> The practitioners of sokushinbutsu did not view this practice as an act of suicide, but rather as a form of further enlightenment.[14]
At what point do we consider this a mental illness rather than some higher ascent?
At what point do we consider this a mental illness rather than some higher ascent?
There are just too many times you read through people doing horrific things throughout history, and if you read enough you can understand the viewpoints and the cultures that drove those people do to those things, but at the end of the day, I can't help but feel like: "why can't people just, from time to time, take a step back and think: really though, do I think this is right?" and then truly be willing to make the changes necessary to their life's choices if the answer is: "No".
It doesn't matter if it is something as obvious as being a member of the einsatzgruppen, or just realizing that you're spending too much time at work when you need to be home with your family (or vice versa).
People don't seem to do this nearly enough, and I've found that generally, its a more important moral signifier than the deep and complicated ideologies we mentally build for ourselves that gets us into these situations.
So no. Even if the moral ideology of these monks is crystal clear, perfectly logical, and rationally perfect, at the end of the day, they've chosen suicide over finding a way to enjoy life. They've failed the kindergarten morality test.
- Why is suicide bad?
- Why is there a presumption that this is your one and only life?
- Why is there a presumption that life is made to be enjoyed?
- Why is there a presumption that consciousness ends after life ends?
- If death is inevitable, then couldn't suicide be broadly construed to pretty much ... just living?
Believe it or not, these are thoroughly explored by monks and philosophers. Ironically, I think perhaps, you should take a step back and examine some of your own frame in looking at this.
I'll start with this: there are more than one kind of motivation for ending one's own life. The most common one, which we call suicide, is usually done after giving up on life because there is overwhelming pain. There is a lively debate about this going on with regards to assisted suicide, including certain countries having passed legislation with state-funded assisted suicide. It's not that I agree with this kind of suicide, but rather, I think you are construing suicide far too broadly, conflating what the monks are doing with suicidal people overwhelmed with pain.
What these monks are doing are not an attempt to kill themselves, because things are more difficult. If that were so, there would be no tradition of self-immolation.
To give you a contrast, look at say, a modern -- still living -- teacher named Adyashanti. In the past year or so, he took a sabbatical from teaching due to his health condition, where he silently attends and lets his partner lead the teaching. And it may not seem like it when you hear him speak over the years, but he has been experiencing significant pain for years due to his ongoing health condition.
It's the same realizations he has that allows him to carry on with his teaching despite experiencing that pain, as it does with the monks going through mummification or self-immolation.
If the self-mummifying monks took this approach, they would probably take a vacation from monking after their trains of monkish thought arrived at suicide, instead of going through with it.
While there is wisdom in that kind of innocence, in this case, the best we can say is that this gut check points to a course or action is right for you. However, it is inadequate for assessing whether it is right for anyone else, much less in an universal sense.
If we are going to make this about listening to intuition, then sometimes, that gut check — or in the case of those monks, it would be a heart check — the answer for them, in that moment, is “yes”.
As a note, the Meiji-era government thought the practice was anachronistic and depraved. They criminalized self-mummification. The last successful practitioner of that particular sect in Japan accomplished it illegally. https://allthatsinteresting.com/sokushinbutsu
GP is merely pushing their own belief that suicide is not OK. Their line of logic belongs to a self-righteous person that uses cheap rhetoric to claim moral superiority.
> ~everybody
Debatable...
> who isn't clinically depressed or "galaxy-brained"
...And there comes the no true Scotsman.
I mean, I don't know a whole lot about Buddhist, but I suspect that you don't either (please correct me if I'm wrong). And really, is dying in peace during a religious ritual really so much worse than desperately clinging to life in hospital for the final before death, maybe ruining and exhausting your closest family in the process? Don't get me wrong, I prefer our way of life, but I believe you think your (our) culture is the only correct one, and for example refer to it as "gut-checking" or "childlike simple thinking". I don't think it's as universal and obvious as you think.
An NGO volunteer working with that community found out about an elder doing that walk. She went off looking for the elder, and found her. Sobbed and begged her to not do this.
The beauty I see in this story isn't one where it ends with the NGO volunteer somehow convincing the elder to live longer. But rather, that of an elder, knowing that the time has come, and all those loose ends have been tied, the words have been spoken, resolving all the regrets and longings, at that last moment of stillness as profound as witnessing a birth, the elder took the time to comfort and guide a stranger to their ways. A child born in a culture who have lost the wisdom of death. And this elder, passes one more wisdom as a gift. The NGO volunteer thought she was saving the elder, but it was the elder saving the NGO volunteer.
