Depression, on the surface, is a problem in itself, and it’s caused by believing that what you need and want will not come to pass or what you do not want is inevitable. One begins to see depression as an entity, a demon or monster that repeatedly comes to cause suffering. Some also describe depression as a dog following them around wherever they go. Consequently, you enter into battle with depression itself.
You win battle after battle, but you can’t seem to win the war.
Beneath the surface, however, depression is a revolt against things as they are, or a process of mourning troubled by being blindfolded to the future. We want always to see the future, to see something good in it, and it’s enormously difficult to accept the blank canvas ahead, the unpredictable.
Mourning that cannot accept the unwritten, or a revolt against what is… in either case, the present conditions have generated pain, but the suffering comes from grasping at what is not and stubbornly fighting against what is. A lot of straining and resisting is happening, and this is really tiring and exhausting. Good grief, so exhausting!
And so scary, like one will be obliterated by the outside world. We feel so small and vulnerable and at the whim of massive forces, but this sense of penetrating vulnerability is in part an artifact of our grasping and resistance. We have pitted ourselves against the world rather than entering its flow. We think we’ll lose out if we enter this flow, but that too is a misperception.
Thus, depression begins simply with pain in the present moment and quickly becomes grasping and resistance, which causes suffering.
Quicksand
Then we look at the suffering itself, and we begin to see it as an enemy in its own right. We notice how the suffering of depression causes even more problems in life. It strains friendships, anesthetizes us to the warmth of others, and pushes matters of work and home downhill fast.
We sink, sink, sink deeper and deeper into the quicksand of this depression experience, and the more we struggle to get out, the more stuck we become, until we cry out in utter desperation, “Good God, I am totally helpless, and I’m going to die!”
The first step in escaping from quicksand is to stop struggling so hard. Stop flailing around in a screaming panic.
I know what this is like. I’ve been so distraught and tormented that I wanted to ram my head into a wall. I’ve crumpled into a blubbering, sobbing mess in public places, in broad daylight, shamelessly–but really full of shame and a sense of helplessness and giving up.
My mind raced with worries about what people must think. Things got worse, and my view of depression as an enemy in itself solidified. In this way, flailing provoked experiences of increased helplessness and disconnection.
Begin by surrendering to the experience of depression. Surrender even to your urge to flail or sink.
When you accept and receive the experience, the irony is that you undermine the foundation of the depression–the resistance to what is. You stop resisting depression, and in turn, you have stopped resisting what is, which is the root of the depression.
There are times when I’ve surrendered so completely that I accepted, even embraced, the possibility that my life would be destroyed or that I wouldn’t survive. Fearing these outcomes was fueling my flailing, which dug me in deeper, but the surrender was genuine. I considered that there were greater things happening in this universe than me and my small life.
Pilot the Ship
Do not, however, surrender to your own mind, your core of awareness. That doesn’t make sense. You are the pure awareness, the mirror upon which the experience of depression alights. You are not a victim of your own mind–you are here to learn how to use it, how to maneuver. You are the pilot of this ship, so don’t give up control of your own awareness. You would be handing over the controls to empty space and coasting in depression until you decide to take them back (and you will–so don’t worry about that either).
This is not an effort. We tend to conceptualize control in terms of physical exertion, even when the control is over something abstract, and physical exertion is precisely what we feel drained of during depression.
This is a choice, just like checking YES or NO, not a taxing endeavor to take control. You check YES–”Yes, I believe that my mind is within my jurisdiction–I am the chooser,” and answers come. You see the doorways and the exits and the light shining through. Check NO–”No, my mind is not my own–I am a victim of my own awareness,” and you keep the drapes closed and coast along in gray until you’re ready to check YES.
If you checked NO, it’s okay. Think of it as an experiment. You will come through, because it’s your nature. You are light, and light knows its power–light cannot forget.
The next step is to acknowledge that by virtue of being the pure awareness of mind, you have power.
Surrender, but do not think of yourself as the victim of your own mind.
Heaven and Hell
“The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.” ~ John Milton
Heaven and hell are in the mind, and your task–your only task–is to discover this for yourself and learn how to choose. Oscillating between heaven and hell, as we often do, presents us with the opportunity to observe the process of transition. The more you watch the steps from one to the other and back, and how even the smallest perturbations in your environment can send you careening into one or the other, the more you realize and actually feel that you are doing it.
Consequently, if you believe that you are ultimately powerless over your own mind, you’ll become mired in fear and grief. Instead of simply allowing them to pass through your awareness, they will trap you–or they will seem to trap you.
Watch and observe how you move between heaven and hell.
Surrender to that which arises and passes through the mind–your experience of depression in particular–and acknowledge the power of your core awareness to choose whether it creates a heaven or a hell with what arises.
Embrace Depression
One task then remains. You have been at war with depression. Battle after battle you’ve fought. You can win many battles, but you cannot seem to win the war. Why does this keep happening? Why does the suffering keep coming back? It feels like a failure. It feels like a pattern you can’t escape, a flaw in your nature that you can’t fix.
