The Consolations of Mortality

by Andrew Stark

  Consider first what it could mean to live without the motives that are so definitive of a self.8 Denuding ourselves of all motives, all motivation, would allow us to cultivate an indifference to whatever happens, thus deflating desire. Critics of Buddhism retort that by becoming demotivated we would simply render life passive and inert. Buddhist scholars, as I read them, reply that there’s a world of difference between motivation and animation. We can still be animated by the energy of life without being motivated by our own selfish schemes and desires. To convey what this means—to show how we can banish selfish motivation and yet still remain animated—Buddhist writings metaphorically cast a selfless life as a kind of “breath,” “wind,” or “spirit.”9

  Breath, wind, and spirit certainly resonate with the idea of pure animation—they move—but without motivation: they are empty. Yet they are revealing metaphors because at their core they gesture to a kind of equivocation, a borderland or netherworld. A breath, wind, or spirit is neither air nor liquid but something hovering in between: air—empty, devoid of animus—but air that flows like a liquid, that’s animated. A spirit too, in ancient Greek and Hebrew, is a fluid vapor.10

  Now hold that thought, and consider next what it means to banish the cognitive categories that so structure the self. How would doing so diminish our desires, and hence our suffering? Suppose that we came to understand that the objects that we chase after, the objects that we think would fulfill our desires—wealth, status, material things, beautiful men or women—do not really exist. They, and hence the very idea of desire-fulfillment, are but chimerical concepts that we impose on the raw flow of experience. All that such cognitive categories ultimately do is lure us into the false belief that the desiderata they conjure up are actual realities—and hence encourage us only to desire and cling to them.11

  We can explode these illusions, these figments, if we learn to engage the world directly in their absence. What would that feel like? Buddhist writers have offered provocative images for what remains when life’s experiences flow unstructured by the desiring self’s cognitive categories. The raw flow of experience resembles “salt in brine,” “oil in sesame seeds,” or “butter in curds.”12 Notably, these and similar images gesture toward something that is neither liquid nor solid, but rather a mixture of the two. And it makes sense that Buddhist thinkers would gravitate to such metaphors. For to grasp the idea of life as a flow of raw experience, we need the viscous imagery of a no-man’s-land between liquid—flow—and solid: all the phenomena that make up the people and objects of experience, but that swirl into each other when there are no conceptual borders separating them.

  Finally, consider what it would mean to rid ourselves of the roiling passions that so deeply constitute the self. You can sap the power of desire, Buddhist wisdom says, by learning to perceive or “notice” the events of your life dispassionately, as if from a distance. View your own life, in other words, as if you were an external spectator to it. In that way, you will develop no self-interested passionate or emotional response to what you perceive—although you could still feel the same third-party compassion concerning your life’s events as you would for any other life’s. As far as you are concerned, then, your life would simply be a series of perceptions—or awarenesses—devoid of affective significance for you.13 The Dalai Lama once illustrated this principle in his usual gently captivating way. Occasionally, when he sees a woman who tempts him, His Holiness quickly calls himself up short, reminding himself “I am monk!” and emotionally distancing himself from that “image of the eye.”14

  What metaphors do Buddhist writers use to convey a sense of such a life—one that we would simply perceive as “images of the eye” without reacting to its events in a selfishly passionate way? They describe such a life as an ongoing interplay of reflections and shadows. Or light and shade.15 Those seem like reasonable images to convey the idea of pure perceptions, devoid of the capacity to provoke emotional response. But what, in turn, are reflections and shadows? They’re simply entities that flirt with the boundary between solid and air—different kinds of solids that are no more substantial than air.

  One cannot, ultimately, be told directly and literally what a selfless life would be like. If we seek to know it truly and non-metaphorically, only years of practice will suffice. Even so, Buddhist metaphors for depicting to the noninitiate what remains when the self dissolves—for depicting life without a self, or a selfless life—are keenly revealing.

