This is revolutionary stuff.

js

In Christianity, one?s current personality is permanent, will survive death, and will exist eternally. This is basically what Christians understand by the word ?soul?.

But Buddhism states that there is no ?soul? in the Christian sense. Buddhists state that there is some small, indestructible bit that survives death and gets reincarnated, but that bit does NOT include the ego-construct (personality). Instead, a new ego-construct is created at each rebirth. So, when the bit reincarnates, it forgets itself, so to speak, as well as its previous incarnations. The current ego-construct then sees itself as the thing that is or should be permanent.

This obvious error leads to ?grasping? ? fleeing its own finiteness, the ego-construct seeks something to which it can attach itself in order to assure its continued existence, even though that is not truly possible. This leads to suffering, and thus, to the basic Buddhist statement that life is suffering. The process of meditation and enlightenment is the conscious, long-term effort to overcome this grasping and to ?wake up? the indestructible bit.

This idea of grasping is what ties in with this post and the follow-up one as well. The ego-construct seeks some way to perpetuate its own existence through things such as religion, children, fame, wealth, or political power.

One of my favorite writers, Ken Wilber, addresses this issue in one of his earlier books called ?The Atman Project?. He has refined some of his methodological approaches since this book came out, so those unfamiliar with Wilber shouldn?t use this as a general introduction to his work.

Laikastes

When I look at some of the weird things people do, looking at it in terms of an attempt to be relevant sometimes explains a lot.

at one point (i can’t recall the particulars of the study), a large sample of olympic hopefuls was asked whether they would become the world champion of their sport in exchange for the loss of their life at age 35, a question to which the huge majority of those polled responded in the affirmative.

the study was meant to be a veiled (and overly melodramatic) proxy for the athletes’ willingness to use performance-enhancing drugs with completely unknown side effects.

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also,

secular and athiestic people and societies have little to no faith in the existence of immortality through an afterlife or reincarnation, so instead they channel all their energy into the urge to distract themselves from death with no afterlife, often through excessive hedonism, substance abuse or chasing as much power, status, sex and fame as they can during their lifetimes.

you’re ignoring some extremely influential confounding variables.

specifically, while i agree that an individual’s “urge to distract [him/herself] … through excessive hedonism … or chasing … power, status, sex, and fame” is doubtless fomented by a society that itself encourages such primitive instincts, we would be remiss to forget that those instincts are … primitive. they are present in abundance in the psyche of any normal human – a fact that you’ve adumbrated numerous times on this very blog – and it would be foolish to ignore their influence.

indeed, those instincts are regulated more by innate limiting factors, such as an individual’s looks, game, wealth, build, social status, intelligence, and the like, than by society per se.

for instance, extremely religious societies generally forbid the sort of hedonism you’ve described. most of those societies’ members will toe the line, living austere lives without cavil, but only because they are not good-looking, wealthy, intelligent, socially adept, or high-status enough to do otherwise without great effort and peril.

show me a society in which the great majority refrains from hedonism of any sort, and i’ll show you a society in which the ?lites do exactly the opposite.
to argue that the strictures of society can actually snuff out hedonistic desires, especially in those individuals best equipped to realize those desires, would be akin to arguing that a sufficient degree of feminism will cause men to start finding ball-busting career women more attractive than young nubiles.

How do you explain altruism? Obviously not the Bill-Gates or Warren-Buffet kind, because they’re looking for fame, rather nameless charity. Anything from an anonymous donation to some cancer research team to dropping a fiver in a homeless guy’s cap.