Dancing with wisdom - chapter 3

We have never had life so good. The opportunities and resources available to us were unheard of even a few decades ago. But with them has come a sense of entitlement and of rarely feeling convincingly satisfied. We discovered earlier how we even have a word for it—FOMO or the Fear Of Missing Out! Through social media, we compare ourselves with the lives of many others. We find ourselves trying to impress people we don’t really like by doing and buying things we don’t really want or need, with money we don’t even have! And we fall into the belief that many other people are living happier and more exciting lives than our own. When we feel miserable and inadequate, which is easy when we compare our internal lives with the apparent success and positivity of someone else’s external life, we forget that what we see on social media is carefully curated with selected photos and polished write-ups.

Matters are made worse when what we thought would make us happy does not live up to our exciting initial expectations. I still remember the euphoria I felt the first time I received email! I sent my own to a friend late one evening in the late 1990s and the next morning, I received a reply! Now, when I open my inbox there are usually a mixed range of emotions none of which are euphoria! Technology has made great promises to us about bringing ease and simplicity to our lives. In some ways, it has indeed provided us with just this. At the same we find ourselves distanced from fulfilment, still not satisfied. Technology’s great advances do not answer the discontentment of restless hearts. There are deeper issues at our core that require addressing.

Fear is a universal human experience. At high-levels it creates panic or terror, at a low level we might call it concern or sometimes nervousness. By contrast, dread is less specific than fear; it is an attitude that something is sure to go wrong, if it has not already done so.

All of us are prone to being frightened and scared. What appears to have changed more recently is the sheer quantity of what can overwhelm and disturb us. News channels and other media produce a steady stream of negative attitudes and reporting which induces fear. There is something fascinating about bad news, tragedies and disasters that encourages us to find out more. We become submerged in a negative outlook. The impact of information technology invading all aspects of our lives makes it easy to become absorbed and fixated on the negative aspects without the relief of perspective or balance. Unless we are careful, this inbalance leads to a sense of dread and foreboding.

Ir’s one thing to be shy and introverted, but it’s another to be isolated and incapable of interacting with other people. What we fear controls us; the fear that we face up to we can control. Overcoming fears and challenges is basic to growing. Finding this growth means intentionally going outside our comfort zone— everything we truly long for lies beyond where we feel comfortable.

We struggle with and do not talk enough about shame. Shame is universal and one of the most primitive emotions we experience. The only people who don’t experience shame lack the capacity for empathy and human connection. We have a choice between an admission of experiencing shame or facing up to the development of what psychiatrists would describe as sociopathic tendencies!

American sociology professor and author Brené Brown, describes factors surrounding shame. She explains that while shame is a universal experience, it is also something we are afraid to talk about. Unfortunately, the less we feel able to talk about shame, the more it takes a hold on our lives.

The twelve shame categories that Brené Brown has identified are appearance and body image, money and work, motherhood/ fatherhood, family, parenting, mental and physical health addiction, sex, ageing, religion, surviving trauma and being stereotyped and labelled. All of these are able to create a deep private feeling of fear about not being good enough, which can come to dominate our thinking.

During Brené Brown’s research, participants revealed shame right across their lives:

As raw and uncomfortable as these examples are, there is a pathway through these paralysing and all-consuming emotions.

Brown calls this pathway stress resilience; the result is empathy and healing.

We live in what has been called an Age of Anxiety. There is something about life (maybe it has always been there) that suggests everything is actually fragile. A constant barrage of information and data coming from all directions suggests that major problems and catastrophes are lurking around the corner. There is no shortage of subjects to worry about—global warming, viral pandemics, threats of rogue states like North Korea developing nuclear weapons, or the risk of terrorist attacks to name only a few.

I remember the very personal experience of walking to school in 1980 and hearing that Ronald Regan had been elected president of the United States. The news was full of speculation that within a few years we would have nuclear war with what was then known as the Soviet Union. The United Kingdom government had even commissioned public information programmes on what to do in case of nuclear fallout! I can still vividly remember that walk to school as a fifteen-year-old boy thinking, What is the point of me studying anything when it seems practically inevitable we will all die from a nuclear attack? As a teenager, I didn’t have much of a positive outlook on life! That experience was not confined to me alone. All these years later, I see increasing numbers of people experience life this way; living with anxiety.

