Dev Bhagavān

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Foundation Series

The Foundations of Authentic Spiritual Life

Transcription Episode 3

Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān

3—The Process of Becoming

Video Links: YouTube archive.com

Audio Link: archive.com

Now we’re back with Part Three of what we’re going to call the Foundation Series, because this explains being and becoming, which is at the root of all of our work with Skillful Living. Being and becoming is the key, the mechanism, the works under the hood, that makes everything work. So if you haven’t watched the first two videos—what is Skillful Living, and Being & Becoming—then stop this video right now, click on the links and go back to those first two videos, then watch this one. OK?

So now we’re going to continue with the process of becoming. Let’s just review: Becoming is the process of changing your being. Everybody is being something or other. We’re being at a certain quality of being. Changing our being means, in our case of Skillful Living, we want to improve the quality of our being.

Well, how do we measure that? It’s improved in terms of your quality of life, and your abilities. So if you have increased abilities, if you have increased quality of life, that means you’ve improved your being.

To change your being you have to stop being what you are now, and start to be something better than that. And how do we do that? Well, the dictionary defines becoming as “begin to be, grow to be, turn into.” That’s applicable to both personal and impersonal things, but of a person specifically, “to qualify, or be accepted as, or acquire the status of.”

The example they give is “She wanted to become a doctor.” Well, I wouldn’t recommend to anybody that they become a doctor. If you want to use this technology to become a doctor, you could do it; or a musician or a pilot or any of the other examples that we use—you could certainly take this technology and turn it into that.

But specifically we want to become leaders: spiritual leaders, thought leaders. Not the kind of a leader that depends on a title or a position in some organization. No, because all the organizations we have right now are based on a false principle called hierarchy.

Hierarchy means that one person is viewed as better than, or intrinsically more valuable than, another type of person. And that’s just not true! We all have the capability or the promise of being something great and wonderful. And the Buddha didn’t recognize any of these organizational titles or statuses; he accepted a person as they are, and he gave them the ability to become something more.

Let’s see how the Buddha defines becoming:

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

In other words, the dictionary tells us what becoming is, but the Buddha gives us how to become, and what he says is, that we tune our consciousness to a refined property which is in the future.

This is the key to the whole thing. If you understand this very simple very direct language, it’s just like E = mc2. It’s incredibly powerful. But how many people actually understand the meaning of E = mc2? If you did, you could go into the lab and cook up an atomic bomb!

Well, it’s similar to this: if you actually understand the meaning of what Buddha is saying here—“The consciousness of living beings is tuned to a refined property”—if you just understand that, in all its depth and implications, then you can become the most powerful person. And what is the most powerful person? It’s someone who has complete control over being and becoming. This is enlightenment!

Now the process of becoming is given in the Buddha’s teaching. This process has two parts: the first and second Noble Truths, which deal with suffering down to the bottom there; and its origin, which is the path from ignorance all the way down to suffering.

Those are the first and second Noble Truths: ignorance or suffering, and the cause of suffering. Then the third and fourth Noble Truths deal with the cessation of suffering: the fact that it’s possible first of all; and the Noble Eightfold Path, which is the way to get there. Those are the third and fourth Noble Truths.

Most people they start from ignorance, thinking that “Oh yeah, I’ll make my life better,” and then they fabricate something and bring it into being gradually. But then it dies. And why does it die? Because what they brought into being is based on ignorance. It’s not based on the elimination of suffering, it’s based on the continuation of suffering.

That’s their big mistake: they create another conditioned form of being. And because of that, they have to suffer. The Buddha gives us the secret of how to create a type of becoming that results not in conditioned being but in unconditioned being. And that leads to the cessation of suffering, and the elimination of the compulsion of creating conditioned being. So that’s the type of becoming, that’s the process of becoming that we are teaching, and it’s a very special thing indeed.

The specific steps of the process of becoming for applications like learning and leadership, we’re going to focus in on the first and second Noble Truths, the left-hand part of the diagram with these red labels. And we can call this, for the purposes of our work, the process of becoming.

In Pāḷi it’s called paṭicca-samuppāda. Paṭicca-samupādda is also sometimes called Dependent Origination. And Dependent Origination means that once you create a particular kind of cause, that the consequences of that cause or the results of that cause manifest more or less automatically. Because one is dependent on the previous one, and so on, all the way back to the original cause.

