The Language of Depression

Picture: Abduction of Persephone, by Lorenzo Bernini

Our life is full of circumstances that lead to depressive states: the presence of chaos in society, the loss of someone, loneliness, an accident, an illness and other kinds of life ordeals. However, the cause of sorrow void has little to do with them, but rather with a way of living that barely scratches the surface of things, driving us to experience a deep void and dissatisfaction; a superficiality that implies cultivating blind habits such as self-pity, excess of self-importance or even self-deprecation. As the Buddha manifested, the main habit of human beings is “attached to suffering”. Humans get caught in behaviours that always lead to suffering, mainly because these are not understood from the root. Therefore, we need to look for understanding.

In the West there have been many attempts to shed light on the phenomenon of depression, although in general, this question remains insoluble, despite ancient teachers knew and taught its profound reason of being.

Romantic thinkers like Jean Paul Richter used the expression "pain of the world" (Weltschmerz) in reference to the sorrow and disappointment with life in general. For them physical reality doesn't satisfy the demands of the heart and is darkened by the presence of evil. Surprisingly, many romantic poets considered sorrow as a form of poetic inspiration; although most of them omitted the negative effects it can have in the psyche when its causes are not discovered. To give an illustrative example. The depressive melancholy and anxious precipitation that moved Søren Kierkegaard to write brought his engagement with Regina Olsen to an end. And he confessed that he didn't want to burden her with those depressive states he couldn't control. 

Kierkegaard referred to “existential anguish” as Angst, his favourite subject, to which he dedicated a book, The concept of Anxiety. Hence he is regarded as the first existentialist thinker, although “existentialism” as a stream of thought would not emerge with impetus until the period between the two World Wars. The harshness and atrocities of war agitated the dark bottom of the human psyche much more than any of the previous historical wars and existentialists focused on the idea that humans have no nature –unlike the animals– what makes us inherently disoriented and anguished. 

Some existential views adopted a terribly pessimistic view that made many lives more depressing. It is the case of Sartre's novel Nausea,  in which the uncertainty and cruelty humans experience in life can never be understood, only faced, feeling nausea.

Much more inspired was the view of Martin Heidegger, for whom the existential anguish arises in man because he feels "thrown into existence", forced to face death and the challenging responsibility of having to use his will in order to forge a nature of his own. As he said, every adult is responsible for choosing his actions, attitudes and life style, and the very act of choosing with courage a path, without being driven by external models, is living an "authentic life". Right at the end of his life, Heidegger started hinting that the "authentic life" and a new way of thinking can lead human beings to the “understanding of Being (Sein), the Divine nature of all things, which reveals itself in a state of “detachment” and “serenity” he called Gelassenheit.

Certainly, there is truth in his ideas, but something more than thinking is required to reconcile inner conflicts and fill the void. Only Love of Wisdom and inner-development can give a much richer understanding of ourselves, including depression.

The "language of Reality" indicates that anguish and depression play an important role, a function linked to particular stages in the path of spiritual evolution. Contrarily, society focuses on selfish comfort, happiness, light, success, pleasure and heavenly heights forgetting the role of darkness. A clear omission of what Wisdom has always taught through myths, legends and teachings: the Light can only be found at the bottom of the Cave, the Darkness of the Sacred Underworld. 

All the great mythological heros, from Gilgamesh to Orpheus and Odysseus traveled to the underworld in their quest for immortality and divine perfection. And later the Alchemists considered that the first step in the process of inner transformation is a state of putrefaction called nigredo.

This truth is also expressed in the Christian Gospels, where it is said that Jesus suffered temptation from evil in a desert –a psychological desert– and despair in Getsemani, that he reconciled evil by forgiving his enemies, accepting a terrible physical death at the cross, and that he finally descended into Hell before returning to the Father. A complete vision of spiritual development, integration of the animal nature and the spiritual nature, meant to be performed by each one of us: I am the Way, the Truth and the Life (John 14, 6).

These traditions teach that transformation can only take place when we consciously embrace what we don't like, seeing it as part of ourselves, the side that closes the circle of completeness.

