Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.
—Emily Bronte
A healthy sense of self is the necessary foundation for further spiritual progress. We’re all unique individuals—everyone truly is a special snowflake—and we should all honor our own singular gifts and achievements.
But when self-affirmation tips over into self-importance and vanity—when that little “somebody self” birdie starts chirping a bit too loudly and arrogantly—it becomes another part of the problem rather than a step on the way to the solution.
Pride is a major weapon in the ego’s arsenal; it is closely associated with the compulsion to be somebody. Taking overweening pride in some particular and temporary personal characteristic or adventitious circumstance in order to feel superior to other people—to be more special than others—is a fool’s game. It seizes on something we think makes us truly special (one personal trait among many—beauty, youth, strength, intelligence, talent, or how much money one has, what one owns, or one’s professional status or religious affiliation) and absurdly elevates it above all other possibilities in order to make ourselves supremely special.
And if we set too much store by such fleeting and ephemeral phenomena, when they change or we lose them, we become devastated. Instead of taking pride in being somebody oh-so-exceptional, we crash hard, as this inflated sense of the special self is punctured and contracts.
Pride is universally identified in the world’s religions as one of the biggest dangers for a spiritual practitioner; it often makes it onto the short list of vices. And what’s most relevant at this juncture is that pride is the lifeblood of the “somebody self’s” interest in feeling superior to others. As C. S. Lewis notes,
Now what you want to get clear is that Pride is essentially competitive—is competitive by its very nature—while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.1
Excessively impressed with and attached to our sense of uniqueness and individuality, we distinguish ourselves from those over whom we tower. And with pride inevitably comes its twin sister: envy. We become jealous of and estranged from those who are even more special than we are (richer, smarter, better looking, more gifted or accomplished).
Feeling too special alienates us from others—from both those we suspect are above us and those we place below us. Our yearning to be somebody not only implicates us in the fear that we’ll never be somebody enough; it also requires others to be less of a somebody than we are. With pride comes not only envy but prejudice.
It is not by further isolating and separating ourselves from others that we will find the genuine happiness we seek. True happiness will not come from feeling better than others any more than it will spring forth from envy and resentment toward those we feel are our betters. True happiness comes only through realizing what connects us to one another—the unity that lies beneath superficial differences.
Taking disproportionate pride in our individuality, we become enmeshed in judgment over those we deem inferior, thus further detaching ourselves from our fellow human beings. And most ironically, this attempt to feel better by ranking ourselves above others backfires and produces the exact opposite effect. For as we shall see in this chapter, it is pride that the spiritual traditions have identified as the main cause of low self-esteem.
What goes up must come down. When we take pride in whatever we latch onto in order to pose as someone superior to others, the result is that we become somebody who thinks of themselves as just a worthless nobody.
One of the many ways we attempt to define and distinguish ourselves—while also paradoxically trying to overcome the isolation and disconnection we abhor—is through identification with a group. We fabricate at least a part of our personal sense of identity by subsuming ourselves within a collectivity.
We describe and designate ourselves, at least to some degree, by hitching our personal wagons to some communal star:
“I am an American, Australian, Japanese, German”—identifying ourselves with our native or adopted nation.
“I am white, black, Asian, indigenous”—identifying ourselves with one of the (remarkably few, given human diversity and millennia of interbreeding) racial groupings.
“I am poor, working class, middle class, upper middle class, or (more rarely and immodestly) stinking rich”—identifying ourselves with our economic status.
“I am a Democrat, Republican, progressive, democratic socialist, Green Party member”—identifying ourselves with our chosen political party.
We all have a strong desire to belong to something greater, to meld our unique little individual snowflake into a larger snowball.
When it comes to the dynamics behind group affiliation, we once more butt up against the internal civil war between the compulsive drive to be somebody and the craving for the release and freedom that comes from being nobody.
