Be Nobody (11 page)

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.

Action Plan: Managing Pride

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!