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Rinpoche's Teachings Meditation and Depression [Continued] PREVIOUS | NEXT PAGE Depression and the Spiritual Path With a genuinely constructive form of depression, we become nakedly in touch with our emotions and feelings. There is a need to make sense of everything, but in news ways, rather than the ways that one is used to - because making sense of everything from the samsaric point of view does not work. All the old beliefs, attitudes and ways of dealing with things have not worked. One has to re-evaluate, say and do things differently, experience things differently. That comes from using depression in a constructive fashion. Depression can be used to curb our natural urges to lose control, to become distracted and outwardly directed, dispersing our energy in all directions until there is no one inside. The feeling of depression always reminds us of ourselves, it stops us from becoming lost in our activities, in our experiences of this and that. A genuinely constructive form of depression keeps us vividly in touch with our emotions, feelings and various aspects of ourselves. In that sense, a modest form of depression is like a state of mental equilibrium. Everything that we experience is normally experienced self-indulgently, from an egoistic or narcissistic point of view. But a constructive form of depression takes away the brashness, the security and the illusory forms of self-confidence that we have so that we have to always re-evaluate and check ourselves. Instead of thinking, 'I know what is going on, I know where things are at,' with such confidence, we are constantly forced to be more observant and to question our assumptions, attitudes and behaviour, in terms of our interactions with others and with the world at large. That is what has to be there if we are to make progress on the spiritual path. That means that the individual is then open to new ways of doing things, new and creative ways of thinking. As the Buddhist teachings say, we have to ride with life, we have to evolve. Life itself is a learning process and we can only evolve and learn when we are open. We are open when we question things and we only question things when we are aware of our inadequacies as much as of our abilities. Being aware of what we do not know is more important than being aware of what we do know, because if we concentrate on what we do not know, we will always be inquisitive and want to learn. We want to learn if there is that slight experience of depression, which in Tibetan is also called yid tang skyo pa and which also has the connotation of being tired of all that is unreal; of all that is sham and illusory. The mood of depression can, in fact, propel us forward. Even though many people who experience depression say that they feel stuck, the feeling of depression can be a motivating force to move forward. The Christian mystics used the expression, 'the dark night of the soul,' which means that you have to experience the darkness in order to go forward. You cannot just embark on the mystical journey and expect there to be light and everything to be hunky-dory. You have to have the experience of the carpet being pulled out from under your feet and you have to experience yourself dangling and questioning, filled with doubts and uncertainties, not knowing what the hell is going on. As Lao Tzu says the Taoist classic Tao Teh Ching (The Way of Chuang Tzu), 'Those who say they know, don't know and those who say they don't know, know.' I suppose he is making a similar kind of point, in that the true intuitive knowledge necessary on the spiritual path comes from doubt, uncertainty and not knowing - so that the arrogance of knowing is expiated. The point is that depression, in terms of its symptoms, can be debilitating and paralysing, because of what the Buddhists would call the 'conflicting emotions' associated with it. However, not all forms of depression are debilitating. There are kinds of depression that can actually aid the individual on the spiritual path. In order to progress on the spiritual path, one has to look at depression in a much more positive light, because depression does have the potential to give us insight into ourselves and into the world that we live in. What we are familiar with is a world that we just take for granted. The onset of depression can upset everything and turn everything upside down, which then becomes an impetus for us to search and explore. We start thinking, 'There has to be more to life than what I have been doing, or what I have been, up to this point.' That is extremely important, according to Buddhism, because if we are not convinced of the illusory nature of the samsaric condition, we will always be two-minded. We will have one foot in the spiritual realm and the other in the samsaric realm, never being fully able to make that extra effort. As Shantideva said, 'This kind of experience can inject a lot of fear and anxiety into a person, because that person feels totally uprooted and everything becomes uncertain.' However, if we persist with that feeling of uprootedness, it is a valuable experience and one that is essential for travelling the spiritual path. In other words, the spiritual path does not just consist of things that massage the ego or make the ego feel good and comfortable. The ego has to be continuously and repeatedly challenged in order for us to grow spiritually. One of the first things that the ego has to learn is that nothing in this world is stable or absolutely true. Depression and Meditation Two of the main symptoms normally mentioned in the literature on depression are a loss of concentration and a weakening of one's memory capacity. If that is true, clinically speaking, then meditation will obviously be quite a useful tool for someone who experiences depression. Meditation is designed to enable us to learn how to concentrate, avoid distraction and maintain a sense of stability, how to resist yielding so readily to upsurges of emotions or overwhelming feelings. Meditation is therefore an essential practice for dealing with depression, because in Buddhism, we have to deal with everything that arises through and from the practice of meditation. There are many different kinds of meditation: meditations that involve recitation, meditations that involve visualisation, meditations that involve physical posture and gesture as well as meditations that do not involve any of these things. However, whatever form of meditation we choose, we still have to use it to deal with the various mental states that we find ourselves in. We cannot deal with depression, therefore, without meditation. Even if we are not immediately aware of depression or have not realised that we are actually experiencing it, when we start to practise meditation we may recognise the depressed state. At other times, we may meditate for a while and find that our minds are out of control and restless, then as we gradually stabilise the mind and experience a little meditative concentration, we notice that we are actually in a state of depression. In other words, even when we are meditating, we can experience depression in many different forms. Sometimes the depression may actually be related to our practice of meditation, to thinking that we are not getting anywhere, for example. Especially for beginnings, the initial pleasant meditative experiences appear to get worse rather than better and they become depressed over it. These kinds of experiences are common. They have been noted and written about by the great meditation masters in Buddhist literature. |