THE LIFTING OF DEPRESSION

Many people have described their experience of depression. Few remember to look back once they are free, and to share the benefit of their liberation with others. When depression lifts, by itself, permanently, only then can we really begin to understand what it was that afflicted us. Through the transition and the comparison, we can start to understand more deeply both the natural state of our being, and its distortion.

When we feel the veil lifting, (the description of St Paul at his conversion, of ‘scales falling from his eyes’, would as well fit this experience), we are freed to see what we could not see before. Depression is a kind of hard-wired, structural, constriction of our experience of the world. Part of that constriction prevents us from looking directly at the depression itself, like the Gorgon Medusa in Greek mythology that turned anyone to stone that looked on her face. It is like a dimming of the light that prevents us from seeing. Only when it lifts, can we begin to see. What we begin to see and feel is ourselves.

We have to have a sense of self in this life. The sense of self may be an illusion, but within the illusion of this life, it is necessary. It is only through the medium of our sense of self that we can navigate through the challenges this life presents. When depression lifts, we find the sense of self has survived under its cloud and is now released, like the bulb of a flower that has sprouted under a stone, and is now exposed to the light. Instead of a medium of discomfort, we start to find assurance in our sense of self. What seemed to be the enemy is found to be an ally. The sense of our own being imbues our experience with meaning. The new-found sense of meaning liberates our will, gives it movement and purpose. We can start to find our direction.

It is important to know that depression can lift. We can change the experience of depression by, for example, physical activity, chemical intervention in the brain, or insight therapy. But that is not the same as its spontaneous lifting.

One morning, you may awaken and know that things are different, different in a way that you are not able to recognise because you have never experienced them like that before. Yet, in the same way that you know you are awake, you know that some unaccountable thing has changed. Something that was there has simply gone, and yet you cannot quite remember what it was that has departed. You know that you have a lightness of being, though it is not an identifiable feeling of joy or happiness, it is simply an upward release. (Interesting that the sensation is upward, whereas before we might have said we felt ‘down in the dumps’.) We realise that something that was pressing on us has been taken off, as though we have carried a heavy burden for so long that we considered it part of ourselves, and now that part of ourselves is gone, and yet, we feel more present, and no loss.

The world looks different. This is important. The way a depressed person behaves is perfectly rational within the context of their experience of the world. But it is a different world that they are inhabiting from the un-depressed. Neither more nor less real or valid. There is nothing to say that the un-depressed state is the final state of emancipation of the mind. It is just a step. But being released from depression, apart from the obvious ‘housekeeping’ aspects of coping with the challenges of everyday life, releases you to experience the naturalness of your own being. It is a step closer to yourself.

Gradually it dawns on you that what pressed on you before was your depression, and that it has gone. You have known about the depression, but you could never look it squarely in the eye. Your depression was a ‘condition’, a set of symptoms, but you could never grab it by the throat and confront it. It was just a shadow looking over your shoulder that moved away no matter how quickly you tried to turn and catch it. And now it is gone. And now you can feel who you are with that ‘hump that is black and blue’ as Kipling described it, safely out of the way. Now you have a sense of awakening, just like the sense of awakening in the morning, only a second awakening on top of the first. And now you are pleased and joyful – pleased that you are no longer depressed, that life can now begin. The myth of Sleeping Beauty, when she awakens, describes the sensation. You have been asleep for 100 years, caught in a permanent dream, and now that you are awake, the world in which you have been for so long, seems strange.

But you never for a moment doubt that the new sensation is preferable. You may, however, catch yourself missing the habit of depression, strangely enough. Freedom is not something we adjust to immediately. And you may, from your new position of freedom, recognise that there was some element of addiction to your depression. There was. And even your new state of enlightenment is only another level of addiction, just one that is more common and easier to cope with. But it is only a step along the road. You are free-er, not free. By comparison, it seems you have reached the ultimate. You know, though, that there was no exercise of will that could have changed your condition, because there was no fulcrum against which you could lever your will. You did not have that sound, solid, sense of self you now have. Whatever you pressed against, gave way. There was no secure footing on which you could base your sense of self, only a continuing unease and a listlessness that held your mind in thrall. Now that you have awoken, your will feels active and confident. But that war has been won. You cannot return with your new-found will and fight it over again. If ever you were to return to that state of being, you would be no more powerful to overcome it than you were before. That’s the pathology!

