a person.
Very few of these ideas we can rightly hold with absolute certainty. We can be absolutely certain of the feelings we are experiencing in the here and now - provided we do not lie to ourselves. We can be sure that right now we are angry or right now we are sad, but if we feel that these emotions are unacceptable we can tell ourselves that we feel frightened when actually we are angry, or we can deny our sadness and pretend to ourselves and others that we are happy.
Doing this, we lose the only absolute certainty we can ever have. All the other ideas we have about what happened in our past and what will happen in our future, what the world is like, what other people think and feel, and what they do when we cannot see them, are guesses, theories about what is going on.
To live safely in the world we have to try to construct theories which represent a reasonably accurate picture of what is actually going on. Every time you drive a car or cross a busy street you have to form a reasonably accurate theory about the traffic on the road, or else you are likely to come to grief. When we daydream we can form the most fantastical theories, but if we want to turn our daydreams into reality we have to take account of what actually goes on in our world.
When our meaning structure is a reasonably accurate picture of what is actually happening, we feel secure. As soon as we discover that a part of our meaning structure is not reflecting sufficiently accurately what is going on, we feel anxious. Sometimes we can delineate precisely which bit of what is going on we could be wrong about. We can be anxious that we have not predicted accurately enough what questions will be on our forthcoming exam paper, or whether the people we are about to meet will like us. Sometimes we cannot name a reason for our anxiety because we suspect that some disaster is about to befall us but we do not know what it will be. Amplified, this kind of anxiety becomes angst or dread. When a great disaster does befall us and everything in our life becomes uncertain, we feel terror.
Whether anxiety, angst, dread or terror, all these states of fear are states of uncertainty, and uncertainty is what we cannot bear. Uncertain, we feel helpless, a prey to forces we cannot control. We want to be secure and in control.
Yet in fact there is very little over which we do have control. We can work hard and take sensible care of the money we earn, but we have no control over the worldwide financial forces which, amongst other things, determine exchange and interest rates and levels of employment.7 We can eat sensible food and exercise regularly, but our body can still betray us. We can try in all kinds of different ways to get other people to behave as we want them to behave, but they will still fail to meet our expectations. We can try to see ourselves and our world as clearly and accurately as possible, and yet we will still get it wrong. Things are rarely as they appear to be.
The only way to cope with all this uncertainty is to accept that it is so. This is the ancient wisdom of Lao Tzu and Buddha. Lao Tzu advised:
True mastery can be gained
By letting things go their own way.
It can’t be gained by interfering.8
Suffering, Buddha taught, was our attempt to make something permanent in a world where nothing remains the same. Such wisdom can be hard to acquire when we are intent on surviving as a person - that is, on keeping our meaning structure whole.
If we understand that our sense of being a person is a meaning structure made up of ideas, then when events surprise us we know that we have to go through what can be a painful, unsettling period until our meaning structure can reorganise itself in a way more in keeping with what is actually going on. If we do not understand that we are our meaning structure, then when the unexpected happens we feel ourselves falling apart and are terrified lest we be annihilated as a person. Not understanding, we build up all kinds of defences to hold ourselves together when we feel ourselves in danger of falling apart.
The tool we use in building these defences is a very cunning one and represents one of the functions of the meaning structure. It is the tool of pride. How pride functions has interested me for quite a long time.
By the late seventies, through listening carefully to what depressed people were telling me, I realised that the essence of depression was the sense of being alone in some kind of prison where the walls were as impenetrable as they were invisible. I could see that the depressed person had certain attitudes or beliefs which served to cut him or her off from other people and from everything that makes life worth living. These attitudes and beliefs preceded the person’s depression, and they provided the person with all the building blocks necessary to build the prison of depression. I wrote about this in my first book, which is now called Choosing Not Losing.9 I came to realize that the many and various beliefs which depressed people held could be summarised as six attitudes which, if held as absolute, unquestionable truths, would create the prison of depression. These beliefs were:
1 No matter how good and nice I appear to be, I am really bad, evil, valueless, unacceptable to myself and other people.
2 Other people are such that I must fear, hate and envy them.
3 Life is terrible and death is worse.
4 Only bad things have happened to me in the past and only bad things will happen to me in the future.
5 It is wrong to get angry.
6 I must never forgive anyone, least of all myself.10
These are not bizarre, idiosyncratic beliefs but are held at least in part by many members of every society, and are often taught by parents to children. They are pessimistic beliefs, but not unreasonable because life is far from easy. However, it seemed to me at first that it could be possible to help a depressed person moderate these beliefs, to be less harsh on themselves and to find it easier to take other people on trust. However, this proved not to be the case. Depressed people, I found, even though they were suffering dreadfully, resisted any suggestion that they might change their beliefs because such a change meant going from certainty to uncertainty. Indeed, they took pride in these beliefs, even though they caused them to suffer. I wrote:
But you want absolute certainty and you have too much pride to admit that you could be wrong. You take pride in seeing yourself as essentially bad; you take pride in not loving and accepting other people; pride in the starkness and harshness of your philosophy of life; pride in the sorrows of your past and the blackness of your future; pride in recognizing the evil of anger; pride in not forgiving; pride in your humility; pride in your high standards; pride in your sensitivity; pride in your refusal to lose face by being rejected; pride in your pessimism; pride in your martyrdom; pride in your suffering.
Pride, so Christian theology teaches, is the deadliest of the seven sins since it prevents the person from recognizing his sins and repenting and reforming. Sin or not, it is pride that keeps you locked in the prison of depression. It is pride that prevents you from changing and finding your way out of the prison.11
It is not just depressed people who possess a pride that prevents them from changing. All of us, to some greater or lesser extent, allow pride to prevent us from changing. To change in some particular way or other would put our sense of being the person that we want to be at risk. We hang on to political or religious beliefs which are clearly not in our interests, or we think of ourselves fondly as being a great singer or a great golfer even though there is much evidence to show that we are not. Moreover, the world is full of people who would rather be right than happy. It is this particular preference which creates most of the suffering in the world, both the suffering we inflict on other people and the suffering we inflict on ourselves.
This became the subject of my book Wanting Everything,12 and here I returned to the question of pride. I described the pride that some people take in their high standards. Anything less than perfection is not acceptable to