A lot of good ideas!
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“Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.”
—Steven Wright, comedian
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I have taken to the habit of turning my cell phone off for blocks of time. Out of conditioning I almost wrote, “…taken to the practice…” but that is the same inappropriate term that people apply to yoga, in this case literally meaning I am turning my phone off in order to prepare myself for some future goal. No, I just don’t want to always be accessible at every moment of the day or night. Sometimes you’re smelling a patch of flowers and a call from Joe to bring you up to speed on how much he drank last night and the girl he hooked up with being a lot uglier in the morning than he remembered her at the bar just kind of fucks up the whole flowering experience.
It was about 1:30 a.m. and I was just about to go to bed. I thought I’d power up my phone for a final check of any messages I may have missed that day and a quick hit of radiation before I turned in. There was a text message from Toad saying, “I think I’m depressed today.” If my focus was on dreamstate compassion over waking up from the dream, my first thought would have been, “My heart is so open and hurting now to hear a friend of mine is suffering.” Instead the first thought that crossed my mind was, “Weak.” I’m not sure if it was a thought really or just a knee-jerk word reaction to wanting to go to sleep and not deal with any more drama than a developing brain tumor from cell phone radiation.
Because of being raised in a culture of guilt, I called Toad up and said, “What’s up?” She told me how she was feeling low on energy and lacking motivation to do anything and I thought, “Welcome to my world, bitch!” But I had a temp working as my mind-to-mouth censor after I fired the former employee and she edited my mental projection. But instead of what the old prick used to do, change it so drastically that what came out was nothing like what I thought it to be, the temp censor just left the page blank. I said nothing and she went on with her tale about how she should be doing this and she’s not doing that and how she’s in her late 30s and had always thought that she should have spit out 2 ½ kids by now, the half-child being just an extra head that was attached to the second child and was soon to be scheduled for a post-partum abortion.
To give you a little history, Toad is a very conscious person who is on medication for depression. Also, in 1776 the American colonists told Britain to go fuck herself. Enough history.
There are two aspects to all of us: the Masculine and the Feminine. This is not defined by hermaphroditic genitalia but is more about the hunter/provider, get ‘er done, yang to give it the name of a Chinese panda bear, part and the nurterer/supporter, rub our backs and wipe our asses, yin, to give it the name of a Chinese card game side of us.
This is the basis why men and women don’t really “get” each other. A woman comes home from work to her lazy, beer-swilling, Ultimate Fighting watching man who is sitting on the couch with chicken wing stains on his underwear and says, “My boss was really mean to me at work!” as she bursts into tears and totally ruins the superfight of which he was in the middle. What she needs from him is for the Feminine voice to say, “There, there, honey. Come here and let me hug you and remind you that I love you so much and am here for you.”
What he gives her is the Masculine voice, which is always about how to “fix” a situation and says, “Do you want me to go in to your work tomorrow and kick the bosses ass?” While we could blame the man for being a total moron, the woman is equally to blame in the soon-to-be big fight and break-up for not realizing that that was his way of saying, “There, there, honey,” and praying that that was good enough to shut her up until the superfight is over.
What Toad could have probably used was some Feminine nurturing. “We all go through this. You’ve been here before and have come through it. I know you’ll make it through this and I’m here for you.” My dreamtime was my superfight and my response was equally Masculine.
“Are you fucking kidding me? This is what you need to talk about at 1:30 in the morning??” Okay, I didn’t say that but let’s just say I didn’t say, “There, there, honey” either. I did care about my suffering friend. I just felt very detached from the whole thing, like if we concluded our call with her telling me, “I’m going to go kill myself now,” that I would probably respond with, “Alright, I’m going to go to bed now. A couple of ways that people have had success in offing themselves has been to sit in a car and inhale carbon monoxide, to hang themselves from the rafters in the attic and to cut their wrists with a sharp object. Hope that helps. Good luck with your project. I’ll read in your obituary how you decided to make a go of it. Night.”
I pointed out that most people associate their physical condition with their mental condition and that being tired or lacking motivation didn’t necessarily translate into the fake definition of “Depression” that psychiatrists created in order to sell more drugs. I also questioned the worth of her anti-depressant if it couldn’t zombie her up enough to keep her seeing hummingbirds flying around her head even in the midst of a real Depression, not created in the mind but created by the Federal Reserve.
She told me that she probably would have been worse if she was not on the medication and I then proceeded to have my Masculine aspect pull an O.J. on my Feminine aspect by stabbing her and her boyfriend repeatedly with a knife while some freeloader creates plausible deniability with a tale that he was sleeping on the couch at the time of the slaying and didn’t see or hear a thing because he didn’t want to ruin his chance that the coke-driven psycho would turn his blade on him.
“That’s typical drug-mindset conditioning. If you feel good you say, ‘Oh, the drug is working!’ and if you don’t you say, ‘Imagine how worse I would have felt without the drug.’” It’s nonsense. About half of the people who pull a Columbine are turned into psychotic killers from pharmaceutical drugs and the other half are trained by the BATF. Granted I’ve used the same line of reasoning with fat fuck personal training clients who have seen no results in multiple years and thousands of dollars training with me, “Imagine what a fatter fuck you would be if you didn’t train with me!”
One key element of depression is the false believe—by most—that it will never end. That’s the real rub, because just about anyone could get through a day where your main motivation seems to be to see how quickly you can get to the bottom of the pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream. But if you think you’re going to need to go out every night and buy a pint and on Sunday the store will be closed and you may not have the foresight to buy an extra pint on Saturday—that will really mess you up.
