Unbecoming: From the Visible, to Experiential, to Existential

By Vasant Raval and Prafulla Raval

An outlier in many ways, this book focuses on what is typically not observed, nor consciously searched in our lives. We know more about becoming, however, more significant in life's enrichment is the unbecoming. While the former shapes a self-oriented life-style, the latter emphasizes other-centric behavior. You can pivot to a better life, lasting peace, tranquility, and satisfaction with your life-goals if you practice unbecoming. Unbecoming provides the most rewarding life style and satisfaction with how you are invested you life for yourself and for the good of others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Aug 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9798765230039

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Copyright © 2022 Vasant Raval and Prafulla Raval.

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ISBN: 979-8-7652-3004-6 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-7652-3002-2 (hc)

ISBN: 979-8-7652-3003-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022911318

Balboa Press rev. date: 07/28/2022

CONTENTS

Preface

1.     Life Is A Journey

2.     Blueprint Of Me

3.     Nature Of Me

4.     The World Around Me

5.     Now That I Am Born . . .

6.     Cards I Am Dealt . . .

7.     Choices I Make

8.     Righteous Living

9.     Becoming

10.   Iolo: I Only Live Once?

11.   Unbecoming

12.   Mindfulness & Meditation

13.   Sustaining Communities

14.   Nurturing Generosity

15.   Am I There Yet?

Bibliography

PREFACE

Ever since we published our first book on spirituality, Finding Soul in Work and Life, we have been thinking: What next? Feedback from the readers of Finding Soul was that of curiosity, seeking more information. We felt motivated to do more. Book writing can be a long, arduous task, especially while you are researching, which never seems to stop. All your clippings and notes, together with foundational, epical writings on the theme come together, the former more as current illustrations and the latter, as the glue that binds. We found that the pace of writing was never quite steady, with other short-term commitments intruding on the amount of time we could put in toward the book. Sometimes, when we returned to the book project, we found that much of what we had thought as final had to be revised to make more sense. At a minimum, it improved readability and reduced repetition. The chapters seemed to come together over time.

For us, book writing is usually a social endeavor. Many people we approached willingly shared their thoughts, provided feedback on the written material, and challenged what can be written in a better way to make it easier for the reader to grasp. Some provided thoughts, questions, arguments, and religious bent to the topics. Others cheered us on to keep going and finish the work. Joyce Coogan carefully edited the entire manuscript; it is a massive effort which took hours of time and deep interest in helping the project. Without her input, the book would have had less impact on readers. Veronica Shukla read the entire book with care, pausing frequently to ask if there was a better way to present the material. Her comments prompted meaningful revisions to an earlier draft of the book. Both Joyce and Veronica helped advance the book substantially in terms of clarity and accuracy.

People of different religious beliefs and diverse cultural and educational and career backgrounds helped us in shaping the book. Ed Morse has been a mentor for us, cheering us on with this project and providing support along the way. Maorong Jiang and Asian World Center at Creighton University have been great supporters of our research and writing on spirituality. Janakbhai Dave, Kishore Jani, Mahesh Vora, Hemanshu Vora, Rupal Thaker, Deepak Acharya, Alka Adatia, Andrew Gustafson, and Greg Dyche took interest in the book’s development and provided guidance and encouragement. We deeply appreciate everyone’s dedicated help and interest in the book project.

We believe the purpose of this book is to continue with the dialog on unbecoming. We hope that readers will contribute generously by sharing their thoughts, posing questions, or seeking more information. Indeed, we would appreciate your thoughts.

Vasant and Prafulla Raval

DEDICATION

With lots of affection, love, and good wishes,

we dedicate this book

to our darling granddaughter

Sonia

1

LIFE IS A JOURNEY

For I spend all my time going about

trying to persuade you, young and old,

to make your first and chief concern not

for your bodies or your possessions, but

for the highest welfare of your souls.

