Depression & Non-Duality
Listen, friend. You aren’t ‘you’.
There is a mighty YOU which is an ocean
in which have drowned a billion ‘yous.’
Rumi
A bout of depression struck me just before my twenty-third birthday. It was a real surprise to me at the time because over the previous several years my life and mental well-being had been on the up. I think I’d been a typically miserable teenager, but at eighteen I’d left school and developed an interest in spirituality and practising meditation. This added a whole new dimension to life for me, something infinitely interesting to pursue. I was for the first time turning my attention around to look within at the nature of my own awareness. Also for the first time I felt I was in a world where the kind of philosophical curiosity I’d always harboured was met, there were other people out there who thought this was and asked these questions too. My ability to relate to people improved and I started forming more and more friendships. All in all I had three years where life was really good. And everything was on the up.
So it was a great surprise when this came crashing down. I thought I was beyond such things. I’m sure a lot of things contributed to it. A lifetime of suppressed emotion coming to the surface and all that. I’ll skip through the more periphery details and get straight to the core of it for you though.
As I mentioned I’d become interested in these spiritual (or non-dual) practices of looking deeply inside one’s self to the very core of being. I’d read and been inspired by the writings of mystics who talked about finding an infinite ocean of love there. An infinite well of goodness at the centre of our being. I believed it, but as time went by I had to acknowledge that it wasn’t my experience. When I looked inside I saw no such thing, only infinite darkness, or nothingness. I came to call this place the ‘not-nothing’, as it wasn’t even nothing, as nothing implies a something too. I experienced it as a bleak emptiness at the centre of my being. This it seemed, was what reality really was.
I recall at the time reading a quote by Sigmund Freud, in which he basically described the love of God as something people who cannot form good social relationship make up to comfort themselves. I remember thinking that I didn’t believe that, but had to admit that it did tally with my experience. I’d read about this transcendent experience of love, but had to concede that the only love I’d experienced came from other people. I became painfully aware of the transitory nature of this love, how it came and went and was never secure. Goodness knows what a psychologist would have made of this! But I interpreted it as a mystic would, as pointing to the need to find security in a transcendent state of Being.
For a long time I was stuck. I would go into the deepest part of ‘me’ I could access and find only bleakness there. I just wouldn’t know what to do or where to go with this. This was having substantial effects on my day to day life, from my ability to get out of bed in the morning onwards. I could be twenty minutes or more preparing some breakfast cereal. Depression would come and go. Sometimes I’d feel absolutely fine then out of nowhere it would strike, effecting me for a few hours then departing again. A day wouldn’t go by without it making at least a couple of prolonged visits.
After a year of this I started to wonder if it was something I’d ever escape. It seemed to be getting more intense not less and I wondered if rather than curing it I would at some point have to accept it and learn how to best live with it. A rather dramatic resolution did come however after a year and a half of struggling.
Essentially I stumbled across a book by an American spiritual teacher called Brandon Bays. In addition to describing a dramatic physical healing, she wrote about an experience of looking within herself and finding this same dark void in her centre which she described as an abyss or black hole. In confronting this Brandon had been advised to allow herself to fall into it, dissolve in it rather than sit on the edge. In doing so she writes about the seeming darkness turning into and experience of peace and love.
This was a penny dropping moment for me. I realised that I’d always come to the edge of my own abyss, peered in and moved away again. Not knowing what to do with it. I had maintained my sense of being a separate self from it, separate from the ocean of consciousness at the centre of my being. I hadn’t allowed myself to dissolve, it hadn’t occurred to me to do so. Where I had been going wrong seemed completely obvious to me now and I vowed to return to that deep darkness within and stay there until I slipped into it.
I sat for perhaps a couple of hours that evening, right on the edge of my sense of inner bleakness. As night time came I eventually thought I ought to go to bed, but I resolved to resume my practice the following morning, and every day after till I found this centre to my own being.
Often at around four in the morning I would awaken with feelings of despair. This was often the most intense period of depression. Tonight looked like no exception. I awoke as usual, into a kind of waking dream. I saw all the people I knew stood around me, they all disappeared off into the distance until just one was left — and then I was completely alone — with no outside source of love. In this aloneness I slipped into that black/not-black, nothing/not-nothing at the centre of my being. It transformed from darkness into the feeling of being immersed in an infinite ocean of love. It felt like the whole universe was just the thinnest of veils, covering this ocean. The ocean was the field of awareness in which everything was arising.
I felt sorry for any time I’d ever acted in a way that had been needy of another person. Why would I need anyone else to act a certain way towards me when I was this.
After a little while the experience subsided and the veil fell back over the ocean. I fell back to sleep. When I awoke the next morning I realised just what a profound experience I had had. I had dissolved into the darkness at the centre of my being and found infinite love there. My depression had totally resolved. As the weeks went by it became clear to me that it wasn’t coming back and (although I had different challenges in the future) I never experienced another bout of it.
***
The implication of this experience is that mental health conditions may not arise due to imbalances of chemicals in the brain, but rather might be the symptom of a deeper cause. They might be pointing to something we desperately need to look at within ourselves. For me, in this case, my depression arose out of my lack of connection to my deepest self. It was a symptom and not the cause. Rather than fighting against such conditions then, we could see them as containing a necessary message for us — that we must integrate them to find wholeness.
The experience also suggests that we cannot approach questions about mental health without asking metaphysical questions about the nature of the reality we live in. We cannot hope to treat consciousness without at least pondering what consciousness is. If we see it as an accidental bi-product of a material universe we will interact with it very differently than if we see it as the fundamental property of reality. In the former case an experience such as mine is essentially a delusion, albeit a healing one. In the latter my experience is one of contacting the very nature of the consciousness in which the universe is arising.
For more on this theme please see a discussion I recorded with Dr. Nicole Schnackenberg — Psychological Suffering as an Invitation to Wholeness.