In many ways, life has never been so easy. We are able to connect practically instantaneously with anyone around the world. A major event happens on the other side of the planet and immediately we know about it. We can see an family and friends anywhere on the planet, at the touch of a button. Yet with all this connectivity we can at the same time feel deeply lonely.

Loneliness is such a factor of modern life in much of our world that campaigns to reduce it have been launched in Britain, Denmark and Australia. In Japan, the government has surveyed hikikomori, or 'people who shut themselves in their homes. Vivek Murthy, a former surgeon-general of the United States, has called loneliness an epidemic whose impact on health he likens to obesity or smoking fifteen cigarettes per day. In January 2018, the British government went as far as appointing a Minister for Loneliness.

Loneliness is not the same as social isolation, which is defined as how often a person meets or speaks to friends and family. It’s also different from solitude, which is more of a choice to be alone.

The key to understanding loneliness is its definition as perceived social isolation, the feeling of not having the social connection and contacts one would like. Someone who appears to be more isolated than the average person is also more likely to be lonely, but it’s also possible to feel lonely when you are surrounded by plenty of other people. I recall growing up in the United Kingdom and feeling lonely and disconnected from South Asian family and culture in India. That created another problem: when I went to my extended family in India, I quickly felt lonely and homesick for the connections and comforts England!

What do we actually mean by loneliness?

Researchers define loneliness as a perception of social isolation a feeling of lacking the social contacts one wants. Of course, the who are physically isolated are much more likely than the average person to feel lonely. But loneliness can also strike those in relationships who have friends and family living in seemingly healthy relationships. The mere fact of being on one’s own is not always a bad thing and learning to live with solitude can be incredibly enriching and rewarding (more on that later). It is loneliness which is harmful.

In 2018, The Economist and the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), an American non-profit group focused on health, surveyed representative samples of people in three rich countries. The study found that 9% of adults in Japan, 22% in America and 23% in Britain 'always or often feel lonely, lack companionship, or feel left out or isolated'.

It is only relatively recently that the links between relationships and health have been studied. In 2015, a meta-analysis led by Julianne Holt-Lunstad of Brigham Young University in Utah synthesised seventy papers through which 3.4 million participants were followed over an average of seven years. She found that after accounting for differences in age and health status, those classified as lonely had a 26% higher risk of dying and those living alone had a 32% higher probability.

Smaller-scale studies have found correlations between loneliness and isolation and a range of health problems including heart attacks, strokes, cancers, eating disorders, drug abuse, sleep deprivation, depression, alcoholism and anxiety. Some research suggests that the lonely are more likely to suffer from cognitive decline and a quicker progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

Talking about stress and its consequences is a very common feature of modern life. Practically everyone we come across talks about how they are struggling to do more with less or the toll that workload pressure is having on them. We can find ourselves waking up in the morning saying 'I need more sleep' and going to bed at night thinking 'I didn’t get enough done today'.

The impact of stress includes:

But what do we mean by stress? Why is it important and what can be done about it?

The word 'stress' is often used in both a confusing an ambiguous way. The reason that it is confusing is that 'stress' can refer to a wide range of mental, physical and social ill health at home or at work. It can also be ambiguous by referring either to an external stimulus acting on the individual or how an individual reacts to that stimulus. (More on that later.)

A possible explanation of why we are confused with the word 'stress' is because it comes from the world of physics, where it originally defined the intensity of a force per unit area. The word is derived from the Latin word stringere, which means 'to draw tight'. This origin matches the idea that human stress arises from an imbalance between demands and resources.

In 1936, Hans Selye, an Austro-Hungarian endocrinologist and Nobel prize winner, proposed three stages of the Stress Response: alarm, adaptation and eventual exhaustion. After he retired, Hans Selye apologised for a serious mistake which his stress research. He confessed that stress was the wrong term and that he should have described his research findings as the strain syndrome. His explanation was that use of the word stress created the perception that it’s something that happens to us and is continually acting on us. He emphasised the importance of a distinction between the external pressure (stress) and the internal effect (strain),

Our response to the external pressure, the stress, is at least as important as what is happening inside us, the strain. This is a profound observation which opens the door to gaining effective control of the different pressures we face in life.

