Why does Buddhism insist you don't "really" exist?

I had a revelation. I finally understood what that "ego doesn't exist" thing is all about.

I remembered that years ago I had read a woman's description of how she was raped. I don't remember her exact words, of course, but the idea was this: when her violator fondled, say, her right breast, she mentally gave her right breast away. That is, she forced herself to think that that breast wasn't really a part of her. And when he fondled her left breast, she mentally gave that away. And so on. Every new body part which her assailant violated, she mentally gave away, pretended it wasn't really her. That was her way of coping with the unspeakable rage and disgust caused by having her body bared and touched and penetrated without her consent.

Yesterday evening it suddenly occurred to me that the way she mentally gave away her body parts one after another sounds a lot like the Buddhist authors telling you how this part of yourself isn't actually real, and that part of yourself isn't actually real, and end up suggesting that nothing you are used to thinking of as belonging to your personality is actually real, so there is really nothing that is you, so no abuse you may be subjected to actually matters, so all your perceived suffering is actually illusory.

Do you see a similar psychological self-defence mechanism in those two cases?

Rape – the way a criminal stronger than you treats your body and destroys your dignity is unbearable, so in order to avoid going crazy with despair, you begin to pretend that parts of your body are not actually you.

Buddhism – the way people more powerful than you treat you and destroy your dignity is unbearable, so in order to avoid going crazy with despair, you begin to pretend that aspects of your personality are not actually you.

Don't forget that Buddhism was created for dirt-poor East Asian peasants in a primitive feudal society. They were completely at the whim of landlords, soldiers, bandits and whatnot. The society was hierarchical, with peasants actually considered inferior beings rather than proper humans. Remember one of the most important Buddhist credos: "pain is inevitable, suffering is optional". That's what Buddhism is all about – pain is inevitable. Buddhism is essentially a way of coping with an unbearable life full of abuse. Buddhism teaches that you can't do anything about the abuse and all you can do is to diminish your suffering by training yourself not to care about being abused.

But that was ancient India, China, Japan. We live in a different society. We are not powerless. We are not doomed to poverty, misery and hopelessness. We can influence things. Maybe not as much as the Constitution says we can, but we certainly don't have to go through life thinking: pain is inevitable, pain is inevitable, pain is inevitable. Those days are long gone.

Buddhism has many good ideas, but the Buddhist authors of today need to realise you can't just take teachings from feudal East Asia and transfer them into a modern democratic society word for word.

The essential difference between the religions

As you may know, a religion has three main purposes:

1) to alleviate the debilitating fear of death which almost every human being has and which almost certainly is genetically inherited because evolutionally beneficial;

2) to explain natural phenomena for which the humans have not yet found a satisfactory explanation;

3) to give the leaders of the society an ideology with which to justify their demand that the rest of the population submit to their rule.

I shall not elaborate on that here. I only mentioned it to remind you that when reading religious writings, it is advisable not to forget that that particular religion was created by somebody and directed at somebody. Maybe a religion was not actually created with a target audience in mind, but it survived to today because it found a target audience for which it was very suitable.

Recently, while I was reading some religious texts, it occurred to me that one can observe a rather striking difference in a way how three major religions (Christianity, Islam and Buddhism; I'll leave our Judaism and Hinduism because I know very little about them) approach the third main purpose of religion – keeping the common people in line, that is encouraging the individual to do whatever the society and its rulers happen to require from them at the moment.

If we simplify, not only their actual preachings, but more importantly their way of preaching, to its essence, we will come to the conclusion that:

1. Christianty is a religion of fear.

It says that if you don't do what the nobles and priests tell you, you will suffer unspeakable torment in Hell after the death of your physical body.

2. Islam is a religion of gain.

It's not hard to notice how Moslems are motivated much less by the fear of hell than tempted by the delights supposedly waiting for them in paradise. Houris and all that. Christianity has nothing of the kind. Paradise is just a moderately nice place to be. You want to get there not for its own sake, but in order to avoid Hell.

