A practical way to overcome depression

Saturday, September 11, 2021

7:15 a.m. The question was, when we don’t have enough energy to get out of our depression, what do we do? And I already know the answer, or at least part of it. I think you will know best how to convey the sense of it to others in various starting-places.

Conceptually it is simple. In practice it is simple, too, but requires a bit of resolution. As we said, the energy comes as if from outside, and must be summoned by an act of will.

Not necessarily an explosive act, nor a violent exertion of will.

No. Calm deliberate courage in the face of discouragement will do. But it does require willpower. You don’t drift out of depression.

Sometimes it lifts, seemingly of itself.

Yes, but when it does, you don’t know why and you didn’t seem to have anything to do with it. In saying you don’t drift out of it, we don’t mean, once in, you’re in forever. We mean, you cannot get yourself out of it by drifting. Drifting is in fact the opposite of getting yourself out of anything.

Lay out your understanding and we will correct if need be.

All right. I get that there is our normal consciousness, the smaller sphere contained within the larger one, as you described it a while ago.  The small sphere represents 3D-us, the larger sphere represents all that we are beyond (and including) the 3D-us we are commonly aware of. When we are depressed, our awareness is entirely concentrated on 3D-us, as if that were all we are. We can’t get beyond it; the 3D reality seems self-evidently real, true, and what it appears to be.

And to escape the illusion of captivity?

In one way or another, we must reach beyond the bar. Remembering – or, more likely, acting as if we remembered – we reach out for our greater existence., that its energy may flow into us.

You can hear the analogy to the way religious people experience active assistance from prayer. They do not think of it as you are thinking of it, but they experience it the same, for of course it is the same condition of aloneness, the same reaching beyond the bars, the same access of energy.

But in our time, fewer people can pray. For one thing we have been taught, between the lines, that any such extension beyond our 3D-consciousness is superstition.

You mean, you have been taught that thinking of it in a religious framework is superstition.

Yes.

In a New Age framework, it would be considered acceptable, even advanced. And in a sense it would be an advance, in that it created a way forward for people who could no longer use the accustomed religious channels. Belief cannot be forced, so if it is dead in a person, that person will find another way to connect, or will be unable to do so. Either way, the gods don’t reinhabit the temples they abandon.

No. That I realized from the first time I read that Jung had said it. But New Age is as limited as Christianity. More limited, in fact, because it doesn’t have behind it centuries of thought and practice, nor ritual nor other aids to connection. So if neither the established religions, what they call the higher religions, nor the New Age movement – and certainly not scientism – is a way forward, where are we?

Let us remain more narrowly focused. The specific problem is, how, when one is depressed, can one summon the energy needed to break out of the depression. Those who cannot pray, and those for whom ritual does not avail, require almost an abstract understanding, not for the sake of establishing the connection, but for the sake of sensing the blockage that their own unconscious or semi-conscious or intermittent beliefs have constructed.

We need an excuse to believe what we already know, so to speak.

Yes. You don’t need a lightning bolt on the road to Damascus, and you certainly don’t need a mathematical theorem. You don’t need anything proved to you. You need a plausible way to think about things when you are in bad shape. A drowning man does not require a lifeboat or even a life-preserver. A simple piece of wood floating will do. In fact, the more desperate you are emotionally, the more you need simple things rather than complex things.

I think of Lanny Budd’s advice to the sophisticated woman, that she pray in the way she did as a child, in that attitude of trust, because no sophisticated formula was going to help her.

Bear in mind, those were day of war – that is, they were more than 80 years ago – and times have changed, your civilization has changed, and the souls that found entry into 3D are necessarily differently composed. In your time, perhaps some of the older people can pray their way out of depression, but mostly that way is closed, by the changing of the times, the changing of the shared subjectivity, the changing of those who entered the play. Three ways of saying the same thing.

So our way is to remember that we are more than we consciously remember that we are.

Let us say this carefully. You experienced something the other day, and confirmed it later, and can confirm it this minute – as you are doing; good – and this is the way, whether you can quite believe in the reality or not. If you can’t believe in its reality, believe that the feeling is a dramatization within you of a real function, and that will do.

It is difficult to describe, as it has almost no obvious sensory component. Thinking a certain way, remembering a certain way, it feels as if I have moved my awareness higher inside my skull. It is as if I climbed to the third floor, you might say, except I haven’t left the lower levels; I have added the higher level to my momentary awareness. I see from a bird’s-eye view instead of my customary street-level view. My eyesight seems different, in a way. Or, that isn’t the way to put it, I am looking at these hands, this journal and desk, all of it, as if from a little distance. Instead of being unconsciously part of the scene, it’s more like observing Frank writing, yet I have not lost awareness of myself.

This proceeded from the remembered sense of connection I obtained by re-reading our mind-mirror sessions of three years ago. But the sensations aren’t the important part. As I say, they could be dramatizations. The connection is what is important, or rather, the renewed reality of connection, the renewed knowing, feeling, sensing, that I am connected.

Of course it blows away depression like smoke.

It does. I wonder, in fact, if depression is mostly us suffering from the illusion that we are alone in 3D.

No need to generalize. Merely, for anyone needing it, this hint: In whatever manner suits you, actively remember that you are more than your physical body, more than the “you” you usually carry around, more than any limits you can imagine. But you have to actually make this real to yourself. It may require an effort to do so, if you are in a depressed state, because your mood will tell you, falsely, that limitation is the truth and connection is only a pipe-dream or an unimportant thing that occasionally happens. Make the active effort to disbelieve the naysayer. The effort itself will help you to escape the prison of depressed functioning.

And we realize that the prison bars were never real. They felt real, but they were real only insofar as they could persuade us to believe in them.

This is true, but not in itself helpful, because someone who is depressed is not capable  of wishing the bars away, which is how they will interpret what you just said. We know it isn’t what you said, but it is what they will hear. More helpful to tell them that they can get themselves out by actively remembering. And remember, here we are considering you all as if you were disconnected 3D individuals, but the fact is, no matter how it feels, you are never alone. Make an inch of effort to extend from the 3D end, and the rest of you makes a yard, a mile, of effort to meet you.

You might call this “A practical way to overcome depression,” though it is more important than that.

Our thanks as always. Next time?

There is still our list.

Okay. Till then.