You know you will never return whence you have come. But you had no choice to heal yourself by a resolute act of will. Your only choice was gradually to learn to turn towards the depression, to embrace it and recognise it as your own. Paradoxically, you had to learn to feel the depression. Strange to think of depression as something you might feel, like sadness. It seems more like an absence of feeling. That is its power and its deception. Behind the symptoms of depression lies the feeling of depression. And the only way out is through. And the only way through is to allow yourself to open to the feeling you least want. Perhaps that is the way of the Tao – the yielding that overcomes.

Depression conditions the entire framework within which we experience everything else. We look through different glasses and see the world differently. When depression lifts, there is a moment of surprise. Something familiar is gone. It is interesting to note that it is not a feeling of something having been added, but of a restriction that has been lifted. A shadow has passed from your world. It is the same world, but now you see it in sunlight instead of shade. You have a sense of having woken from a trance. Perhaps you have.

In the absence of feeling lies the deadness of depression, upon which foundations the mind then builds its rational castles of interpretation, all consistent with their foundations. Foundations laid in air. And yet you know that you are somehow the richer for having had the experience. It has given you a humility, an empathy with the sufferings of others that you would never have had otherwise. Twenty-eight years in prison can do that to a man. So can 28 years of depression.

What the depression has done for you is to make you aware, make you able to discern that your perception of reality can be so convincingly distorted that it seems certain. And it has enabled you to know that it is possible to awaken from that certainty, and see beyond it. And from that experience you might, if you are fortunate, start to believe that you might also wake up from your current state, and continue in a series of awakenings until you are fully awake. Or you might simply decide to camp where you are. How far do you have to journey in one lifetime?

The shadow that darkened your mind and dimmed your perception, has passed suddenly away. The webs of reasoning that you endlessly wove to hold together the fragments of reality, have evaporated. You feel the world directly and have no need of explanation.

From infancy we develop our conceptual structure – we learn to perceive space and time.[1] In our very early stages we develop the conceptual structure which we experience as ‘reality’. This process of development, if undamaged, occurs from within the child. Children learn to speak and to walk without adult intervention. An environment can be supportive or hostile. Supportive does not mean intrusive. A supportive environment means that the process will unfold naturally and operate as it was designed to operate. And we are generally designed to operate positively. Only traumatic events, such as the death of a parent, or a hostile environment such as malnourishment, or destructively intrusive adults, will cause a distortion in how your reality if formed.

One such distortion is depression. We are not designed to be depressed, as a species. There may be more than one set of causes of depression. What is important is that it structures the way we experience the world just as extensively as our sense of space and time do. And the perception is just as convincing.

What is even more important, is that that structure, primary as it is, can still be healed. The depression can lift, and your life can continue its natural course. And the course of life is a movement, however gradual, to a clearer perception of reality. We do not have to do anything to improve on reality. We have to learn to recognise and acknowledge it as it is, rather than through our distorted perception.

One of the key elements in awakening from depression is time. And time is linked to reality because reality is always in the present. [2] We are strongly bound to our memories of the past as constituting reality. Is this not part of what is called karma? Even when we think we live in the present, we are still trailing far behind. When we wake from depression, it is as though we have leapt forward in time, closer to the present. There is an immediacy to our experience of the world that was never there before. A septum, or membrane, that stood between ourselves and the world, has been removed. Through this change we may become aware that, though we are closer to the present, we are not yet fully there. Now we may choose to stop and rest – or continue. © John Mitchell 21 06 08
[1] In an experiment with a sheet of glass laid over a table, a baby below a certain age would crawl over the edge of the visible table beneath the glass. Above that age, it would stop at the edge of the table. What had changed is that it had developed ‘depth-perception’. Before that age, it simply did not have the capacity to know that it would fall off the edge of the table.
[2] Bertrand Russell said that, if we believed in creation, then there was no logical reason why the world could not have been created, complete with records, history and memory, half a second ago.

LETTING GO OF SUFFERING

In the UCT medical museum there is a tumour, preserved in a bottle, and it is the size of a melon, as the accompanying newspaper article describes it. At least, it was there when I visited in 1970 as a young philosophy student, eager to discover more about the world.