More than that, Islam tempts believers with all-but-heavenly pleasures already in this world. While the Quran prescribes certain rules for intergender relations, it states specifically that with women looted in war, one can do as one pleases. There is nothing like that in Christianity. Quite on the contrary – pleasure as such is a sin. Fight against pleasure is what Christianity is all about – brought to the extreme by Calvinism, but unmistakably present since the very beginnings of Christianity. It is no exaggeration to say that the association of sex drive with guilt is the most important principle that lies on the basis of the whole Christian faith. (I'm not the first one to point that out, of course.)

3. Buddhism is a religion of reason.

Other than Christianity and Islam, Buddhism doesn't urge people to fight for or against something. Rather than insisting on subservience, it persuades you to stop trying to achieve anything. By the means of psychological facts and logical arguments, as well as occasional skilful truth-twisting, it suggests that meekly submitting to whatever life throws at you is in your best interest. Pleasure is neither a sin (as in Christianity) nor a reward of doing the right things (as in Islam), it is unachievable. Whatever you do to be happy, Buddhism consistently and vehemently insists, will bring you a lot more suffering than pleasure. It is therefore reasonable to give up striving for happiness. The (relatively) best you can ever hope for is to minimize your suffering, which you can achieve by making yourself numb to everything and, ideally, giving up your very identity. Buddhism can be summed up in one sentence – "Happiness is impossible, but if you don't care about anything, then at least you don't suffer." But the main point I wanted to stress here is that Buddhism doesn't say what you have to do – it tells you that following their teachings is in your best interest. Christianity and Islam say that you must work on your master's field and pay your taxes to the king in order to save your soul from hell. Buddhism says you can't do anything about it, so it's in your best interest to put up with it and learn not to care. Christianity says self-denial is your obligation. Buddhism says it's the lesser evil.

I think there can be little doubt that the original target audiences of those three religions – Europeans, Semites and East Asians – were very different in their prevailing mentality. I dare say, the difference between their target audiences can be observed even today. Admittedly, it is only thanks to historical chance that Islam is very popular in Indonesia and Christianity in the Philippines. From the anthropological point of view, it could just as well be the other way around. But I don't think it's an accident that Christianity never seriously caught on in India, China and Japan, and neither did Buddhism outside of East Asia – and that Islam is far more popular among the blacks than among the whites.

Does it mean that the white people are very cowardly, the semites are very greedy and the orientals are very rational? I rather disagree with that. But understanding the fundamental differences of the three big religions is surely helpful for better understanding of the peoples among which they are popular.

Sinking the Buddhist nonsense. Part 1. Past conditioning and limiting expectations

The quote below is from a book that is actually good. That is why I won't name the author here. I'd like to believe he's a wise man, so there's no need to embarass him.

The thing is, I don't want to criticise the book, I just want to draw your attention to what can happen when one detaches oneself from reality and flies away on the wings of logic. Besides, the ideas expressed in the quote below can be found in but slightly different formulation in countless other Buddhist-inclined writings.

* * *

It's about how one's being conditioned by one's past experience limits one's thinking: one reacts in a way that one is used to react, failing to see opportunities.

[---] the mind [---] has a strong tendency to create habitual reactions, as a default mechanism for coping with the complex demands of life. [---] The Self is a vast network of inter-related habitual reactions that define what we think, act and feel, and greatly influence the possible outcomes of body, speech and mind. [---] Like a recurring nightmare, conditioned habitual reacitvity forces us to re-experience reactions of anxiety, fear, worry, grief, sadness, disappointment, frustration and anger over and over again. [---]

In the next paragraphs, the author is revelling in that idea, getting more and more cathegorical (to not say bombastic) in his expressions:

One of the fundamental problems of habitual reactivity is that it introduces a degree of inflexibility in the mind. [---] habit gives us a sense of order and control, but it comes as a price, because each time we blindly identify with a habit, we lose a little more of our freedom. [---] Like a train passenger, we are taken to our destination without any say on the route taken, because the route is fixed by the train tracks. In the same way, the mind reacts according to the tracks laid down by past conditioning. [---] Habitual reactivity is a powerful force that limits the possible outcomes of the present. [---] Like daydreaming or sleepwalking, we perform activities as if on autopilot. Instead of seeing reality as it is, we see only the shadows of our past projected onto the present [---]. [---] the limitations imposed by conditioned reactivity [corrupt] and [distort] the mind, making it inflexible and rigid.

