DEATH DENIAL SHAPES WORLD HISTORY: A BUDDHIST WAY OUT

In the modern West, many have felt trapped by a history that we can’t help but create. Human beings have long acted destructively while only getting occasional glimpses of the deeper causes of such behavior. Existential thinkers such as Pascal to Kierkegaard attributed human destructiveness to an inability to come to terms with mortality. At the same time, the fear of death and, most deeply, that of lack, has made it difficult to recognize just what it is that humans have been fleeing from. For example, Western people since the Enlightenment have looked to economic growth, the accumulation of goods, the sciences of management and control, social engineering, and various other ways to stave off the anxiety that comes from physical vulnerability and feelings of not counting for anything in this vast universe.

But Eastern philosophies as well as Western psychotherapy have been bringing about a shift in awareness that enables human beings to overcome their anxiety over lack in more effective ways. The result is that people are consciously making history. Although the effects of this evolving consciousness are not widespread, an increasing numbers among thinkers and activists have explored these possibilities. Here I will describe the course of this development starting off with the ideas of those who emphasized the notion of death denial. Then I will move on to examine developments in Buddhist philosophy in the West that have provided a way to more fully understand both the causes of human unhappiness and the ways of treating it at the individual and social levels.

The Causes of Human Unhappiness

Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death created quite a stir at the time in the 1960s due to his radical approach to the current predicament. Instead of putting forward political recommendations that would show a way out of our historical mess, Brown went in a different direction. He revised Freud to make psychoanalysis compatible with mysticism and undertook an explanation of human history in psychoanalytical terms. He made the point that Marxist accounts of history ignored biology and human nature. Character structure is responsible for hierarchy and exploitation, but character is the outcome of human nature rather than economic forces and institutional structures.

For Brown, social institutions reflect human nature rather than produce a particular kind of character. Biology influences destiny. So he gave Freud and his instinctual psychology precedence over politically oriented approaches. But he took Freud’s ideas in a more existential direction, emphasizing his later work around the opposition between life and death, Eros and Thanatos. His work parallels that of the great psychoanalysts Adler, Rank, and Jung who also interpreted Freud’s ideas in a more existential manner.

Brown was a scholar of classics who turned to the study of Freud in the late 1950s to investigate the reasons for human unhappiness and to explore the prospects of overcoming that unhappiness. In Life Against Death, he inspired social thinkers and young people of the 1960s who strained against the boundaries of conventional behavior and opposed the prevailing conformity of the 1950s. Although, as Ernest Becker noted, much of the attraction of Brown’s work for young people was his idea that repression could be overcome, Brown also presented an understanding of Freud that made psychoanalysis once again relevant for social thought.

Brown’s Renewal of Psychoanalysis

Through the renewal of psychoanalysis, Brown hoped to make new contributions to our understanding of the nature and destiny of humanity. He believed that psychoanalysis could be reshaped into a broad general theory of human nature, culture, and history.

Brown proposes that the meaning of human actions throughout history can be analyzed in the same way as neurotic symptoms. In this sense, human history is the history of repression. But Brown does not believe that Freud accurately described what was repressed. Although he follows Freud’s later thought in positing the opposition between life and death as the primary human conflict, he interprets this conflict between the life and death instincts in a manner far different than Freud.

In Brown’s view, the separation from the mother whom the child dearly loves is the origin of individuality and is experienced as death. It is also the source of anxiety. In Freud’s libido or sexual theory, the Oedipus complex is seen as the sexual desire of the child for the mother that is thwarted by the presence of the father. But in Brown’s reinterpretation, what he calls the “Oedipal project” is the male child’s attempt to overcome death by becoming his own father. It is a revolt against death and, in particular, against the biological separation between child and mother. What underlies the Oedipal project is not the desire to possess the mother, but the desire for reunion with her. Such reunion enables the male child to deny his dependence on the mother and on sources of nourishment in the world. It contains the solution to the contradiction between the child’s wish to be lovingly united with the world and the reality of dependence on that world for survival.