The impact of these pressures is highlighted by our mind’s reaction to negativity. The first thing our brain does is to lose ten to twenty IQ points. This is a natural physiological reaction from our brain being designed to help us survive threatening attacks, generally from predators. Unchecked, this response has profound consequences.

Kelly McGonigal has thought about this in great detail. She is a Stanford University health psychologist who seeks to translate academic research into practical strategies for developing health, happiness and personal success. Her short fourteen-minute TED Talk illustrates the power of how our thinking about stress dramatically affects our overall health and well-being."

Her talk is based on three observations.

The first starts with a 2012 study that tracked 30,000 adults in the United States for eight years. The study was based on two simple questions:

What is fascinating is that those who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43% increased risk of dying, but that was only true for those who also believed stress is harmful for your health. What is more, those who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. They actually had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including those who had relatively little stress.

The staggering conclusion was that over the eight years the study was conducted, 182,000 Americans died not from stress but from simply believing stress is bad for you. McGonigal’s extrapolation is that simply believing stress is bad for you was, in 2012, the 15th largest cause of death in the United States, killing more people than skin cancer, HIV/AIDS and homicide combined.

What can we can conclude from these results? That when we change our thinking about stress, we change our body’s response to stress.

Typically, when we are having a stress response, our heart rate goes up and our blood vessels constrict. The key is how we interpret those physiological symptoms: When someone views their stress response as helpful, their cardiovascular profile resembles what happens in moments of joy and courage.

According to MeGonigal 'Over a lifetime of stressful experiences, this one biological change could be the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at age fifty and living well into your nineties. And this is what the new science of stress reveals—how you think about stress matters'.

Looking back, I have burnt out at least three times in my life. The first two episodes occurred at the end of my first and third year of studying medicine at university. The combined challenges of moving away from home, feeling out of my depth academically and being isolated and alone gradually took their toll.

The third time was around the year 2009, I was juggling with all the demands of being on the leadership teams of a church while having a growing family and working as a psychiatrist, It became too much for me to handle and something had to give. At the core was the fact that I did not like the person I had become. Sensing a critical and discontented spirit growing inside me, I knew it was time to step down from something and re-evaluate my priorities. At this point, I stepped aside from the church leadership.

In all three cases of burnout there were both significant learning opportunities and resulting growth from the experience At the time, it felt very different to that!

After the first time, I experienced a spiritual awakening that continues to have an impact on me to this very day. After the second, I found a greater purpose and direction to stay in medicine and I began to focus on psychiatry. As for the third, It laid the foundation for starting a blog, podcasts, coaching and even this book!

Burnout is a state of chronic stress. It gradually develops over a period of time and leads to three main outcomes:

Depression has been called the 'common cold' of psychological problems because nearly everyone has experienced it in some form at some time. The word 'depression' itself is, like stress, a confusing term. It is used frequently in day-to-day conversation and it’s also used in what is intended to be a more precise, clinical way by doctors and psychiatrists.

According to the psychologist Martin Seligman, people born since 1945 are ten times more likely to suffer from depression than those born before. He estimated 350 million people around the world suffer from depression, which is the leading cause of disability and a major contributor to the burden of disease.

Depression has been described as the number one psychological disorder in the Western world. It is said to be growing in all age groups in virtually every community. The growth is seen most in the young, especially amongst teens. This rate of increase led it to become, by 2020, the second-most disabling condition in the world, second only to heart disease.

But because the word 'depression' is used so freely and interchangeably in many different ways, we need to be careful about explaining what the D-word actually means.

It’s very common to experience feelings of sadness or distress in some way. These feelings may be a result of grief or other stresses in life, including physical illness. Sometimes feelings of sadness appear out of the blue with no obvious relationship to anything else going on in the person’s life. There appears to be a spectrum of mood disturbance that can range from mild to severe and from short-lived episodes to long periods of unremitting illness.

Depression was recorded by the ancient Greeks, the Bible and Shakespeare, but it was only relatively recently, in 1980, that a formal definition came into being. This was when the American Psychiatric Association produced what is called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders 3rd edition (DSM-III).