Let’s go through these labels and define them according to the Buddha, and according to the process of becoming. First of all there’s ignorance, Buddha says. “And what is ignorance? Not knowing suffering, not knowing the origination of suffering, not knowing the cessation of suffering, and not knowing the way of practice leading to the cessation of suffering. This is called ignorance.”

In other words ignorance of the Four Noble Truths. We’ll see things in terms of the Four Noble Truths. To put it in a technical language, the Four Noble Truths are going to be the root categories of our ontology of becoming. And we’ll see, as we go into this, just how important ontology is, what ontology is, and how to utilize it to attain our goals.

The next step is called fabrication. “Fabrication is the process of intentionally shaping states of body and mind. There are three kinds: Bodily fabrication means the in-and-out breath; verbal fabrication is directed thought and evaluation. And mental fabrication is of two types: feeling, meaning feelings of pleasure, pain, or neither-pleasure-nor-pain; and perception, mental labels applied to the objects of the senses for the purpose of memory and recognition.”

And now this, in practically so many words, defines what an ontology is for our purposes. An ontology is a set of categories that are used in the mind as mental labels for the recognition and categorization and memory of the objects of the senses. And that can also include the mind of course. The verbal fabrication can be of two kinds: can be verbal by means of speaking, or verbal by means of a mental conversation.

And the mental conversation is the part of the verbal fabrications that limits and rules the process of becoming. Because as it turns out, if we don’t have a mental category for a particular type of being, we will not be able to become conscious of that type of being when we encounter it. And what to speak of trying to create it.

If we don’t, for example, understand that there is a type of consciousness which is completely free from suffering, we’ll have no idea how to recognize it, if by chance we run into it. Furthermore, we’ll have no idea how to create it for ourselves.

This idea of verbal labels, mental labels composed of categories of thoughts and fabrications and pet perceptions, is extremely important for the process of becoming. And we’ll see how important it is as we go deeper into this work.

Now Buddha says, “What is consciousness? These six are classes of consciousness: eye-consciousness, ear-consciousness, nose-consciousness, tongue-consciousness, body-consciousness and intellect-consciousness. This is called consciousness.” So in other words, consciousness is consciousness of the six senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and the mind.

Next is name-and-form: “Feeling, perception, intention, contact and attention. This is called name. The four great elements and the form dependent on the four great elements—earth, water, air and fire—this is called form. This name and this form are called name-and-form.” And why is this so important? Again, if we are to recognize a form, if we are to recognize a thing for what it is, we must have a name for it; and that name has to be related to other names in meaningful ways.

The Buddha uses the example of a chariot. In his day, everyone was familiar with a chariot. We could use the example of a car. If you take a car and completely disassemble it, and then take all the parts and put them in a big pile, how many people would recognize that, “Oh, this is a car”? Most people would just say, “Hey this is a pile of junk!”

But a mechanic would look at that pile and say, “Oh, here’s the makings of a car! If I put this together with that, and put these, assemble these this way and that way, I’d have a car!” What’s the difference? The ordinary person doesn’t know the language of the parts of a car. He doesn’t know the relationships among those parts, and how they can be put together into a working automobile. The mechanic does.

Well let’s say, a doctor for example. You go and see your doctor and you say, “Oh, it hurts here.” And the doctor will give a very specific name to that condition. This is called a diagnosis. Dia-gnosis OK? Through names, through knowing, through the ontology or the vocabulary of being a doctor. He can say, “Oh that’s the so-and-so muscle, and then you have such-and-such a swelling or whatever associated with that muscle, and this is causing a condition known as such-and-such.” Then he goes in his books, he looks up that condition, and he knows the cure. That’s how a doctor works.

So just like a doctor, or a mechanic, or an airline pilot, or a musician, or any kind of specialist, they each have their own shop talk. They each have their own specialized vocabulary. We are going to learn, or we actually are learning, the vocabulary of becoming as given by the Buddha.