All our difficult moments can be a direct way to inner growth if we face them with patience and mindfulness. They are an opportunity to become “authentic individuals”, instead of shadows. The  poet John Keats seemed well aware of that when he wrote in a letter: some say the world is a vale of tears, I say it is a vale of soul-making.

The moments of distress and apparent impasse are signs demanding our attention and openness. And every time we ignore the message of longing and the necessity of inner work, certain creative energies –Chthonic powers of the Earth– communicate by means of distress and sickness that something must be done, that a conscious contact with our soul, the feminine side of reality, must take place. In Greece this was expressed with the myth of the abduction of Persephone.

Depression is the fingers of Hades and Persephone reaching us –Peter Kingsley–.

Our heedlessness makes the divine in us very sad, and its laments are indeed our sorrow, void and anxiety. Yet, our unconscious procrastination compels hidden forces to drag us down into a hell of terrible sufferings. Moment in which humans think: "life is rubbish", "why am I so miserable?", "why is this happening to me?", "I don't want to live like this?", "I prefer to die". All an indication that something must die inside us. Although, without discernment, this impulse may be interpreted "literally", leading to suicidal thoughts. Hence we must understand the ancient maxim: die before you die. 

In this psychological death, one sees that we are more than the thoughts and emotions of our superficial personality. A realisation that puts us into conscious contact with our true infinite nature. 

By knowing ourselves we can be open enough to use our predicaments as catapults that push us towards the Plenitude of the All Embracing Father-Mother.

As soon as we dedicate more time to rest in the silent awareness of space and call into question the literalness of our thoughts and emotions, wonderful things start to happen. There is a Spanish saying: nothing is false, nothing is true, everything depends on the colour of the crystal you are looking through. Things are not what they seem to be.  Appearances can be that disgusting mythological being, Medusa-Gorgona –a beautiful woman under a spell of ugliness–, whose glance turned into stone everyone who dared to look at her eyes directly. So we need to be like Perseus, and use a shield as a mirror to avoid looking at her face directly. All we see, light or darkness, is truly a reflection of our nature, and it does not have more eyes than ours. 

Conflict only arises when what we see appears as “other”. And only by identifying the reflection could Perseus behead Medusa with the sword of will, obtaining Pegasus, the flying horse, the wings of our soul.

Perseus also had winged shoes received from Hermes, metaphor of the elevation of wise reflections, and the helmet of invisibility, given by Hades, to be Nobody, for egoism makes throws us outside of ourselves.

As we see, myths can be a really helpful to know ourselves and keep the mind focused on something better than negative thoughts.

Each one of us has a full range of potentialities waiting to be displayed without delay. And we can only discover them by listening to the logic of life and working day after day on the soil of our imperfections.  Sometimes it is necessary to be like Knights, taming the dragon of our egoism, with patience, strength, discernment, determination and equanimity, to endure pain and avoid mechanical habits. 

But there are also times in which we can do just one thing: surrender ourselves under the transformative power of Silence and Darkness. Peter Kingsley reminds us in his books Reality and In The Dark Places of Wisdom that in Ancient Greece this was even a practice, known as "incubation", lying down in sacred caves, temples or rooms (theme of another post).

All in all, our attitude must be that of service and gratitude. We are called to be "organs of perception" for the Endless Unmanifest so that darkness can be illumined, reconciled. This is how we become active participants in a Cosmic Drama where the Divine forgets and remembers itself forever, in Eternity. Only when we miss our mission we fall into depression.

© 2009

Struggle In The Soul

Humanity is going through the most important stage in the course of its existence. Our present time is marked by difficult global challenges which mirror a serius fork in the road. There are just two directions, two rivers. One goes up. The other goes down. And the way we choose depends on each one of us. It's a question of becoming really conscious human beings or degenerate into sub-human species.

The core of this difficult situation is the most ardent of the struggles, the internal one.