The 5th edition (DSM-V) published in May 2013 lists the following criteria for the diagnosis of what is called a major depressive episode;

At least five of the following nine symptoms need to be present over a two-week period or longer:

There are three further requirements to using the DSM-V for an official diagnosis of major depressive episodes:

From this point, the depression is classified as mild, moderate or major according to severity. But however the doctor classifies the depression, for the individual it is always major. Like all minor surgery, if it’s happening to you personally, it is major surgery!

The other classification system is the ICD (International Classification of Diseases). The ICD is produced by the World Health Organisation and is very similar to the DSM.

That is how psychiatrists and doctors diagnose depression. But it is still a challenge to making sense of what we mean exactly by the D-word.

Both the DSM and ICD set strict criteria for identifying disorders of the mind such as depression. You would think that such an approach would make diagnosis more reliable. In fact, there is much criticism about both these systems.

For example, why were five of the above symptoms chosen and not, say, four or six? Why two weeks and not three weeks? The decision to go for five symptoms over two weeks was judged appropriate, though arbitrary. The effect is that anyone who is consistently unhappy for a fortnight and also has other symptoms, such as poor sleep and loss of concentration, could be diagnosed as having a major depressive episode. It also means that the prevalence of the condition is very high, at up to 50% of people at some point over their lifetime!

This uncertainty explains why there are understandable concerns about wrongly diagnosing, or overdiagnosing, and thus ending up with medicalising so-called normal behaviour.

DSM-V has softened a number of exclusion criteria, particularly those for grief. The implication is that any symptoms that last for two weeks or longer must be an abnormal response. Genuine concerns have been expressed over what is a normal human experience of grief being medicalised into an illness.

So why is the diagnosis of depression increasing so much? It is the result of the combining together of the two different Categories of sadness and depressive disorder.

According to a British Medical Journal review by Dowrick & Frances, overdiagnosis is more common than underdiagnosis. They quote a study where only '38% of adults with clinician identified depression' actually met criteria for depression. That means that in more than half the cases, doctors are incorrectly diagnosing depression and are unnecessarily prescribing medication with the associated potential side-effects and costs.

On a personal level, we don’t know how to talk about our sadness or disappointments, We lurch into tasks and seek ways to medicate our pain. We escape into shopping, working, watching television, food binges, drugs or alcohol, fantasies or pornography, email and Facebook. In many churches, the unspoken rule is that you aren’t spiritual if you’re feeling depressed or sad'. So people pretend to be well. The not-so-subtle message is that if you are following God properly, you are supposed to not feel hurt, confused of discouraged. What you need is simply more faith and if you were more diligent in your spiritual practices, then these feelings would go away.

For more on depression, do see drsunil.com/depression.

So many people seem to be absorbed and focussed on their goals and achieving success regardless of the cost to their health and relationships. It’s very easy to be focussed on a particular path in life to the exclusion of considering long-term implications.

There is an analogy (first attributed to Coca-Cola CEO Brian Dyson) of how life can be regarded as bouncing a series of five balls. Each ball has a different label—health, family, friendship, work and one described as activities that nurture our soul. They are all made of fragile glass except the one called work, which is made of rubber. In other words, if you drop the health, family or friendships ball, (all activities that nurture the soul) they can each be irrevocably damaged. It is only the one called work that can bounce back if you drop it. The point of this analogy is not to excuse laziness at work, but to think about how we manage these five key 'balls'.

The consequences of not managing the non-work parts of life are vividly described in the immensely popular book by Australian nurse Bronnie Ware called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying—A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing. These top five regrets, as witnessed by Bronnie Ware, are:

One of the great modern tragedies of a world that is challenging and complex is the increasing number of people who feel that life is not worth living. It’s a difficult subject that gets relatively little coverage. Yet the statistics give a staggering indication of how widespread an issue it is.

The World Health Organisation estimates that worldwide approximately 800,000 people die by suicide every year. There can be no doubt of the tragic consequences of such a final act. Suicide is a permanent solution to what in hindsight coupled with hope would often have been deemed to be temporary problems. Someone committing suicide can see no other alternative to the situation they find themselves in. It’s the final devastating outcome of a belief that the only way out of the pain is to terminate one’s life. In Western-style secular society what the person committing suicide often believes is that death will lead to an end of existence. Paradoxically, this belief is a statement of faith, albeit one which many find strange.

Although suicide rates tend to increase with age, there has recently been an alarming increase in suicidal behaviour among young people aged fifteen to twenty-five. This is true not only in Western-style secular societies but across cultures worldwide. With the exception of rural China and parts of Africa, more men than women successfully commit suicide, although in most places more women than men deliberately self-harm in what can appear to be attempted suicide. Suicide is now the leading cause worldwide of death for men aged fifteen to forty-nine. Men are three times more likely than women to take their own lives.

Key factors associated with suicide in men include:

The National Confidential Inquiry into suicide by children and young people stated, 'Suicide is the leading cause of death among 15-29 year-olds worldwide, accounting for 8% of all deaths in the UK. Suicide is the leading cause of death in young people, accounting for 14% of deaths in 10-19 year-olds and 21% in 20-34 year-olds.'

United Kingdom statistics show that, in 2018, there were 6,507 suicides in the UK—​an average of around eighteen people ending their own days every day.

The author and highly popular TED talk speaker Simon Sinek describes himself as an unshakable optimist. However, when writing about the generation known as baby boomers (born approx. 1946-64), he comes to some sobering conclusions. Baby boomers are growing increasingly disappointed and disillusioned with life in the world they find themselves a part of. Since the turn of the last century, the rate of suicide among this group has grown so dramatically that it now claims more deaths than car accidents and ranks third behind cancer and heart disease. His conclusion is that this is only likely to get worse for the post baby-boomer generations, His reason is that rather than relying on biological bonds of friendship and loving relationships, those who are 20-30 years younger than the baby boomers have grown up relying on social media, prescription drugs and online support groups as their main form of coping with the life which they see as presenting increasingly complex challenges. This disconnection from human relationships, he predicts, is likely to become manifest in rising rates of depression, prescription drug abuse and suicidal behaviour.

My motivation for writing this book has been driven in part by wishing to provide an attractive alternative to the growing undercurrent of despair in many lives.

Any discussion of suicide also needs to cover a subject that is rarely debated openly. Coming from a South Asian background, I am very aware that there is an even darker side to suicide. That is the whole issue of suicide bombing and killings in the name of religion. Currently, this fervour seems to particularly affect the religion of Islam.

My own journey of faith from a Hindu background included a deep sense of emptiness and absence of meaning. I could not satisfy these feelings in the secular West European environment in which I was brought up. My adolescence and early adulthood coincided with the age which sought freedom but also lacked responsibility in both general behaviour and, particularly, sexual relationships. Part of me wanted that, while another more perceptive part could see that it led to an empty and dead-end future. My problem was that for a number of months in my late teens, I could see no alternative.

I am convinced that if I had been attracted to the clear rules and strong community support of Islam rather than coming to a living faith in Christ, I would have developed further my pride and sense of superiority towards Western culture. Unchecked, I could have gone on to use Islam to vent my fury with the world in a form of suicide terrorism. The sad reality is that this is how many in the Muslim world look at the West. The gap between cultures is widened by the secular Western mind struggling to define a category which will enable them to best address these emotions and longings. Western culture cannot fathom how, in pursuit of greater meaning and purpose, people resort to nthe acts in the belief that they will find reward in the life to come.

Someone who thought deeply about the implications of Western secular thinking was Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Prize winning Polish poet and author. Over a ninety year lifetime he experienced the repression of both Nazism and Communism. In the essay he wrote before his death, "The Discreet Charms Nihilism', he made a fascinating observation. Quoting Marx’s well-known saying that 'religion is the opium of the masses' he concluded that 'the true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death'. This nihilism led and possibly sanctiond many to ignore the consequences of their actions. Czeslaw Milos followed with the acute observation, 'It’s the huge solace of thinking that our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, are not going to be judged. But all religions have recognised our deeds are imperishable'.

Believing that there is nothing after death is a very secular idea. I am quite sure that this attitude to death feeds the desire, when life becomes unbearable, to completely stop existing by ending one’s own life. The disconnection from responsibility to oneself and others progresses to the thought of escaping painful consequences which appear to lack any hope of resolution. Suicide becomes a permanent solution to problems which from another perspective are likely to seem temporary.

