Vibhava-Tanha, craving for non-existence (quote, anger, Samsara, life)

[brianberkeley]

The Second Noble Truth established the principle that dukkha(suffering) is caused by craving and clinging for more and more sensory experiences and things that can never be satiated.

" This is the noble truth of the origin of suffering. It is this craving which produces repeated existence, is bound up with delight and lust, and seeks pleasure here and there, namely craving for sense pleasures, craving for existence, and craving for non-existence."
Quoted from Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Noble Eightfold Path

In the Buddhist literature craving or tanha is divided into kama-tanha, craving for sensory experience, bhava-tanha craving for existence, and vibhava-tanha, craving for non-existence.

In this post I address vibhava-tanha, craving for non-existence. We have all known people who followed a self-destructive life style; with the abuse of alcohol, drugs, and dangerous living. It is not just rock stars that are self-destructive, it is a common occurrence.

Sigmund Freud talks about the pleasure principle and the thanatos or death drive. As a psychiatric nurse I have seen thousands of people who were seemingly propelled by a quest for non-existence. One result is suicide. Another is embracing a life-style that will end your life. My favorite poet, Dylan Thomas, drank to the point of death.

Why do some people crave for non-existence? I have no answers, just the realization is that it is very common. The thanatos drive is powerful. Another term is annihilationism.

But there are other explanations for this phenomenon of craving for non-existence. Some Mahayanists would say that vibhava-tanha signifies the empty nature of the five skhandas; that since there is no self there cannot really be non-existence, just avidya, ignorance. If samsara is correct all that has occurred is a rebirth into a lower realm.

However, my opinion is that craving for non-existence is exactly what it says it is.

Comments

[kevxu]

Originally Posted by brianberkeley

...
In this post I address vibhava-tanha, craving for non-existence. We have all known people who followed a self-destructive life style; with the abuse of alcohol, drugs, and dangerous living. It is not just rock stars that are self-destructive, it is a common occurrence.

Sigmund Freud talks about the pleasure principle and the thanatos or death drive. As a psychiatric nurse I have seen thousands of people who were seemingly propelled by a quest for non-existence. One result is suicide. Another is embracing a life-style that will end your life. My favorite poet, Dylan Thomas, drank to the point of death.

Why do some people crave for non-existence? I have no answers, just the realization is that it is very common. The thanatos drive is powerful. Another term is annihilationism....

However, my opinion is that craving for non-existence is exactly what it says it is.

Comments

I've trimmed down the quote to save space, but I think what I have left is adequate to my comment.

I would say, yes, in the case of suicide...though some suicides may have other motivations I think. I have encountered people who said they had decided to cut short the course of their AIDS illness by suicide.

But I am unsure when it comes to the habitual use of alcohol and drugs, for example. I have experience with my own problems in these areas, and as an Intake Clinician in the late 80s and 90s at an organization which dealt with persons who had AIDS or were HIV positive. Over the years my intakes covered the range of gay, straight, various races and ethnic groups, male, female. There were people who had been or were alcoholics or drug addicts in all those categories and combinations of them.

Drawing on this I would say that I encountered people who were quite convinced that their habits were about pleasure or attempts to increase it. And then there were those whose habit was rationalized as a kind of self-medication, i.e. to alleviate the distress of an unsatisfactory personal relationship or job among various things.

Thus, the effect was one of self-destruction physically, but the professed belief about the habit was that it was for another purpose. This confuses your topic a bit - for me - because while some people who professed to be drugging for the pleasure of it seemed adamant that this was their motivation, in the case of those who were drinking/drugging "to kill the pain of X" some came right up to the edge of something like "kill the pain of being me." And of these latter I would be inclined to think, yes, as well.

But denial - and maybe delusion - on the part of the user can cloud considerations of an addiction situation.

Then there are those people who crave the pleasure of dangerous adventures. Would that particular type of pleasure craving be possible without the element of craving possible self-extinction?

Perhaps this just brings a person around to facing craving as craving regardless of whether it has single or multiple goals.

[ukrkoz]

This is basic struggle between the eternal Self in a body and its ego, or mind. Self knows always that it is eternal and does not belong to this earth world. It wants liberation. It went through countless physical experiences and slowly came to understanding or, is on its arrival to it, that it is time to liberate it-Self.
Self is, normally, under complete influence of the mind. This is how Self came down to the earth existence to begin with. Then, liberation is seen as physical destruction of the physical. It is "quick out" that does not work. It only brings to another return.
Please, watch The Groundhog Day. It is classic for anyone who wants to see how Self goes through physical existence stages.

[LuminousTruth]

Originally Posted by brianberkeley

...

[Craving for non-existence might be exemplified by self-destructive life styles, it is a common occurrence.]

Sigmund Freud talks about the pleasure principle and the death drive. ...

Why do some people crave for non-existence [suicide]? ...