Be kind to all you meet for all are engaged in a life and death struggle (Plato). Not seeing it in ourselves means one is dead already and has succumbed to the dark side of the force. Darkness destroys, excludes and divides. Therefore, to become really conscious, darkness should never be avoided or feared, but rather included. Two poles interacting make light.

St.George's Dragon can never be destroyed. We all need to face our inner dragons: fears, repressed emotions and instincts. And winning means not succumbing to unconsciousness.

When an inner content is not made conscious, it happens outside as Fate (C.G.Jung).

All the destruction, scandals and aberrations that the criminal mass media displays with such a shameful morbosity is an explosive externalization of all the elements humans repress.

Therefore, the responsibility of not supporting darkness falls upon man. We carry the world upon our shoulders, like Atlas.

The Absence Of God Is The Presence of God

The words we use to describe the world rarely grasp the richness of a given moment. Nevertheless, the power of words can still be real.

In the context of the Gnostic path of love, Cynthia Bourgeault expresses her teacher´s wisdom (we highlighted a few inspiring sentences):

Rafe began his hermit life. It was an exhilarating time for him in its new found freedom, but the strain of loneliness and disorientation -not to mention the sheer physical brutality of the site- gradually took its role. Late one afternoon he was in a thickly tangled, rock-strewn field, trying to move a large boulder to clear a site for his cabin. He strained and strained with pickax and crowbar, but the boulder wouldn't give.

"And suddenly I burst into tears" he said. "I was so tired; it all just felt so lonely, so totally useless. I sat there on that rock and said to myself, 'Listen, God didn't ask you to come here, you came here yourself'.

"I'd never felt that way before. It was an ache all the way to the end of the universe. I realized this must be my 'bare self'.

Over those next long months, Rafe said he gradually became acostumed to it. That ache all the way to the end of the universe was how things would be, how they had to be. "God can only work in us through our bare self", he averred. "At that place, if a person is really willing to wait there, god says, 'Aha! now we can get down to work. At last there is something to work with'".

Later, in an astonishing observation, Rafe added, "we only think it's bare because the light is so intense that it blinds us".

Again and again Rafe taught me to work this way, not flinching from those moments of utter unremitting emptiness. "You have to endure the tedium until something gradually emerges in it" he told me, the lesson of those long, empty winters up at the cabin. In it, not from it, he insisted. It is not the incubator of the new; it is the new itself, in the beginning of its own dimensionality, stark and pitilessly embracing.

Sometimes, he said, he'd cry out with terror. With the ache and futility of it. With a life wasted, a God far away. "That's the beginning of it. That's when you're getting somewhere. If you can only just stay present in that bare self, you'll begin to discover how the absence of God is the presence of God".

We are human. We want to jerk away from that moment. Fill it with distraction and activity, with our own meaning. In my case, run up the hill to Rafe's cabin, fill it with a person, sitting in his chair in his lonely winter watch -a person, my heart told me, who would too soon be gone. Fill it with a conversation, a cappucino, the energy flowing between us, the joy of times shared, the glow of human love. But to live in that world, to warm oneself only by its fire, means to be stranded in unbridgeable, wrenching loss when that fires flickers out. To find the eternal communion, one must not be afraid to venture into that dark, black sea of what seems inexpressible absence. More painfully, one must 'choose' to venture out, while the fire is still burning on the shore. For only what is truly begun here can continue in eternity.

Dwell in it...endure the tedium until something gradually emerges in it. Often now, I lie in my bed and simply ache. But I try to remember that this ache is what is given to me in this moment to express the presence itself; to paraphrase Rilke, it is the beginning of a love I can just scarcely bear in human form. In the cosmic sphere everything is a two way street. By that very ache I know I am still connected in love; it is the bridge on which I cross. I remember Rafe saying, "it seems bare only because it's so full of light".

"If I can love you across the space of a mile, I can love you across the space of eternity" excerpted from the book Love is Stronger Than Death

The Dark Night Of The Soul

One of the greatest spiritual literature jewels is the poem Dark Night, written by a the Spanish mystics, Juan de Yepes Alvarez, also known as Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591), a Carmelita monk who worked closely with Therese of Avila, another important mystic.