On the one hand, it seems that our desire to join a community is inspired by an innate drive to transcend the loneliness and isolation of singularity. And as such, it is certainly a positive thing. The impulse to connect with others, to identify with a group, seems to be a variant of the urge we all have to drop the obsession with individualism and lose ourselves in something greater. Our interest in associating our discrete, isolated lower selves with a nation, a race, an economic class, or a political party is, from this point of view, motivated by a kind of secular expression of our spiritual longing to drop being ourselves and be nobody through connection to a larger whole.
As we know from personal experience, it is exactly in those times when we discard the burden of self-consciousness and the striving to be somebody that we feel a sense of relief, spaciousness, and fulfillment. And so it is that we can lose ourselves in a group, gaining a sense of belonging and camaraderie, which is all well and good . . . up to a point.
If we exaggerate the defining importance of any one of these group identities and take pride in our communal sense of self, we’re asking for trouble. For each of them is a mere role we play (or have been given to play) in the game of life, and each is quite different from our essential and higher Self. If we focus monomaniacally on any one of these social personalities—elevating it to a supreme position, and then submerging the lower individual self into this collective identity—we have the complete formula for fanaticism and for a new kind of alienation from others.
Individual identification through the collecting and blending of various communal identities can at best only partly, and never essentially, define any of us. For an individual’s connections with a set of groups is only a small component of what comprises that person. Each of us is much more (or, you might say, ultimately much less!) than the groups with which we are associated.
We are not wholly defined by being card-carrying members of one club or another, and when it comes to our true nature, our wallets are altogether empty of such nonessential credentials.
Our attempts to forge some kind of special individual identity through our memberships in larger social groupings are all just more carnival cutouts into which we stick our particular faces. In the great internal war that we discussed at the end of the last chapter, it seems as though identification through association is most often aligned with the “be somebody” side of things rather than the “be nobody” faction.
What over-identifying with one or another of our collective guises inevitably entails is not only being included in some group but also not being included in others. Groups are defined negatively as well as positively: If I’m an Australian, it means I’m not a New Zealander; if I’m a Democrat, I’m certainly not a Republican.
For while the ego is immersed in and defined by the group, the group is in turn usually defined by who is excluded. And when we constitute membership in one or another of these collectivities as exclusive, separating out an “us” from a “them,” we obscure or even deny the deep commonalities we share with all other living beings.
We seek to overcome the pangs of loneliness and isolation and gain a sense of community in such group identifications. But if we overestimate them and give them overweening dominance in how we think of ourselves, we re-create the conditions for estrangement from and animosity toward others. Submersion of one’s distinct individuality into a group identity can end up being just a repositioning of the will to be somebody.
And too often, being somebody requires that we not be somebody else, and once again we find ourselves alienated from others.
It is especially ironic that religious identities have so often functioned to separate human beings into oppositional factions. As with our association with other groupings, identifying with and taking pride in one or another of the religious traditions—“I am a Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim,” or whatever—endows us with a sense both of belonging and of distinctiveness. But insofar as our connection to one or another of the organized and institutionalized religious “isms” is understood to preclude rather than enable our sense of a shared humanity, it has at least the same divisive, if not lethal, potential as national or political identities.
Living in an age when boundaries of all sorts are breaking down, traditional markers of religious identity are increasingly anachronistic. What really matters is not the particular group one adheres to, but rather the universally promoted spiritual message, which is one of tolerance, love, and respect for others, no matter what tribe they are a part of.
There was once a group of young Westerners who were visiting India back in the sixties, in the early days of the Tibetan exodus from Chinese persecution and the establishment of refugee communities in places like Dharamsala. The Dalai Lama at that time was not the famous international figure and Nobel Prize recipient he is today, and according to this anecdote the motley crew of European and American hippies walked right up to His Holiness’s house and banged on his door.
And the Dalai Lama, as the story goes, came to the door and said, “Hello. What can I do for you?” and joined the Westerners on the verandah for a bit of a chat.
The discussion, as one might guess, turned to the topic of religion. One of the Westerners was quite adamantly antireligious and got into his host’s face about it: “How can you in good conscience act as leader of a world religion? Religion has caused nothing but trouble throughout human history—it’s been nothing but a source of violence, dissention, and animosity! How can you justify yourself?”
