www.radicaluncertainty.com

Author: Nicholas Williams

THE ‘HEROIC TASK’ OF INTEGRATING DEPRESSION

In our culture we do not value pain. Civilization consists not only of the management of our external world or environment, but also the management of our internal world of perceptions, feelings and thoughts. Management of ‘inner reality’ means that we don’t permit those elements which we don’t think are useful, i.e. those regions of inner experience that don’t have a place within our scheme of things. Our ideas about pain are a bit inconsistent: we see that physical pain has an important ‘warning’ function, but we don’t apply this idea so much to mental pain and distress. For example, if I pick up a hot poker the pain will make me drop it straight away - the pain is not nice, but it saves me from suffering any serious long-term damage to my hand. Pain stops us in our tracks before we can go too far. Pain lets me know that something is wrong. Why are we so sure that mental pain does not have a similar ‘helpful’ function?

If I have been deeply depressed for a long time and you come along and suggest that my suffering is a useful sort of a thing, I am probably not going to be particularly impressed with your input to the situation. I might be angry at your arrogance and insensitivity, or, equally possibly, I might turn the anger inwards towards myself and agree that I deserve the suffering of depression because I am such a rotten person. Certainly the idea that depression means I have gone ‘wrong’ in my life somehow, and need ‘correcting’, tends to sound punishing; it sounds like ‘victim-blaming’. Victim blaming generally happens to some degree in cases of depression anyway, because everyone who knows the depressed person tends, after a while, to secretly think that the person is selfish and ought to snap ought of it. This has been demonstrated by studies of people suffering from what is is called chronic-pain syndrome where there is ongoing, often very severe pain with no apparent cause. In the cases that were studied, all the people around the sufferer (friends, partners, doctors) eventually come to suspect that the person concerned is malingering - basically the perception is that they have no right to keep up all this business because no one can see what is wrong. If the person had cancer, it would be different. Clearly, this is a very similar situation to depression, and if there is any implication that I, as a depressed person, ought to ‘cop on to myself’ and ‘pull myself out of it’, then this is not at all helpful because it just increases the guilt, and there is more than enough guilt there anyway!

To say that I, as a depressed person, am somehow to blame for my depression, is not at all the same as saying that the depression is a significant process for me to go through, so that it is not just a totally meaningless experience. Our current medical models of depression tend to treat it as a disease process, as a species of ‘brain-malfunction’. This makes us feel good in one way, because if it is simply a disease then I have no responsibility whatsover and I can leave it for the experts to sort out. This is in fact what we are encouraged to do - passively hand over our depression to those qualified to deal with it. Therefore, there is the pay-off of handing over responsibility, and putting all our trust in the impressive edifice of medical science. All short-term pay-offs carry long-term costs, however, and the long-term cost here is that we become absurdly alienated from our own experience - we don’t integrate our experience (i.e. take it on board and change as a result), we split-it off, and so thwart the whole growth process. No one ever grew as a result of handing over responsibility! In addition to being stuck in our depression (and possibly periodically repressing it), we are left, in the end, in the ghastly position of having an experience that no one, including myself, is willing to accept or look at. This is suffering that does not have a witness, and suffering when there is no one to witness it, goes nowhere. What we have then is pain that really is meaningless, because it is not allowed to have a meaning. Instead of my pain being allowed to speak for itself, which it certainly will do if I let it, I have given the medical ‘experts’ the right to speak on behalf of my pain - as if anyone else could ever know what my pain is saying!

Therefore, we are not talking about ‘blaming’ me for being depressed, but respecting the depression, which implicitly means respecting the depressed person too. It is a very hard experience that I have to go through, to be sure, but it is not meaningless. All experiences have to be respected, they are all ‘adventures of the spirit’. The human spirit, contrary to current belief, is not diminished by hardship and adversity - on the contrary, this is when its hidden resources can come to the surface. What really does damage the human spirit is when we deny it this adventure, when we attempt to restrict it to ‘socially-validated’ experiences, i.e. regions of experience that are regarded as ‘normal’. Although we have said that present-day culture tends to deny the meaning and necessity of pain, there have always been voices expressing the opposite point of view. Thus, psychiatrist and psychotherapist M. Scott Peck (1978, p 72-4) has this to say on the subject of depression:

....I mentioned that during the process of giving up my desire to always win I was depressed. This is because the feeling associated with giving up something loved - or at least something that is a part of ourselves and familiar - is depression. Since mentally healthy human beings must grow, and since giving up or loss of the old self is an integral part of the process of mental and spiritual growth, depression is a normal and basically healthy phenomenon. It becomes abnormal or unhealthy only when something interferes with the giving up process, with the result that the depression is prolonged and cannot be resolved by completion of the process.