But there are other explanations for this phenomenon of craving for non-existence. Some Mahayanists would say that vibhava-tanha signifies the empty nature of the five skhandas; that since there is no self there cannot really be non-existence, just avidya, ignorance. If samsara is correct all that has occurred is a rebirth into a lower realm.

However, my opinion is that craving for non-existence is exactly what it says it is.

Comments

Thank you for posting this up. Indeed, suffering can be caused by insatiable craving. According to the famous monk Bodhi on the N8FP, it is largely craving that causes the recycling of misery (my words). Craving for pleasures such as
1. of the senses,
2. of existing (not dying, not sleeping), and
3. of not-existing (both after-life cravings and annihilation cravings)
all cause suffering.

But as one recorded monk (in a psychology of Buddhism course I took for free online) discussed, suffering doesn't only have to be caused by insatiable sentient craving, suffering can also be caused by mere pain. He had a disorder or allergic reaction that caused intense pain all over his body and he didn't suffer from it because he had craved not having pain... it was once he HAD the pain and suffering, that he craved not having it. I experienced something similar with a very incessantly itchy back one night that felt like a horrible sunburn I got many years later but the original pain was without the prior sun exposure, or any sort of trigger I could identify. It was a hell (most especially the part of not knowing why it occurred or when I should expect it to end), but thankfully it only lasted a few hours one night (and it still haunts me much more than my 3-4 days of itchiness and pain from a sunburn I knew I would get over). Neither I, nor him, craved for "non-existence" nor "just existence" nor "a sense" but rather we craved the lack of an unbearable sense.

Regardless, from an Immunologist's perspective, this "death principle" or crave for non-existence reminds me of something very microscopic. It is apoptosis. In the larger scale, a society stops giving the right signals that a person should live, and so the person themselves seeks death (even if merely through depression to shut down their immune system). They don't see themselves and society making a good fit (over-worked, underworked, etc), and so they are naturally (perhaps genetically) inclined to do what is best for the society as an evolved population/body: personal apoptosis, to make way for other cells that might be a better fit or to help out their population through being a venom against another (competing) population (through war or terrorism).

In terms of the no-self principle, I find it amazingly eye-opening to think of it as negating annihalationism. When looked form the perspective of a rebirthist or a non-rebirthist, not being a "independent self" means that craving non-existence (being suicidal) is just a meaningless craving since "ending your previous life" is what you do every new plank-time. Thus ending/limiting the possibilities for your "future non-selves (which is you as you grow through time)" is just decreasing the good potential which would increase suffering overall.

Thanks again.

Originally Posted by kevxu

I've trimmed down the quote to save space, but I think what I have left is adequate to my comment.

...

Your full post was extremely insightful, thank you kevxu, I think most suicidal tendencies are egotistically driven [rather than craving not existing as a selfless principle]. But there are factors such as addiction and depression that aren't purely egotistical/hedonistic and they do come into play often. I'm guessing that a lot of the difference could stem from the inpatient depressive/open experience that a psychiatric nurse might be more exposed to than an intake clinician seeing someone new for the first time.

Originally Posted by ukrkoz

This is basic struggle between the eternal Self in a body and its ego, or mind. Self knows always that it is eternal and does not belong to this earth world. It wants liberation. It went through countless physical experiences and slowly came to understanding or, is on its arrival to it, that it is time to liberate it-Self.
Self is, normally, under complete influence of the mind. This is how Self came down to the earth existence to begin with. Then, liberation is seen as physical destruction of the physical. It is "quick out" that does not work. It only brings to another return.
Please, watch The Groundhog Day. It is classic for anyone who wants to see how Self goes through physical existence stages.

A lot of creative food for thought, but it could be the struggle between trillions of eternal Selfs dancing on the head of a needle and the "truer" self, or "mind." These "eternal" pseudo-Selfs could be parasitizing off of the "truer" mind in order to continue to "feel" eternal through the thoughts of a "truer" but rightly impermanent existing mind. Perhaps these imagined eternal pseudo-Selfs have come to the understanding that they are merely a shadow of what a real identity should be, and are thus bound up in their own ignorance of their very unimmortal and pathetic natures. Self-perception being under the influence of the previous experiences and new experiences, they came up to the earth-existence in desperation and self-delusion. Then they deny that (as with themselves) when a river dries up, all that is left is evaporated water and a dry bank. Instead they go own about unevidenced thoughts of what they think is an obvious "ghostly flow" that continues on existing as an anti-non-Self bearing some form of "real identity" for the actual river that is really dead and gone.

Groundhog Day (with Bill Murray) truly is a classic, but you'd have to at least jump through a few hoops to make the movie be about how the Director is a Prophet of the "Reality of Self and Physical Existence Stages" rather than about a guy that has to (or gets to) repeat the Groundhog Day holiday day over and over again to his bewilderment and exasperation.

[ukrkoz]

This is just fine.

namaste