The Dalai Lama purportedly said this: “Religion is really not about vertically dividing ourselves into separate compartments like Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Jew, Christian, Taoist, and the rest. Rather, it’s better to draw the line horizontally. Those who practice religion, regardless of label, are pretty much all alike. And those who don’t practice religion, whether formally affiliated or not, are also pretty much alike.”
So what unites all the real practitioners of religion, regardless of which (if any) of the world’s faiths they adhere to? Surely the core message of any authentic spiritual path is the cultivation of a universal love, leading to a sense of unity among all people, irrespective of differences in culture, race, economic standing, political belief . . . or formal religious affiliation (or the lack thereof). Those who are practicing religion (and this includes those who disavow formal association with any particular religion) are practicing being more expansive and inclusive in their love, compassion, empathy, and sense of interconnectedness with others. And those who aren’t practicing the true intent of religion are in the business of creating more, not less, divisiveness and ill will among people—often very loudly!
Religion, it has been said, is like a swimming pool. All the noise is coming from the shallow end.
Back in my academic days, I once had the opportunity to join a group of students who were having lunch with one of the eminent scholars of comparative religion at the time, Wilfred Cantwell Smith. At some point in the conversation, Professor Smith was asked whether he was a Christian. The answer was quite memorable: “I can’t really say. You’ll have to ask those who know me—my family and friends.”
To be a real Christian (or Buddhist, Hindu, Jew, Taoist, and so on) means that you try to live like one. And surely that must include living a life guided by the universally extolled religious principles of kindness and love (not animosity and hatred) for others, and the cultivation of harmony and fraternity with (and not estrangement from and enmity toward) others.
If we want to claim to be a Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Taoist, and so on, we should try to act like one. And this will not involve trying to be somebody by means of exclusive religious branding, but rather will necessitate cultivating the willingness to be nobody through the practice of humility, universal brother- and sisterhood, and the abandonment of egoistical self-regard—even, or especially, when enveloped in a religious guise.
If we’re too obsessed with our religious identity, we can lose sight of our responsibilities to our fellow human beings. We become so “heavenly minded” that we’re “no earthly good,” as the Johnny Cash song would have it:
You’re shinin’ your light, and shine it you should
But you’re so heavenly minded you’re no earthly good.2
Overweening pride of all sorts has disastrous consequences. If someone brags about standing, they surely will fall, as the Man in Black so aptly notes in the song. But there’s no pride like spiritual pride. Taking undue self-satisfaction in our religious affiliation or, even worse, in our supposedly exceptional spiritual realizations, blinds us to the very thing a genuine path is supposed to lead to—the end of the clinging to the little, egoistic self, and the realization of our true universal nature and interconnection with all others. If we’re too heavenly minded and proud, we’re no earthly good at all.
It is easy to forget that learning to be nobody is both the ultimate goal of any authentic spiritual path and the royal road to true happiness. The very institution that throughout history has been responsible for transmitting this redemptive message has also repeatedly been usurped in order to subvert and invert the good news. Pride in one’s religion has too often been used to shun those with beliefs that differ from one’s own—to judge and condemn outsiders in order to extol and congratulate the insiders.
It is, of course, not just religious people who are proud and judgmental. This is yet another way in which we are alike—we all have the tendency to be forever placing ourselves above and judging others. But it’s sad to say that, when it comes to being judgmental and feeling superior, so-called religious people often seem to excel.
We do not become better and happier people by elevating ourselves over others or through judging. Au contraire. Judging destroys our wisdom, our forbearance, and our love and compassion, and leaves us just feeling smug and isolated.
Here’s how it goes, if you’re like me: We encounter a complex, constantly changing person or transitory situation, and then we freeze-frame the picture and impose some immutable characteristic on our snapshot: “He is a bad person; she is a liar.” Passing judgments like this—and we all tend to do it, don’t we?—denies a basic fact of life: everything and everybody is impermanent and in a perpetual state of flux and change.