And this is not something you’re going to learn in school. It’s even not something you encounter if you study Buddhism, because we are abstracting the process of Dependent Origination, and we’re using it in applications that are certainly within its scope, and certainly within its design parameters; but that were not the original intention. The original intention was to recognize these things and allow them to end, so that we can get on the Eightfold Path. We’re also going to use them for that, but first we need to know what they are, so we can observe them and then eventually control them.

Buddha says, “And what are the six sense media? These six are the sense media: the eye medium (color), the ear medium (sound), the nose medium (odor), the tongue medium (taste), the body medium (touch), the intellect medium (thought). These are called the Six Sense Media.”

So now you have the senses, which are kinds of perceptions. You have the sense media, which are the physical senses: eye, ear, nose and so on. And then you have the objects of the senses, which are color, sound, odor, taste and so on. So these three things must be present in order to have a perception, and perception is exactly how we define being.

A being—let’s say a doctor for example—is the type of being who has the perceptions of a doctor. A musician is a type of being who has the perceptions of a musician, and so on. Let’s say we want to be a leader. That means we’ll have the perceptions of a leader, will understand what leadership is in terms of its technical vocabulary, in terms of a model, a theoretical model of how leadership functions and so on.

Because of that we’ll be able to respond. Just like a doctor responds to an illness or a musician responds to a cue, a leader responds to leadership situations that call for the exercise of authentic leadership. And we’re going to go all into this in tremendous detail, so that you understand exactly how to apply all these things in real life. You can become the leader of your own life!

“What is contact? These six are classes of contact,” the Buddha says, “eye contact, ear contact, nose contact, tongue contact, body contact, intellect contact. This is called contact.”

Contact happens when a sense organ meets with a sense object—for example the eye meets with a form—conditioning an act of consciousness at that sense organ. The meeting of all three—the sense organ, the object and the act of consciousness—counts as contact.

So for there to be a perception there has to be contact. You can have the senses there and you can have the world out there, but if there’s no contact between them you won’t have a perception, you won’t able be able to be conscious of these things. Buddha is gradually defining all the terms and showing the order that they manifest in to create being.

“And what is feeling?” the Buddha says, “These six are classes of feeling: feeling born from eye-contact, feeling born from ear-contact, feeling born from nose-contact, feeling born from tongue-contact, feeling born from body-contact, feeling born from intellect-contact. This is called feeling.”

Feeling is based on contact at the six sense media, and it’s also based on whether we perceive that contact or that feeling as being pleasant, unpleasant, or neither-pleasant-nor-unpleasant. Because that determines whether our attachment to them, our craving, which is the thing that comes next, is going to be positive or negative.

Buddha says, “And what is craving? These six are classes of craving: craving for forms, craving for sounds, craving for smells, craving for tastes, craving for tactile sensations, craving for ideas. This is called craving.” Craving for the objects of the six sense media takes three forms:

Let’s say a person conceives themselves as being fat—and they don’t want to be fat, they want to be slim. So they crave non-being becoming as a fat person, and becoming a slim person. And then they begin to collect the vocabulary of a thin person: a certain kind of diet, a certain exercise regime, a certain collection of experiences that they can see leads toward that being.

We all know this, we all do this, but we do it more or less unconsciously. Buddha is trying to bring this process of becoming into consciousness so that we can use it deliberately to become anything we want.

Then, “What is clinging/sustenance? These four are clinging: sensuality-clinging, view-clinging, precept-and-practice clinging, and doctrine-of-self clinging. This is called clinging.”

Briefly, clinging is the passion and delight focused on the five aggregates: form, feeling, perception, fabrication and consciousness. Clinging can take these four forms that Buddha’s mentioned:

Now we’re not going to go into all of these very deeply right now. This is just a summary defining the terms in a basic way so that you can see how this process works, and how each step is built on the consequences and results of the previous ones.

“What is becoming? These three are becoming: sensual becoming, form becoming, and formless becoming. This is called becoming.” So becoming on any of these three levels—sensuality, form or formlessness—is counted as becoming. How do we become something formless? Remember there was non-being craving? So when the current form that we inhabit is something that we don’t want to be anymore, we begin to crave for its non-being. And gradually that form becomes formless.

In fact, our bodily form being a temporary arising because it’s born (anything that’s born is going to die) so this present form that we inhabit is due to become formless in time. There’s no avoiding that.