A leading reason for people to think about seeking psychiatric attention is depression. In other words, patients are already involved in a giving-up, or growth, process before considering psychotherapy, and it is the symptoms of this growth process that impel them toward the therapist’s office. The therapist’s job, therefore, is to help the patient complete a growth process that he or she has already begun. This is not to say that patients are often aware of what is happening to them. To the contrary, they frequently desire only relief from the symptoms of their depression ‘so that things can be as they used to be’. They do not know that things can no longer be ‘the way they used to be’. But the unconscious knows. It is precisely because the unconscious in its wisdom knows that ‘the way things used to be’ is no longer tenable or constructive that the process of growing and giving up is begun on an unconscious level and depression is experienced. As likely as not the patient will report, ‘I have no idea why I’m depressed’ or will ascribe the depression to irrelevant factors. Since patients are not yet consciously willing or ready to recognise that the ‘old self’ and ‘the way things used to be’ are outdated, they are not aware that their depression is signalling that major change is required for successful and evolutionary adaptation. .......

Of course, even if I do accept that I need to change or grow, that doesn’t tell me what I have to do. What is more, if you did tell me ‘what to do’ then that wouldn’t faciliate growth on my part but dependence and loss of autonomy. If I try to emulate you, then that isn’t growth but ‘copying’ - what you tell me might have been true for you when you learned it, but I have to find my own path, rather than following yours. You can support me, but you cannot advise me. However, given this central difficulty (the impossibility of giving advice without disempowering the person you are giving it to) it is possible to provide a helpful theoretical framework. That framework is provided by something which we will call the ‘The Pain-Mountain Model’.

THE PAIN-MOUNTAIN

Facing depression is like facing a mountain of pain or suffering. I am standing there, and towering massively in front of me is the equivalent of Mount Everest, its peak reaching up so high that I can’t even see it. All I can see is the awesome outline of the mountain, disappearing up into the clouds. This mountain is making a demand on me, albeit an ‘impossible demand’. And even though the mere sight of that mountain is enough to let me know, deep down in my bones, that I cannot ever hope to scale it, neither can I back down from the challenge, and make off in a different direction. I cannot refuse the task, because this particular mountain is attached to me and follows me around, so that no matter where I go, it will always be there, overshadowing me. I want to turn my back on it, but the lesson I eventually learn is that the suffering of ignoring the pain mountain is even worse that the suffering of facing it.

We have said that depression can be perceived as mountain of pain that is making an impossible demand on me - this is the way that it looks when we face into it, so that we can see it. Normally, however, we only sense the mountain indirectly and so the idea that there is any way a ‘task’ there for us does not even begin to occur to us. We are too busy either trying to escape the bad feelings, or to analyse them and identify the cause or reason for them. We are still dealing with the mountain of pain, however, the only thing is that we are ‘dealing with it by not dealing with it’. At this stage everything we do is indirectly influenced by the dominating presence of that mountain, but it is just that we prefer to deal with the secondary problems thrown up by our denial of the original problem, because these problems look easier to fix. These secondary problems invite us to forget the bigger issue by getting engaged or preoccupied with them - even if we can’t get anywhere with them this in itself is an advantage because our hidden agenda is not to get anywhere, but to be successfully distracted. All the same, the secondary problems proliferate and ramify, becoming increasingly oppressive until one day we realize that it was the original Pain Mountain all along that we were dealing with. The game is up, and we have to face it once more; we realize that once again we are in that impossible position where we can’t go forward, and we can’t go back. We know that we cannot even dream of conquering that peak, and we also know that there is no running away from it. Seeing this clearly is the first essential stage in the process of ‘integrating depression’.

The Mountain of Pain has two sides: a ‘light side’ and a ‘dark side’. The dark side is the slope which is always in darkness, because the sun-light is blocked out. The fact of the matter is that the mountain is pure suffering, and we are always there, on that mountain. On the dark side of the mountain, however, all the the suffering is of the unconscious variety. Unconscious suffering is when we choose to ignore the true nature of the pain by distracting ourselves and dealing with ‘unreal’ problems and situations instead. The key factor in unconscious suffering is that there is periodically some kind of hope - what keeps me going on the treadmill is the illusion that I am actually doing something positive that is going to get me out of the mess that I am in. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, and I keep on trudging towards it until it evaporates like the mirage it is. Then, after a moment of black despair, I find another hope to chase after. What we are talking about here is classic denial - rather than see that I haven’t got a chance of getting out of my situation, I distract myself with ‘coping mechanisms’ that don’t work in any real sense, but which allow me to ‘hand over responsibility’. I adopt a method or belief that allows me to feel in control, because the illusion of ‘being in control’ keeps the unpalatable truth at bay, which is that I am not in control.

