An Alternative to Potions and Incantations
Depression and anxiety are a normal part of the human emotional experience. If someone says they haven't been sad or worried, they are exaggerating or lying, to you and maybe to themselves. The real question is, how do we deal with them? How do we recover from them and not get stuck?
There are two normal answers to how to deal with negative emotions. These have been called different things throughout history. We might think of them from older civilizations as potions and incantations. In a more modern sense they are often called medicine and counseling, or pharmaceuticals and therapy. In the most basic sense, it's drugs and words.
Drugs and words are powerful things. They change how we feel, think, perceive, and behave.
The problem with drugs is that they have side-effects. Drugs often cause worse problems than they are even intended to solve, and people often realize that too late. The names of the drugs change. New ones are invented. But the same patterns keep repeating. This is true if it's a natural drug or a synthetic drug, if it's administered by a doctor or a witch doctor, or a person is self-medicated, if it's a drink, smoke, injection, cream, food, or pill. You can go on a good trip or a bad trip, take a small dose or a large dose. But, since it doesn't change the fundamental reality of the problem, you have to take it again, and again. It doesn't deal with the emotions directly, only indirectly.
The problem with words is that they don't go deep enough. Words are concepts. They are ideas. This means that specifics are removed from reality to come up with the concept, which is an abstracted generalization. The word "chair" is fundamentally different than an actual chair. Reality is not a concept, it is the thing itself. The cells of your body are made to react to reality, not a disembodied concept. Words are not reality, they are a disembodied representative symbol of conceptual reality. That is something very different.
In trying to use words to change feelings people are trying to talk themselves and others out of and into feelings. They are working at two different levels. The basic formula is, if you feel anxious or depressed, then say these words, and you'll feel happy, calm, and confident. It's the same as a sales process where you have a person that doesn't want to buy, the sales person says these words, then the person wants to buy. Both are types of persuasion. There's a lot of skill that goes into that, and it does work to a certain extent. But, there's a high failure rate because you're dealing with emotions indirectly rather than directly.
When people can't save themselves from their depression and anxiety they appeal to a higher authority to come save them and solve their problems for them. When people are children this is normally a parent. When people are adults this is normally a government or a god. This too can sometimes work. The parent certainly can comfort the child, and god often comforts adults. Again, this deals with the emotions indirectly instead of directly, which is why the limitations often become apparent over time.
People take a chemical solution to a spiritual problem, a word solution to a feeling problem, an other solution to a self problem. That's why these work in a limited way, if at all.
Life, soul, spirit, is an embodied awareness. Our awareness is a direct sensational connection with reality. A depressed soul, an anxious spirit, can transform and save themselves through direct experience of their own sensations.
Perception and awareness are emergent. Each of our cells has life and senses the world. Together these sensations add up to a point that we become aware of them consciously when they cross a minimum threshold quantity.
Some experiences are so intense for us that they go beyond our maximum threshold. Then we experience residual cellular emotional reactivity. We haven't fully experienced the reality of our perception at the time, so we keep experiencing it a little bit over time, and it haunts us. We can rid ourselves of these demons by fully experiencing our reality, and we do that by fully feeling our sensations. This present moment contains the past that has added up to now, and the future that will unfold before us.
We're made to feel. It is life itself. It's part of our natural human ability. To feel better, we must feel more.
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