So what we’re talking about here is actually the process of manifestation and unmanifestation, and how it can be applied to different objects to give us exactly the type of being that we want. And this is called the process of becoming.

Now once all this is in place, we have birth. “And what is birth? Whatever birth, taking birth, descent, coming to be, coming forth, appearance of aggregates and acquisition of sense media of the various beings in this or that group of beings, that is called birth.”

So birth is the actual assumption of an embodiment or identity on any of these three levels: sensuality, form or formlessness. It’s either a manifestation or an unmanifeststation, or a change in manifestation. And those can apply to the senses, any of the six senses, any of the five aggregates, or any of the different perceptions and thoughts in the mind.

What’s the problem with that? Birth is always followed by aging and death. “What is aging and death? Whatever aging, decrepitude, brokenness, graying, wrinkling, decline of life force, weakening of the faculties of the various beings in this or that group of beings, that is called aging. Whatever deceasing, passing away, breaking up, disappearance, dying, death, completion of time, breakup of the aggregates, casting off of the body, interruption in the life faculty of the various beings in this or that group of beings, that is called death.” The aging and death of the created identity with its attendant suffering, sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress and despair, that is aging and death.

And of course this is a kind of suffering, whether you apply it to a state of mind or a thought or a perception. For example we all desire pleasure and avoid pain. When we get pleasure, even though we might get exactly what we wanted, we find in the moment of getting it that it’s not perfect. It’s not really what we wanted. It’s a little bit off.

There was a cartoon a long time ago of a Mayan priest doing a sacrifice. They’re up on top of this big pyramid. Here’s all drums playing and stuff going on and they bring this guy up and put him on the stone altar. And he takes the knife and cuts out his heart. And he’s walking down the pyramid going, “A little bit further to the left…”

In other words, even something like that, even something really extreme. Or let’s say some pop star has oodles of money, doesn’t know what to do with, so he gets himself a Ferrari. And then his best friend wrecks it. So we know anybody like that? These are the imperfections or the unsatisfactoriness of the material world, that whatever we get it’s always going to be to some degree unsatisfactory, it’s always going to be impermanent.

Even high spiritual attainments like samādhi, jhānas and so on are actually impermanent. They come and they go. Because they have a beginning, they also have an end. So there is nothing actually permanent, nothing actually eternal except the law of Dhamma itself. Being and non-being, becoming and unbecoming, these are all temporary things.

We can’t escape them. We have to be something, we have to be somewhere, we have to do something and have something in order to exist at all. And even if we attain unbinding like the Buddha did… Look, the Buddha is still present in the form of his teachings, he can manifest any place he wants.

These states of unbecoming are as impermanent as the states of becoming. However there is a stage of mastery of the process of becoming that means you are no longer subject to the suffering involved. There’s a beautiful saying: “Pain is inevitable; suffering is a choice.” It’s an attitude, it’s a way of looking at things: looking at things with craving and attachment. If we have no craving or attachment, then we don’t suffer even when those things go away.

And why is that? Because we know, we have confidence we can create those things again whenever we want. So we don’t mind losing them. If you have a million dollars in the bank, you don’t care about losing a hundred dollars. It’s nothing to you. But if all you have is a hundred dollars, then you care! What we’re talking about is complete mastery of the process of being and becoming, such that one is completely relieved from the anxiety of loss, from the pain of suffering and from the uncertainty of ignorance.

Here are all the stages of becoming lined up from ignorance to aging and death. And in general they go from the top down, counterclockwise on the wheel. But becoming is not a linear process. There are many cross-paths and feedback loops between and among the stages of becoming. Now why do we need to know that? Because these are the most sensitive points in the process of becoming, and that’s where we can have the influence on that process.

If we try to stop our kamma, for example, we can’t stop that, it’s coming. But we can significantly alter its effect by leveraging the sensitive points in the process. Like Archimedes said, “If I had a lever long enough I could move the world.” Well we can’t change our kamma, but we can alter it. We can change especially the way that we see it, and the way that we deal with it.

For example the way most people deal with suffering, is that they try to get pleasure. So they simply create more suffering for themselves in the future, because of course everything that we do to try to attain pleasure produces equal and opposite reaction.