As a contrast there is this story that took place here in America, something I'll never forget. My wife and I visited my wife's grandmother when my son was about 6 months old. My grandmother-in-law was in bad health, having survived some major medical interventions where she is now on a highly restricted kidney diet and constant pain. We took the trip so that my grandmother-in-law has a chance to hold her great-grandson, and my son has a chance to connect with his great-grandmother, even if he will probably never remember it.
I remember when my grandmother-in-law, spoke in a voice on the verge of breaking, that she didn't know how long she could keep going. And I remember my wife telling her, to hang on for a few more years, because we were planning on raising another one. And my grandmother-in-law then said to herself, "ok, there will be another one ..." She continued living to see another two great-grandchildren from the extended family, and if things work out, another one this summer.
You just never know, just poking at the surface. It's easy to try to fit things in our comfortable narrative frames. Dealing with and surviving the death of another is no easy thing, and yet, there's great wisdom within those experiences.
I do not understand this mummification thing, but I do understand the concept that death is a transition to other worlds. A common goal of most spiritual traditions is to purify the person so that when they die they can ascend to the best possible next thing in their evolution. The Toltecs talk about cultivating “fire” inside one’s system such that they can use it to propulse themselves straight up into what’s next - and not get lost wandering into their attachments. The Buddhists talk about letting go of karma so we can stop reincarnating due to our attachments. It’s all very similar. My sense is these monks aren’t trying to escape life, but rather maybe felt ready to propulse their souls back into the cosmos with intentionality. I don’t understand it, but I can’t have the audacity of judging people who I know nothing of and who, if I met, would likely read me like an open book.
I do believe that Harry Potter is accurate when it separates magicians from moguls, and that as one reaches much higher levels of consciousness - their perceptions and abilities become unfathomable to the uninitiated. It doesn’t mean they can’t be wrong, or become twisted in their perceptions. But it means I’m not going to pretend I know better than them.
So no, to answer your question, I don't know much about Buddhism. I don't know much about mathematics, either, at least not when compared to how much there is to be known. And yet, if I heard about a subset of mathematicians who believed in a proof that one was equal to zero, I'd still dismiss it (and them, to some extent). The same is true of a subset of philosophers (these particular Buddhist monks) who arrive at the conclusion that they should let their own functioning bodies die. I'm sure they've thought a lot about it; certainly a lot more than I have! But there's a thing that sometimes happens when you think about a problem too much, to the point of obsession: You can end up even further from the truth than you started.
Just look at the hardcore utilitarians. Look at Ayn Rand. All of them know more about ethics and philosphy in general than I do. Doesn't mean I can't dismiss them with a heuristic, which I do. Why is there reverence for suicidal Buddhist monks in this arena, but not the equally-kooky Western utilitarians?
I don't want to derail the conversation, but there are many pretty weird and diverse ideas in mathematics, including finitism and ultrafinitism (where people just don't believe in some very large numbers), various subsets of peano axioms (where 1 != 0 may not be provable), or modular arithmetics (where 0 = 2 may be true).
> The things you feel before you get taught to feel anything. The things that make us feel kinship with dogs and gorillas.
I'm not convinced I should listen the Things absolutely. The Things often tell me to hit someone annoying in the face, eat exclusively very caloric and fat food, and seek sexual gratification with every female of age around me. I don't think the Things are as smart as you give them the credit for.
> (...) who arrive at the conclusion that they should let their own functioning bodies die.
What about:
- Medieval old people, who just left for the woods when they felt they're getting old and are a burden on the family.
- Mothers sacrificing their life for their children
- Strong and healthy males on Titanic who, despite their physical superiority, decided to let women and children first
- People fighting in war/guerilla for their country or their beliefs
That's not really what I'm talking about. I'm imagining somebody who is so sure of their own mathematical reasoning skills that upon proving to themselves that the number one, in its simplest sense, was equal to the number zero, they started behaving as though this were the case. Perhaps going mad and (in good service of the analogy I'm making) killing themselves.
> I'm not convinced I should listen the Things absolutely. The Things often tell me to hit someone annoying in the face, eat exclusively very caloric and fat food, and seek sexual gratification with every female of age around me. I don't think the Things are as smart as you give them the credit for.
FWIW I think everything you're listing has some amount of instinctive conflict. Violence requires you to disable empathy. Chronic gluttony eventually requires you to turn off your ego and hate yourself. These are conflicts that (apologies for leaning heavily on this point, but it's kind of central) pretty much everybody, from a very young age, learns about and has to work through.
The red flag is when you arrive through cold reasoning alone at a conclusion that makes no sense to any of your instincts, as evidenced by the fact that the average person off the street is completely bewildered by your conclusion. Like the idea that you should starve yourself for no other reason than that you have freed your spirit of all desire.
