Depression has been described as a modern epidemic. An army of highly trained theoreticians have postulated all sorts of approaches and created a vast enterprise pushing pills to cure this disease of our modern, so-called 'civilized', society. This is not going to be a discussion of psychology and trite self-help materials from ignorant people whimsically pontificating from their ivory towers.
Today, we're going to go down into the trenches to cut through all of the BS and investigate the incidence and role of depression from an existential, non-materialist perspective. In doing so, we might just discover the 'meaning of life'.
Some depression has a clear cause and effect relationship, an abusive family, job loss etc. This type of depression forces us to look at issues in our own lives that should be relatively straight forward if we can step out of ourselves for a moment and consider rational solutions to the stressors. It should, therefore, not be long lived, and should pass as soon as the immediate problem is solved. This is not the type of depression that we're concerned with here, however.
The depression that I'm interested in is the kind that drags on and on, the kind that costs the victim much couch time at the therapist's office and puts them on a medical treadmill, often for life. The kind of depression I'm talking about is the type that drives people to suicide, often multiple times over long periods of their lives. It sucks the soul out of you because it convinces you that the world is a completely nihilistic place. There is no purpose, no hope, no future, and no one understands. There is only a cold unfeeling world whose culture is at best superficial, and at worst outright psychopathic. There is a nothingness inside of you that grows and grows and grows.
How and why do relatively well-adjusted people with normal lives come to carry this monster inside of them, this feeling of a shattered soul that refuses to be cured with drugs or the latest counseling theories? I think the answer to that question is that the being of such people has, at some level of awareness, been forced to realize that the world "out there" is not right in some fundamental way; that it has in fact become a playground for nihilistic personalities who have no plan whatsoever other than to gorge on their own thirst for darkness and destruction.
There is, in fact, no hope for a world run in this way, because the logical result of a world run by an 'elite' who possess nothing but a hunger for darkness is complete entropy. This runs counter to any and all reason why people should be alive and what the meaning of human life might actually be. You would have to be truly twisted to believe that the goal of the universe and all of its creative diversity around you is nothingness; that the reason for everything is nothing. Normal people do not have brains that are wired this way, and when faced with the reality that the self-proclaimed 'reality creators' are creating, normal people react with sheer terror. However, the people who can actually stare down the beast and attempt to do something about this state of affairs are relatively rare, and most of those attempt to sweep the painful truth under the rug and just get on with their lives.
Most of humanity is rather fickle and will go along with the program as long as they can continue to get a piece of the pie and find someone else to deal with their problems and someone else to blame. Those with more feeling natures get the distinct impression that it is wrong to feel, since nobody else cares, and the media keeps parading the desirability of happiness obtained from the most superficial and vapid of things; conflating 'happiness' with true fulfillment. Since feeling is 'wrong', they become disillusioned and fold into themselves because they can't see any purpose in a world that is so antithetical to their inner nature. I think disillusionment is a more appropriate term for this deep depression.
So what is to be done? Why are so many people subjected to this horrible emotional state? Before we answer that question, let us take a detour for a moment and explore some scientific principles which will provide us with some context.
Read more
No comments:
Post a Comment