Unconscious suffering is ‘useless suffering’ since it is only postponing the inevitable. Even though I might work very hard on this side of the mountain, it is ‘work that is against myself’ since the more I invest in denial, the more difficult it becomes to face the truth, which I eventually must do. There is, however, no limit to the length of time that I spend on this side of the mountain, dealing with stuff by not dealing with it. I can spend my whole life here, possibly surfacing every now and again into a bit of happiness and peace, but always with the unconscious menace of the mountain there somwhere, exerting its malign influence from the back-ground, waiting in the wings for its chance to come out and destroy my dreams. The Mountain of Pain is not malign really, though, because it is Reality, and Reality, although sometimes terrible and frightening, is not malign. The reason the Mountain exerts an evil influence is because I have ‘split-off’ from the genuine, authentic experience of my depression, rather than integrating it. What ‘splitting-off’ means is that I have turned my back on the dynamic and living truth of my situation, because I didn’t think that I could cope with it. The trouble is that the dynamic or living aspect of my situation continues to be ‘dynamic’, even though I have splt-off from it. The psyche, as psychologist Carl Jung said, is an independent entity - it has a life of its own, independent of our rational manipulation. What happens when I turn my back on this ‘psychic reality’ is that it becomes an implacable enemy, that is the ‘inversion’ that happens when I deny it (or try to deny it). Before, no matter how terrible it was, the manifestion of psychic reality was always a teacher, it was always a force for positive change. Although I may not see it at the time, truth when accepted is always a friend, it is always a blessing. Sometimes we may have to wait a long time to see this, but see it we will, and then we will be thankful for it. When I deny it, and split myself off from it, the action of the psyche appears as an enemy - as a curse rather than a blessing. The principle of conscious life, the very principle of Reality itself, is against me!

Actually, the principle of conscious life is not really against me, but I am against it. What has happened is that I have made Reality into an enemy, by repressing it, and Reality is a terrible enemy to have, because it will always win in the end. Picking a fight with the wrong guy doesn’t come into it! The pain of the dark side of the Pain Mountain is the most horrible type of pain there is because it is pain that cannot teach us. It is pain from which we cannot learn, pain that has no power to change us. Pain on this side of the mountain is characterized by its apparent succeptiblity to control, which is to say, its apparent lack of ‘inevitability’: It always seems to offer us some sort of purchse on it, some sort of a way or angle that we can get on it in order to beat it, or lessen it. Because of this, we are constantly engaged in the attempt to control it (and/or ‘reverse’ it so it becomes pleasure). Unconscious suffering has as much to do with chasing pleasure as it does to fleeing pain, and therefore we can equally well say that we are ‘unconscious’ when we belive that happiness is succeptible to control. In the state of psychological unconsciousness, pain looks like something we can run away from, and happiness looks like something we can ‘catch’.

The moment we pass over from the dark side of the mountain to the light side is when we suddenly see through the game of control. Control, in the psychic realm (which is to say inside our own minds) is a game because it involves seeing the ‘plus’ side and the ‘minus’ side of a situation as being somehow separate or unrelated. What this means is that I think I can obtain an advantage, without incurring immediately a counter-balancing disadvantage that I will at some point have to pay back. I ignore pay-back time, in other words, because I do not take a wide enough view to see that [+] is always compensated for by [-] a bit further down the line, just as [-] is always compensated for, in time, by [+]. As soon as I really and truly see that all my attempts to escape depression are counterproductive, and that manipulation of the underlying situation is completely impossible, then I have had a crucial change in attitude - I am now facing the inevitable.

ON THE OTHER SIDE OF PAIN......

From this point on I am on the other side of the Pain Mountain, no matter where I was before, I am instantaneously transported over from the realm of unconscious suffering to the realm of conscious suffering. The first thing that I notice is that although the original underlying pain itself has not shifted, my relationship to it has undergone a 180 degree change. It used to be that the pain had dogged me, and haunted me, and oppressed me, so that my whole world had contracted into a sterile and static valley of misery, where all I could see was myself, bleaky surveying my own emptiness. Conscious pain, on the other hand, has a completely different quality to it - it is expansive, refreshing and awe-inspiring in its capacity to show me what lies beyond my old wretched horizons. Unconscious suffering is not connected to reality at all, and as a result it can show me nothing outside my own ‘self-of-denial’. What this means is that I am trapped in the sterile contemplation of ‘the kingdom of the contracted self’; I cannot go beyond this unhappy kingdom because everything that I see automatically relates back to the key concern of ‘me’. Therefore, if I see a happy person, I only see the person inasmuch as that information relates to me and my misery; I see their happiness and contrast it to my own condition, so that what I see only serves to underline and enhance my depression even more. Seeing happiness outside myself doesn’t make me happy, it makes me even more sad, because everything is related back to ‘me’, and if doesn’t help me, then I have no interest - I have no capacity to take pleasure in someone else’s good fortune. Because I am trapped in a bubble of self-reference, I can become aware of nothing except insofar as it impacts me, and yet this ‘me,’ because it is a construct of my narrow way of looking at things, is not really who I am at all. I am stuck in a false self, the ‘I’ of depression, and everything that I experience from this basis of understanding feeds back into that self and makes it seem more real. The pain I experience actually validates the counterfeit self of depression, it traps me further in unreality.

