Observe the mimosa pudica in the two following videos. Observe its behaviour! In the first it responds positively to the touch of sunlight, in the second negatively to that of human flesh:
This behaviour of the plant, and the echo of which you can easily discern pervading every human inclination, may be regarded as a very basic, primitive form of “upadana”; and it acquires physiological and emotional dimensions with more complex forms of life such as animals, and with human, abstract and conceptual dimensions as well (someone expresses an “idea” to which you respond with love or hate). Upadana is thus substantiating your experiences like that; the natural situation where you get stimulated by what you experience, and respond to it spontaneously, automatically, habitually, independently from self-awareness and self-regulation, just like that plant, inclining to what you like, repelling away from what you don’t like.
Bhava arises out of that. Each time you act in this way, not just physically or verbally, but also mentally, through emotional and conceptual habitual responses, you reinforce or give a further push to all these behavioural habits. Thus they become more established, more deeply rooted, digging deeper and deeper into the foundations of the heart simply through the repetition of behaviour. These behavioural habits can thus gain such momentum throughout one’s life to the extent that they may become chronic to the consciousness, hard to change even if one wanted to be free of them, and then, even death won’t stop them! Just as they reinforce themselves through one’s own oblivious and conditioned life, they carry on further beyond death into another life, and they continue to reinforce themselves there, with no counter force to stop them, and so on, endlessly. Hence the connection with subsequent rebirth in various different realms which correspond to the nature and qualities of one’s heart by the time of death. This is a condition of samsaric existence.
The Buddha taught that human, unlike the plant above, or other animals, can become aware of those habitual, engrained behavioural tendencies, and can understand their ramifications and consequences on both the psychological and cosmological levels, and that through this awareness he can practise in such a way as to become alienated from them, dispassionate about them, non-reactionary to them, so that they find no psychological foundation upon which to sustain their roots, but gradually grow weaker and weaker, unsubstantiated, all the way up to their total and final cessation. Precisely that, is nibbana or Buddhist salvation, the end of bhava, bhava-nirodha. May it be the reward of all beings, unless they have other plans!!
) that bhava refers to the 31 realms of existence:
