DOROTHY ROWES GUIDE TO LIF EB

Dorothy Rowe

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780006384229
• eBook ISBN: 9780007381883
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

A superb distillation of the wisdom of one of Britain's most admired writers on the human condition.

Dorothy Rowe gives insights and comfort on some of the most difficult aspects of life-including: identity and self-esteem, fear, depression and unhappiness, coping with people, power, agreed, guilt and selfishness and getting older.

CHAPTER 1

The Secret of Life

THE SECRET of life is that there is no secret.

All that you need to know about life is there for you to see. All you have to do is open your eyes and recognize what you already know.

However, down the centuries, many people wanting power have tried to keep the secret. They have created their theories and their jargon, and told us that they and they alone know the secret of life. These are the people who have claimed to be the wisest of the wise. They have called themselves philosophers, theologians, clergy, doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, counsellors – in short, experts on life and living. Jungians say we are all part of the collective unconscious, while psychiatrists say that we are the product of our genes. Each of these theories is a way of describing and explaining certain parts of human experience, but no one theory can describe, let alone explain it all.

Some of these people have always known that there is no secret, while others have insisted that they and they alone know the Secret Truth About Life.

Down the centuries a few of these experts have dared to reveal that there is no secret, and, consequently, have been reviled by their colleagues. How dare such renegades say that each of us can sort things out for ourselves! How dare they threaten the experts’ power, prestige and wealth!

The experts always protect themselves by forming themselves into an elite and guarding the entrance with a formidable barrier of examinations and rituals through which only a chosen few can pass.

When the selected few do get through the barrier they are faced with a choice. Do you now tell yourself that you are initiated into the Secret Truth About Life? Or do you bear the disappointment of your discovery that what you might have is simply a collection of useful research results (for instance, we now know that babies are born with the ability to distinguish faces from all other phenomena) and, if you look for it, the kind of wisdom in living which has always been available to every generation.

Amongst the experts this wisdom has been more known than used. On the whole, the personal lives of experts are far from edifying. Some experts do live wisely but most (I’m speaking from years of observation) manage their lives no better than the rest of us. They’ve been so busy being experts they haven’t learnt what they need to know.

The secret which is no secret is that there is a body of knowledge which concerns how to live wisely. This wisdom is available to all of us. You don’t need a brilliant intelligence and a superb education to understand it, absorb it and use it.

However, just as we are all born artists, musicians, mathematicians and explorers and our upbringing and education take most of these abilities away from us, so we are born with the ability to understand ourselves and life, and the adults around us pour scorn on this ability and forbid us to use it. In learning to be good, obedient members of society we lose touch with the knowledge we need if we are to live our lives in ways which are rich and fulfilling.

A rich and fulfilling life is not one of unalloyed happiness. No amount of wisdom can defend us from loss, disappointment, old age and death, nor from the idiocies committed by those who have political and economic power.

However, such wisdom does ensure that we can live comfortably with ourselves and with other people. Being comfortable with yourself means that you are not forever thinking about and worrying about yourself, always prey to difficult and unpleasant emotions. Being comfortable with other people means that you are not afraid of others but can enjoy their company. There’s no longer a barrier between you and other people. No longer burdened with the sense of your own inadequacies, you cease to see the world as a cold, evil, disappointing place and instead become aware of the world’s infinite possibilities.

What follows here is not a list of Absolute Truths. The way we are physically constituted means that if there are any Absolute Truths in the universe we could not recognize one even if we stumbled over it. What we have are relative truths, conclusions we have drawn from our experience and which are always relative to our past experience and the situation in which we find ourselves.

We each have our own relative truths, and if we compare notes we can see that some of us have arrived at much the same relative truths. This suggests that perhaps we have managed to approximate that kind of relative truth which, in a random universe, turns up fairly frequently. We can then decide, if we were laying a bet, on which of these truths we would put our money.

Writing this kind of book creates for me the problem of which of the personal pronouns I should use. Should I say ‘them’ or ‘us’, ‘me’ or ‘you’?

Using ‘they’ and ‘them’ puts a distance between them and us (my reader and me) and sometimes I want to do this.

I use ‘we’ and ‘us’ when I’m talking about something which everybody is likely to do at some time or other.

I use ‘I’ and ‘me’ when I’m talking about some part of my own experience which may or may not be like that of other people.

When I use ‘you’ and ‘your’ I don’t mean that you, my dear reader, have had all the experiences or think in all the different ways which I am describing. No person could live so long or be so changeable. I am simply assuming that with some of my anecdotes about ‘you’ you will feel an identity. Others of these anecdotes are an invitation for you to make a leap of imagination into someone else’s world. ‘Ah, yes,’ you might think, ‘that reminds me of so-and-so. Is that what he thinks? I wonder.’

