The Perception of Impermanence: The Process of Becoming
When developing the perception of impermanence, and using Dependent Arising as a guide, it is useful to begin near the end of the chain, with becoming, before it manifests as birth, aging, and death.
Becoming is the ongoing process through which experience is continually shaped toward becoming something other than what it is now. It is the movement toward establishing a self, a situation, or a way of experiencing the world that promises satisfaction, security, or escape from what is presently experienced.
To understand becoming, however, it is important to understand that Dependent Arising does not describe a cycle or a simple sequence of events. It describes dependencies. Each link depends on conditions that allow it to arise and continue, and each link also conditions how becoming takes shape and manifests.
Ignorance conditions the process by preventing experience from being seen according to its actual conditions. Instead of seeing experience as impermanent, unsatisfactory, and not-self, there is a tendency to see it as something that can provide lasting satisfaction and something that can be established as me or mine.
Volitional formations condition the habitual tendencies through which this process of becoming continues. They shape the conditions that trigger what type of becoming will result, and the tendencies that influence how becoming develops into birth, suffering and death of an experience
Consciousness provides the knowing through which an experience of a world can be established. Conditioned by suffering and the movement toward something satisfying, consciousness seeks a place to establish itself, a place in which the promise of becoming can be experienced.
Name and form are continually reshaped into what is hoped in the experience. Feeling, perception, intention, contact, and attention give meaning and structure to form, while form provides the basis around which these activities organize experience. In this way, name and form continually configure the particular world in which becoming takes shape.
The six sense bases provide the interfaces through which that world can be experienced. They establish the fields through which sights, sounds, smells, tastes, bodily sensations, and mental objects can appear, giving becoming an environment in which it can operate.
These factors are not fixed things that remain unchanged until the destruction of the body. They are themselves continually arising and passing away according to their conditions. Their changing activity continually influences how becoming is formed and experienced.
Contact brings the sense bases, their objects, and consciousness together, providing the conditions for particular experiences to occur. Feeling gives those experiences a tone of pleasant, painful, or neither-pleasant-nor-painful. Perception recognizes and identifies what is being experienced. Together, contact, feeling, and perception continually provide the immediate experience upon which craving can operate.
Craving then moves toward what has been felt and perceived. It seeks pleasant experience, seeks to avoid unpleasant experience, and more deeply seeks becoming or not-becoming. In doing so, craving gives direction to the process of becoming.
Clinging takes up and holds onto what craving has reached toward. It makes the desired experience, view, way of being, or sense of self into something to depend upon. Through clinging, the movement of craving becomes established as something that can sustain a particular becoming.
Becoming is therefore not something added to the process after the other links have finished. It is the continuing process that these conditions are shaping. Ignorance, formations, consciousness, name and form, the six sense bases, contact, feeling, perception, craving, and clinging all influence what becoming is and how it manifests.
When becoming is established, birth gives that becoming a particular form. A self comes to be within it, together with a world in which that self experiences, seeks, protects, resists, compares, and suffers. Aging and death then describe the instability and eventual breakdown of what has been established through birth.
The different links can also be conditioned in different ways. Craving is not always directed toward the same thing. There can be craving for sense satisfaction, craving for becoming, and craving for not-becoming. These can occur together, or one can become prominent while another is not.
The underlying craving that sustains becoming is the movement toward becoming or not-becoming. It is the movement that seeks to establish something different from what is presently experienced, either by becoming something or by escaping from what has come to be.
Within this ongoing process, however, craving for sense satisfaction can arise and pass away according to its own conditions. It does not necessarily create a new becoming each time it arises. There can be many occurrences of craving for pleasant sights, sounds, tastes, sensations, or other forms of satisfaction within an already established becoming.
Thus, becoming should not be understood as something that first comes into existence and then causes craving, clinging, feeling, and the other links to disappear until another becoming begins. Becoming is itself dependent upon these conditions, and while becoming continues, the other dependencies continue to operate within it.
In this way, Dependent Arising describes an ongoing process rather than a sequence in which one link happens once and is then replaced by the next. The dependencies remain active, continually conditioning and shaping how becoming manifests. Within that process, some forms of craving may arise and cease many times, while the deeper movement toward becoming or not-becoming continues to sustain the process itself.
The perception of impermanence begins to reveal this process. What appears to be a solid self existing within a solid world is actually a continually changing configuration of conditions. Becoming is not a thing that is created and then remains. It is an ongoing process of arising and ceasing, continually shaped by the conditions on which it depends.
The purpose is not to observe clinging, but to see how becoming arises in relation to what is impermanent.
Dependent on clinging, the mind engages in permanence-making. This is not passive, but an active and intentional process. It is the act of trying to become something, to establish oneself in a particular experience, and to sustain that position through craving and clinging.
This process is described by the discourses as "becoming," the craving to want to exist (bhava-taṇhā). Though it arises dependent on craving and clinging, it can be discerned as a distinct activity: the urge to establish identity and continuity within experience.
It is the effort to assert “I am this” or “I must maintain this state,” whether that state is a mood, a mental quality, a view, or an identity. It is the attempt to project permanence, substance, meaning, and reliability onto what is conditioned in order to establish a place for the self to exist.
With clinging as condition, there is becoming. Becoming conditions birth. Birth conditions aging and death.
SN12.2
This is why identity is not just formed from clinging to impermanent things. Through ignorance and craving, the mind continually tries to establish stability and continuity within what is impermanent. Through permanence-making, craving makes what is conditioned appear capable of supporting and sustaining existence, as the primary process to build a foundation for the self.
Self-making does not arise merely because experiences arise. It arises when craving seeks to establish and maintain a position within those experiences. This is becoming, an active and effortful process that continues whenever its supporting conditions are present. The sense of self is like a performance: it is constructed and reinforced through every act of trying to land somewhere solid.
This is why it is not enough merely to see experiences arising and passing away. We must also discern the craving, clinging, and becoming that arise in relation to them. If we do not see the urge to become as it arises, even practice itself can become another self-making project.
The path to freedom requires seeing not only that things change, but also how the mind continually tries to become something in relation to that change, sustaining suffering in the process. The discourses do not just teach us to recognize impermanence; they teach us to see the mind's deep tendency to try to establish itself within the conditioned, treating it as a stable foundation where the self can exist.
Seeing this is not the ending of a self, but the ending of the craving and becoming that continually construct a sense of self. That’s why nibbāna is not annihilation. It is the cessation of the activity of becoming.