It’s not so far-off. I remember seeing some show on T.V. where you saw some people who were suffering with migraine headaches every day for weeks. Imagine your head feeling like the drilling that has been going on for the last two years at the construction site across the street from my apartment starting at 7:00 every morning was taking place inside your head. Now imagine that you believed that would be the case for the rest of your life. I think everyone would agree that committing suicide by becoming a government asset and hijacking a plane and crashing a plane into a building would be the sanest choice of action.
But for most people, and Toad was no different in this regard, the “Depression” comes and goes. There are periods of downs but there are also periods of ups. Pinnacles and nadirs…Bear and Bull markets…full erection and a limp puffy. It seemed almost childish to lament in a low when personal experience had shown her that “This, too, shall pass.” When people are in this mode, it feels like you’re listening to a teenager tell you after breaking up with her first love that, “I will NEVER love again!” and thinking that her drama seemed almost laughably fictitious.
The real drama for me had little to do Toad’s troubles and more to do with my disappointment that someone who I had met who I had believed to be very conscious—and who I felt I needed in order not to go insane in a world of zombies—was behaving just as unconsciously as the rest of the deadheads. “Will I ever break out of this downness? Woe is me, my life is a nothing!”
What happened to all the “deep” talk of, “We create our own reality” and “It is all Maya [illusion]” and “A Tantrist accepts the whole gamut—easy and difficult—and uses it all to grow.” The Toad turned out to be like everyone else, when the going got rough, she turned to jelly, closed her eyes and started to recite her mantra of plausible deniability of responsibility, “Woe is me. Woe is me. Woe is me.”
What I might call the one “Feminine” island in my stormy sea of Masculine was when I suggested to Toad that she schedule into her daily routine—not “plan to do it when you work it in” but actually schedule—nurturing times for her that remind her of her joy and her connection to her true Self and the, perhaps true, Whole.
For instance, the last time I was at her place she took me and Abandon for a night walk on a quiet road through overhanging trees that she had taken since she was young and that always gave her a sense of peace. Sure my crazy dog ran through tic-infested woods and lost her reflective bike light that was around her collar but it was a good, peaceful time for all of us.
These necessary respites from the fictitious world of “responsibility” and social roles are often put on the “When I get to it” list and that list is about as useful as the New Year’s Resolution list—something to write down and for feeling guilty about never following through. A question we can all ask ourselves is, “If not now, when?” If the answer starts, “When I…” you’re bullshitting yourself. End of story. “When I get my job sorted out…,” “When I get my apartment in order…,” “When I earn enough money to…,” “When the kids are out of college…” All tricks to keep you forever delaying taking the walk, taking the trip, starting the new degree, divorcing the wife.
I tried to bring this point home to Toad by asking her one of the proverbial questions: “Do you swallow?” That didn’t prove to be too useful so I asked another. “If you were on your deathbed, would any of this that you’re worrying about now really seem to matter?” This question takes us out of the Child mode of “Everything is the be all and end all” and needing instant gratification and into the Adult mode of “It’s really no big fuckin’ deal.”
Toad seemed to come around a bit and even offered up an example regarding her favorite T.V. series. “It’s true, if I didn’t finish the season of ‘The L Word’ my life would not be any worse off.” And while I appreciated her playing ball, I was playing basketball and she was bringing a baseball bat and a mitt to my game.
It’s easy for most of us to see that if we didn’t clip our toenails on this particular day, the sky is not going to fall out of the sky and the nail fungus that we have been ignoring for a decade is not going to suddenly grow out of control and take over the entire leg. What’s harder to see is that NONE OF IT MATTERS. This is not a nihilistic view of life where I’m suggesting we all throw away all our colored clothes and only wear black and smoke in packs with the rest of the Goth losers. But this is to say something quite grand, which I grant you is annoying for someone to write and not only because the word “grand” is one of those British words like “brilliant” that are always used unsparingly and result in diminishing every object that ever follows them, where in a breath you go from “Einstein is brilliant” to “This cup of tea is brilliant” and then suddenly Einstein is relegated to the importance of a cup of warm liquid but also because it sounds like a stand-up comic preparing you with, ”This next joke is really funny!” and you internally growl knowing that after you paid a $12 cover and a two-drink minimum, it can only go downhill from here.
The job you will mindlessly indenture yourself to for the next thirty years…The husband who you thought you thought you once loved and provided the sperm to spit your two-and-a-half kids but on reflection feels about as “brilliant” as a cup of warm liquid…Your activism to save the environment, save the animals, save Al Gore from being relegated to just another manipulative douche bag…Your reputation…Your spiritual “practice”…Your family. NONE OF IT MATTERS. To point to one painfully obvious example of irrelevance in a world as seen through the eyes of delusion is like taking a handful of water from the ocean and saying, “What I hold in my palm is wet.” Yeah, but you’re focusing on the tree and missing the fact that that forest is equally wet, to mix metaphors in a completely confusing way.
I’m not heartless. My heart just yearns for Awakening and not just to remain asleep with a pretty dream in my head and drool on my pillow. And the place I have come to where I have realized that most everything—including the “self” I have constructed with the material of conditioning, lies and fear—is all bullshit. All of it. Not just most of it. All of it. And it is lonely and scary and I would like a comforting Feminine to stroke my back and tell me, “There, there, honey” as much as any sleepwalker.
The difference between the sleepwalker and me is that the sleepwalker will be comforted by the temporary drug of passification, whether through a nurturing word, devotion to some “spiritual” path that only teaches how to be a good person in a bad dream, or if she is in real need, of dullification through the deadly arsenal of the pharmaceutical companies. I know that there is nothing that will quiet my angry voice of discontent besides Waking Up. I acknowledge that I am alone. I just wish I weren’t lonely as well.
“To become a sannyasin is not to join a new group or religion; it is not to acknowledge yourself under a leader or guru. It is to accept that you are always alone on the journey.”
—Osho, quote given to me when I took sannyas
