o i come back to this issue of stories and how we organize our thinking 01:11:03 and worlds around stories and especially stories of ours of what our own purpose in life is uh how we respond to our desperate fear of mortality and death i draw on the work of the anthropologist 01:11:16 and social psychologist ernest becker which has been elaborated by social psychologists in something called terror management theory

the attempt to prolong life infinitely

when people do die it is almost like I think a colleague of mine under Sandberg 00:31:27 says that when somebody died the library Burns because all of that wisdom that they're carrying around in their minds that it took decades and decades to build up inside of them gets extinguished

ernest becker has made a lot of is offered the same kind of argument which he calls terror management theory um shanti deva rather in the beginning of how to awaken uh how to lead an awakened 00:36:00 life talks about how terrified we are of death how terrified we are of being nothing how terrified we are what's going to happen after death becker doc talks about the same thing and shantideva 00:36:13 argues that in order to save ourselves from that terror what we do is we try to pause it make permanent and self safeguard this self becker does the same thing says we tend to reify ourselves as 00:36:24 a ball work um against terror to somehow manage our terror and but in any case self does seem the self illusion i think i think that idea is quite right by the way that the fear of death which is 00:36:36 deeply wired into us causes us to posit that self causes us to say hey maybe it can live forever maybe it can be reborn life after life after life maybe it can go to heaven things like that 00:36:48 but i also think the idea that affect is deeply related to our sense of self is really there shanti deva makes this point as well as does david hume um shanti deva uh points out that here's when you really decide you've got a self 00:37:02 it's when somebody insults you or hurts you right so somebody says garfield you idiot an and i immediately said wait a minute i'm a whole lot better than that how dare you talk to me like that i don't feel like my body's been 00:37:13 insulted i don't feel like my mind has been insulted i don't feel like my perceptions or sensations have been insulted i feel like i the thing that's got those things has been insulted and i want revenge at that point so that kind 00:37:27 of effect there or if you do something really cool like win the olympic gold medal in 100 meter sprint like i would love to do um with usain bolt's body um then you think when you're really proud of what you've done the pride 00:37:39 attaches not to my body not to my mind but to me so this idea that affect really brings up that sense of self i think is really important uh hume uh makes the same point in his treatise of human nature for those of 00:37:52 you who want to see this done in western philosophy he thinks that it's pride and shame that really bring up the idea of the self you know i mean when i'm ashamed of something that i'm done that i've done i'm not ashamed of my hand 00:38:04 that wrote badly i'm ashamed of me for having bad penmanship if i didn't give to a beggar i'm not ashamed that my mind did something wrong i'm ashamed that i did i was tight-fisted um and so the 00:38:16 idea that these and these aspects bring up the idea of self i think is very powerful and of course anger as i said earlier is another big one all of these involve egocentric attachment so it's when we're attached to things in a way that really fronts 00:38:29 our ego as the possessor then we find that we're positing that self and so this finishes the first of the three things i wanted to do this evening first was to convince you that you really do think yourself to explain what 00:38:42 that self is and to give some idea of why i think that you have why i think that you think that you have a self um no matter how much you might reject that idea on reflection

it will be worthwhile to develop his idea of a courageous breaking away from culturally-supported immortality systems by looking back in history to a character who many people have thought of as an epitome of a self-realized person, someone who neither accepts his culture’s standardized hero-systems, nor fears death: the philosopher Socrates. When Socrates was brought to trial in 399 BC before a jury of 501 Athenian citizens on charges that included impiety and corrupting the youth, he disappointed most of the jurors (and irritated many of them) by not petitioning for leniency, or appearing intimidated by the penalties he might face if found guilty. And when the jury condemned him to death, he remained composed, and spoke carefully about the consequences of the judgment first for himself, and then for Athens. Through Plato we understand that Socrates’s typical tranquility and self-control never left him throughout his month in prison and up through the final minutes of drinking the hemlock. The eyewitness report has it that he drank the cup of hemlock “calmly and easily,” and had to chastise his friends for their weeping. Combined with other testimony about Socrates’s bravery as a soldier–and the record of his dangerous refusal to obey what he considered to be immoral orders from the leaders of a temporary govemment-all this adds up to the portrait of someone very much at ease with his mortality. What accounts for it? Did Socrates’ courage come from a psychological denial of mortality through embrace of some “immortality system?” Let us look at what he had to say about death to the jurors at his trial immediately after his condemnation. “Death,” he said to them, “is one of two things. Either it is annihilation, and the dead have no consciousness of anything; or … it is really a change: a migration of the soul from this place to another (Plato, Apology, 40c-d).” Those are in fact the only alternatives: maybe its nothingness; maybe it isn’t. Socrates shows himself prepared for either eventuality. Note well: there is no dogmatic assertion of an immortal afterlife here. An assertion like that would, after all, contradict Socrates’ first principle of conduct, which is to never assume that one knows what one doesn’t know. Earlier in his defense speech Socrates had stated the matter about death carefully: “To be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise when one is not; it is to think that one knows what one does not know …. [Not] possessing any real knowledge of what comes after death, I am also conscious that I do not possess it (29a-b).”

We all want out lives to have meaning, and death suggests that life adds up to nothing. People want desperately for their lives to really count, to be finally real. If you think about it, most all of us try to found our identities on something whose meaning seems permanent or enduring: the nation, the race, the revolutionary vision; the timelessness of art, the truths of science, immutable philosophical verities, the law of self-interest, the pursuit of happiness, the law of survival; cosmic energy, the rhythms of nature, the gods, Gaia, the Tao, Brahman, Krishna, Buddha-consciousness, the Torah, Jesus. And all of these, Becker says, function as “immortality systems,” because they all promise to connect our lives with what endures, with a meaning that does not perish. So let’s accept Becker’s thesis: that fear of death and meaninglessness, and a self–deluding denial of mortality, leads many people to these “immortality systems.”

as members of society, we tend to identify with one or another “immortality system” (as Becker calls it). That is, we identify with a religious group, or a political group, or engage in some kind of cultural activity, or adopt a certain culturally sanctioned viewpoint, that we invest with ultimate meaning, and to which we ascribe absolute and permanent truth. This inflates us with a sense of invulnerable righteousness. And then, we have to protect ourselves against the exposure of our absolute truth being just one more mortality-denying system among others, which we can only do by insisting that all other absolute truths are false. So we attack and degrade–preferably kill–the adherents of different mortality- denying-absolute-truth systems. So the Protestants kill the Catholics; the Muslims vilify the Christians and vice versa; upholders of the American way of life denounce Communists; the Communist Khmer Rouge slaughters all the intellectuals in Cambodia; the Spanish Inquisition tortures heretics; and all good students of the Enlightenment demonize religion as the source of all evil. The list could go on and on.

Maybe it’s time we talk about it?

Seven Sleepers