And now you are weary from fighting, and the battles seem to pop up more quickly and easily, and all the soldiers know their parts well, and you keep getting wounded, but the old injuries haven’t even fully healed yet. Fuck!
The reason you can’t win the war is because you are fighting, and it’s not a war. Depression is not an enemy to engage in battle, nor is it a monster coming to plague you.
Depression is the fighting itself, and you cannot fight fighting. Instead, stop resisting and embrace it. It might feel like putting your head on the chopping block, but the need is for you to enter the flow. And right now, the flow is your resistance to entering the flow, depression. Allow yourself to experience it without resistance. Be authentic, not trying to feel it fully, because you don’t need to feel it fully. Whatever you feel is full enough.
Essentially, you want to stop suffering, but you can’t end the suffering by pitting yourself against it. Welcome the suffering.
The Tibetan Buddhist saint, Milarepa, was meditating in a cave when he was confronted by demons. Instead of attempting to cast them out, he invited them into the cave for tea and conversation. He welcomed and embraced them. His love dissolved them.
Welcome depression as Milarepa welcomed his demons. Invite depression into your experience with love.
Embrace depression by seeing its essence as a natural and beneficial part of your experience. As you embrace moments of depression, cherishing them for what they offer, the suffering component fades leaving simple pain. And mere pain is a cakewalk when unaccompanied by needless suffering.
When I embrace depression, it ceases to be depression and becomes something else, a journey inwards, a process of transfiguration, an adventure through darkness. Whatever it is, I can’t call it depression any more.
The Treasures of Depression
Cherish times of turmoil–they bring you, albeit kicking and screaming, to the crack in the shell of this collective dream and sit you there long enough to draw your attention to the untouched field of potential.
In times of overwhelming anguish, pure vision comes more easily, because you’re finally able to turn your eyes away from the movie screen, ordinary experience.
Give up the goal of ridding yourself of depression forever. Accept that you will experience this again and again, and each time, you will find treasures of bliss and light hidden within it.
Depression can transform awareness and awaken the heart. Perhaps its greatest power is to bring the present moment into full view. We find ineffable power there.
Magic and Dreaming
Episodes of depression seem to increase in frequency as we open to magic.
What is magic? Magic is the unpredicted. Magic is the sacred alchemy. Lead becomes gold–not because some causal chain of events transforms lead progressively into gold, but because lead arises from the formless field of potential, then gold arises from the formless field of potential.
We begin to understand that what arises next need not follow from what came before.
This is the law by which dreams abide, and this collective dream we call reality is no different.
As we begin to open to magic, sacred alchemy, and the dream nature of reality, we step out into the unknown with a greater faith than ever before. We begin doing magic and shaping the dream.
But we are still learning. Dreams respond to the most subtle cues, the slightest insinuations, the message between the lines. We forget to accept and surrender to what is. Acceptance is a dream of gold, and our resistance to what is, a dream of lead. When partially formed gold seems to pass through stages of lead, the part of us that still craves predictability, that still wants to think that all of this is real, freaks out. “Uh oh! Now I am really in trouble. What have I done?” Panic.
You see loss where there is simply transformation. You see danger where none exists. You are the wizard, but you are spooked by the shapeshifting smoke rising up from your sorcery.
In addition, opening to the unpredictable quality of this collective dream activates all of our ordinary objections to unpredictability. We are simultaneously empowered and threatened. When a part of me still holds to perceptions of life as mechanistic, the acausal principles of experience trigger depression, which at its heart is a clinging to causality.
Off the Ride
One cannot both open to magic and insist upon predictability. Once you begin to open to magic, you are opening your awareness to the dream nature of life, and once you know this roller coaster ride is not real, you can’t go on the ride anymore.
During an experience of depression, I dreamed that I was riding a skateboard down the sidewalk, and I approached a ramp. When I tried to jump it, my skateboard flew into thin air, and I fell on my ass. When I looked back at the ramp, I realized that the ramp was just a projection of light on the sidewalk.
If we can’t go on the rides anymore–in other words, if we can’t treat this reality like a predictable machine–what then? As I said before, your only task is to discover that heaven and hell are in the mind, to watch and learn how the things passing through your awareness can be made into heaven or hell.
Commit yourself fully to living by the magical and dream nature of reality. Don’t be afraid of the unexpected.
You have been to hell and back more than once. Don’t take this to mean that you are doomed to keep dipping into torment. Understand it as a demonstration, one that is repeated for your benefit, that hell is not a place or a thing but something you’re doing, and it cannot really hurt you.
Continuously choose to allow the experience you are having now transform you. Cultivate a trust so deep that you even trust your experience of distrust to open the portal to luminosity. No ordinary experience, not even depression, can lead you away from your true nature.
October 16, 2009