On the other side of the pain mountain, pain doesn’t act to trap me further, but, rather, it liberates me. I feel pain, but I don’t relate this to myself and feel sorry for myself. Instead, the pain is spontaneously related to the reality that is going on outside me - I learn about the inner world of other people through pain and thus compassion is aroused, rather than self-pity. The reason this happens is perfectly straightforward - in reacting to pain (so as to avoid it) I am controlling, and it is impossible to control without fixating upon a fixed view of the world, a fixed frame of reference. Basically, as soon as I start to control I have to assume that I know what is going on. Once I start controlling I immediately get caught up in fixed frame of reference, and then all the information that comes back to me automatically acts to reinforce the validity of that framework. This is why ‘internal controlling’ can be equated to psychological denial: it plunges me instantly into a particular contracted ‘microworld’, and getting to grips with this static version of reality totally pre-occupies me, so I don’t get to see what was there to start off with. Anger is a perfect example of this: when I get angry my world shrinks until it contains nothing apart from those details that have relevance to the anger issue, everything else is excluded. The world I believe in when I am angry doesn’t match the real world at all, and yet I simply can’t see this. What we are essentially talking about, therefore, is a type of mental oversimplification. It is important to realize that I can’t run away from an oversimplified world, or reject it, because my attempt to escape, and my attempt to reject, are both predicated on the logic of same oversimplified world that I am trying to get away from. In other words, my ‘trying’ is based on my understanding of my situation, but my understanding is oversimplified understanding. This is the precisely the dilemma that we are faced with when we try to exit the oversimplified world of depression.

We have explained the idea of ‘getting trapped in a contracted world’, a world that is narrow and unrepresentative of the real world. What we have to look at next is the idea that at the same time we get trapped in a contracted, unrepresentative world, we also get caught up in contracted, unrepresentative ‘self’. Actually, that is just another aspect of the same process - the world I perceive and believe in is oversimplified, and the self I perceive and believe in is also oversimplified. Because everything that happens now has to make sense within the narrow framework of meaning that I have imposed on the world, that means that I also have to make sense within this system of meaning. Therefore, a fixed framework of meaning creates a fixed notion of ‘me’, which is why we say that controlling creates a ‘controller’, and trying creates a ‘trier’, and wanting creates a ‘wanter’. Controlling creates the closed situation of self-reference.

We are now at last in a position to see the glitch that has kept us on the dark-side of the Pain-Mountain: Once I have identified with the static or fixed ‘I’ of controlling, then I am well and truly caught in the trap because it is this false ‘I’ that wants to escape, and yet that ‘I’ can never escape because it is itself is the wanting. Here we have the problem: the ‘me’ that wants to escape can never escape - the ‘me’ that wants to scale the mountain can never succeed in scaling the mountain. This ‘me’ never gets anywhere because it itself is the limitation, and the limitation can never go beyond itself.

THE ‘OPENNING-UP’ PROCESS OF UNIVERSALISATION

Carl Jung says that what happens when our relationship to suffering changes in this way is that we go from experiencing everything from a particular viewpoint, so that it only makes sense in relation to our own story, to experiencing the drama of our life in terms in its universal aspect, so that it makes sense in a wider (and, in a way, ‘timeless’) context. No longer is it my suffering, but Suffering in general. When it is merely my suffering, all it can do is reinforce and reiterate the idea of the isolated self that is undergoing the suffering. When asked “Who is suffering?” I have to reply that it is me suffering, it is me that is having to endure this pain... The more it hurts, the more I am reminded of ‘me’! Therefore my suffering separates me from life, because I imagine that the pain I am undergoing is somehow special, and that everyone else doesn’t have to experience anything quite like it. My pain is what makes me different from everyone else - I contrast myself to ‘the others’ who have no pain.

As we have said, suffering which I am struggling to avoid crystallizes a sufferer, a ‘self-of-suffering’. Suffering which is unconditionally accepted, on the other hand, does not crystallize a self (a particular centre) because there is no trying involved, because there is no controlling going on. Instead of closed pain where there is a fixed way of looking at everything, there is an open situation - an continuously evolving viewpoint has arisen. Open pain means a situation without a particular center - there is no subject and no object, only process. The good thing about process is of course that it is always moving on, always going somewhere; process is not trapped, stale energy. When my suffering has become universal it is not just me that suffers, but I suffer with the world, or the world suffers with me, and so suffering unites me with life, and takes me out of my isolated frame of reference. My pain is what makes me the same as evryone else; I don’t contrast my difficult situation with that of others, but relate to them through it. Therefore, the more it hurts, the less I am reminded of myself!