Brown’s formulation of the Oedipal project enables him to view Freud’s libido theory in more existential terms. Although many psychoanalysts have resisted Freud’s notion of the death instinct, Brown makes a connection between the death instinct and the flight from death that is at the center of human neurosis. The death instinct leads humans to seek the end of all tension, and its result is the denial of separation, dependence on others, and death. The forms of human society and culture are the product of this inability to accept death. Humans try to achieve symbolic immortality as a way of overcoming death, and as Otto Rank had already noted, history can be viewed as the record of different types of immortality projects.

Brown on Capitalism and the Money Complex

A remarkable application of Brown’s theory is his analysis of capitalism and the money complex. Brown finds the alliance between Protestantism and capitalism to be a pure expression of the death instinct. A culture fully given over to the flight from death eliminates most forms of spontaneous living. The demonic drive of capitalism is to completely master the world and to establish full control over nature. In its world of calculating rationality, money becomes the visible God and is thus sacred. Even though the worship of money has replaced and substituted for the worship of God, the secular world of capitalism treats money with the same reverence that was once given to God. In Brown’s view, modern economic activity is an attempt to escape death by piling up money that defies time. “Death is overcome on condition that the real actuality of life passes into these immortal and dead things; money is the man; the immortality of a state or corporation resides in the dead things which alone endure.”

Brown’s optimism about human happiness is intriguing. Freud’s notion of the contradiction between civilization and the instincts had led him to dark speculations about the need to accept normal human unhappiness. Brown traced Freud’s pessimism to the idea that the life and death instincts are opposed. In contrast, his own view is that the life and death instincts are related dialectically. So life and death should be seen as one and as a unity. Since life and death are one, the repression of death also means the repression of life. By overcoming the fear of death and being strong enough to die, people could truly live in unity with all life. They would give up their fantasies of total individual control over reality in exchange for mystical oneness at the bodily and nonrational level.

Becker’s Attempt to Solve the Problem of Social Evil

Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death can be viewed as a powerful confirmation of Brown’s ideas about the centrality of death in the human unconscious. However, Becker criticized Brown for believing that repression could end. He was sure that happiness and ultimate meaning cannot be achieved through any form of mystical oneness with all life. The opposition of life and death cannot be dialectically overcome.

Unlike Brown, though, Becker was highly interested in politics and identified with the Enlightenment and its goal of human emancipation through knowledge. The specific question he tried to answer was that of the origin of evil. Human history is replete with violence and destruction, and such evil appears to be a reflection of human nature and of the human tendency to deny death, in particular. Could there be a way out of this entanglement with evil, while still admitting the unpleasant facts of human history? Could evil be circumvented through the channeling of death denial into positive and constructive actions?

Becker was a cultural anthropologist who expanded his interests to include psychology, philosophy, history, and other disciplines. He complained that specialization had made people unable to achieve believable general knowledge about the world and the human condition. The power of his work stems from his awareness of the large stakes involved and the urgency of his quest. At issue is the future of humanity, and the best way to assure that future is to unflinchingly look at the worst aspects of the human being. He viewed his own particular contribution as providing an existential framework for the insights of psychoanalysis that was free from the biological orientation and reductionism of Freud. Before completing his final work Escape from Evil, he died of cancer in 1974 at the age of 49.

In his writings, Becker largely follows the revisions of Freud that had been made in the work of Rank and Brown. He traces the impact of the fears of life and death on human functioning, views culture as the result of repression and, therefore, as neurosis, and understands the human drama not in terms of sexuality and libido but rather as the attempt to avoid the reality of death and the chaos of life. He also examines various immortality projects within history and views human history as the record of attempts to give meaning to a life that ends in death.

Becker on the Centrality of Heroism

To understand our dilemmas and the real nature of our problems, Becker starts with the notion of heroism. As children, we are narcissistic, that is, highly absorbed with ourselves. This selfishness comes from our animal nature. Narcissism is closely connected with self-esteem, the sense of our own worth. We want to stand out and to really count. Becker thinks that the issue of heroism is central to human existence because it penetrates to the deepest levels of human nature — the child’s narcissism and need for self-esteem. He views society as a “codified hero system,” by which he means that societies are defiant ways of giving meaning to people’s lives in the shadow of death. As both Rank and Brown have shown, all culture is religious because it meets our spiritual need for heroic transcendence of mortality.

Becker equated mental difficulties with loss of self-esteem due to failure of courage, insufficiency of hero systems, and inability to maintain illusions. In such cases, there is a lack of confidence in the ability to transcend fate and doubts about personal immortality and the value of life. Self-esteem is the feeling of being right and is an active passion. This feeling is produced by the heroic triumph over evil and the belief in one’s own permanence. When people are secure in their belief that they will not ultimately disappear, then they are capable of heroism and of facing death. The role of society is to supply the symbol systems that give people a way to achieve heroism. Through their actions, people can justify themselves as important in the scheme of things, as a contributor to the life of the world, and as being special to the cosmos.

Becker’s ambition is to explain the nature of social evil. His main argument is that it is ingenuity rather than instincts that explains the inhumanity of people toward each other. The impossible hopes and desires of humans have led to the vast evils of the world, both present and past. He sees people as defying death by identification with their culture. Therefore the meanings that their culture provides which are the symbols of immortality serve them like a life raft. But the insistence and persistence of this need in the face of uncertainty leads to anxiety as people struggle to preserve their cultural worldviews in the face of inevitable challenges.

Becker also uses an idea of Rank’s to explain the prevalence of evil in the world. It is through the killing and the sacrifice of the other that death fear is assuaged. Through the other’s death, there is no need for one’s own death. In fact, Becker sees the killing of others as proof that one is favored by destiny and fate. And so, war is an arena where one tests the gods to see if they really favor you. “Men use one another to ensure their personal victory over death.” By killing someone else, people affirm the power of their own life.

The wars of our time show that the enemy has a role to play in a ritual drama in which evil is redeemed. In two senses, wars are “holy wars”: they reveal the dictates of fate, and they also purge evil from the world. People try to qualify for eternity by showing that they are clean and pure. They do this by cleansing the world of evil. The greatest heroism is to eliminate those who are contaminated by evil. In Hitler’s Germany, the heroic ideal was for Nazi high priests to eliminate dirty and impure Jews from the spotless world of the Aryans.

The great destructiveness of history is the result of people giving their whole selves in allegiance to the group that represents their hero system. Through various immortality ideologies, people seek heroic transcendence. The fullest expansion of life is experienced while in the throes of these ideologies. Therefore, people are aggressive in order to expand life. Aggressive behavior brings joy and the feeling of transcendence.

Becker was prescient in his appreciation of the significance of the environmental crisis. He thinks that environmental destruction may be a sign of the end of human evolution. For him, runaway economic growth and production of goods was a 19th century hero system that was killing the earth. It is the worst type of evil that has ever existed in human history since it may seal the doom of us all.

Becker’s work is profound and unsparing in its willingness to face all the unpleasant truths about human nature and human history. His passion for ideas and his awareness of the high stakes that are involved in this intellectual quest are electrifying. He emphasizes that death is the worm at the core of human existence.

Death Denial and Politics

Becker’s existential anthropology has important political implications. Becker was a product of the Enlightenment, but his willingness to engage with the psychological dimensions of human behavior led him to take seriously the criticisms of major Enlightenment assumptions. He carefully examined Freud’s theories that cast doubts about the goodness of human nature and the role of social institutions and socialization in the genesis of evil. As a result, the political implications that can be drawn from his work are somewhat ambiguous.

The standpoint of the Enlightenment is basically liberal, since it upholds the idea of progress and the use of knowledge to achieve social improvement. Its view of human nature is that it is formed by the social structure of a particular society. Human nature is variable and can be improved through social reform or revolution.

Although societies function as hero systems that give people the hope of triumphing over evil and death, Becker thinks that no society is capable of fulfilling this promise, and all societies are based on mystifications and lies, whether secular or religious. The study of society becomes the revelation of such lies and mystifications and the comparative study of society becomes the evaluation of the costs of these lies. There tend to be two major types of costs: the costs of abuse of power within the society against one’s own people and the costs of victimizing people deemed aliens or enemies.

The fear of death is natural but it has always been used by those in authority to dominate and exploit others. It has served as a mechanism of repression and oppression. In such cases, those who gain political power assuage their own death anxiety through fantasies of omnipotence and total control. At the same time, since culture gives humans their symbolic transcendence over death, large numbers of ordinary people have been willing to acquiesce in their own enslavement. By identifying with the powerful and the mighty, their fear of extinction is kept at bay and they are able to persuade themselves that they do count for something. But identification with leaders promising glory and triumph over evil has led many people to participate in highly destructive systems of heroism at the cost of much human life.

Becker’s Search for Hope

In light of Becker’s understanding of human nature based on the fear of death and the need for immortality, what hope is there for human betterment? His answer is that it is necessary to find some kind of liberating ideal that is life-affirming and offers an alternative to the terrible and unthinking modes of heroism that have often prevailed. To accomplish this goal, there has to be some way for people to experience a triumph over evil and death that does not involve the scapegoating of others and the narcissistic assertion of the self. He calls the type of society that is needed to achieve this aim a “non-destructive yet victorious social system.”

Becker allows himself to fantasize a society in which leaders are chosen that are themselves able to face their own fear of life and death, and are aware that their own cultural worldview serves as a path to heroic transcendence. They ensure that this worldview is not defended as being an absolute truth and is subject to alteration and development. Democratic societies that allow self-criticism and attacks on the reigning cultural fictions approach this ideal of a free society.

In his quest for non-destructive heroism, Becker would like to believe that a human society can enshrine reason to a degree sufficient to balance destruction. His own work is clear evidence of the enormity of the task, so he was struggling with himself. Still, his approach explains many political phenomena with much precision and accuracy. For example, he shows that revolutionary Maoism’s attempt to bring about heaven on earth is motivated by the fear of death, just like all the other communist utopias. Becker’s great achievement is his uncovering of the roots of evil. History is not only the struggle for power between classes and among nations. Such struggle only occurs when survival needs are at stake. But humans also seek meaning. Their quest for heroic transcendence is a compensation for the powerlessness that they experience in the face of death.

The End of the Enlightenment Ideal

Becker was committed to the Enlightenment ideal of human emancipation. He combined the perspectives of the left and Freud in order to create a theoretical view that could serve as the foundation of an effective politics for our time. But he added one key element, death anxiety, which had not played a major part in Freud’s thought. Through this revision of Freud, Becker provided a persuasive account of the psychological dimension that any realistic political theory would have to address. Instead of focusing on the instincts of sex and aggression as the major determinants of human behavior, he explained how fear of death motivated the terrible violence and plantation that pervaded human history.

In Becker’s view, our cultural beliefs and values function to counteract death anxiety; as a result, societies are standardized ways of denying death. They serve as hero systems that enable people to feel that they are central to reality. Without them, people cannot experience meaning and would be at the mercy of their fear of nonbeing and feel like small and insignificant creatures destined to disappear. Thus human history can be understood in terms of the effectiveness of these symbols.

Becker’s work leads back to Rank and Jung. Rank showed that psychology was unable to provide a system of immortality that could satisfy human religious needs. In a psychological age, the tragedy was that cultural ideologies undermined religious belief while failing to provide an effective substitute. Jung clarified that the greatest challenge for modern people is to find their soul. His own solution was to personally experience the reality of God and to create his own myth. For Rank, the artist successfully created meaning through the production of a work of art.

Becker was more politically conscious than either Rank or Jung. The political direction he envisioned was the creation of hero systems that did not involve the destruction of members of other groups. He wanted the human sciences to come up with nondestructive myths and to create ideologies that are life-enhancing. As Becker himself recognized, on the one hand he was saying that humans are most happy when they strongly believe in illusions of immortality. On the other hand, though, he is saying that such beliefs lead to injustice and war, intolerance and cruelty.

Becker’s recommendation is for the human sciences to take on the mission of exposing the mystifications of those in power and demonstrating the ways in which some immortality ideologies are destructive myths. This would clear the way for the creation of more life-enhancing illusions. The problem is that awareness of mortality leads to the need for immortality projects that make one’s own group foremost in the scheme of things. But how effective can a cultural hero system be that is not favored by God or that is not the best, truest, and most deserving, one that merely has relative validity?

Thus Becker was unable to provide any convincing examples of illusions that would meet the need to feel central to the cosmos while also contributing to overall human happiness. He formulated the dilemma in such convincing terms that there really is no way out available for Enlightenment partisans. His failure to find a psychological and anthropological foundation for progressive politics prevented him from convincingly putting forward a liberal program for human emancipation

A Buddhist Perspective

Brown and Becker confirmed that spiritual needs and needs for meaning are deeper than the material needs and the desire to command resources that Marxism emphasizes. Becker says that the only way that death-fearing creatures can overcome anxiety is by becoming a god and by having the strength of a god. Brown takes a different view: repression is transcended as the ego becomes one with the body and the separation between ego and instinct ends. For the Buddhist tradition, repression is overcome through no longer identifying with the ego and the limited self. Once there is no longer a sense of separation between self and world, anxiety disappears. Instead, there is only the unity of the experiencer and what is experienced.

Becker sees human nature as static, but Buddhism holds that humans are capable of self-transcendence. This occurs not through changes in social systems but through efforts to achieve genuine self-knowledge and self-transformation. Admittedly, this is a daunting task that only a small number of people in every age have embraced and completed. Nevertheless, the number of such people seems to be increasing. The need is not to discover heroes but for ourselves to become heroes and serve as models for others to learn from.

The Buddhist approach has been explained by the contemporary American Buddhist philosopher David Loy in Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism (1996). Loy makes an important addition to the understanding of death denial by proposing that the cause of human anxiety is not just the fear of death but the more general fear of not being grounded, that is, the fear that the self is not real. The problem is that the self is not free and autonomous in some absolute sense; it is conditioned by the mind and by society. Therefore it experiences a sense of lack since it is not grounded; what’s more, it is experienced as fragile. So we repress the awareness that we have no ground of being.

Loy sees the duality of being and nothingness as the fundamental set of opposites that humans deal with. Our awareness of self is plagued by the feeling of lacking something in our very being that we cannot quite put our finger on. Feeling separate and free is accompanied by the feeling that we are not good enough and not worthy, that something is not quite right about us. This sense of lack is very disturbing so it is repressed. Then we experience such lack as projections, the various forms taken by our efforts to make ourselves real.

Loy praises Becker’s explanation of the destructive forms that these projections have taken throughout history. Like Becker he sees war, for example, as a hero project in which we experience catharsis in relation to our fears of death. And, Loy adds, catharsis of our fears of lack. So war is experienced as sacred, functioning as a ritual for the production of heroes with whom the rest of us vicariously identify in order to experience catharsis of our own fears of death and lack.

The self-knowledge that Buddhism gives us is that we cannot die because we were never born. In other words, since there is no separate self, there is no “self” that is born and dies and lives within time. It is a fiction created by the go. When we let go of this fiction, we go beyond the opposition between birth and death, being and nothingness. The dualism of life and death does not describe a condition that actually exists in the world. It is just a belief, a concept that we have projected onto the external world. Loy quotes the Japanese philosopher Dogen: “Just understand that birth-and-death is itself nirvana. There is nothing such as birth and death to be avoided; there is nothing such as nirvana to be sought. Only when you realize this are you free from birth and death.”

In Buddhist meditation, we learn the way to die by letting go of our concept of self. As we become absorbed in the practice, the sense of being a separate self disappears. Our sense of self is the result of our trying to become a thing, something real, which means we strive to grasp ourselves. In meditation, however, we experience that there is nothing to be grasped. We are free and our sense of lack as well as the fear of death are no longer present. Instead, there is only serenity which cannot be disturbed because there is nothing there to be disturbed. The quest for being and the fleeing from nothingness is over.

Buddhist Politics

The end of the Enlightenment hope that the expansion of scientific knowledge could lead to human happiness is momentous. An urgent issue then arises as to the contributions that spiritual approaches can make to relieving human suffering. But this imperative is not merely a personal one alone; it is also a social imperative since we need to build new institutions as well as social and political philosophies that can sustain our lives in the face of challenges such as environmental destruction, war, inequality, exploitation, and alienation. Can we come up with new social and political philosophies based on Buddhist thought and insights? As Loy recognizes, Asian Buddhism has focused on individual liberation from the causes of human suffering: the ill will, delusion, and greed that exist in our own minds. But its contribution to social and political philosophy is meager

Nevertheless, Loy thinks that Buddhist offers something important to help us deal with the crises of our time which have grown increasingly severe. It was Nietzsche who emphasized that the loss of the belief in the Christian God in the West would lead to nihilism. In other words, the decay of symbolic immortality projects can help to account for the unprecedented violence of the twentieth century. What Buddhism can do is give us pragmatic solutions to the relief of suffering that do not have to be supported by hero myths and campaigns to root out evil. At the same time, it can help us recognize the immortality systems like the money complex that continue to stand in the way of a greater number of people sharing the wealth and resources of the earth.

In The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory (2003), Loy explains that Buddhists see the cause of suffering in cravings or thirsts that are pursued to fill the emptiness people feel due to their sense of lack, of not being real and grounded. The outcome is runaway technological and economic development. This is not to deny the need for a social system to provide people with sufficient food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. But once such basic needs are met, the focus ought to be on education so that people learn ways to overcome their illusions about who they are and what will make them happy. They do not need to identify with heroes outside themselves in order to find peace and joy since happiness lies within.

This approach to individual transformation can be used to deal with social issues as well. In addition to providing the basis of wellbeing and promoting education, nonviolence is also necessary for a spiritually sane society. In order to bring about peace, the ends and the means must harmonize or else we will be undertaking the impossible task of achieving worthy goals through violent methods. We can also make vows to ourselves to carry out certain precepts in order to further our own growth. These precepts can serve as the foundation for deciding which social practices to follow and what kind of social order to construct.

The precept to not kill would lead us to be critical of militarized societies that spend huge amounts on military budgets; not stealing would mean that small groups of people should not consume large amounts of the earth’s resources while others receive tiny shares; not lying would imply withdrawing support from the various media and advertising outlets whose actions are solely geared to increase profit rather than ensure the public good.

Following the lead of the Dalai Lama who says his religion is compassion, Loy emphasizes that his Buddhist perspective is not based on asking people to believe Buddhist doctrines. He is promoting Buddhist wisdom as the foundation of private and public action. Such wisdom recognizes our connection with all living beings, and it offers loving-kindness as the attitude that enables people to live in a peaceful and joyous way.