Understanding yourself and understanding other people are exactly the same process.

CHAPTER 2

Life – What You Can’t Change and What You Can

WHEN YOU think about your life, do you feel that you are as you are, the world is as you see it, your past was what it was, your present is what it is, and your future will be very much what you expect it to be?

Do you feel that although some parts of you, your life and the world can change, you, your life and the world are, in essence, fixed?

Do you feel that you are as you are, your life is what it is, and the world is what it is?

Do you feel that in knowing yourself, your life and the world, you know what reality is?

Do you feel that you, your life and the world are your fixed, unalterable fate? They are as they are, and they are your lot. They are reality.

If this is what you feel, then you are mistaken.

You, your life and the world are not fixed, unalterable parts of reality which you have to put up with and cope with as best you can. What you see as being you, your life and the world is not reality. You, your life and the world are matters that you can change.

What you see as you, your life and the world are the set of conclusions you have drawn from your experience of life which began when you were a tiny babe tucked in your mum’s womb and your growing brain, like the hardware in a computer, got to the stage where it could run your software, commonly called your mind or, less commonly, your ‘meaning structure’.

To describe what I mean by a meaning structure I have used the analogy of a computer, but this is quite inadequate because our brains can do much more than the most advanced computer can.

A computer’s hardware is built and then the software, which someone has constructed separately, is fed into it, whereas the hardware and the software of a brain develop together. Our brains come equipped with much more than what can be observed when a brain is dissected or scanned.

Our brains come equipped with tools which are there as potentialities until our interaction with the environment brings that potential into use. Thus before the potential of your tool of language could come into being and be used you had to have a language spoken around you and you had to be able to hear it.

Clever though these tools are, their function is not to reveal reality to you. They are not transparent windows on to the world. Instead, the tool’s function is to create a construction which represents some aspect of your experience. This construction is a meaning. If the language you learn to speak is English you’ll see the world in the way English creates it. If you learnt Latin or Spanish or Italian or were born in the West Indies you’ll see the world differently.

A study of the derivation of words will show just how diversely different languages ‘see’ the world. The word ‘dawn’ comes from the Old English daeg, ‘day’, and dagian, ‘to become light’.³ Ancient Romans saw dawns where ‘the air grows golden’, hence aurora from aurum, gold. Spaniards and Italians saw a white dawn, alba, ‘the white’. Out of African languages dawn in the West Indies became ‘day clean’ and cock crow ‘Gi me trousers’.⁴

When, shortly after birth, your eyes open, you seem to be surrounded by a blur of events. Then one of your tools comes into operation – the tool of contrast. With this tool some parts of the blur look different from other parts. You start to see patterns. For the rest of your life you will continue to see patterns, even where no patterns actually exist. You’ll hear patterns and learn to call the clearly structured patterns you hear ‘language’ or ‘music’ and the less clearly structured ‘noise’. You’ll also learn to feel patterns, taste patterns and smell patterns.

Within a day or so one of these patterns which you see becomes very significant though as yet you don’t know why. Your tool of face recognition has come into operation and a few days later you know, though you haven’t the words to say it, That’s my mum.’

Aren’t you clever? That’s because

The function of your brain is to create meaning.

You could ask, ‘Isn’t the function of the brain to keep the body alive?’

I would say, ‘This is the meaning for the brain which many people now use because this meaning seems to give useful results. But it’s only recently in human history that the brain has been given this meaning. In other times and cultures other organs of the body – the heart, the stomach and the bowels – have been given the meaning of being the most important organ. Current research on genes and DNA suggest that it’s our genes that have the primary importance. No doubt there are genes which enable our brain to create meaning.’

At the moment of conception the brain starts developing and at some point (current research suggests at about 18 weeks’ gestation) meaning starts to be created.

Note that I did not say, ‘You start creating meaning.’

There is no YOU sitting inside your brain creating meaning.

Or at least I hope there isn’t, because then I’d have to work out how little you-inside-your-brain creates meaning and if little you has a littler you inside a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Chapter 1: The Secret of Life
• Chapter 2: Life – What You Can’t Change and What You Can
• Chapter 3: You and Your Own Truth
• Chapter 4: You and What ‘You’ Is
• Chapter 5: You and How You Feel About Yourself
• Chapter 6: You and Tour Priorities
• Chapter 7: You and Your Life Story
• Chapter 8: You and Death
• Chapter 9: You and Depression
• Chapter 10: You and Other People
• Chapter 11: You and Emotion
• Chapter 12: You and Power
• Chapter 13: Is It All Your Fault?
• Chapter 14: You and Communication
• Chapter 15: You and the World
• Chapter 16: You and Time
• Chapter 17: Living Your Own Life
• Chapter 18: If You Want to Learn More
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Praise for Dorothy Rowe:
• By the Same Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher