You are born in ignorance, you don’t know or understand reality (objective understanding), how to react to experience (reciprocity), or how to conduct yourself in a way that minimizes suffering and maximizes happiness (morality). You don’t have knowledge of form, of language, nor of how to conduct yourself in the world. You don’t know right and wrong, and you cannot differentiate or hierarchically organize values. The biological system has values, but these values are merely of genetic inheritance, and as conscious awareness of oneself hasn’t yet developed, and external influence has yet to form cultural and traditional values, we have only primitive values which drive us.

 You are taught things, in infant-hood, that form as habits in response to the chaotic environment you have yet to form into order. These volitional formations arise only out of the initial state of ignorance. These become conditional responses in the form of action both physically and mentally. Pavlovian and traditional conditioning take place, and you begin to form neural pathways linking phenomena, still, subconsciously. You become responsive to the phenomena of action and response, of reward and punishment, in the form of pleasure and pain, yet are unable to distinguish the causal chain, acting only on conditioned instinct.

Next arises, dependent on these formations, consciousness, or as is better understood – awareness. Based on the habit forming structure inherent in the human neural makeup, you are provided the six senses, thus you have six forms of consciousness; eye consciousness, ear consciousness, nose consciousness, mouth/tongue consciousness, body consciousness, and mind consciousness, through which you are able to be aware of all experience available to you. All experience is experienced through these six consciousnesses. So when you see your mother you become conditioned through the habit formation of association of her with a certain role, whether it be protection, or nourishment, stemming from the basic drives provided by the genetic makeup at birth.

Next arises namarupa (name and form, immaterial and material) dependent on this consciousness. So you have awareness/consciousness, you’re aware of seeing your mother, due to habituated response to experience, due to ignorance, now you not only are “conscious” of the experience, but are able to recognize her form (material property), and attach her name (immaterial property), onto the phenomenon of “mother”. This identifying and linking between material and immaterial, and conceptualization of both a physical form and a mental phenomenon, arises only after consciousness arisen. The key element in how your experience becomes experienced and conceptualized, is in the arising of contact, dependent on namarupa. If there was no material or immaterial side of reality, you would never be able to make contact with anything, and your experience would never be, you wouldn’t be able to identify a material form, nor produce an immaterial (mental) connotation in relation to the phenomenon. So your eye sees the photons of light reflected off your mother, the enter the retina, the two are combined through “physical” contact, and eye consciousness arises in awareness of the fact, and the meeting of the three, including consciousness, is the contact that is necessary for an experience of vision. Without the previously established identification process you wouldn’t know what it is your aware of, conceptually. From this mental formation attached to the individual of mother, you are able to identify her form, and “name her”, perhaps not using language, yet, but in conception of the association between the form and the result of interaction. The experience of eye consciousness is used in recognizing the form of the person which you have unconsciously been informed of as important to your survival for many reasons (the preservation and reproduction of the genome by getting the individual’s survival machine further into life). This contact is recognizable upon inspection of any experience you have ever experience. Even in thought, your mind consciousness must make contact with the object of thought, the conceptualization in the words or picture of the thought, in order to presently be aware of what it is passing through your mind.

From contact comes a feeling, the type of feeling is dependent on the stimuli you make contact with and its relation to you in your experience. There’s three types of feelings that arise out of this contact, pleasant, non pleasant, or neither pleasant or non pleasant, but no matter what you make contact with, one of the three arises as a result. From pleasant feeling comes craving to have, running towards, or wanting or willing or desiring to be in possession of this object of pleasant feeling. From unpleasant feeling also comes craving, but in rejection or separation from the object, in aversion as a positive form of willing, or desire or willing to not have this object in your experience, in rejection, or pushing away. So from both pleasant and unpleasant comes this craving, or desiring, which is where suffering enters your life. In neither pleasant nor unpleasant experiences of contact the object simply doesn’t have a meaningful effect upon consciousness and its actions, and does not continue to produce the craving and attachment inherent in the other two forms of feeling. Whether the object of desire is wholesome or not, the not achieving the acquisition of object of desire always produces suffering, or unsatisfactoriness, or discontent, the amount of which is characterized as located on a spectrum dependent on the individual and upon his training in mental management. Thus, in our link of dependent origination, suffering first shows itself as the result of feeling, through craving. Your mother walks into the room, she is in the visible field that becomes known through eye consciousness in the link between light bouncing off her, and your eye receiving the transmission, the recognition of her identity becomes known to you through the conceptualization of “mother”, and the form presented. From this contact, this association, and conditioned response, comes a feeling dependent on your current relationship and state of being, this feeling being either pleasant, non-pleasant, or neither. In the case of a pleasant feeling arising in response to the identification, you crave her to stay in the room, if she is walking out, you desire her to return and not to go. If the feeling produced in response to her identification is negative in nature, then you wish for her to leave, and not to stay. If there is no feeling produced, you are indifferent to her existence within that present moment, whether she stays or goes has no meaning and is of no significance to you (perhaps your attention is more readily engaged in another phenomenon). Thus is the nature of desire in response to feeling and the object of contact in conscious experience which gives off a feeling.