He wrote this poem after enduring tortures and a nine month incarceration, for disobeying his superiors and wanting to make reforms in his order:

On a dark night,

Kindled in love with longings

Oh happy chance!

I went forth without being observed,

My house being now at rest.

In darkness and secure,

By the secret ladder, disguised

Oh happy chance,

In darkness and in concealment,

My house being now at rest,

In the happy night,

In secret, when none saw me,

Nor I beheld aught,

Without light or guide,

Save that which burned in my heart,

This light guided me

More surely than the light of noonday,

To the place where he

Who I knew well! was awaiting me

A place where none appeared.

Oh, night that guided me,

Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,

Oh, night that joined

Beloved with lover,

Lover transformed in the Beloved!

Upon my flowery breast,

Kept wholly for himself alone,

There he stayed sleeping,

and I caressed him,

And the fanning of the cedars made a breeze.

The breeze blew from the turret

As I parted his locks;

With his gentle hand

He wounded my neck

And caused all my senses to be suspended.

I remained, lost in oblivion;

My face I reclined on the Beloved.

All ceased and I abandoned myself,

Leaving my cares

Forgotten among the lilies.

The expression "dark night of the soul" is very used in the mystic literature and it sometimes refers to states of emotional distress and existential ordeals. However, in this poem, the dark night indicates a state of silent stillness (hesychía) in the depths of oneself.

Saint John of the Cross wrote abundantly on the experience in two wonderful books, The Dark Night of The Soul and Ascent of Mount Carmel. The poem basically describes the spiritual surrender and profound inner stillness -My house being now at rest- which led John to the realisation of divine oneness inside, Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover.

The experience of this sacred night beyond "ordinary" thoughts and perceptions after his moments of suffering entail the transcendence and integration of those moments, which served as part of the purification process, the defeat of the selfish personality.

This inspired mystic explained the spiritual purification as having two stages: the purification of the senses, which is the cleansing of our ordinary perceptions, and the spiritual catharsis, which deals with the hurdles of sloth, self-pity, envy and lack of faith: the dark night of the soul is the arising of God inside the soul, which is stripped of her ignorance and imperfections: habitual, natural and spiritual; being summoned by contemplations saturated with divine knowledge. Thus, God teaches her secretly and instructs her in his perfection of love, without doing anything or without understanding the nature of the contemplations (The Dark Night of the Soul).

Spiritual purification takes place by going through, and digesting, emotional suffering such as deep sorrow, despair, boredom, sourness; symptoms which arise before and during the process of inner growth. They are even experienced by yoguis and monks. The solitary and ascetic Fathers of the Desert, for instance, talked about acedia, a sort of sloth and boredom which was considered a kind of sin, a manifestation of the false ego.

As for the importance of dwelling in silent stillness, beyond the distraction of the senses, St.John wrote: the way in which these souls [the spiritual seekers] are to conduct themselves in this night of the senses [beyond sense perceptions], is to devote themselves not at all to reasoning and pondering, since this is not the time for it, but to allow the soul [psyche] to remain in peace and quietness, although it may seem clear to them that they are doing nothing and are wasting their time, and although it may appear to them that it is because of their weakness that they have no desire in that state to think of anything.

The truth is that they will be doing quite sufficient if they have patience and persevere in prayer, without making any effort. What they must do is merely to leave the soul free and disencumbered, and at rest from all knowledge and thought, troubling not themselves in that state, about what they shall think or meditate upon, but contenting themselves with merely a peaceful and loving attentiveness towards God and in being without anxiety, without the ability and without desire to have experience of him or to perceive him. For all these yearnings, disquiet and distract the soul, from the peaceful quiet and sweet ease of contemplation which is here granted to it (The Dark Night Of The Soul).

This ability to remain immersed in pure awareness and stillness is considered to be the higher level of prayer by the mystics. Be still and know that I am God (Psalm 46, 10).

