŪṀ Hariḥ ĀŪṀ.