Dev Bhagavān
Foundation Series
The Foundations of Authentic Spiritual Life
Transcription Episode 1
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
1—Skillful Living
| Video Links: YouTube | archive.com |
Audio Link: archive.com
The teaching of the Buddha is the basis of one of the world’s great enduring civilizations. It’s also the basis of many different religions. But that’s not all it is. Westerners are finding now the value of mindfulness taught by the Buddha in all kinds of situations in life.
But the Buddha’s teaching is very deep. The Buddha himself admitted: “My teaching is profound, hard to see, hard to understand.” (Brahmāyācanasutta, SN 6.1) Only someone who experiences it for himself can really understand. And why is this? Because the Buddha’s teaching is the equivalent of modern science; but instead of exploring the external world, his teaching explores within.
Along with mindfulness, the Buddha emphasized skillfulness: that a skillful person can learn or teach himself anything, any skill. Western science has developed the technology of dealing with the outside world to a high degree; but Buddha’s teaching develops the technology of the inner world to a degree beyond any other field of knowledge. This can only be experienced for oneself.
Skillful Living Network (an early name for Dharmasār, the Essence of Dharma) explores the Buddha’s teachings on skillfulness and how we can become expert at living.
Skillful Living Network is designed to help you acquire the greatest skill in life: the skill of skillfulness itself. All of our programs are either foundational knowledge or examples of that knowledge in practice.
So, first of all, let’s define a few of the terms we’re going to be using, so that you’re clear on the meaning.
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: it aims at the extinction of the suffering, unsatisfactoriness and imperfection of every experience or state of being in the world. It has an intrinsic truth that you can see and experience for yourself without having to rely on authority, tradition, logic, philosophy, hearsay and rumor, common sense, preconceived ideas, the social status of the presenter or because you consider yourself a student of the presenter.
Becoming skillful is the most important activity of human life. Becoming skillful is applicable to all human activities, even to itself. In other words, becoming skillful is itself a skill that can be learned, improved and perfected. The skill of skillfulness is, therefore, a meta-skill. Skillful Living means applying the meta-skill of skillfulness to human beingness and life itself.
Real Skillful Living means the art and science of being human on a much higher level than ordinary. Perfect skillfulness leads not only to above-average competence and expertise in any field of one’s choice; it is also the key to other meta-skills such as realization of the science of being, the elimination of all suffering, unlimited creativity and similar high attainments.
The Buddha’s teaching is not mundane, it’s not ordinary science. Ordinary science by definition excludes the subjective, the internal. But Buddha’s science is all about the internal, the subjective, our actual experience of life: not a theory, not a doctrine, not a dogma. It’s not science in the ordinary meaning of the term. But it’s science that opens up something inside of us that we normally don’t have access to.
Students of Eastern thought will recognize Skillful Living as knowledge derived primarily from the teaching of the Buddha. But it is actually far more than that. Here’s a definition:
Skillful Living is the teaching of the Buddha and other spiritual disciplines, as understood and realized by contemporary Western practitioners, presented in an experiential self-learning format, in non-technical English language, informed by advanced concepts in science, education, ontology, semantics, software and systems theory.
In other words, we’re not a bunch of born-again Buddhist religionists. Far from it. What we’ve done is taken the Buddha’s teaching and analyzed it in terms of the best Western knowledge: ontology, semantics, phenomenology, existentialism and other sciences, so that you don’t have to. You can simply take this knowledge, apply it in your life and get the benefits.
Now, what about becoming skillful? How is skillfulness actually done? And here’s the answer: becoming skillful is a cycle with three stages:
1. Practicing: Causing something to arise or to happen.
2. Increasing: Developing it by repetition.
3. Investigating: Observing and reflecting upon the practice.
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.
For example, I’m a musician by trade. When you’re practicing an instrument, you play something, you hear it, and then you examine it: is the quality good enough? Is the tuning right? Is the expression good? Or making a video, for example: I’m gonna take these shots and review them, cut them up, edit them, do things to make them look better, sound better—you see?
It’s about continuous improvement, and we’ve heard a lot about that. Similarly, there are other areas in life in which we can apply the same principles of continuous improvement, other than our productivity in the external world. We can apply it to thinking, we can apply it to being, we can apply it to our feelings, to our thoughts, to so many other areas of life. The process of skillfulness is learning how to learn. (See our series Matrix Learning)
So once we learn how to learn, then what? Well, we want to take it to a higher stage, we want to link together people who are skillful and who already have learned how to learn, to work on projects together, projects that will have profound influence and impact on their fields, such as the videos that we’re going to make about Buddhist society.
So Skillful Living is also a social network of exceptionally able creative people, community leaders and consultants in every important field. You can qualify for access to this network by successfully completing our online video courses—those will be coming up soon.
What you can do with the resources available through Skillful Living Network is limited only by your imagination and resourcefulness. We do not impose any limitations on the application of our advanced human technology. The only requirement is that Network members deal with one another with skill and integrity.
We’re going to be creating many online courses and these will be on video, and they’ll also have content that you can download and study on your own. And, of course, the first course is going to be about how to study itself. And these courses are going to go way beyond anything you can find in a university, or what to speak of in a religious school or something like that. These courses are going to be things that profoundly impact your ability to live, to be human, to experience and to learn other things.
These courses will be coming up soon: it’s the next thing on our list. And what are we going to do? OK, we’re going to produce sophisticated media that showcases the benefits and high quality creative results of our methods.
Becoming Genius: (now called Matrix Learning) a learning technology that allows you to teach yourself any skill at a professional level.
Being Integrity: the foundation of a noble life. And both of these are prerequisites to our flagship course:
Leading by Being: how to establish yourself as an independent leader without any organizational title or permission—quite a trick if you can do it. (Note: we have withdrawn this course because so far no one has qualified for it.)
Now and then we’ll be issuing Luminous Mind, which are short videos on different aspects of the Buddha’s teaching. (Note: This turned into over 1,000 videos on Self-realization on our YouTube Channel.)
Then there’s our regular websites: The-Arahant.org: dialogs with a realized monk—my mentor (Note: This website turned into a blog.) And
ergontic.com—about ontology and enlightenment: what’s going on underneath the hood. (Note: This website is deprecated.)
These are all coming soon on our YouTube Channel, so don’t miss the next episode—the next exciting episode. Now, really, I’m the spokesman, but we’re a whole team of people that have these ideas, and agree, and want to publish them in a way that engages people and actually leads to happiness and benefit that you can’t even imagine could come from something like Buddhism.
Because people don’t really understand the Buddha’s teaching. Even so-called Buddhists: they limit it to an ordinary religion. But it’s not, it’s something far more than that. So, please stay with us to explore this extraordinary teaching of the Buddha.