  What they disclose is a struggle to get across the idea of a life that’s animated but not motivated, experienced but not in a cognitive way, and perceived but not in a passionate manner. That’s what life shorn of the self would be like. But crucially, the struggle to get it across to the noninitiate has come to center on a kind of symbolism that’s almost not of this world—that exists at the interstices of air, liquid, and solid: not any of them, but somehow betwixt and between. A selfless life is a kind of liquid air—breath, wind, spirit, and moving vapor—or a solidish liquid—runny butter, viscous sesame oil, water clouded with particulate salt—or an airy solid: shadow, light, reflection, and shade. Neither air nor liquid nor solid. If the self truly doesn’t exist, does it not seem as if life barely would either?16

  Self-Effacement

  Celebrities often refer to themselves in the first-person plural, as “we.” “For two years,” Garth Brooks said in an interview with the Independent in 2007, “we couldn’t find anything that we wanted to be an actor in.”17 Other famous people speak of themselves not in the first-person plural but in the third-person singular: “I’ve been very careful that Deborah Norville does the right thing,” the TV personality Deborah Norville once told the Seattle Times; “Deborah has been pretty clever about managing her associations.”18

  These rhetorical tics are far from uncommon. Martha Stewart shows a partiality for using the first-person plural, “we,” to refer to herself. Regis Philbin opts for the third-person singular, “he.” And the actor Richard Dreyfuss uses both.19 Perhaps, one day, he will simply start referring to himself as “they.”

  Viewed one way, these two modes of referring to oneself seem aligned with Buddhist notions of self-abandonment or self-effacement. Each allows a person to refer to himself without, actually, referring to his self.

  And indeed some Buddhist thinkers do explicitly advocate dissolving the self—the “I”—into the first-person plural, into the “we.” An individual should identify his aims and projects with those of mankind as a whole, the Buddhist writer David Loy says. Once a person recognizes that there is no “I” but only the ongoing flow of human life, Loy claims, the “I” will become “us.” Other Buddhist writers, arguing for a detached view of the self, in effect recommend that we each view ourselves in the third-person singular, as a removed “he” or “she.” Observing our self from a distance, as if it were somebody else, we will become emancipated from the suffering it undergoes.

  When pressed, celebrities who refer to themselves in these two no-self ways, as either “we” or “s/he” instead of “I,” do give a more or less Buddhist account of their usage. The singer Neal McCoy is fond of referring to himself in the first-personal plural, as “we.” In doing so he claims to be acknowledging, in a self-deprecating way, that his success results from a team effort requiring an entourage of managers, agents, writers, and directors.20 There is no “I” involved in McCoy’s projects and plans, no ego or self, only “we.”

  Meanwhile the baseball player Wade Boggs, in using the third-person singular “he” to denote himself, says that he does so lest it seem that, by referring to himself as “I,” he would be boasting. Whoever it is that has achieved baseball glory, Boggs is saying, it is not I. Instead, Boggs self-effacingly places himself at a remove from the “he” who has those feats to his credit.21 The elder George Bush went halfway in this direction, not referring to himself as “he” but dropping the “I” so as to distance himself modestly from whomever it was who scored all his accomplishments.


  Both McCoy and Boggs claim to be jettisoning the self in more or less Buddhist fashion. But that’s not how we hear it. After all, we have come to think of the use of “we” and “he” to refer to oneself as just the opposite of Buddhist-style self-effacement: such coinages are about as self-aggrandizing as you can get. They are poster children of unrestrained ego. Referring to yourself as “we” suggests not that you have submerged yourself in the onrush of humanity but that—as with the “royal we”—you have submerged humanity in your grandiose self, that you view yourself and your needs as equal to theirs, or perhaps more: that they are there to serve yours. You are large; you contain multitudes. Likewise, referring to yourself as “he” or “she” suggests not an admirable and self-effacing detachment from your own accomplishments, but a sense of yourself as something so prodigious that you, too, have to step back agog with the rest of us and admire or worship it. Liza Minnelli refers to her self—her public persona—as “her,” to signify an entity that’s transcended the narrow confines of any mere individual and become a legend of gargantuan proportions.22