Buddhism and the Eco-Crisis

In his recent work Ecodharma: Buddhist Teachings for the Ecological Crisis (2019), Loy addresses how Buddhism can help humanity to come to terms with the environmental crisis, the greatest threat to its continued existence that it has ever faced. First of all, through meditation and other practices, we wake up to the realization that we are not separate from other people and from nature. The next step is to take a close look at the ways in which we get along with others and how we are interacting with nature. In the process we see how our economic and political systems are the source of so much damage to our relationships with others and especially with our environment and we then confront those structures to save our future. This is where the individual and social levels of transformation intersect. “Engagement in the world is how our individual awakening blossoms and how contemplative practices such as meditation ground our activism, transforming it into a spiritual path.”

Loy uses “ecodharma” as a way to describe a new phase of the Buddhist tradition as it becomes more socially conscious. This term brings together the ecological issues that we face today and Buddhist teachings as well as those of similar spiritual traditions. One thing that jumps out is the striking resemblance between the key principle of ecology that living beings and systems exist in relation to each other and the outlook of Buddhist philosophy that nothing has independent existence since everything is dependent on everything else for its life.

But Loy also emphasizes an important parallel that is less often remarked upon, the parallel between our personal situation and that of the world. The self’s anxiety comes from the sense of lack and not being good enough which motivates it to seek money and power, possessions and fame in order to feel real and to count for something. The result, though, is continued suffering, craving, and lack of ease. Our group selves experience the same dilemma. At the level of the human species, we see ourselves as separate from the biosphere that we are part of. We define our civilization as apart from the natural world which gives us a collective sense of alienation and causes us to feel anxious and confused about who we are. Our way of resolving this unease is to pursue unlimited economic growth and technological development which divorces us further from nature and reinforces the problem.

In the case of both the individual and the group, the way out is to see through the false sense of being a separate self or a separate species. Instead of striving for power and glory in the world, we become a wise and generous person who recognizes the connections with people and nature and treats them with love and kindness. Likewise, at the collective level, we stop destroying nature when we experience that we have always been part of nature. We treat nature with devotion and care, with reverence and respect, embracing voluntary simplicity, using appropriate technologies, developing the inner world, and attuning ourselves to the natural world.

Deliverance from Anxiety and the Shaping of World History

Humanity has been forever searching for a way out of the anxiety that makes people unhappy and causes much destruction and death. In the West, 20th century psychology has been groping toward ways to treat the causes of anxiety rather than only addressing the symptoms. But it is in the nondual philosophies of Buddhism, Vedanta, and Daoism that we find long traditions where the sources of anxiety have been uncovered and ways of letting go of such anxiety have been established. As Loy has shown in Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy (1988), the worldviews of these three traditions are based on the experience of transcending the distinction between the self and the world. This experience, often called “enlightenment,” has been achieved by a few practitioners in every era who have undergone the rigorous training that is often required. Today, as the world faces very dark times due to environmental destruction, there is a great urgency for people to leave behind dualistic thinking and perceiving.

The efforts of Western psychology to relieve our distress have floundered, as in the case of Becker, due to an inability to find a way of successfully dealing with the fear of death. It has not recognized that death anxiety is part of a broader problem, what Buddhism has called the belief in a fictitious self. However, during the last half of the 20th century, Western humanistic psychologists moved in this direction, and Abraham Maslow helped to establish transpersonal psychology whose outlook is similar to that of nondualist Eastern traditions.

Eastern traditions do not have highly developed political philosophies that work out the implications of their own worldviews, but recent Western scholars like Loy as well as Thich Nhat Hanh and Gandhi and other Eastern spiritual activists have started to remedy this deficiency. As a result, humanity can stop creating hero systems that provide symbolic immortality but are often highly destructive and bring about greater evils. Leaders with a more highly developed consciousness can apply the insights of the wisdom traditions toward the construction of political and economic systems that work in harmony with people’s increasingly spiritualized and sacralized awareness. The big question is whether a large enough number of people will be ready to help shape history in a conscious and positive way in time to prevent worldwide catastrophe due to the breakdown of the ecosystems of which we are all a part.