He carries on like that, but I think this is enough to give you the idea.

Of course, if you have read any Buddhist books, you are very familiar with the above. They all say the same thing: it's harmful for us to allow the bad experiences from our past to prevent us from doing, seeing, believing things now.

It sounds very convincing when presented as pure theory. In fact, as long as you avoid any reference to anything that occurs in real people's everyday lives, you can easily bring truthful and useful observations to the absurd extreme – as if any reliance on past experience was "blindly identifying with a habit". That's what Buddhist authors do, filling hundreds of pages with brilliant logical conclusions from truths and half-truths, ending up with the insistence that you must begin to think that you don't exist, and all your suffering is just your imagination. (Translating their elaborations into plain English, they seem to be suggesting that if you are hit by a car and lie there with broken bones, it is entirely your decision to suffer from pain or not.)

* * *

That Buddhist principle is obviously, utterly, manifestly, spectacularly, ludicrously wrong, which can easily be proven with the following simple example.

Imagine that you have to walk from your home to your workplace. Let's assume you can choose between A-street and B-street, and the first route is somewhat shorter. So, all other things being equal, one would prefer A-street.

Now, suppose that on your first walk to work, you discover that in A-street there is a house where lives a very aggressive dog. In fact, it attacks you and bites you.

The next 8 times you walk to work, the same thing happens – as soon as that dog sees you passing by its house, it runs to you and bites you.

Now, you are about to go to work on your 10th workday. As each past workday, you must choose between A-street and B-street, the first path being somewhat quicker. What will you do?

(Let's not confuse things by making up options that may or may not be available, such as trying to find the dog's owner and talking to him, buying a car, getting an armed escort and such. Let's just keep to this one choice that is clearly there: to take A-street or B-street.)

Choice 1:

Remembering that in A-street lives a dog who has bitten you 9 times already, you use your intelligence and realise there is a very little chance that anything will be different this time. Comparing in your mind the risk of getting bitten by a dog versus a little more time spent, you decide to take B-street to work today.

Choice 2:

You realise that conditioning through your past experience limits your freedom. You also realise that it's wrong to be prejudiced. Just because the dog has attacked you in the previous 9 workdays, doesn't mean it'll happen today. Maybe the dog isn't even there? Are you going to be the slave to your fear for the rest of your life? Are you going to carry the memory of your past pains forever? You don't KNOW the dog is going to bite you today. But you do know that via A-street youre path to work is shorter than via B-street. So you choose A-street.

It should be obvious to every even halfway sane and intelligent human being, that choice 2 is not freedom. It's extreme stupidity. (And if you expose not only yourself to that danger, but your child as well, it's actually criminal.)

Now, not all of us walk to work, but each one of us makes a great number of choices each day. If we wouldn't let our past experience and mental predictions guide us, we would be making great many mistakes. It is very true that we also make mistakes when we excessively cling to our past experience and become blind to changed circumstances, but we must strive to reach a reasonable balance between acting on expectations created from past experience and being open to the new. The Buddhists' insistence that we have to completely disregard our life experience and approach every situation as a blank sheet is sheer madness.

P.S.

Don't try to tell me the Buddhist authors don't really mean it like that. It is what they say. If they mean one thing and write another, then they need to learn to write what they really mean, not do I have to struggle to give their obviously nonsensical statements a sane interpretation.

In simpler words:

If you mean "use a campfire to warm yourself", don't say "create a fire that burns everything".

If you mean "some immigrants have committed sex crimes", don't say "the immigrants have raped our entire nation".

If you mean "some things you believe to be true are actually not true", don't say "everything you believe in is an illusion you need to get rid of".

And so on.