A Becoming Critic
May 15, 2024

Pali has the word bhava, which means becoming, and the word bhāva, which means an emotional state. They’re very close, not only in spelling but also in meaning.

Bhava, becoming, is a sense of your identity in a particular world of experience. These worlds can include the world outside—but when you think about it, the world outside is actually many different worlds—and then also all the worlds inside your mind. Yet even though they’re inside your mind, once you get into them, they surround you. They become not only a mental experience, but also a bodily experience.

Sometimes they’re centered on sensuality, sometimes on the fact of taking on an identity, and sometimes on the desire to destroy an identity you’ve got. All of this applies to your emotional states as well. As the Buddha said, any craving that gives rise to becoming is going to give rise to suffering, too.

So, it’s important to understand, in our quest to put an end to suffering, how we create these worlds of becoming. If you simply try to destroy them, you take on a new identity as the destroyer. That leads to more becoming.

The Buddha pointed this out as one of his special insights: The people who try to find oblivion in their meditation are simply creating more states of becoming as they do so. That means that you can’t just blank out and say that you’re done with everything. You’ve got to understand: How do these states of becoming get started in the mind? One of the reasons we meditate is to get to know these states of becoming well.

We’re going to be creating a state of becoming as we meditate. There’s you, the meditator. You’re identifying with your intention to get the mind to settle down, to stay with the breath. And then you’ve got the body here as your world of experience.

As for the world outside, that’s relevant only to the extent that it’s either conducive to the meditation or not. An airplane goes by and makes a lot of noise. In this world of meditation, it’s a disturbance. But in the world of commerce, in the world of business, maybe it’s doing something useful. So, it’s a disturbance to you in your world, whereas it plays another role in other people’s worlds.

This is why there’s a lot of conflict among us. We’re living in different but overlapping worlds. Sometimes our worlds are helpful to one another; sometimes they get in the way. As long as you can keep a balanced sense of the fact that you’re centering your mind, it doesn’t have to depend on things outside.

Here comes a helicopter, right on cue. It’s up to you to maintain your original intention that you’re going to stay with the breath. As for the helicopter, it’s doing its own business–and you don’t have to comment on it. You don’t have to have anything to do with it at all.

Years back, we had a woman staying here. As she was getting serious about her meditation, she practiced what she called sense restraint. She was upset because other people were talking within earshot. “Don’t they know that I’m practicing sense restraint?” she complained.

Actually, it was up to her to restrain her senses. It wasn’t up to other people to restrain them for her. We can’t expect the helicopter to skirt the monastery so that it won’t make any noise and disturb your meditation. It’s up to you not to get disturbed. Focus on what you’ve got to do. And a good part of concentration is learning how to concentrate no matter what the circumstances are around you.

Now, we try to create an ideal environment here, or as close to an ideal as we can, making it quiet, promoting a set of values that recognizes the worth of this practice. But for concentration to be really good, you have to be able to do it whenever and wherever.

So, try to be up for the challenges. And try to be very conscious about what you’re doing, how you’re putting this state of becoming together. You do it through the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, the perceptions you use—the images you hold in mind or the words by which you label things—along with the feelings you focus on. Notice how you put these things together to make a state of becoming.

It’s like learning to be a film critic. You don’t just watch the film for the sake of the story or the enjoyment. You’re trying to figure out: How did they put this together? Did they do a good job? Learning to meditate is like going to a film class and learning about the art of filmmaking. When you’re watching a film in a class like that, you’re not totally immersed in the story. You’re also conscious of how the director put things together, what the actors were trying to do, how the film editing helped or didn’t help, what the photographer was up to. You try to see all the different elements of how the film was put together. That gives you some distance from the story, but it can actually enhance your appreciation and understanding of what’s going on.

This is precisely the kind of skill you’re going to need as you look at your other becomings as they come into the mind. You want to see how they’re put together. One of the first things you have to learn to look for is what the Buddha calls the allure. In more common English, we call it the hook. These little stirrings appear in your breath and in your mind, and something about them pulls you in. What is that? Look for it.

The Buddha wants you to see things in terms of dependent co-arising. You don’t have to know all the different steps, but basically, the principle is that these becomings, these worlds that we live in, are like homes that we live in. They’re constructed—out of intentions and acts of attention, feelings, perceptions, and the way you breathe.

There are certain steps that these things go through leading up to these states of becoming. There’s one analysis where the Buddha talks about how we move from craving to clinging and to becoming. It answers a question that often gets asked: What precisely is the difference between clinging and craving?