The hesychast master St.Theophan the Recluse taught that there are three levels of prayer: the prayer of the mind, the prayer of the heart and the prayer of the body, which integrates the previous ones in the pure space of awareness; it's not a simple physical sensation, but a consciousness that integrates mind, feeling and body in quietness. This is an extremely clarifying teaching, in so far as it dispels all those pseudo-mystic misinterpretations that preach an absolute annihilation of mind and feeling in higher states of being.

There are higher degrees of feeling and thinking which must be actualised in order to tap into infinity. These degrees of objective knowledge (divine contemplations, says St.John) include what we could call "causal mysticism", where the seeker leaves the ordinary senses behind and plunges into the feminine side of reality, a dark vastness of potentialities devoid of form. The Sufies call it Alam i Imkan, the world of possibilities. That might be what St.John seems to be hinting at.

Althought this causal state is only one side of the cosmic equation. Our task is experiencing it and make this infinite energy flow into the world of multiplicity. For the form is emptiness and emptiness is form (Sutra of the Heart).

Incubation, A Western Form Of Meditation

Dream Temple of Kos

The forgetfulness regarding Western roots is mirrored in the way occidental seekers focus obsessively on spiritual practices and doctrines of the East, bypassing the tremendous healing power of techniques which were taught and cultivated in mystical traditions of the Ancient Greece.

One of these practices is incubation (enkoímesis), which used to be central in the Asclepian medicine, practiced in Dream Temples or Asclepieiai, of which archaeologists have found different types in Greece, Turkey and Spain. These temples had terraces with columns and altars as well as underground galleries and chambers with sleeping rooms, couches and medicinal pools carved on the rocks.

Men and women –particularly those in a desperate condition, affected by terminal illnesses– went to dream temples looking for healing, as a last resort. And there they were guided by the iatromantei, healer priests of Apollo –as Parmenides of Elea. The patients would purify their bodies and lie down on a couch. For hours or even days the patients had to rest in silence and stillness, surrendering to the healing power of naked consciousness, waiting for the light out of darkness, and under the strict supervision of expert healers, who also interpreted their psychological states and dreams.

In his book Asklepios: Archetypal Image of the Physician's Existence, Carl Kerenyi gives us a good account, in regard to the Asclepeion of Kos: The patient himself was offered an opportunity to bring about the cure whose elements he bore within himself. To this end an environment was created which, as in modern spas and health resorts, was as far as possible removed from the disturbing and unhealthful elements of the outside world. The religious atmosphere also helped man's innermost depths to accomplish their curative potentialities.

Ancient chronicles tell us about miraculous healings, as well as inner states experienced by the patients. The descriptions range from deliriums to special dreams and insightful states with mystic and shamanic characteristics well known in all spiritual traditions.

Incubation allows the seeker to stripe away all the layers of perception, accessing deeper dimensions of being.

This art turns out to be extremely effective for bringing poise into the psyche and the body, finding the source of well-being and natural healing.

The only thing required is to lie down comfortably, preferably in a dark place, and pay relaxed attention to the sensation of the body, including the breath, the heartbeat and the silence within, without trying to control thoughts nor emotions, and yet keeping an open mind and longing heart for the cure of the waters of the Mother Soul.

A systematic attention to heart and different limbs help to stop the wanderings of the mind. Mental contents simply become clouds dissolving in the space of pure awareness.

There exists a clear similarity between Oriental and Western techniques of meditation. Incubation in particular is very close to relaxation in savasana, one of Hatha Yoga poses, where pure consciousness is accessed gradually, through body sensation and finally moving further, as in the technique called Yoga Nidra or Yoguic Sleep. 

Its ultimate goal is known in Vedanta as Turiya, or Fourth state, which integrates and transcends three states: waking vigil (jagrat), sleep with dreams (swamana) and dreamless sleep (shushupti).

There have been giants of Spirit who plunged into the greatest depths of reality , sometimes after terrible sufferings, as it happened to the Spanish mystic St.John of the Cross, author of The Dark Night Of The Soul, and subject of our next post. 

© Copyright 2009

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Note: Peter Kingsley is one of the few scholars who works to bring this tradition of incubation back to life. More information at: http://www.peterkingsley.org/