It is in this sense that the pain becomes ‘heroic’ - an ‘adventure of the spirit’ - for to undergo it is to have the courage to partake in the universal experience of life, to see what is going out there. This result of this is to kindle the force of compassion, instead of feeding the ‘distorted compassion’ of self-pity. Self-pity is insatiable, like a hole that sucks everything into, just as compassion is unquenchable, remaining pure and undeterred no matter how grim the circumstances might be. For this reason we can see that compassion (which includes compassion for oneself) is a reversal of self-pity.

IDENTIFYING WITH A FALSE SENSE OF SELF

All of this business about ‘identifying with a false self’, and then going on to get trapped in the self, and suffering because of that loss of freedom, tends to sound very peculiar to us. This is because we have a very unreflective attitude towards the notion of self. As Jung says, we think we know all about ourselves, whereas in fact all we know about is our convenient description of who we are. Of course I know all about my description of myself - it is my description, after all! The almost suffocating sense of familiarity is due to the fact it was me that was responsible for creating the description, but, obviously enough, this bland unreflective sense of familiarity is not at all the same thing as true self-knowledge, which never reveals what we expected. We tend very much to react with surprise if someone asks if we really know who we are. “Of course I know who I am - I’m ‘me’, who else would I be....” I say, laughing at the stupidity of the question.

Things are not nearly so simple as this, however. If I think I know who I am, then I couldn’t be more wrong. Actually, the Self is not a static ‘thing’ at all, which means that it can never be described. It is not a fixed pattern, but a process, an ongoing movement - a movement from an unknown source to an unknown destination. Another way to say this is to say that the Self is that which is always moving beyond itself. This necessarily means that the Self is outside of our mental map, which is always a static picture of a moving process. Our beliefs and ideas about who we are are like snap-shots, like frozen moments that have lost their relevance because they have been removed out of their proper ‘dynamic’ context. It is of course okay to take snap-shots, to form mental pictures about what is going on - the only thing is that if we identify exclusively with the static picture we end up in the ridiculous situation of being opposed to the dynamic aspect of reality. If we invest too much importance in the fixed view, so as to say that “This description must be the only true way to look at things”, then automatically this means that we have to deny all the other ways of picturing what is going on (i.e. we have to repress them) and this in turn means that we have made an enemy of reality, because reality, as the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said is flux, or ‘change’.
Therefore, to be really definite and say “This is me”, is asking for trouble, because straightaway we have put ourselves in the position of having to defend ourselves from the counter-proposition which was created at the same time, which is the exact opposite of the one we are clinging on to. This counterproposition is the negation of the original proposition - it is born simultaneously with it, because a [minus] is always born at the same time as a [plus]. So if I say “God exists” I have automatically brought into being the possibility that God doesn’t exist, because if there wasn’t that negative possibility there somewhere, then why would I have bother insisting on the positive in the first place? Actually, Reality is altogether independent of our assertions and denials, it doesn’t give a damn for them because it doesn’t need to prove itself. It isn’t insecure, unlike us!

Just how important my ‘fixed idea of myself’ really is becomes more obvious when we make the connection between my rational description of myself, and what is sometimes referred to as the ‘mask of personality’, or the persona. My personality, in this specific sense of the word, is a fixed or predictable pattern of behaviours, attitudes, beliefs, opinions, values, habits, skills, social roles, etc which I use to interact within my physical and social environment. It is useful as a tool is useful, because it does a specific job - one of its most important functions is to allow us to operate smoothly and be accepted within the structure of society. As we have already said, social psychologists have suggested that the ‘mask of personality’ (which corresponds to our repertory of interpersonal games) serves the function of shielding us from intimacy, i.e. it enables us to keep our distance. When we get ‘stuck’ in our persona, however, this distancing function does us no favours at all because it is no good at all to be permanently distant, permanently safe in our comfortable opinions, permanently closed to life’s challenge. I am not the mask after all, I am the one who chooses sometimes to hide behind the mask.

HAPPINESS

Possibly the best way to show that ‘who I am’ isn’t the ‘me’ that I usually think I am is to consider happiness. There is a curious fact about happiness, and that is when I am truly happy, I forget about myself. In happiness the ‘me’ dissapears without a trace, the mask is discarded, and goes tumbling away unnoticed. In that moment of happiness, I am exposed, vulnerable, unguarded - I have ceased my perennial pursuit of ‘self-monitering’ which is so second nature to me that I don’t even know that I am doing it half the time. Since I am not defending myself, trying to ‘be myself’, I am not my usual self at all, because my usual self is the ‘self-of-defending’, the ‘self-of-trying’, the ‘self-of-the-conceptual-mind’. Naturally enough, the only time I can truly be myself is when I am not trying to be anything in particular, when I am not ‘minding’ myself, when I am relaxed enough to let myself be what it was all along - undefined and free. ‘Me’ is an obstacle to happiness, it is an unnecessary embellishment that gets in the way of the process.

