ernest becker has made a lot of is offered the same kind of argument which he calls terror management theory um shanti deva rather in the beginning of how to awaken uh how to lead an awakened 00:36:00 life talks about how terrified we are of death how terrified we are of being nothing how terrified we are what's going to happen after death becker doc talks about the same thing and shantideva 00:36:13 argues that in order to save ourselves from that terror what we do is we try to pause it make permanent and self safeguard this self becker does the same thing says we tend to reify ourselves as 00:36:24 a ball work um against terror to somehow manage our terror and but in any case self does seem the self illusion i think i think that idea is quite right by the way that the fear of death which is 00:36:36 deeply wired into us causes us to posit that self causes us to say hey maybe it can live forever maybe it can be reborn life after life after life maybe it can go to heaven things like that 00:36:48 but i also think the idea that affect is deeply related to our sense of self is really there shanti deva makes this point as well as does david hume um shanti deva uh points out that here's when you really decide you've got a self 00:37:02 it's when somebody insults you or hurts you right so somebody says garfield you idiot an and i immediately said wait a minute i'm a whole lot better than that how dare you talk to me like that i don't feel like my body's been 00:37:13 insulted i don't feel like my mind has been insulted i don't feel like my perceptions or sensations have been insulted i feel like i the thing that's got those things has been insulted and i want revenge at that point so that kind 00:37:27 of effect there or if you do something really cool like win the olympic gold medal in 100 meter sprint like i would love to do um with usain bolt's body um then you think when you're really proud of what you've done the pride 00:37:39 attaches not to my body not to my mind but to me so this idea that affect really brings up that sense of self i think is really important uh hume uh makes the same point in his treatise of human nature for those of 00:37:52 you who want to see this done in western philosophy he thinks that it's pride and shame that really bring up the idea of the self you know i mean when i'm ashamed of something that i'm done that i've done i'm not ashamed of my hand 00:38:04 that wrote badly i'm ashamed of me for having bad penmanship if i didn't give to a beggar i'm not ashamed that my mind did something wrong i'm ashamed that i did i was tight-fisted um and so the 00:38:16 idea that these and these aspects bring up the idea of self i think is very powerful and of course anger as i said earlier is another big one all of these involve egocentric attachment so it's when we're attached to things in a way that really fronts 00:38:29 our ego as the possessor then we find that we're positing that self and so this finishes the first of the three things i wanted to do this evening first was to convince you that you really do think yourself to explain what 00:38:42 that self is and to give some idea of why i think that you have why i think that you think that you have a self um no matter how much you might reject that idea on reflection