The story tells of a young woman in her late 20’s who was visited by a social worker in connection with some other problem. She discovered that the young woman had a huge tumour on her bottom, and was unable to sit comfortably because of it. The social worker explained to her that she could have the tumour removed. But the young woman resisted. It was a part of her. She had adjusted her life to it. It had always been there and in fact, she had absorbed it into her self-concept. It took a lot of persuading and counselling for her to agree to let go of her affliction. Afterwards, she rejoiced in her new found freedom, able to wear normal clothes, a bathing costume, go at last to the beach. It was a true release.

When people say we choose and are attached to our suffering, it sounds ridiculous. Who would choose to suffer? But the way we choose our suffering, and the way we hold on to it, is much more subtle. It is a Buddhist precept that there is suffering. What is meant by this is much more than the mundane fact of earthquakes and famine that we can all see. It means that we are all in a state of suffering merely by virtue of the fact that we are on this earth. And we suffer because we are ignorant, as the young lady was, that we can be released from our suffering. We suffer because we have absorbed this level of suffering into our self-concept. It has always been there, and we cope with it as best we can. But we do not really know how to let go of it. Most of our attempts to escape our suffering just lead to greater enmeshment within the web that holds us.

We may claim that we are not suffering. It is just ‘life’, and the defenders of the position are just being ‘realistic’. All too often, ‘realists’ are just closet pessimists, no closer to reality than anyone else. If only they could be real instead of realistic!

What we can see is relative suffering. The body of the Meths drinker in the street reflects the deep level of his suffering on the ‘blue Train’. There is a numbness to his senses, beyond that induced by his imbibing. Without that numbness he could not survive. He would be screaming and writhing in pain. In fact, of course, some people who breach the limits of endurance do exactly that, and we call them ‘insane’. But for ourselves we feel relatively less pain, and we tend to take ourselves quite comfortably as the ‘norm’. But the same situation applies to us. As Aldous Huxley discovered in ‘The Doors of Perception’, if our senses were fully operative we would be overwhelmed with information. We can survive in this world because there is a filter on our senses which limits the extent to which we can perceive the world, and of course, to which we feel our pain. ‘Pink Floyd’ described it as, ‘comfortably numb’. People who suffer from hyperacussis hear sounds abnormally loudly, and loud noises actually cause them physical pain. What we regard as a ‘normal’ level of hearing ability, is way below what is possible for humans, let alone for other animals.

Some people are living in a constant state of suffering compared to which we are relatively well off. If their ability to endure this is made possible by a filter which limits the pain, we cannot claim with any certainty that we are not in exactly the same situation relative to some other state of being. Compared to that, we are the Meths drinkers. And so on up to some potential state of being which is completely free of suffering. Could be.

If a person can be reluctant to loose a source of physical discomfort, might we not also be clinging to a view of reality which is limiting? It could be quite threatening to us to let go of all we have deemed certain to face the hope and risk the disappointment of release. How clearly do we want to see reality?

We can see this process of release from longstanding suffering in psychotherapy. When a person experiences a cathartic release or attains a significant insight, they feel relieved and released from a discomfort they have endured all their lives. This release can be permanent, and it can be succeeded by other releases. On what grounds can we posit a limit to the extent that this process can continue? Until we actually confront the limiting factor, we cannot know its extent, nor what might lie beyond.

Let us look at how we can release our attachment to our suffering. There is no mystery in this, and no arcane belief required: just a step by step plodding towards reality. But as we approach reality, (whatever reality turns out to be for each of us as we uncover it), the intensity of the fear which holds us in thrall, increases. When we finally acknowledge the reality, the ‘charge’ in that aspect of our psyche is released. It is like bringing a rod charged with static electricity towards an Electroscope. As you approach the electroscope, the charge in the rod causes the gold leaves in the device to repel each other and move apart. But when you bring the rod so close that it actually touches the electrode, the charge is released, and the gold leaves collapse.

Our fear and the unpleasant feelings that hold the blockage, increase in intensity as we approach the confrontation with our reality. Once we acknowledge the underlying truth, we are released from one more illusion, one more predisposition to choose and hold on to our suffering, and we move a little closer to the discovery of our true nature.