The underlying belief about suicide is that following death, existence will cease and everything will be over—this life is all there is to live for. But such thinking does not satisfy the deep hunger and restlessness of our human souls, as it renders human existence meaningless. In reality, as long as there is life there is hope. Secular thinking resolutely refuses to pursue such lines of thinking. That is why we need wisdom to lead us away from the hollow promises that are based on secular and materialistic ideas.

One of the great dilemmas of modern societies which lacks spiritual grounding is how to make sense of the evil and the suffering we either experience ourselves or see others endure. The author W. H. Auden faced this dilemma just as World War II was breaking out. Before the War, he had left Europe for the United States. He considered himself to be an atheist. In November 1939, at a cinema in a largely German-speaking area of New York, he watched a documentary by the Nazis of their conquest of Poland. He was disturbed to see the reaction of many of those in the cinema around him. When the screen began to show Poles he was shocked to hear many in the audience scream, 'Kill them!' Up to that point, he had believed in the popular mindset of the un-religious of the age that people are basically good and that the only requirement for them to lead a decent life is the right education and upbringing. Yet in that cinema, in an instant, he was brought to the realisation that such thinking was inadequate. His secular thinking, which had no belief in moral goodness, lacked any wisdom with which to legitimately object to the inhumanity he felt around him (or, indeed, the crimes of the Nazis themselves) if people were just expressing their innate evil. As he put it, "There had to be some reason why [Hitler] was utterly wrong'.

But his Western liberal, secular upbringing could offer no answer. For Auden, the liberal thinking of pre-war England was inadequate to this task. Later, in 1940, he wrote:

More than eighty years after Auden delivered his insights, we still live with a dogged and determinedly atheistic view of the world that is continually coming up short in accounting for and understanding the complexity and tragedies of life.

Perhaps the saddest consequence of the confusion and complexity around us is when we allow the life and dreams within ourselves to die silently inside us.

There is a painful internal resignation that runs through a life which has no zest nor sense of anticipation nor excitement. Everything that happens in such a life is closely fenced in by the lacklustre motion of routine and predictability. We are afraid of stepping away from the conventional or socially acceptable and we are afraid of being found out getting it wrong. Part of this timidness is because we do not know how to cope with failure. We struggle with the prospect of getting things wrong and failing because we are so emotionally invested in a particular outcome we want. As I’ve grown older I’ve been struck by how much this is the experience of the older generation. We sense something of all this anxiety and caution in life. The result is a life that we find frustrating, at times pointless, and profoundly exhausting.

Overa hundred years ago Oswald Chambers commented on someone he had met ten years previously and admired for their earnest devotion and commitment to the ways of God. Meeting, the same person a second time a decade later, Chambers was shocked to find this person, as he puts it, 'Garrulous and unenlivened'. In other words, they would talk excessively about trivial matters in a way that was dull and uninteresting. He concluded:

Some of the words Chambers' uses seem from a bygone era. But I find them challenging and worth pondering over. He is commenting on someone he met who, over a period of ten years, changed from being passionate and zealous for the things of God to being excessively talkative about things that are trivial and unimportant. This person had become dull and uninteresting, excessively preoccupied with themselves. His life had become small minded and inconsequential. As someone comfortably over the age of forty, it is jolting to read Chambers' assessment that this is a common phenomenon over the age of forty!

In my experience, the problem that Chambers identified has not diminished but has grown more prevalent with time.

Our culture and age emphasise ease, rest and comfort above all else. Another word for that is 'sloth'. Dorothy Sayers defines sloth as 'the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and only remains alive because there is nothing it would die for'. I confess to seeing such a tendency within myself. I do not think I am alone in that. But, what a tragic way to live life!

The majority of people regard their day-to-day work as a toil and drudgery that has to be tolerated until either the weekend releases them or occasional holidays materialise. Work is a necessary burden to bear until escaping to really live and enjoy life, Sadly, this unending routine seems to be the rhythm of life for very many people. But our restless hearts, our questioning minds and our disordered lives need more; they need wisdom.

The bigger issue is the question of ego. The ego is an internal enemy which each one of us has to deal with. Ego prevents us truly living in wisdom and traps us within ourselves.

In the next chapter, we will look at the question of ego.