Another way to explain this is to say that happiness is when we lose our self-consciousness. Normally we are separate from our experiencing of life, we are somewhere in the background, cautiously (or obsessively) monitoring what is going. We are not in it, we are outside it. The reason we are removed from the direct perception of, and participation in, what is going on around us is that we want to watch ourselves perceiving and participating. We want to monitor the process so that we can regulate it, keep it under control. And when I notice that I am happy, I tend to bring ‘myself’ back into it, I feel concerned that I should introduce the self-monitering business again - I am tempted to ‘check up’ on myself, and so I do. This concern to check up on myself is the archetypal spanner in the works, it is the serpent in the Garden of Eden, the root cause of our ‘expulsion from paradise’.

INTRINSIC VERSUS EXTRINSIC INTEGRITY

What we have here is a glitch that stops us attaining or holding onto happiness when we are happy, and stops us avoiding or escaping sadness when we are depressed. This glitch can be traced back to a fundamental question of sincerity, which in its turn comes down to the question “Who is it that wants to obtain happiness, or escape misery?” This question gets right to the very heart of the whole problem, and it can be answered in terms of intrinsic versus extrinsic integrity. Happiness, we might say, comes about as a manifestation of inner freedom (or ‘letting go’) which means basically that we allow things to be the way they already are. This is an act of sincerity (or integrity) - it is not something we do for an ulterior motive of some sort, it is something we unconditionally allow, because ‘the truth has to come out’. If there is a motivation or agenda there in the background somewhere, then clearly all my acts are insincere. For example, if I am willing to be your friend just so long as I am going to benefit in some way from it, then this is an insincere friendship. Being a true friend means being unconditional, it means that I am your friend no matter what, through thick and thin, whether I benefit or not. If I am your friend only when it suits me, then I am not your friend at all - I am fundamentally lacking in integrity. Actually, I do have a sort of integrity, which is to say, my integrity to my hidden agenda, to my ‘ulterior motive’. Having integrity with respect to my hidden agenda is extrinsic integrity - it means that I am going to do whatever is necessary to maintain the aims of the agenda. Everything else, when it comes right down to it, is secondary. Everything else can go to hell, basically, because that is not where my true allegiance lies.

Intrinsic integrity is where I have allegiance to the truth, no matter how much it hurts. It doesn’t matter what the truth turns out to be, because it is not a question of being biased to finding out that one thing is true rather than another thing. It is a question of ‘the truth, at any cost’. Whereas extrinsic integrity comes down to an over-riding need to have everything work out the way I want it to (which is basically an allegiance to my ideas, or prejudices), intrinsic integrity means allowing things to be the way they actually are, whether I like it or not. There is nothing that needs to be maintained or protected, because only fictions need to be maintained and protected, not the truth. Thats what truth means, it is what actually is - the ‘unconditioned reality’, reality when it hasn’t been messed about with, or interfered with, by us.

So, we have said that the question “Who is it that wants to obtain happiness / escape misery?” comes down to intrinsic versus extrinsic integrity, and when it comes right down to it the ‘me’ that wants to be happy is in fact nothing other than the static framework of meaning within which that agenda is constructed - the framework with which I have identified. In other words, if my ultimate allegiance is to this agenda, then I am that agenda. The ‘me’ that wants not to be depressed is the very same ‘me’, and this is the ‘me’ that we have been referring to as the ‘false self’. As long as my ultimate allegiance is to a hidden agenda, rather than to ‘truth at any cost’, then everything I do is insincere - it is insincere because everything I think and say and do is in the service of this hidden agenda. The origin of my activity is therefore the false self, and not me at all. The true ‘I’ is not there at all, because the true ‘I’ is essentially the same thing as ‘truth at any cost’. This is another way of saying that ‘who I really am’ is an open situation - I can define the false ‘I’, but I cannot define the true ‘I’, because the truth is beyond definition, I can hold on to my persona, my ego, but I cannot hold on to my essence.

We can sum up the main point that comes out of this discussion in terms of the ‘futility of trying’. The struggle on the dark side of the Pain Mountain is futile because everything was coming from the wrong ‘I’, it was the false self who was trying to get somewhere. The false or imaginary self was trying to find freedom, but for that self there can never be any freedom, for the simple reason that freedom is Truth, and falsehood can only preserve itself by blocking out the Truth.

WHO IS IT THAT ATTAINS ‘THE PEACE THAT PASSETH UNDERSTANDING’?

The motivation of the false ‘I’ is what we have been calling extrinsic integrity, i.e. allegiance to a static picture of reality, rather than to reality itself, which is a dynamic pattern, a pattern which is always in the process of transcending itself (i.e. going beyond its limited forms of manifestation). All goal-orientated activity (which is to say all attempts to control and perpetuate the conditions of the false self so there is no change in the underlying situation) only results in the superficial appearance of change. We have said that the key to transition from the dark side to the light side of the Mountain (from extrinsic to intrinsic integrity) is when I see beyond any shadow of a doubt that my suffering is, ultimately, not amenable to control, and that all attempts to manipulate my situation are counterproductive - offering advantage only in my imagination. The true meaning of my situation cannot be controlled or imposed, it can only be unconditionally allowed; I cannot manipulate it, but I can learn from it. In other words, I do not change the truth, the truth changes me.