Socrates

L IFE IS A JOURNEY. DOTTED by an origin and a destination, every journey has a purpose. We are used to taking the road or traveling by air. For air travel, we buy a ticket, pack our bags, go to the airport, and take the flight. At the destination, we do everything in a different order. There is no Transportation Security Administration (TSA) requirement that you need to meet, except perhaps that you need to keep your facemask on until you leave the airport. You pick up your bags from the baggage-claim area, and travel from the airport (by train, bus, taxi, etc.) to the destination. If you are traveling by car, the procedure is simpler. You have no reporting time for the travel, and no security clearance requirements. Just drop your luggage in the trunk of your car and take off, making sure that the car is fit to travel, has enough gas, etc. Broadly, these are all visible components of our journey.

It helps, however, to look at each journey as a bundle of experiences. For example, along the way, you meet people (or bump into them!). It all happens as if it is a chance event. If you are traveling by air, you do not get to choose your fellow travelers, or the airline flight check-in staff, the captain, and the flight crew. Sometimes, you run into people and feel as if you have known them from the past! You feel so close to them, so quickly that you wonder why that might be. They show their unconditional and selfless love for you and assist in any way they can to make your journey comfortable and successful. You also meet people you do not particularly care to engage with and will probably forget soon after you meet them. Regardless, people you meet along the way may have a very short duration of exposure to you, drifting away in a hurry and never again crossing paths. Either party may not take the initiative to re-connect and the relationships and experiences become part of the archives. You wonder who sent them to run into you and why were they so helpful, despite the absence of direct quid-pro-quo. All you are left with is the experience.

Life’s journey is usually several decades long. In this rather long trip, you collect experiences with a variety of different traits. Some experiences are short lived, while others have a much longer life. Some are more impactful than others, and some may dislodge you from your chosen path, while others solidify your confidence in the journey. A significant differentiating factor across these experiences is the degree of impact it has on how you live your life. This is where we set aside visible components of our journey and instead focus on their effect on the end goal of the journey. In sum, the journey is essentially an aggregation of experiences along the way.

Destination

It is so much more fun to talk about the details of the journey than the destination. We can talk about how a cold, and perhaps dated, mushroom soup that the flight attendant offered on the overseas flight to Atlanta caused food poisoning. Or how an unlabeled box, found unattended at the Mumbai airport, was examined thoroughly by a bomb-squad, only to find that it had about a dozen raw mangoes in it! Recently, we heard about passengers who revolted against the requirement of face-covering in-flight and thus created the degree of chaos and uncertainty that is unnerving to others. There is just no dearth of experiences, although not all of them are as interesting or life-changing. While we forget some, or just laugh out loud in sharing them with others, there may be other experiences that have a lingering effect on our life; we may, for example, process each to understand why it is important and what we must do in similar circumstances in future.

In the excitement of taking on the journey, what is often forgotten is the destination. Where am I going? How did I choose to go there? Why am I going there? How does the journey help shape my overall life-goal? Short duration trips may have purposes that can be articulated better, but even in these cases, does the trip lead to anything long-term? Or is this just a one-time shot with nothing intended for the lifetime? We may be living every moment with gusto, but do these moments add up to anything that we intend to achieve?

The reality is this. We may know our destination well in all kinds of micro trips we take, but when it comes to the entire embodied life, we are not sure. Or perhaps we have not even thought about it. It is as if we are floating from day to day. Have you thought about what each day adds to your ultimate, overarching goal in life? The trick is in aggregating the experiences into those that likely will lead to material happiness (becoming), or eternal happiness (unbecoming).

Unbecoming

It appears that we do not pay much attention to the destination of our lifelong journey. A purpose of this book is to help you not think about the material, but rather existential goals. The former are generally more jazzy, attractive, exciting, and playful: we call them goals of becoming, while the latter, more crucial in achieving undiluted happiness, lasting peace, and tranquility, are genuine outcomes of unbecoming.