Continual desire based on continually feeling pleasant or unpleasant works until the craving becomes attached to the object, and thus arises attachment, which is dependent on this craving, and includes an even greater amount of suffering and delusion. At this stage you hold the physical/mental phenomenon so tightly that any change to it causes you suffering. When it is close, experientially, you want it to stay close, when it is far, you want it to become close, in regards to an object of consciousness that produces a non-pleasant emotional response, when it is close you wish it to be far away, when it is far away, you wish it to remain far away. This goes for all phenomena, not just objects, but feelings, ideas, thoughts, experiences, states of mind, and abstract pursuits such as fame, admiration, or wealth. In the case of something you like, any change, alteration, or distancing causes you immense suffering as you see it as permanent, unchanging, and something you wish to be close to you all the time. The opposite happens when you’re attached to the absence of something, if you dislike something so much that any appearance or closeness of it becomes a problem, due to the continual desire for rejection or aversion to this object of attention, you become attached to the experience of that thing not being in your experience. This can be emotion, poverty, state of social class, any phenomena, because everything meaningful whether positive or negative within our experience conceptually or physically you can make contact with, a feeling arises, you either experience it positively or negatively, producing the effect of liking or disliking it, and therefore anything can become this object of attachment if the desire is fostered long and strongly enough.

The desire which presides over all content of experience, and the attachment thus developed in relation to objects of desire, is the basic conditions from which the state of “becoming” rests upon. This is the becoming or changing into something different than before, as regards to your mental state and mode of being, or character and personality and lifestyle of the individual. While we are always changing, and always in a process of becoming, this stage is differentiated as informing how we come to be based on the conditionality of prior causes. You can become attached to any phenomena through continual craving which is the condition for the becoming of someone new, whose own identity changes and starts to include the identity of the object of attachment as being part of its own. Remember that this example of a person is just a practical example, but the idea here ranges to any form of experience possible, whether it be that of a simple object, a stimulation, an ideology, or state of mind. The person starts becoming inseparable from the concept of the attachment, becoming someone that believes their very Being includes the association with the object of attachment, and in a sense, for all intents and purposes, it does. This is why the drug addict, and his family, sees him become a new person after addiction has set in, and he begins becoming altered as a totality of his character begins identifying with the substance, as it is simultaneously modified by the substance. Yet, unconsciously, a similar pattern emerges in response to any attachment which develops, in that the attachment becomes internalized and part of the character which manifests itself in the content of our experience. This attachment comes from desire, which arises based on the feeling produced by conscious contact with an “object of experience” which we can distinguish as a concept and having a material form, the distinguishing arises from a mental formation which, ultimately, arises from ignorance, since we have no choice in the matter. The arising of each state is necessarily conditioned by the prior, and develops in this way. If the prior conditions are not present, the arising of the next link in dependent origination does not manifest.

After becoming comes birth, this is the birth of a new, mind made entity based entirely on the object which gives a pleasant feeling, initially was craven, then clung to, then, dependent on the becoming, a new “Being” is born. The individual’s very psychological idea of “self” not only is strong and pervading, but it includes as a key component the object of attachment as being part of who he/she is, as it defines his very existence. As always, the last chain in human dependent origination arises, the final step for all who give birth to a new creation, its eventual diminution, fading away, destruction; sickness, aging, death. Death is the end to all who are born, and nonexistence is the fate for all that exists, whether it be an idea, a pursuit, a formation, if it arises, it is inevitable it will pass away, at least in its current conception, it will not last, it will be altered, modified, change, what once was, will no longer be. It does not happen to that which never existed, to that never created, or born, thus it is dependent on this birth, this creation, this manifestation of existence. The conditioned Being that is born out of ignorance, became an entity that is defined by his attachments, is necessarily located in a transient existence, in which he will inevitably change, the ultimate impermanence of any state of Being, even one born in this way, necessarily declines into destruction, as all conditioned phenomena do. The “death”, in this case, merely refers to the ultimate destruction of the mind made association and identity with whatever the individual has become attached to, eventually, the mindset will change, the identity will fall away, and a new being will be born, a new state of mind instantiated, a new version of the “self” conceptualized, based on further desire, attachment, becoming, and birth. In this way the twelve chains of dependent origination produce the suffering of our existence, as we build up narratives, egotistical structures that become powerful enough to define us. Eventually, as everything impermanent does, they die out, only to be replaced by the new desires, and thus suffering, both in the acquisition, and the destruction. So suffering begins with initial ignorance, yet only becomes manifest and more of a problem at the craving level, and gets worse from there. Delusion, negative emotions, and unvirtuous behavior due to the object of desire also grow in manifestation at the same level from craving to death.

These are the 12 steps of dependent origination, and were originally formulated in Buddhist canonical literature, the oldest of which available to us currently, the Pali Cannon. The causality and conditionality for all arising phenomena can be put into this framework, but originally it is formulated in the dependent arising of suffering, which was the Buddha’s true aim in delivering us from. In its primitive form, this twelve-fold linkage of causal conditionality, was in reference to the past life, in ignorance and habit forming, in current life, from consciousness to becoming, and the result, in future life, in birth and death. Here I used the structure not in the traditional sense, but as the entire process can be applied to psychological phenomena within this very life, and not only in reference to suffering itself, but into the various forms of experience which come into being, as seen from this structure. Other content and metaphysical speculations were disregarded as not important, and it is the knowledge of the process and the method of its escapement in regards to suffering that truly drove him to uncover the dharma and thus his teachings which he shared with the world. These 12 steps outline the conditionality of suffering to arise, and how it can manifest itself in our lives. The removal of desire and thus craving and attachment, through a process of developing ourselves along the Noble Eightfold Path, was his solution, and part of Right View, is being aware of the conditionality of suffering and how it develops, as detailed above. For a more philosophical and scientific approach as to the existence of hard determinism, and its universality, see the essay “The Causal Tethers Which Bind Us“. While I make the association between the development of a psychological makeup, these twelve links can be used as a metaphorical tool to apply the totality of our lives.