Another way of approaching this would be to say that the great difficulty in making the transition from unconscious to conscious suffering lies in our attachment to goals. A goal necessarily implies an agent who obtains that goal through successful manipulation, i.e. through control. This effective causal agent, the ‘I’ of controlling, can never attain the ‘goal’ of freedom, because it is not possible to control one’s way to freedom. Freedom is not a goal, it is not a static idea - rather, it is a ‘letting go’ of ideas, a ‘letting go’ of the static framework. The need to control is the opposite to freedom, which, as we have said, happens only as a result of the unconditional acceptance of whatever is going to happen. Therefore, the moment when I cross over from one side of the Pain Mountain to the other, is the moment when I attain the non-goal of freedom, and this is also the moment when there is no longer a static ‘me’ to receive that blessing. That old familiar ‘me’ has gone, and, what is more, I realize that it never actually existed in the first place. In his discussion of Kabalistic symbology, psychologist David Fontana (1992, p 174) quotes from Isreal Regardie’s book The Tree of Life: “Arrived at the Crown, the Magician is no more.” The Crown is the top-most level of the Tree of Life, and the Magician (in the Western Kabbalistic tradition) is the person who sets out to attain this level. At the climax of this voyage of adventure and discovery, therefore, the voyager discovers that he or she was not who they had originally taken themselves to be at all. The person who set out on the journey was not the person who arrived.

‘MINI-MOUNTAINS’

It is important to realize that everything we have said about the towering Mountain of Pain that is major depression, also holds good on a smaller scale. During the course of the day every one of us will encounter numerous little waves of depression (or anger, anxiety, etc) that wash over us. Each one of these is a ‘mini-mountain’ and each one makes a demand upon our intrinsic integrity: do we integrate it, and learn from it, or do we split it off, and pretend that it never happened? Each little wave of negativity is a test, and if we fail to rise to that test the one thing that we can be sure of is that it will be back, stronger and darker than ever. Because we are sold on the idea of being in control (which is extrinsic integrity), we automatically try to dodge the unpleasant feeling that comes along. ‘Automatically’ means that we avoid without even knowing that we are avoiding, so the first thing to do is learn to watch ourselves and notice how we react to negativity. One of the first things we learn is that there is a lot more ‘undercover’ avoiding going on than we would ever have dreamed of. All of this avoiding is caused by unacknowledged fear, and so self-observation also means facing our fear - it doesn’t mean doing anything about that fear because the commitment is to the truth, to honesty above everything else. I don’t have to try to be a better person, I just have to allow myself to be what I really am, to see myself as I really am. Whatever that might turn out to be.

Normally, I do not witness the drama that is my life, my attention is elsewhere, focussing on the story of what I would like to believe is happening, and who I would like to believe I am. When my life is not witnessed, it is unlived - it is not integrated, it never gets to happen, and as John Bennett (1960) has observed, to deny the true meaning of one’s experience is to condemn oneself to a living death. This is what happens when I deny the meaning of my depression, when I fail to integrate it, as I am usually encouraged by those around me to do. They want to ignore it, and pretend it isn’t happening, and so do I. We would all prefer that it wasn’t happening, and so we all conspire to say that it is just a meaningless illness-episode, a manifestation of some sort of ‘disease process’ that can be managed for me by experts who ‘know all about it’. Rather than fall in with this collusion, however, it is up to us to respect our own pain, and stay with ourselves in our depression. This means having compassion for ourselves, and this, as we have said, is not at all the same as feeling self-pity. Pity is when I am outside you, looking in at you from a safe, external vantage point, and thinking to myself “Isn’t that terrible!” The hidden implication here is always “Thank God it isn’t me.....” This hidden implication is a function of the fact that I am fundamentally separate to you - my pity reminds me that it is you who have the problem, not me! I hold onto the knowledge that after I have appeased my conscience and spent a bit of time with you, I can turn around and go out of the door.

Compassion, on the other hand, means “feeling with” - I feel your pain as if it were my pain, there is no distancing, no ‘looking in’. Compassion means really being there with someone, being unguarded, totally vulnerable. We are not separate - it is no longer ‘only your experience and not mine’. Thus, when I am feeling self-pity this means that I am splitting-off from myself, I am not ‘in it’, I am not with feeling with myself. This sounds absurd, how can I feel the deep saddness of depression, and yet not feel ‘with’ myself? The answer is that I have split off the experience, I have refused it, I have decided somewhere along the line that it wasn’t worth it. So we have the absurd situation where I have a feeling, but I am at the same time removed from that feeling. Of course, I still feel terrible, but instead of the original pain, what I am experiencing is the pain of my reaction to the original pain, i.e. secondary pain. In terms of negativity, we can say that I am stuck in what the Tibetan meditation master Chogyam Trungpa calls ‘negative negativity’, i.e. my attempt to justify or rationalize or otherwise ‘deal with’ the pain that was there to start with. Negativity is when I feel bad, negative negativity is when I feel bad about feeling bad.

WITNESSING THE UGLINESS OF NEGATIVE NEGATIVITY

When we are depressed, we feel that the depression, and therefore ourselves, are ugly. Yet sorrow in itself is never ugly, it always has its own beauty because it is an expression of truth - it comes out of reality, it is an acknowledgement of reality. It is only when sadness is refused, denied, and ‘unwitnessed’ that is becomes ugly. Unconsciousness is an ugly business - one might say that unconscious suffering (negative negativity) is ugly because it has no relation to truth, it is based on denying truth. This is why we have said that unconscious suffering is ‘useless’ or ‘sterile’ suffering, i.e. it is pain from which we cannot learn. And yet this ‘ugliness’ or ‘sterility’ is not to be rejected and condemned, for its ugliness is its truth, its connection to reality. If I ignore my negative negativity because it is ugly, then I have created double negative negativity - the ignoring is the problem, not the negativity! Seeing the ugliness that is there is a conscious act, and all conscious acts have beauty and dignity in them. Inner honesty enriches the spirit, lack of honesty impoverishes it.

NEITHER ACCEPT NOR DENY

Just because we have said that pain, when refused, becomes ugly, that doesn’t mean that we should ‘accept’ it. That would imply that we have some sort of power or control over reality, that we are able to graciously allow it, that it needs our ‘permission’. Truth needs no one’s permission, and so rather than risk getting confused by talking about ‘accepting’ it is better to use the word ‘witnessing’. When I see something, or witness it, that is not a volitional act - all I have to do is open my eyes and the seeing does itself. Ignoring is a volitional act, but seeing is not. This is perhaps a clearer way to say it, but is it any help? Usually, even when we do have a clearer way of seeing our situation, such as is (possibly) provided by the Mountain of Pain model, that doesn’t automatically help us. I might agree that what you have said sounds good, but then point out that it actually sounds too good. It sounds like pie in the sky - I can’t find it in myself to believe that any of this can translate into real change. It might work for some people, but it won’t work for me; I am beyond hope.

The thing is, though, that ‘believing’ and ‘hoping’ would not be any good anyway. They are attachments, obstacles. All I need to do is unconditionally allow my depression to be as bad as it possibly can be, for my sadness to be as sad as it wants. This doesn’t involve hope or belief (either positive or negative) because my sadness will go right ahead and be sad of its own accord, it doesn’t need any assistance or encouragement! It doesn’t need acceptance, and it doesn’t require denial. The point, as Alan Watts has said in The Art of Happiness, is to let your sadness be as sad as it wants to be. There is no danger in this, it isn’t the sadness that does the damage, but the reaction to the sadness, the fear of the sadness, the defense against it, the attempt to make it stop. Letting your sadness being as sad as it wants to be is being honest, and it is okay to be honest - it is respecting the truth. That is how you feel, so simply feel the way you feel. Don’t be a stranger to your feelings, don’t cut them off.

What the task does require, therefore, is intrinsic integrity, and for this there is no need for me to worry about my own ability to make the grade. After all, it is not myself I have to rely on, but the power of Reality to be itself. This power, one need hardly add, has never failed. It cannot fail: the power of Reality to be itself is unassailable. Its victory was assured right from the beginning. Therefore, everything that is needed for the completion of the depression process is already there in my present situation - there is nothing lacking, and nothing there that shouldn’t be there. My problem was that I was looking at it all wrong, I was looking at it from the wrong stand-point, which is to say, from the stand-point of the isolated ‘doer’ and ‘controller’, the static freeze-frame self which was desparately trying to preserve itself at any cost. From the limited and distorted perspective of the false self, it is impossible to see what depression actually is. When we let go, and unconditionally allow the process to do its thing, then we can see.

REVERSE APPRECIATION

Depression, really, is a reverse appreciation of Value, and a reverse appreciation is still an appreciation: there is still an arrow there pointing at something which I need to see, something which I had forgotten about, something I can ignore no longer. ‘Reverse Value’ means that I notice something because it has gone away. I notice how important something is because it is all screwed up. If it wasn’t so good in the first place, then it wouldn’t feel so bad when I lose it. And yet, because Truth is in everything, and because it is Truth itself that is the great Value, I can never really be apart from Truth. There is nowhere else to be - it was only when I identified with a fixed or static framework that I fell into the error of thinking that I could gain or lose that important ‘something’. That ‘something’ is Truth - Truth is freedom, the freedom to be what we really are, and we are already that.