For one thing, look at the words. The word for craving in Pali, taṇhā, can also mean thirst. The word for clinging, upādāna, can also mean feeding. That gives you an idea right there. Craving is desire and passion for something you don’t have. Clinging is desire and passion for something you do have—and you’re afraid it’s going to leave you.

There’s another analysis where the Buddha talks about how from craving there comes seeking. You’re thirsty for something so you look for it. Then you acquire it. And then you ascertain it—in other words, you figure out, “Is this what I was looking for?” Sometimes it is, sometimes it’s not. When it’s not, you have to decide, “Am I going to use it anyhow? Or am I going to throw it away and look for something else?”

But when you finally decide that it is going to serve your purposes, that’s when you feel passion and desire for it. This is the passion that comes from wanting to hold on along with the desire for whatever it is to stay. Based on that, you get possessive. When you’re possessive, you get defensive. Then there’s all the conflict that comes as you try to fight off anyone who might try to take away what you’ve got, whether it’s an actual person outside or something inside.

Now, the Buddha lays out all these processes as the steps leading up to becoming. It’s like looking at a house and realizing it’s made out of papier-mâché, feathers, and twigs—in other words, things you can’t really depend on, can’t really rely on. The purpose of this analysis is to develop a sense of dispassion: Why would you want to move in, no matter how alluring it is? If you build a house out of papier-mâché and bits of newspaper, you know it’s going to rain. You know it’s going to all dissolve at some point. So, no matter how attractive you make it, you realize, “This isn’t worth it.” That’s how you develop dispassion. And that’s what the Buddha is aiming at.

As he said, you know that something is Dhamma when it leads to dispassion. And dispassion is actually the highest of all dhammas.

How did the Buddha know this? He stepped back. He stepped out of his becomings and looked at how they were constructed, the same way that a film critic tries to decide, “How did they put this movie together?”

So, we’re engaging in becoming-criticism, not for the purpose of further enjoying the becomings, but for actually deciding we’ve had enough. After all, if you try to move into these worlds, they collapse on you. Yet, we’re afraid not to move into worlds because we’re even more afraid there if we don’t move in, there’ll be nothing. The Buddha is trying to assure you, though, that when you give up on this process, there’s actually something better.

So, we get into concentration both so that we can make the mind quiet enough to see these processes, and also so that we can understand the construction of concentration itself, as an example of how becoming happens. It’s made out of intentions, your intention to stay; acts of attention, you’re attending to the breath and trying to not pay attention to other things that would distract you; you’ve got the perceptions that hold you here; and the feelings that provide some attraction to the concentration. You’re trying to put all these things together.

There’s a well-known principle that the things you know best are the things you do, the things that you make. That’s what we’re trying to do here: put together a state of concentration so that you can understand, “This is how concentration is put together. This is how it’s fabricated. This is how all states of becoming are fabricated.”

When you really comprehend it, as the Buddha said, then there’s no more passion for it, because you see how ephemeral the whole thing is, how unreliable it is. You see that there’s a lot of suffering that goes along with it. If it were a totally innocent activity, that would be one thing. But think about all the identities that people take on, and how distraught they are when those identities are taken away from them.

This has happened to you many, many times. The question is, why do you still keep wanting to go for it?

It’s like King Koravya. After having him reflect on his own aging, illness, and death, Ratthapala poses a question for him: “If someone were to come and say, ‘There’s another kingdom that you could conquer,’ even though you’re old and decrepit and really about to die, would you go for it?” And the king says, “Sure, why not?” “A kingdom to the east? West? South? North? A kingdom on the other side of the ocean?” “Sure,” “Sure,” “Sure,” “Sure,” “Sure.”

That’s blindness.

As the Dhamma summary says, we’re a slave to craving. The whole purpose of the teaching is for us to understand how craving makes us a slave and how we can free ourselves from that slavery. What’re the steps? This is where we get the mind in a position where it can step back, step out of the content of its worlds, all the narratives that pull us in—all the narrative hooks, the positive things that we think we can get out of becoming, and even the negative things. We can get ourselves into really foul emotions and not want to leave, for the fear that we’ll have nothing. That’s how blind we are.

So, we want to learn how to step back and engage in some becoming-criticism. Understand how these things are put together so that you can really comprehend them and say, “Okay, I’ve had enough.”

And there, the Buddha says, that’s where you’re going to find the ultimate happiness. It’s in an unexpected place. But then, if true happiness were in any of the expected places, we’d have found satisfaction a long time ago. It’s because it’s in this unexpected place that we’ve been traveling around for who knows how many eons.

But now, here’s the way out.