We know how complex we are—each one of us is an incredibly intricate mass of experiences, proclivities, memories, opinions, influences, and feelings. We’re so complex, it’s hard to know who we really are! But when we encounter one another, we seem to forget that others are at least as complicated. When such meetings occur, it’s like one tiny edge of the huge balloon that is “me” touches a minute portion of the massive balloon that is “you.” And on such paltry, fragmentary evidence, I make my determination: “He is such an irritating person! She is so conceited!”
“Judging,” observes author William Young, always “requires that you think yourself superior over the one you judge.”3 And it is always in the service of ego-enhancement, for as Eckhart Tolle points out,
There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being right is identification with a mental position—a perspective, an opinion, a judgment, a story. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, and so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right.4
Judging is, therefore, both deeply implicated in ignorance and precludes any sort of deep sense of kinship between ourselves and others. Instead of bringing us closer, the tendency to judge tears us apart. Rather than helping us appreciate our commonalities (including our common tendency to be judgmental!), judging imposes a rank order where (in our imaginations, at least) we’re on top and others cower guiltily below.
As Mother Teresa said, “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”5 And as Jesus advised long before, “Judge not, that you be not judged.” What goes around will come around: “For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.”6 We know how unfair and hurtful it feels to have others judge us to be essentially this or that—wrong, bad, ugly, stupid, and so on. And yet, as usual, we create the causes for more of this by doing it to others.
• • •
Now, let’s be clear. To refrain from judging does not mean that we no longer are allowed to make distinctions among things. In Buddhism, the ability to discriminate is counted as one of the five physical and mental parts, or “aggregates” (samskaras), that make up our very being.I We cannot help but discriminate; it is innate to our nature, and without it everything would be one big indistinguishable blob.
But there is a difference between judgment and what we might call “discernment.” To discern means simply to recognize things as distinct from one another (from the Latin discernere, dis- meaning “apart” and cernere meaning “to separate”). And with its connotations of being able to recognize or comprehend something (“He discerned a pattern in his behavior”), it is not bound up in ignorance (as with judgment) but rather it is the essence of wisdom.
While judgment inhibits learning, discernment is the very soul of it. It functions to distinguish, among other things, what works to bring happiness and what doesn’t. Discernment involves identifying what is good for ourselves and others and what is not; what will be useful in our quest to live the good life, alone and in company, and what will only bring more pain.
Discernment is discrimination minus the self-righteousness and egoism that accompany judgment. It is fundamentally egalitarian rather than hierarchical—what I correctly discern to be beneficial for myself will also be good for you. Hurting others, selfishness, self-cherishing, and, yes, judging are not conducive to happiness, either for me or for anyone else. Loving-kindness, compassion, equanimity, and wise discernment bring happiness to anyone who cultivates them.
Discernment helps us honor Jesus’s advice to take care that there be no hypocrisy fouling our evaluations:
And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, “Let me remove the speck from your eye”; and look, a plank is in your own eye? Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.7
There’s a difference between different modes of differentiating. It’s not discrimination that’s the problem here. But we often exercise the discriminating capacity in a judgmental modality, a way of differentiating that is conducive neither to our own happiness nor to the betterment of our relations with others. This very same ability to discriminate can be used to appreciate the distinctive and unique beauty and goodness in every particular thing and being. We all are indeed special somebodies . . . equally special in our own way.
One way to foster a healthy exercise of discrimination is to note that in every person there are good attributes as well as bad; in every situation, no matter how difficult and challenging, there are positive aspects and things to learn. Every cloud has a silver lining; every “problem” can also be seen as an opportunity; every person possesses at least some admirable and loveable traits if we look for them.
We perversely are so drawn to the negative side of things that we systematically ignore the positives that are always present—in ourselves, in another person, in a situation, and in groups (national, ethnic, social, economic, or religious) other than our own.
It’s like when we get a small sore, cut, or scratch. The whole rest of the body is fine, but instead of thinking about all the bits that are OK, all the parts that are working well, we become obsessed with this one little scab and we keep picking at it. We fixate on the dark cloud instead of the silver lining.
Since we all innately have the ability to differentiate, why not exercise that power to choose that which will bring more happiness to ourselves and others instead of less, and that which will bring us together rather than separate us?
