Why now?

Even before the current crisis, we had a problem.

I gave a talk to a large group of like-minded folk where, to stress the importance of inner work, I illuminated what is going on in our society. It doesn’t seem to be discussed much, but we are experiencing a real mental health/spiritual crisis. Mind you, these statistics are pre-pandemic. All these metrics will get worse, probably much worse, in the coming economic climate. Some of the highlights-

 ·         Polls consistently show that only 30% of Americans are “happy”.

·         Suicide rates are up 56% in the 10-24-year-old age bracket.

·         The number of ER visits for suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts in pre-teens has doubled between 2007-2015. These are kids as young as 10 years old.

·         Veterans are committing suicide at the rate of 17 per day.

·         The overall suicide rate is up 33% since 1999; around 130 people a day take their own lives.

·         Over 700,000 Americans have committed suicide in the last 17 years.

·         Drug overdoses kill 192 people a day.

·         Diagnosed major depression went up 33% in just 3 years and is up 47% in millennials in the same time.       

I know, enough already about depression and suicide. It’s ridiculous. But I list these things to show there is a real problem here: people live lives full of despair and hopelessness, and it seems all the medical system can do is throw drugs at them. It is pretty apparent this isn’t working because, for the most part, it isn’t a medical problem.

Do I think that most people who need guidance will ever get it? Sadly, no. People are very much attached to their beliefs, and what they believe is their reality. Everyone occupies a different place on the continuum; all are learning regardless of where they are or what they seek.

I want to offer a different way of looking at why so many people are apathetic, at least, and why many are living lives of pain and sorrow. I come from the angle of someone diagnosed with depression, and I wrote about it extensively in A Gentler Path.

There is no doubt depression can be debilitating. It steals the flavor from one’s experience; it dulls the senses and disallows what is inherently ours by the fact of our existence—joy, contentment, and the wellspring of everything—Love. Depression results from obstructing the umbilical cord of life and pinching off its divine flow, insulating one from the subtleties of life’s nuance, beauty, and grace. It fools one into thinking there is no point to existence, to life, that there is no reason to try or to be. Depression results from an error in thinking, and a belief one is separate, alone, unloved, and without purpose. It results from forgetting who and what we are and how we are forever connected and inseparable from our divine nature. It results from an overemphasis of the importance of the trivial, at the cost of acknowledging and honoring the essential, all the while giving far too much importance to the illusion of time. It arises from the notion that the circumstances of one’s life are not what they ought to be, and the resulting frustration inherent in fighting a battle against that which cannot be fought. Some might call this resistance.

In my experience, I have found that ultimately, most depression results from egoic judgment, which induces a perceived disconnection from or doubting of Source, that which created you and trillions of suns. When this most primary of facts, the one that lies at the heart of everything, is denied, don’t you think your emotional system may try to make the error known?

Suffering of this nature is not a bad thing. Depression is an opportunity for spiritual advancement, a sign that something needs attention. Like everything else, it always has a reason, a reason that needs to be heeded, explored, honored, and processed.

How we approach this issue and many others is a symptom of how lost we really are. We worship at the altar of numbers, attempting to measure the immeasurable, smugly certain and naïvely arrogant. As long as phenomena fit into an arbitrary box, which can be validated by known methods and means, we deem it as real. All else is minimalized, ignored, and dismissed. We expect the intellectual mind to solve problems itself has created through its ignorance and confusion. And worse, we look to other intellectual minds, those who do not necessarily have our best interests at heart, to solve the problems we are here to work out for ourselves in a more organic fashion. We look for chemical solutions for non-chemical issues, defined by a narrow and cold empiricism for things that will always defy such pedantic categorization, things that lie far beyond our ability to perceive using our simple, primitive, and foolish investigations.

When the chain of causation is traced back far enough, we will find that the egoic mind, the illusions it perpetrates, and the judgments it holds are the real cause of depression. If you are depressed, I would ask this: where in your life are you holding judgment against yourself, others, or society? Where are you judging things aren’t the way they are supposed to be? Where do you hold the idea you are not good enough, that your life isn’t good enough? What past actions or mistakes are you still holding onto with a guilt that stings, a regret that burns? What memories tumble out of the dark in the middle of the night without invitation, incessantly playing over and over in the theater of your mind, twisting your gut into knots? What are you worrying about when sitting in traffic, mind racing, teeth unconsciously clenched, while that vague and always present anxiety and dissatisfaction roils just under the surface? Where do you feel empty and disconnected, helpless or disempowered? What lies do you hold that justify all this pain? Notice that all these things exist either in the past or in the future; they are memories, imaginings or projections. Therefore, they are not real; your higher self knows this and is screaming at you the only way it can—by making you feel bad and forcing you to take notice. I would have to ask. Where else are you denying the present moment?

It needs to be pointed out that every single one of the things written above are caused by the ego and its denial of the perfect divine Love of which you are, without exception.

Unfortunately, I think soon, depression, anxiety, suicide, violent crime, drug addiction, and alcoholism will all rise and, in the end, will kill far more people than any virus.