Socrates said that the first state of knowledge is to know that we do not know. The difficulty is exactly that we have so absorbed our habitual state of being into our perception of ‘reality’ that we really believe it is real. We really believe we have to live with our tumours. To start to doubt that is to start to doubt the whole fabric of our reality. Once we wake up from the anaesthetic, it can be dangerous. The process of liberation is not to be undertaken lightly. Often it is useful to have a supportive structure, a group of trusted friends, or at least a routine to return to, to let you get your bearings again before venturing into more discovery. Once you have let go of the handrail of your regular limitations, it is difficult to judge with certainty which is a new reality, and which, a new illusion. This can be the role of ritual: like a fire drill, something that can guide us in coping with daily life when panic, or unusual experiences, have removed the familiar. When we judge a ritual ‘meaningless’, we have to be able to say by what measure we are sure of our own meaning.

Simply to argue that we cannot see any meaning in it, is dangerous and foolish. Sartre wrote of going to a café to meet Pierre. He could not find him there. But the mere fact that he could not see him did not allow him to claim that Pierre was not there, with the same certainty that he would have called him ‘present’ if he had seen him. He might have been in a corner of the room that was dimly lit. It is dangerous to draw conclusions on the basis of what we cannot see. Better to keep looking, and draw our conclusions from what we can see. And if we find that the longer we look, the more we see, better to keep looking, to keep letting go of old presumptions, to refresh the screen of our perception and keep living with the uncertainty of knowing that we do not know.
© John Mitchell 06 06 08

FAITH, TRUST, AND REALITY

The biggest mistake is to try to have faith. We can no more make ourselves have faith than we can make ourselves fall in love with someone, or make ourselves feel what we do not feel. We can convince ourselves that we feel it, and we can open our minds to the possibility, so that we do not block it. So that we recognise it when it happens. But we cannot plan to be spontaneous.

So it does help to tell people about having faith. Someone who may never have experienced faith, or know that it exists, can be assisted by having the cognitive groundwork laid. The relationship between what we feel and what we think is essential to our sanity. We create that relationship when we recognise what we are feeling. It takes time for an infant to recognise that what it is feeling is thirst, and time for a teenage to recognise that water satisfies thirst, Coca-Cola satisfies pleasure. So, if you are thirsty, drink some water. If you still feel like it, have a Coke for pleasure. But imbibing sugar will only increase your thirst. You need to understand what is going on inside in order to take appropriate action outside.

It does help to explain to people that what they are feeling is sadness, because they may be thinking it is anger at the person they hold responsible for their sadness. People do not automatically recognise their own feelings. They do not always have the courage to take the responsibility of acknowledging them. They may know they want to break something or hurt someone, and they may think that is an expression of anger. Sometimes it is. But feeling your anger is a whole different experience and once you have learnt to do that, you no longer indulge in destructive behaviour. But you have to have discovered how to recognise that feeling. You have to have discovered what it really means to feel a feeling – without having to externalise or express it. Hitting pillows and shouting as is sometimes done in therapy sessions, is a teaching process, to enable the person to learn to make the connection. But it is not the end of the process, but the process itself.

So where does faith come in? Faith, like recognising your feelings, occurs after the fact. First you have faith, then you recognise that you have it. Faith arises from knowledge. A person who knows his science, has faith that the experiment will prove his theory. If his knowledge is insufficient or faulty, the experiment will show this. But if he really knows what he knows, he has faith. Einstein was asked what he would have done, had a crucial experiment not validated his theory. He replied that the experiment would have to be repeated because the experimenters had made an error. And he was right.

When does knowledge become arrogance, when does faith become insanity? We have constantly to judge our own grasp of reality for ourselves. Occasionally, the universe nudges us back to reality when, for example, we reverse our car into a pole that was not there. But one of the things we are doing in this life is learning to recognise what is our imagination, and what is the underlying reality. When a doctor tells you that you only have one month to live, do you make your will and prepare to die, or do you ‘…not go gentle into that good night, Fight, fight, against the dying of the light’ as Dylan Thomas wrote to his father? Sometimes the doctor is right. Sometimes the will to live can change the outcome.

A study done in New York showed that there was a drop in the average rate of deaths of old Chinese people prior to an important annual festival. It was followed by an increase in the rate of deaths after the festival so that overall, the average was maintained. The theory they were testing was that people could influence their time of death by their will to be present at this important festival.

This is where the active influence of faith comes in. As I have said, we cannot try to have faith, and it is pointless fooling ourselves into thinking what we do not feel. On the other hand, if our knowledge of how things work is sufficient and accurate, the cognitive recognition of what is already the case, does reinforce it. Once we begin to discover that we are actually in a universe that is on our side, we can gradually open our minds to recognise the events in our lives that confirm this. That is when we begin to trust.

Trust is not an abdication of will or of responsibility. Trust requires will and responsibility. But it is a change in the ground rules. It is a recognition that changes the relationship, just as it changes our personal relationships. If you do not know what it means to trust another person, that is a place to start to find out what trust means. Then, by analogy, you can begin to recognise a trusting relationship with, let us say, the universe, or the higher self, or the unconscious. Whatever it may be, it is a trusting relationship with something beyond our most limited perception of our mundane experience.

It takes courage to trust because, once we begin to question the taboo on looking beyond the sensory existence, we court insanity. It is possible to become completely deluded, so out of line with the material world that we keep on bumping into things that are not there. And this is the risk we have to take to move beyond the limitations of our mundane world.

A baby elephant is traditionally hobbled with a rope on its foreleg. Eventually it learns to accept this restriction. As an adult, it is as effectively hobbled by a piece of string which it could easily break. Or experience of life from infancy structures our world, often for the good. And sometimes we outgrow those experiences. This can be simple, or more extensive. We might have been bitten by a dog, and believe that all dogs are fierce. We can challenge that taboo and learn to distinguish between those that are fierce and those that are friendly. This is a step towards a clearer perception of reality. It requires suspending our belief in what we are sure of. All learning does so. If that taboo was a mistaken belief, there might be others. But there is no certainty in choosing between them. Only gradually, can we start to build up our knowledge of a universe that we can trust, of a reality that exists prior to, and beyond our experience to date, of a mystery which is constantly available to reveal itself, as soon as we are available to receive it.

Trust is the foundation. Once you can gain the insight that allows you to trust the universe, and recognise that there is, both psychologically and psychically, an unforced tendency towards health, just as the body tends towards healing itself, then you can begin to look toward faith. Not faith in this or that. That would be to introduce restriction, rather than release the constraints. But faith that moves your whole body and being into the light. When you have faith, there is a cognitive reinforcement of the trust. Your mind is now predisposed to recognising the new insights into reality, as the mystery reveals itself, whereas before, you looked to send them away. Naturally, as an inevitable consequence of faith, comes joy and love as you begin to feel the positive nature of the universe. There is still adversity, there are still challenges to overcome, there is still work to be done. We eat when hungry and sleep when tired. But the context is different. It is like a move from winter to spring. Rain in spring feels different from a rainy day in winter.

Once we have trust and are developing faith, we can begin to look at the way in which we perceive reality. After all, underlying everything is reality. Who knows what reality is? We all do. Of necessity. If we exist at all, we exist in reality. Even if we do not exist, then that conclusion is the reality. But we are arrogant if we think we know everything about reality. We only have to look back to the seventeenth century, when people were beginning to get excited about the physical sciences and discover that blood circulated within the body, and that planets orbited on predictable paths, to see that we have a long way to go before we can say that everything has been invented that can be invented, and that everything has been discovered that there is to discover. That reality might extend beyond what we now know about it is as simple and true a proposition now as it was in the 17th century, as it ever was.

What is important now is to develop the trust, and grow the faith, to loosen our hold on the brilliant discoveries of the past, and have the courage to learn to recognise new aspects, to develop new concepts, of reality, ourselves, on a daily basis.


A note on time.
It is consistent with this view, and consistent with our doubts about an unknown universe, that the future might reliably be predicted. People who do predict future events reliably generally say that ‘time is different on the other side’. There is a logic to this which is quite simple.

Our experience of time is sequential. Someone once compared it to watching a movie frame by frame, even though the whole movie had already been recorded. If anyone were to be able to ‘experience’ the future in the present, their whole sense of temporal sequence, time as we know it, must have been suspended. To be able to jump ahead in time, you have to be free of the constraints of time. That is why, though they can tell you what will happen, they cannot reliably tell you when it will happen. You cannot have time outside the constraints of time.
© John Mitchell 02 06 08