Whether we pride ourselves on our individual status, possessions, or accomplishments, or on our association with a national, ethnic, or religious group, when such vanity serves to prop up our sense of importance, it sets us up to fall.
Egotistical pride is universally regarded as an obstacle to true spiritual progress, and therefore to true happiness. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, pride made it onto the list of the top five or six of the “mental afflictions” that militate against our sense of well-being and contentment. The whole of the religion known as Islam takes its name from the Arabic term for overcoming one’s pride and practicing submission (islam) to God’s will. And in Catholicism, pride is listed among the “seven deadly sins”—and, indeed, is often regarded as the worst of them. C. S. Lewis calls it “the essential vice, the utmost evil”:
According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil; Pride leads to every other vice; it is the complete anti-God state of mind.8
Pride is a vice not so much because it is “bad” but because it is self-destructive. From a karmic point of view, as we shall see below, pride is one of the principal causes of depression and low self-esteem. What is elevated too high will fall very low; what rises up into the stratosphere comes crashing down into the depths.
Pride sets itself up to lose, in both the short run and the long run. In the short run, pride can only sustain its illusion of superiority by remaining a big fish in a small pond.
In my own case, I have taken pride in my intelligence since I was in elementary school. I remember feeling quite pleased back then to think that I was the smartest kid in my class. This may or may not have been true—relative “smartness” is slippery to measure, and memory definitely plays its tricks—but in any case there were only twenty or thirty others to whom I could compare myself.
Convincing myself that I was “the smartest” was less sustainable in high school—especially since I nearly flunked eleventh grade due to truancy!—and even harder to maintain in college (there was that course in logic that I just barely passed, and plenty of other ego deflators and reality checks along the way). But it really wasn’t until I got to graduate school that this particular illusion was completely blown out of the water. The truth finally penetrated through all the levels of self-deception that sustained my pride. It became indubitable that there were plenty of people way smarter than me—for there they were, lots of them, teeming around me at the university every single day.
And then, of course, a new mental affliction arose: envy. But that’s a different story.
The point is just that pride in anything (intelligence, wealth, technical skill, physical beauty or strength or flexibility, or even in one’s supposed spiritual attainments) can only be maintained in willful isolation from those who would challenge it.
While depression and problems associated with low self-esteem are on the rise, it is not contradictory to observe that it is actually the narcissistic overestimation of the self that lies at the heart of this beast. One modern expert has baldly stated, “There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of really low self-esteem. The average person already thinks that he or she is above average.”9 This double-faced Janus—simultaneously insecure and arrogant, self-abasing and self-absorbed—is consistent with the neurosis that arises with the self-preoccupation definitive of our culture.
So here’s one helpful hint for solving the problem of pride: If you’re liable to take inordinate self-regard due to your intellect, go to Harvard or the University of Chicago and hobnob with some hardcore eggheads. If you are vain about your good looks, stop hanging around with people you feel are obviously uglier and enter a beauty contest! If you think you’re so amazing because of your money, quit socializing with those who have less and chill with really rich people! If you think you’re cool because of the flexibility you demonstrate when at your local yoga studio, go to an international yoga conference and check out the real competition.
Get the fish out of the small pond and into the ocean!
Pride takes a lot of work to maintain and prolong—not only in light of the constant real-life challenges to its inflated sensibility but also because of the impermanent and changing nature of the things we take pride in. The financial position or professional status, the popularity and fame, the cleverness or brainpower, and (especially!) the appearance and abilities of the physical body are unreliable. That’s why pride and insecurity are actually two peas in a pod.
But it’s the long run—the karmic consequences of pride—that we’re especially concerned with here. So let’s cut to the chase, shall we?
Led by pride into the lower realms, they are even in this human life deprived of joy. They will be servants who feed on others’ leftovers—stupid, ugly, and weak. Stuck up with pride and miserable, they will be despised by everyone.10
As we unpack this verse from the Buddhist classic Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, we see that, first of all, the karmic principle of “What goes around comes around” is here reformulated as “What goes up must come down.” The high shall be made low; the first shall be last. The proud will sink in the afterlife into “lower realms,” and even in this life will feel inferior, like “servants” of others. Those who take pride in their intellect will see themselves as stupid; those whose arrogance centers on their good looks will regard themselves as ugly; and those vain about their strength will feel weak.11 Having been too proud, one perceives oneself as inadequate intellectually and physically and, in general, will feel unloved by others (“despised by everyone”).
The proud, according to the laws of karma, will become the depressed.
But what’s really interesting and insightful about this passage is that it also states that the proud will remain proud, even after they have been brought low: “Stuck up with pride and miserable,” the text says, pointing not only to the idea that karma tends to replicate itself (one of the effects of pride being a future propensity to continue to feel pride), but also to the fact that one can be proud even while simultaneously feeling miserable, inadequate, and unloved.
Or perhaps it’s like this: it is possible to be proud of feeling miserable, inadequate, and unloved.
• • •
Medical science has not identified any single cause of depression. A whole array of factors, external and internal, is said to be capable of triggering it in any given individual. External causes might include family conflict, interpersonal conflict, bereavement, job loss, major life changes, and drug or alcohol abuse. (Sounds like a description of life itself, doesn’t it?) Internal causes seem a bit more vague: previous negative experiences (e.g., a history of depression), “personality” (e.g., a tendency toward perfectionism), medical illness, and “family disposition” (i.e., bad genes).
As one expert summarizes the situation, “The precise causes of these [depressive] illnesses continue to be a matter of intense research.”12 Decoded, that means, “We really don’t know exactly what causes depression.”
Ancient Indian logic texts distinguish between a “cause” (hetu) and a “condition” (pratyaya). A “cause” is what’s absolutely necessary if there is to be the effect. The cause must be there before the effect will be produced, and if the cause is not there, the effect can never come about. An oak tree cannot grow without an acorn to function as its seed.
But a cause isn’t a cause until it’s activated by the right circumstances. A “condition” acts as a sort of midwife to help the cause give birth to its result. The acorn is the cause of the oak tree, for without it you’ll never get an oak tree. But the acorn needs certain conditions to occur for it to operate as the cause of the oak tree. It has to be planted in the right kind of soil and given water and sunlight. Without the proper conditions, the cause can’t perform its function.
When it comes to the origins and treatment of depression and low self-esteem, we should be careful not to mistake what are just conditions for real causes. The so-called external causes for depression listed above—family or interpersonal conflict, loss of a loved one or job, and so on—can’t really properly be regarded as such. They certainly can act as conditions for enkindling the true cause. But there are plenty of people who suffer through such experiences in life without getting depressed, and depression can arise apart from undergoing such experiences.
And the same is true with respect to the supposedly “internal causes.” It’s not necessary to have had previous negative experiences or some personality defect or a medical illness or a particular genetic disposition in order to succumb to depression.
Here, as in so many other areas of modern, secular life, is where we must push what I call the “Why, Daddy?” question. You know, like that little kid who won’t quit asking Daddy or Mommy “Why? . . . Why? . . . Yeah, but why?” As adults, we should ask similar questions of our secular experts:
Why am I so depressed, Doctor?
Well, you just lost your job.
But my friends at work were also laid off, and they didn’t get depressed like me. Why am I depressed?
You lost your job, plus you have a genetic predisposition to depression.
Yeah, that’s true, but my brother’s been through all kinds of terrible experiences in life, and he’s never been depressed! And anyway, how come my family has depression genes when other families don’t? Why me, Doctor? Why?
And just like the little kid who keeps asking “Why, Daddy?” eventually we get the same answer from the doctor that we give to our inquisitive four-year-old children:
Just because. No reason. It’s random. Bad luck.
In my case, it wasn’t that I lost a job, but rather that I got one that seemed to set off my own depression. For twelve years, throughout college and graduate school, I had been told over and over by my professors that I probably wouldn’t get a teaching position in my unmarketable, specialized field. Comparative religion with an emphasis on the religions of ancient India wasn’t exactly a lucrative field of study with a huge demand that needed filling.
And sure enough, when I finished my studies and went looking for a job in my field, there weren’t many openings. And there were lots and lots of brilliant, well-trained applicants for each one of the very few available positions.
In the year when I was up for employment, I not only landed one of the few jobs advertised, I got the very best of them—a plum position in the Ivy League. And within four months, I was checked into a local psychiatric ward and put on twenty-four-hour suicide watch.
Getting the great job obviously was not what caused my depression, but none of the other possibilities I explored with my therapist seemed to sufficiently explain things, either: the difficult relationship with my father, past traumas that had been left unexamined, an “imposter syndrome” that made me afraid I’d be found out to be a sham. No one of these, nor any of the other possibilities that modern therapy could come up with, rose to “acorn” status; they were all just conditions (“soil,” “sunlight,” “water”) that inexplicably came together to precipitate a cause that was yet to be identified.
A depressed person feels like a “real nobody,” but, if there is to be a surefire cure for the malady, we should first identify the true source of the ailment.
• • •
It is within the spiritual traditions that we must look for the real causes of our experiences. Religions offer answers to the “Why, Daddy?” questions of life. But if we are to be empowered to really help ourselves, we cannot even here remain satisfied with answers that render us impotent victims. Agreeing to religious explanations like “God’s inscrutable will” doesn’t get us any further than secular, scientific answers like “genetic predisposition.” Both of them end up sounding like “Too bad! Just your tough luck!” and leave us in the same powerless and helpless place.
Fortunately, there are other explanations for what causes depression and low self-esteem. And knowing them gives us power: if we no longer create the cause, the effect will arise no more. But in order to gain the power, we have to accept the responsibility.
The truth of the matter is that we experience depression and low self-esteem because of specific kinds of actions we’ve done in the past. What goes around really does come around. We do in fact reap what we sow, and this is an absolute truism in every authentic spiritual path: good acts bring pleasant experiences; bad acts bring undesirable consequences.
While the ancient texts offer several candidates for the karmic cause of depression—including anger (animosity toward others boomerangs into hatred of the self) and “idle speech” (talking trash comes back at us as the feeling that we are trash)—there’s one that’s by far the most glaring: pride. It serves as the cause and then repositions itself as the self-centered perpetuator of our self-esteem problems.
It seems paradoxical only because of our fundamental confusion and ignorance: low self-esteem is the consequence of high self-regard. And what’s even less apparent is the fact that identifying oneself as a “depressed person” is just another way, albeit a sad and twisted one, to take pride in being somebody special.
Among the many nasty aspects of pride is the fact that it is good at concealing itself from those of us who have it (and, let’s be honest, we all have some version of it). “There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular,” observes C. S. Lewis, “and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves.”13 Pride can pretend it’s not there, when really it has just relocated itself.
And so it is that pride and overweening self-regard can even express themselves through self-deprecation. The individual self, in its desperate attempt to be somebody, can stake its claim to be somebody special because it feels so worthless—and so it asserts its special status in just that way, as a “depressed person.”
As Eckhart Tolle has written, “If you take away one kind of identification, the ego will quickly find another. It ultimately doesn’t mind what it identifies with as long as it has an identity.”14 The “somebody self,” if unable or unwilling to find confirmation in anything else, will go looking for validation in its own suffering. Physical and psychological disabilities can, as easily as anything else, become the individual’s defining quality:
You can just as easily identify with a “problematic” body and make the body’s imperfection, illness, or disability into your identity. You may then think and speak of yourself as a “sufferer” of this or that chronic illness or disability. . . . You then unconsciously cling to the illness because it has become the most important part of who you perceive yourself to be. . . . Once the ego has found an identity, it does not want to let go.15
It may seem surprising to those who have never suffered from depression to learn that nobody thinks of themselves more than somebody who is depressed. But even those who have only experienced “a bad day” or just “a little case of the blues” will recognize the phenomenon: when you’re feeling down, you aren’t interested in much else besides how down you feel.
Depression is a caricature of the main cause of depression. Depression is ultimately caused by thinking about oneself all the time, and is experienced as the inability to think about anyone other than oneself.