  The language of no-self, then, can easily be subverted and taken over by the self, the ego. The most self-distancing terms we can possibly use to refer to ourselves have become the most self-aggrandizing. All of this is a sign that self and no-self don’t necessarily constitute poles on a spectrum, with the path from one to the other long and arduous. Rather, they are often the starting and ending points on a circular route, a hair’s breadth from each other. Hence the notion of “small ‘b’ Buddhism”—the idea that you must take care not to develop an ego about how well you’ve abandoned your ego, to not exult in how justly you have managed to call yourself “nothing.”23 For many, the two extremes sit right next to each other, the strongest selves and the strongest no-selves just an emotional toggle away from each other.

  “Narcissism,” one psychologist notes, “has variously been referred to as [among other things] compulsive self-effacement.”24 The mythical Narcissus, of course, did not think he was the greatest and expect everyone to love him. Instead, he saw his reflection in a pool, thought it was the greatest thing he had ever seen, and fell in love with it. His self-love began in self-detachment, self-effacement. Meanwhile, at the far opposite place on the circle, 180 degrees away from the point where extreme self-love and extreme self-effacement meet, lies a moderate balance of the two: a low-key self-confidence. But at neither location is the Buddhist consolation of true self-abandonment possible. Certainly not for a bundle of ego and anxiety like me, and perhaps you too.

  Whoever Has the Most When He Dies, Wins

  To eradicate loss from our lives, Buddhist wisdom says, we must accept that the self does not exist. Once we recognize that the self is an illusion, we will understand that there is nothing to suffer loss in the first place. And of course once we realize that the self is an illusion, then death too will be nothing to us, because we will see that there is nothing to be lost by it. No longer will the self be either the subject or the object of loss.

  But aren’t there other ways for busy, ambitious people to interpret their lives so as to banish loss? Aren’t there, in fact, innumerable socially provided templates for whisking loss out of the picture, without our having to abandon the self?

  Think of wealth accumulation—the epitome of scorekeeping in which losses count. Think of the t-shirt slogan: “Whoever has the most when he dies wins.” That person is not simply the one who earned the most money over the course of his life, not if he ultimately lost much or all of it. The person who has the most when he dies has subtracted all his losses from his winnings and yet still comes out ahead of everyone else.

  But that can be a pretty unforgiving way of thinking about one’s life, even for those who make financial success their standard for selfesteem. And so over time the business world has created narratives for wealth accumulators that allow them to omit the losses. Consider the blossoming phenomenon of Businessperson Halls of Fame, Entrepreneur of the Year prizes, and CEO of the Year honors. The “Global Energy CEO of the Year Award,” according to its official criteria, goes to “a leader who is highly respected by [her] peers” for her “vision, judgment and motivational skills”; it is explicitly “not an award for . . . revenue and profits growth.” You could lose a bundle and still win this accolade. Similarly, the “Northern California Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award” recognizes “original, imaginative, or innovative programs” in marketing, hiring, and office management, regardless of whether you were hemorrhaging money. Businesses may boom and bust, profits might be wiped out by losses, but a CEO of the Year award is forever—winning it this year is never cancelled out by the fact that you’ll lose it next year.25

  In business the money you lose is remorselessly subtracted from the money you win. Perhaps, then, that is why businesspeople have begun to create prizes in which winnings do not have to be balanced against losses. Conversely, in athletics, the prizes you win are often weighed against the prizes you lose. Perhaps that is why the sporting world has begun to take note of total money won without taking into account money lost.

  If you look at their golf matches in 2003, you will see that Tiger Woods did better than Vijay Singh. Woods won five and lost thirteen of his tournaments. Singh won only four and lost a whopping twenty-three. Fortunately for Singh, though, there was another metric. He made $7.57 million in 2003, exceeding Woods’s total by $900,494.26 And for golfers, unlike for businessmen, a dollar metric takes into account just money won, not money lost. We don’t say that Singh won $7.57 million and lost tens of millions, even though that’s the total amount of money he did lose—and lost in exactly the same way that he lost the twenty-three tournaments we do count. And so while golfers are routinely rated on their win-loss ratio when it comes to prizes, golf honors like the PGA Tour Money Leader take into account only money won, not money lost. If you’re Vijay Singh, and you shift your life narrative from prizes to money, you cease to be a loser.

