This week (today is the 14th September 2014) was the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 attack on New York. September 11 is also R U OK? day. (These events are related but that’s not the discussion here.)
There’s a great deal of superstition and fear associated with the number 13 – Friday 13th, buildings not having a 13th floor and so on. In Tarot the 13th Major Arcana card is Death.
This is clearly a significant time but what’s it all about?
In a recent conversation a doctor said to me “anyone who says they never get depressed is lying”. There’s clearly a lot to get depressed about. Reading the newspaper or watching the nightly news is enough to ruin anyone’s sanity and equilibrium. Just trying to stay current and informed is fraught with the risk of spiraling into depression or even suicide.
Here are some other thoughts to ponder:
– “to be normal in a psychotic society is to be psychotic”
– “just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get me”
We see many celebrities, people who seem to have it all, suffering drug & alcohol addictions and worse. We’re right to ask the question “is the world spinning out of control towards self destruction?”
Given the state of the world, feeling depressed is probably a reasonable response. However, we’ve now turned depression into a mental disease. The ABC has recently been promoting the statistic that 50% of Australians will suffer mental illness.
Important disclaimer: I’m not a trained mental health professional and so what I’m saying probably has little or no basis in reality but I’d like to raise a few points about how we see things.
Have we reached a point where we medicalise and pathologise (some new words for you???) normal human responses to unhealthy situations?
In the book “Tuesdays With Morrie”, by Mitch Albom, one of the things that stood out for me was that Morrie allowed himself to feel angry, tearful, miserable and so on. He measured how good his days were by the number of boxes of tissues he went through.
BUT, after experiencing the pain and anguish he would lift himself out with “OK, I’ve done that. Now I can move on.” He gave himself permission to feel down and could then lift himself up.
I’m concerned that we don’t allow ourselves to experience pain and suffering even though they are natural (and possibly healthy) responses to our experience of the things around us. We try to intervene as soon as we feel negative and have to be medicated to feel better (either self-medicated or by our health professional).
In personal & spiritual growth we used to hear about “the dark night of the soul” – a period of negative feeling before a breakthrough of insight and awareness. I haven’t heard that term for a very long time.
Here’s what Eckhart Tolle says about it: “It is a term used to describe what one could call a collapse of a perceived meaning in life…an eruption into your life of a deep sense of meaninglessness. The inner state in some cases is very close to what is conventionally called depression. Nothing makes sense anymore, there’s no purpose to anything. Sometimes it’s triggered by some external event, some disaster perhaps, on an external level. The death of someone close to you could trigger it, especially premature death, for example if your child dies. Or you had built up your life, and given it meaning – and the meaning that you had given your life, your activities, your achievements, where you are going, what is considered important, and the meaning that you had given your life for some reason collapses.
It can happen if something happens that you can’t explain away anymore, some disaster which seems to invalidate the meaning that your life had before. Really what has collapsed then is the whole conceptual framework for your life, the meaning that your mind had given it. So that results in a dark place. But people have gone into that, and then there is the possibility that you emerge out of that into a transformed state of consciousness. Life has meaning again, but it’s no longer a conceptual meaning that you can necessarily explain. Quite often it’s from there that people awaken out of their conceptual sense of reality, which has collapsed.
They awaken into something deeper, which is no longer based on concepts in your mind. A deeper sense of purpose or connectedness with a greater life that is not dependent on explanations or anything conceptual any longer. It’s a kind of re-birth.”
In the Biblical Book of Kings (19:11-19:13) there’s a description of Elijah experiencing God. It says: “And behold, the LORD was passing by! And a great and strong wind was rending the mountains and breaking in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake.
After the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of a still, small voice.
When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood in the entrance of the cave. And behold, a voice came to him and said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
For me, this sounds like depression – that need to isolate yourself, remove yourself from the world – not in a calm meditative state but as a response to feeling overwhelmed.
If we’re feeling overwhelmed, where everything is out of control, our world is full of chaos and confusion, is the appropriate response one of withdrawing, shutting down and finding that “still small voice” deep within?
Elijah needed to be out in the wilderness where there weren’t the distractions which result from being amongst other people. Is depression a sane response to an insane world?
Returning to my reference about the Tarot Death card – what we see here, described by Tolle and Elijah, is a death process, a loss of the old self image and the beginning of a new one. Therefore, I see this card as indicating a transformative process just like the birth of a new you. Just like the Christian idea of “being born again”.
Like a birth, if we can get through the pain and trauma, the outcome is full of joy and celebration.
The challenge for us, on a personal and global scale, is to survive the birth.
As we come to the Jewish New Year there’s a final thought I’d like to leave you with.
In Jewish tradition the world is in perfect balance between good and evil. (It needs both elements to function.) So anything we, as individuals, do to tip the balance, will make a difference to the whole universe.
What will you do to tip the balance (and in which direction)?
*With thanks to Coles Supermarkets