> What about... [four moral case studies]
Moral conflicts are still moral conflicts. Killing to avoid killing, violence to avoid violence. In the more difficult cases, perhaps even killing to avoid non-lethal violence (e.g. slavery), or even suicide to avoid extreme pain or the moral paralysis of your family members. Yet again, the sorts of decisions that people actually have to make with some regularity. The sorts of things we feel we need to teach children about, as they become adults.
Suicide for purely ascetic reasons is not a moral conflict. From an unlearned perspective, it's just wasteful and bizarre. It seems to be the ethical equivalent of the mathematician going mad after incorrectly proving to himself that one apple was equivalent to zero apples.
> Why is there a presumption that consciousness ends after life ends?
Because there’s no evidence to the contrary and Occam’s Razor as applied the plain observations of life and death suggests this is a reasonable base assumption. “The simplest explanation is usually best.”
(and by the way, you only picked two out of many questions to answer)
Theism in itself is a simpler explanation for existence than atheism, and yet many rational people are atheists. Is it because they weighted all the possibilities or because they discarded the option a priori?
We are all way less rational than we would like to believe.
We could also explain computers as magic and it would be simpler than explaining it with electricity and math.
No religions are based in any observable facts* and thus being naive explanations, indistinguishable from magic.
* More like they are based on deprecated observable facts, at first the sun and nature, later man and it's dramas. Now we now the sun is just a big ball of gas and man is just a big brained mammal.
That being said religion is just one area of many and you could be very rational in lots of them but be religious for whatever reason.
A belief in natural emergence relies not only on endless untestable hypotheses, but even still results in the exact same sort of frustrating unanswerables. For instance if one believes that the initial matter, which would culminate in the Big Bang, whisked into existence through a quantum fluctuation, then it immediately leads to the question of what created this void, rich in quantum interactions, or the nature of quantum interactions themselves? And for that there's not even a hypothesis, untestable or not.
Maybe there will be one day, but also maybe not. To me the simplest answer is to simply acknowledge of our own inability to offer any compelling answer to this question. That's not to say an acceptance of such inability, but assuming the nature of a destination (one way or the other), in a journey we've yet to even scratch the surface of, seems neither simple nor wise.
It inflicts massive suffering to everyone around you and is frequently driven by incorrect perceptions of how bad things are which can be treated.
> - Why is there a presumption that this is your one and only life?
It might not be, depending on how you see loss of consciousness every night. Are you even the same person you were before sleeping last, other than that you believe you are?
> - Why is there a presumption that life is made to be enjoyed?
We seem to have some instinct to enjoy ourselves, though it can go wrong in many ways. Also, we like it.
> - Why is there a presumption that consciousness ends after life ends?
It really looks a lot like sleep, except that there are relatively few people who say they've ever observed anyone waking up from it.
> - If death is inevitable, then couldn't suicide be broadly construed to pretty much ... just living?
I mean, if we're going the kindergarten route, you'd tend to look at it as "just dying" ... except that many people have experienced it and it's generally horribly painful for everyone who was near you.
Let's say you travel for work for a week. If you analyze just that week, it appears you are living your life completely out of balance. Don't get to see your family at all. No time spent with close friends. No opportunity to deepen ties to your local community.
But if you only travel for a week and are otherwise home, and the career affords you the ability to take care of your family and community, then this is a reasonable trade-off. So you have to look at a larger timespan. But how large? A month? A year? What chronological scope is the right one to evaluate one's actions?
Now consider the much harder scope: number of people. Humans are social creatures and almost nothing that we do can be evaluated in isolation. Willingly dying in a knife fight certainly fails the kindergarten test. But not necessarily if doing so protects your family from the attacker.
But what kinds of sacfrifices do you consider reasonable and for which groups? Many jobs have some level of physical danger. Is it reasonable to take those risks for the benefit of the company? What harm would you accept to yourself to benefit your community?
What about your country? Flying a thousand miles to a foreign country to shoot someone in the face who did you no harm certain fails the kindergarten test. But what if your country is at war with that person's country? How does the kindergarten test handle this scenario when it's a member of the SS during WWII versus someone in some other conflict?
Morality is hard.
We're on a forum that is largely composed of engineers, business strategists, and other types of work that encourage and reward thinking deeply about their respective topics.
So I wanted to point out that human cognition is faulty. It is an important skill to be able to think 10 steps ahead in a chess game, but you have to remember that as much as we desire to be rational, we are imperfect rational creatures, and there's a percentage error on every one of those steps, as a result of our being human. To continue the example, its part of why chess is fun: you try to think X moves ahead, and realize that you miscalculated at step 3 when your opponent does something you didn't expect.