  The Buddhist doctrine of no-self, too, is a way of reinterpreting one’s life to expunge losses. Of course, there’s a big difference: it aims to wipe out not just losses of money or prizes but all losses. The governing idea is that the sooner we can reframe our life so that we no longer have a self, the sooner we will abandon the entire category known as loss, because there will no longer be any entity that suffers it.

  But for those of us who value the self, the Buddhist consolation will seem like a Faustian bargain. Except that instead of giving up our soul for unlimited gains, as Faust does, we give up our self for the extinguishment of loss.

  True, there’s one additional benefit that comes from abandoning the self as a whole. The benefit is that we banish death too.

  But can that really work?

  A Parfit Gentle Night

  In defending the Buddhist view of no-self, the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit invites us to imagine an advanced form of teletransportation from Earth to Mars. First, a scanner here on Earth “destroys”—vaporizes—your body and brain. Then a document describing your entire cellular composition “is beamed to Mars.” Finally, using that blueprint, a replicator there “makes a perfect organic copy” of you. That copy includes a new brain containing all the contents of your earthly mind, conscious and unconscious, as it was the moment before you were destroyed: all its memories, plans, projects, beliefs, and feelings. Your “Replica on Mars will think that he is [you], and he will be in every way psychologically continuous with [you].”27 Have you yourself survived the process?

  For Parfit, a “thought experiment” like this furnishes a litmus test for the Buddhist consolation. If there is nothing more to you than your memories, plans, projects, passions, commitments, and so forth—nothing more to you than the contents of your mind—then, it would seem, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t survive.28 After all, what else is there to you? If you can’t point to anything, then you must accept that there is no such thing as a self, something further that underlies all those m
emories, plans, projects, beliefs, and feelings. Those memories, plans, projects, and attachments amount to the life that you have led. But you can’t find a self anywhere in them.

  And if you can’t point to anything that’s lost in the process of teletransportation, then you can’t point to anything that permanently perishes in death either—anything that death destroys. True, unlike with teletransportation, when you die your memories, thoughts, hopes, and plans aren’t being re-created in an organic copy of you, here or on Mars. But that’s not the point. The point is that—assuming they could be and you would then regard that person as you—you’ve accepted that there’s no underlying self that’s uniquely your own, and that death would destroy. There’s no “you” to take ownership of all those thoughts, feelings, and memories; no “you” to whom their termination would be a loss.

  But there’s more: they needn’t terminate, even if they aren’t replicated on Mars. For if you have children who share your memories of summers picnicking at Centre Island, and friends who share your love of Zydeco, and colleagues who share your quest to preserve Venice from sinking into the sea, then you know that, in some form, your life—your memories, passions, thoughts, and quests—will continue on after you die. True, they won’t persist in exactly the form they currently do in your mind. But then neither would they if you didn’t die. Your memories, passions, thoughts, and quests are always being modified and eventually jettisoned to be replaced by new ones. And if that’s all there is to you—if the self is a myth—then death inflicts no losses that life wouldn’t also inflict. Everything about you, even the subjective stuff like your memories and thoughts and feelings, can live on.

  “Now that I have seen this,” Parfit writes, “my death seems to me less bad.” The logic is persuasive to him. True, he’s aware that psychologic is another matter. Psychologically, something will still trip most of us up in accepting the idea that the person on Mars would be us: that nothing would be lost in the process, that there really is no self. Even “Buddha,” Parfit notes, “claimed that [it is] very hard” to accept this view without years of mental practice.29 So what is it that makes us rebel against the idea that there is no self to begin with, especially in light of Parfit’s challenge to point to it?