The art of manipulating one’s kamma is closely tied in with the art of leadership, because the art of leadership (in a Buddhist sense anyway) is very much about how we benefit others, not ourselves. And this generates so much good kamma that the ordinary pleasures of life are effortless to attain—even some of the extraordinary pleasures of life.

So by mastering this process of being and becoming, we not only fulfill all of our needs, but we act as a very positive influence on others, and we make the world a better place.

Let’s take a look, for example, at the interplay between consciousness and name-and-form. I mentioned earlier that if we don’t have a name for a particular type of form, then even if we encounter that form, even if we actually have that experience, we will not register it. We will not recognize it, it will not get hooked up to our memory because our memory’s all based on terminology—name.

If we’re not going to be conscious of something because we can’t recognize it, then there’s no way that we could use it or leverage it in our process of becoming. In other words, we disempower ourselves. What we’re going to do here is that we’re going to go through creating a type of terminology, a type of network of terms. It’s called a terministic screen or shoptalk.

We’re going to work on developing a shoptalk of being and becoming. And the application that we choose, first of all, is leadership. And for this to work we have to understand the theory behind it, because no book or website or set of videos can give you all possible permutations of this process. There’s too many variations. Individual facts will always determine what you’re going to do with this knowledge. What we’re going to do is give you a general theory of becoming and then you can apply that in any situation.

Our work with becoming in learning and leadership focuses on the feedback loop between consciousness and name-and-form, because this is the most sensitive point of influence on the whole process of becoming. And we’re especially interested in this part of the process because a tiny little change in consciousness or name-and-form can have a huge influence on the entire process of becoming—in fact this leverage is exactly how one attains enlightenment.

Try to imagine: We’ve been in this saṁsāra, in this birth-and-death process for millions of lifetimes, uncountable lifetimes, actually. How do we break out of it? How do we break down that conditioning? How is it possible? We have to have some kind of leverage, otherwise the sheer amount of kamma, the sheer amount of conditioning is going to overwhelm us.

So the leverage we need is in our understanding, our view. Buddha calls it Right View. If we have the right view, we can set up a type of becoming that leads to the end of becoming, a type of being that leads to the end of compulsive being. This is called unbinding or Nibbāna (nirvāṇa). What we’re trying to do ultimately is set up a very special type of being and becoming that leads to the end of being and becoming, or that leads to mastery of being and becoming. We can use it if we want, or not.

So this is what we’re doing here. This is a huge piece of work and it’s a very important step on the stage to final enlightenment.

To sum up, when we talk about ontology in the context of becoming, we are talking about name-and-form. An ontology in this context is a structured list of the states of being allowable in your consciousness. If a state of being appears in your ontology, when you encounter it later in the stage of contact, you will be conscious of it. If a state of being is not present in your ontology, even if you contact it, you will not be conscious of it.

For example when we’re asleep at night in the stage of deep sleep, we’re not aware of anything—or let’s put it this way, we don’t remember anything when we wake up. We know that we’ve been asleep, and we know that we were in deep sleep without even dreams. But we don’t recall what happened. Why? Because most people don’t have a category for that kind of consciousness.

The only consciousness they know is consciousness that’s directed outside through the senses. They don’t have any kind of name or understanding of consciousness that is folded in on itself, that’s directed only at itself. And for this reason they miss this very important experience of dreamless sleep.

We will discuss the effect of context and ontology on consciousness and becoming in detail later on in this series. This is just an introduction to the process of becoming, which underlies all our research at Skillful Living Network. So for any other research that we’ve done, you have to have this background. You have to have this knowledge, otherwise you will be lost. That’s why I said in the beginning of the video, if you haven’t watched the first two in the series, go back and watch them before you review this video. Because otherwise it won’t make any sense.

And similarly, if you were watching any of our courses, you should go back and review these three videos: What is Skillful Living, Being and Becoming, and The Process of Becoming. Otherwise you’re not going to know what we’re talking about in other videos, because you won’t have the proper foundation, the proper background. So that’s it for these three, and then the next series is going to be Becoming Genius (Matrix Learning), the process of learning, the science of self-instruction, so please stay tuned for that. ```