This book is about unbecoming, in stark contrast to the familiar: becoming. However, it is hard to conceptualize unbecoming without first knowing what becoming is. Becoming takes you through a stage in life where you see physical, mental, and intellectual growth. The person as such is changing, generally improving in worldly life. It is the stage where growth is expected; a child becomes an adult, learning and living at the same time, likely becoming more responsible for oneself and toward others. While childhood and education may be worry-free for most, all kinds of stresses and strains come along in later stages of becoming. The stress points may emerge from relationships, personal and family health, struggles to meet necessities, and so forth.

Whether they are a part of becoming or unbecoming, a compilation of all experiences would help comprehend one’s state. Experiences move the person along the way to some destination or milestone. Interpreted in this way, one could consider becoming, unbecoming, and the next state of being as the milestones in which experiences amalgamate. In a spiritual sense, being is the ultimate experience, unbecoming is on the way to the ultimate realization, and becoming typically defines the beginning of all material experiences of the embodied life. Although not a prerequisite to unbecoming, a successful stab at becoming could lead to a better quality of life later when the person may choose to unbecome. Each has its role and is neither good nor bad as such; however, these states form a rough hierarchy in the existential sense: becoming is a worldly play, an expression of engagement with reality as we see it, the next is unbecoming where we unhook ourselves from selfishness and become other-centric, and the final state is the state of being, often called nirvana.

Life normally begins with becoming; there usually aren’t many options. However, life may unwind later with unbecoming, and in a few rare cases, eventually land in pure being, the nirvana state. We read about numerous accounts of becoming, mostly in the form of biographies, and very limited accounts of being (such as in Autobiography of a Yogi), but the middle stage – unbecoming – is often left unrecognized or is deeply marginalized. And yet, it is the crucial next step for someone who has attempted to become. It is, indeed, a crucial milestone, for in one embodied life, a person may not complete the full journey from becoming to being. Life would be well spent if one can at least unbecome.

Unbecoming is an important stage in one’s life. Without it, any attempt to reach out to lasting happiness, peace, and tranquility is nearly impossible. We may not realize the importance of unbecoming while we are busy becoming; however, toward the late stages of becoming, dissatisfaction with what one has achieved and doubts about how meaningful the life has been, are inevitable. Some may not quite get to this opportunity to reflect on life, but most do. The sooner we know about what unbecoming is, the better the chances of improving our lives.

Why Unbecome?

If the amount of time we spend in our lives on doing various things is one indication of what we believe would make us happy, what does it suggest? Most people spend too much time pampering themselves, enjoying worldly pleasures, and catering to I-ness within us. This may not be enough, or even appropriate to make life worth something. In the spirit of improving our current life, this book proposes that one should adopt the transformation process of unbecoming. In turn, this will change the adopter’s behavior in a positive way.

Hardly anyone dislikes the idea of better living. In fact, there are numerous books written to guide people to improve their lives. However, we see millions of people suffering, struggling to do better and we wonder why that is so. Every hint to help people do better is probably helpful but may not be enough. Even beliefs about spirituality or religion may not be enough to visualize that life is a gift and it is our duty to exert to improve our lives.

And there are larger questions in forming our intention to do better. For example, do the effects of our efforts to improve carry forward beyond this life as we know it? Is there a life beyond this life? If there is only one life to live, should we worry about anything beyond our horizon limited by the embodied life? Or should we not worry about all that and instead, just live this life as we see fit? Is the idea of better living influenced by whether there is next life? Good behavior in this life does not hurt, even if we believe in no life after death. Our aim should be that the gift of this life is put to the best use, regardless of what happens upon death.

For many people, the issue is this: Why worry about questions we cannot even begin to understand fully? Why waste time on something with no context, no apparent or anticipated consequences for lack of knowledge of it, no clear evidence of its existence, and no history? If we don’t know what is next, we will be a lot less motivated to stage our current life to gain a better standing in the next one. Interestingly, curiosity about the next world (and even the former world) has been strangely lacking amongst most people, many of whom seem to have no belief in their existence. This book explores these questions with a view to provide a practical guideline for better living.