Mr. Karma (who is no one other than your own conscience and consciousness) has a sort of sick sense of humor. He notices when we’re constantly preoccupied with ourselves—What about me? What about me?—and says, “OK. You want to focus on yourself all the time? Try this!” We get depressed, unable to get out of our own heads and stop the repetitive, broken record of how bad we feel.
And then, performing another trick from its vast repertoire, the “somebody self” identifies with this “depressed person” it has fabricated. We are so desperate to be somebody that we’re willing to stick our heads into even this kind of carnival cutout: If I can’t be a good enough anybody else, at least I can be somebody as a nobody. The ego tries to solve the problem of low self-esteem by assuming the role of “somebody with low self-esteem.”
And tragically, this designation of the self as “a depressed self”—now more self-centered than ever and taking perverse pride in its self-defining misery—re-creates the very cause that brought about this dismal state of affairs in the first place.
Depression is a downward cycle, in more ways than one.
• • •
The culture of narcissism that encourages rampant self-obsession and self-congratulatory pride has had unfavorable ramifications when it comes to the pursuit of true happiness. The precipitous rise in depression and the steep plunge in self-esteem can be directly correlated to living in a society where the unconstrained preoccupation with the self has taken on pathological dimensions.
While we’ve drawn the karmic correlations between, on one hand, egotism and pride, and on the other hand the calamitous fall into the bleakness of depressed self-absorption, you don’t really even have to accept karma to perceive the relationship between the two. Selfishness doesn’t make us feel better about ourselves, which we know if we check in on our own experience. And in fact it makes us feel much worse, depressingly so.
The karmic causes of depression—anger; idle speech, either in the form of self-righteous gossiping about others or making promises that aren’t kept; and the pride, arrogance, and judgmental mindset that cause us to place ourselves above others—these are all expressions of a more fundamental root problem: self-centeredness. And correspondingly, the real causes of happiness (and the cures for depression) will all orbit around the same foundational source: selflessness and altruistic concern for our fellow human beings.
In the next chapter, we’ll see that the usual forms of self-absorption are in fact based on a grand illusion. While in our culture of narcissism we invest so much time and effort in appeasing the needs of a divinized, egoistic self, the status of that deity is insecure—and for very good reason. The “somebody self,” one might say, is in a perpetual identity crisis because it suspects (while at the same time it denies) that it isn’t really real.
When we actually go looking for the self we feel so intuitively is there—it makes such constant demands, after all!—a sneaking suspicion starts to grow that there’s really nobody home. For the self we are so obsessed with and take such pride in has only an apparitional existence, and our obsession turns out to be no more than chasing a shadow.
This is not, however, the nihilistic tragedy we might fear. When we give up looking for the somebody who’s not really there—when we come up empty-handed in our futile search for some unchanging and all-controlling entity amidst our many and variegated personae and appearances—we begin to realize that the nobody we’re left with isn’t just a big nothing.
Wising up about the real nature of the “somebody self” makes it possible for us to become a happier somebody. It’s through accessing the infinite potentiality of being nobody that we can really begin to help and improve ourselves.
Make a list of personal traits that you are proud of—your looks or physical abilities, acquired skills, natural gifts, accomplishments, whatever. This is not the time to be falsely humble. We’re all proud of something about ourselves.
First off, consider whether these traits are permanent and will always be with you. Do you really suppose that you will always be beautiful, strong, clever, adept, successful, or famous? How will you feel when what you are proud of is diminished or lost altogether due to the ravages of time and changing circumstances?
Second, check to see whether the pride you take in these characteristics is only in relation to others who don’t have them or who have only lesser versions of them. Isn’t it always the case that what you’re proud of depends on feelings of superiority to others?
Finally, reflect on the fact that there are others who definitely have more or better versions of these traits. Be more realistic about your place in life: are you really the most talented, beautiful, rich, skilled, accomplished, or intelligent? Get the fish out of the small pond, at least theoretically, and realize your true place in whatever hierarchy you’ve bought into!
I. The five aggregates that comprise the basis for our sense of self are the physical body, the ability to discriminate, consciousness, feelings, and mental imprints.