This is why I am doing this. If we can become more peaceful and grounded in chaos and uncertainty, it cannot help but affect those around us and the larger whole. When we become more in touch with the more profound, heart-based, and infinite part of ourselves, we can change the world, one person at a time. Some guy named Gandhi said it pretty well-

We must have compassion for ourselves before we can have compassion for others. We must become more tolerant and accepting of what we think are our flaws, mistakes, and imperfections. We must foster a genuine sense of intrinsic and inherent self-worth without qualifications. We must learn we can accept responsibility for our lives without assigning blame. We must become gentler with ourselves and each other at all costs. We must accept that we are imperfectly perfect and all learning as we go, and that is our ONLY purpose, to learn and grow, and for this, we must have patience with ourselves and each other. You wouldn’t strike a child because she misspelled a word on her homework or spilled some milk, now would you? We are all children, and we are all innocent.

The world is mad, and when an innocent spiritual being is brought into a world of madness, what do we expect? When children are born into families of confusion and dysfunction, when they are taught fear from day one, when they are taught this is all there is and that life, by definition, is a struggle, how else can they react?

With depression, who is to say a young person isn’t as spiritually mature as you or me? Who is to say what some of us come into this life already carrying? Perhaps the depressed kid is sensitive to all the unhealthy vibration around him not only in the house where he may live but also in the world at large. Depression can sometimes be a very accurate response to madness. What about the pre-birth environment? If a child is conceived without Love, gestated in an environment of fear, and raised in an environment where basic needs are denied, with Love being the most basic of those needs, then a baby begins life already fractured, already behind the eight ball, and sentenced to a life of struggle very early. It could be a lot of things, but I know man-made neurotransmitter modulation will not cure it. It may treat it, and that may be necessary, but it will take digging a little deeper to find a cause and thus a meaningful way out.

Humans from a young age need to be taught they are here for a reason, which goes far beyond simple survival and materialism. They need to be taught what is real and what isn’t. They need to be taught they are more than cogs in an unconscious and mindless economic machine that exists solely to acquire material goods. They need to be shown they have wings; they need only learn how to use them.

We can extricate ourselves from apathy, depression, anxiety, and many of the ills afflicting modern society by consciously embracing what we are and what we are here to do and then living from that higher place. It worked for me.

What’s needed is a new way of looking at things—a new way of looking at ourselves, our purpose, and our world. We need to consciously and consistently choose the higher road and get out of our monkey brain- the fearful, small, “get what’s mine, survival at any cost” model of living. As I have said repeatedly and will say once more- we create our reality with our thoughts.

What we know as hell is of our own creation, and we dwell within its prison of pain and suffering willingly. Much effort is spent creating and maintaining our own personalized hells: incessant discrimination, endless self-judgment, and self-condemnation manifested by chronic dissatisfaction, joylessness, and hyper-vigilance, all stemming from runaway thought. All will result in illness, addiction, depression, and anxiety. From these personal hells are born the hells of society: crime, poverty, violence, racism, and religious persecution. From society’s hells are born the collective hells of the human race responsible for mass suffering and the wanton destruction of each other and the planet itself.

These hells are man-made; they are not of God. They are not punishments; they are merely cause and effect. They result from forgetting who and what we are.

What we desire most is what we know but have forgotten. Somewhere inside we feel a primal pull toward the higher parts of ourselves, to the essence of the divine, the loving spark of creation dwelling within every molecule of our being. It is at once close and so far away. We realize joy as we awaken to the truth—sometimes over a lifetime, sometimes in a flash—until we rise out of the ashes of what was once thought to be real but was revealed to be nothing but a painful fantasy.

Ripples in a pond we are. One person really can change the world. As one is healed they will vibrationally affect all those around them, and those people will affect those around them, and so on, ad infinitum.

All healing occurs within. Peaceful people make for peaceful communities, which make for peaceful countries, which may even lead to a peaceful world, if one can imagine such a thing. Every loving thought makes the world better, and every thought of fear does not. It is a battle of opposites, of dark vs. light, ego vs. heart, right vs. wrong, God vs. the Devil, or whatever symbolism appeals to you.

But this isn’t entirely accurate. There is no opposite of the blinding and complete Love from which we all arise and to which we will all return. All separation is an illusion. But that doesn’t mean the illusion can’t make us miserable. It surely does within the framework of this world. Our job is to realize the split within us and to locate and repair the fractures within our hearts, within our very being. By so doing, using Love as the tool, the fractures within our collective soul will be repaired as well. Only then will we return to our rightful place in the light.

We are speaking of healing—societal healing arising from the transcendence of fear. Healing that comes from simply remembering the magnificence of our essence. This is the deep and true healing that comes from the only place it can, the depths of the human heart.

To be healed is to be made whole again; to be made whole again is to heal the chasm separating us from ourselves and each other, thereby reconnecting to all that is. We go to great lengths to separate ourselves from each other, nature, and our Source, and it is within this separation we suffer. We, all too often, trash and disrespect our gifts, our environment, our hearts, our bodies, and each other. We are better than this. We are higher than this. We must remember we are One in every sense of the word. There is no judgment other than our own, and there is no separation other than that we insinuate into our experience willingly. Our suffering is almost always created by us whether globally or within our own hearts. It is our choice.

If this resonates with you, if it tickles you ever so slightly in any way, then I have succeeded, and I encourage you to share this site with anyone you think may gain peace or inspiration from this place.

Thank you for reading and for being here.

“One love, one heart, one destiny.”

-Robert Marley (aka Bob)