The essence of this book is simple and yet well-founded. It rests on the teachings of Sanatan Dharma (eternal duty) or what is often called Hinduism and related religions, mainly Buddhism and Jainism. These religions offer lessons - complete with illustrations, anecdotes, and analogies - on how to live daily life. Like all religions, these religions thrive on mystics, yogis, or knowledge seekers. Not that there are no gaps in understanding the landscape, but most significant aspects are clear and may draw your conviction. Importantly, this book is not about religion, but about a way to better our lives in a systematic and holistic manner. The attempt here is to make the reader aware of unbecoming, and thus to explore the possible retreat from becoming. Lasting happiness and a fulfilled life are likely outcomes of unbecoming.

This book introduces you to a conceptual frame of the human life, the universe, and beyond, and how a person is situated relative to Consciousness. In matters of creation of the universe, several competing frameworks exist; we exercise our bias toward philosophical and religious perspectives of Hinduism. Even there, there are alternative frameworks. We primarily rely on the Advait philosophy, which essentially says that there is no duality, only one supreme Consciousness exists.

The framework we have chosen clarifies the nature of existential end-goals of one’s life. After all, we do not want to be remembered as someone whose life was buffeted by uncontrollable forces and never could come to mean anything. A somewhat thoughtful walk is better than the default mode of random walk. If we are not intentional, hours, days, weeks, months, and years go by and toward the end, we feel empty, not having achieved anything. Even a simple goal of donating blood slips by slowly when the prospective donor becomes disqualified by his age! Failure to understand what is important, and the failure to work on it, is not a good excuse for living the presumably good life.

Finally, this book is about preparing for what is next by attempting to raise awareness of what that might be. Empowered by faith, seeking reasonable answers from the heart might be helpful here; the logical answers obtained by scratching one’s brain don’t go too far! Science may not conflict with theosophy, but it has yet to figure out the nature and structure of Consciousness. As T.H. Green puts it, Poetry we feel, science we understand. He asserts that the ideas which poetry applies to life should be left to take their chance alongside scientific beliefs. Religion, like poetry, has truth of its own, though from the scientific point of view, we may admit it to be an illusion.

Helping you identify better life, one that will lead to lasting happiness, is an overarching goal of this book. In reaching this goal, we want to be deliberately systemic without being prescriptive. We believe you will benefit from it. Your investment of time and effort could dramatically change your life. If you feel you are tired, or unhappy, or even totally fulfilled in what you wanted, you may lean on this book to do better. Insights from unbecoming are yours only if you commit to the journey. Once you learn the pathway, be persistent, and just do it!

2

BLUEPRINT OF ME

Life is that which animates all existence.

Without its energy, nothing that is, is.

Neale Donald Walsh

in The Only Thing That Matters.

I T SEEMS THAT FOR MOST of us, life’s end-goals are absent, ambiguous, or artificially picked without adequate reflection. If the goal is weak or absent, the journey cannot be structured to get the most out of it. Without a clear understanding of where I am going and how I intend to get there, the journey remains uncertain, wobbly, and perhaps wasteful. Before we embark on finding out the purpose of life’s journey, it would help if we knew who we are. We explore here the question of identity more generally to understand the blueprint of a human being.

When asked the question, Who are you? we fall for the obvious. It is tempting to claim, for example, that I am a professor, a parent, a homeowner, and so forth. The obvious is not the spirit, it is the matter. Spirit behind our Be-ness is beyond the reach of thought. It would be difficult for people to convincingly say: I am the consciousness, single and indivisible, that powers all organisms. The world is described in the language of the matter, which is relative in context, whether you are looking at occupation, blood relationship, ownership of material goods, or anything worldly in nature. The matter needs context, and context