The same thing applies to life in general. We build up ways of thinking about things over lifetimes of thinking deeply on subjects. But each layer of learning is built on a previous layer, and each layer has a percentage error.
So it is important, from time to time, to stop and reassess. Is your current view of the world faulty? How might I be wrong? What if I am wrong? What would be the repercussions? Is my current way of thinking leading me to live the type of life I want to live? Is my way of viewing the world a positive or negative, for myself and for the people around me?
If the answer to any of those answers is no, that's a good indicator that the compounded errors in your way of thinking have lead you down a bad path, and you should stop and reassess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU
And the thing is, that's not something that you can notice, unless you really take the effort to take a step back and re-assess, in part by asking such questions. We get so used to our current mode of thinking, whatever it is, that even if it has led us down dark and dangerous and self-destructive paths, it will feel normal at the time, unless one makes a conscious effort to re-asses from time to time, and really, genuinely, consider that our world outlook might really be deleterious or even outright wrong. Its what David Foster Wallace was talking about when he talked about his 'default human viewpoint', or 'this is water'.
And one last thing, if you do do these re-assessments, then you have two options. You can stop and reassess your way of thinking, and look for the mistakes in your thinking and evolve (which is always a good thing to do, always, regardless of whether or not you are wrong to begin with, this is how we grow as people).
Or you can choose to radically change your life outlook and philosophy, _even if you still believe your initial one was correct_, just because you think a different viewpoint might be beneficial. Because there are a wealth of different life philosophies that have been developed over the years, many of which have been deeply developed by myriads of intelligent people and refined throughout the ages. It turns out life is complicated, and the human brain isn't really capable of 100% understanding all of it, the best we can do is choose which lens we want to view it through. Learning how to view life through a different lens, if carefully chosen, is never a bad thing.
So I don't know much about the self-sacrificing monks in the original post. Maybe such self-sacrifice was the right thing for them to do. And I am not trying to come out against suicide, there are plenty of times in life where such self-sacrifice is warranted or a downright honorable thing to do. But I sure hope that each of those monks, before they did it, took some time to really consider that even if this was the right move for them to take, they could still choose not to do so. My suspicion of the average person, is that once they get in that deep, they tend not to do so, even when they are facing their own death, or the taking of another's life. And I think that's a tragic flaw in humanity.
Tell me you’re vegetarian without telling me.
This is just "What if the people in mental hospitals are the sane ones, and we're all crazy?" with fancier words.
It's well documented that this can end in severe depression (existential dread) or even suicide.
If you don't have a firm grip on yourself to begin with, I could see how it could end in insanity just as easily. Probably a little different cause and effect model though.
Someone could just as well believe that typing letters into a machine and waiting for more to appear from someone else you've never met on the other side of the world is a form of mental illness, or a type of spiritual suicide.
Some people may believe the entirety of modern life and many of its trappings are a form of mass insanity. And who's to say they're wrong?
Or putting other people's words in your brain could be considered somewhat icky ...
It doesn't seem too wild to use irrational belief in something (faith) to make oneself happier through tough times.
It does seem wild to spend your final days in a pit alone until you starve/dehydrate to death painfully.
These monks aren’t impulsively killing themselves, they seem to be towards the end of their lives anyway and are choosing how they want to go out. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. I might prefer to be in hospice hopped up on drugs when I pass, but I won’t claim to be morally superior for it.
Religion is basically always a socially acceptable mental illness that we not only tolerated but encouraged because it has been a part of civilization since before we formed the basic premises for what constitutes a civilization.
That doesn’t make it an illness, unless it produces massively negative outcomes.
usually when the patient complains or harms someone else, and not before
If someone wants to amputate their own hand, for example, it seems hard to argue that they shouldn’t be allowed to. But it does depend whether they’re mentally sound; you wouldn’t want to let someone who’s clearly suffering an illness do that.
It’s… tricky. I try to err on the side of personal freedoms though.
Where we draw the line on "mentally sound" is a social construct, right? I can't really wrap my head around somebody wanting to amputate their own hand and at the same time being considered "mentally sound" by the people around them.
> If someone wants to amputate their own hand, for example, it seems hard to argue that they shouldn’t be allowed to
I just don't get this. I suppose it hinges on what you mean by "allowed to". Maybe there's an argument to be made around personal bodily autonomy, that as a society we decide we don't want the government to compel us not to do things like this? But if someone I loved expressed to me that they wanted to harm themself I would do whatever I could to convince them not to. If one of my kids tried to chop off their hand for no good reason I would do everything I could to prevent it.