questions, questions, questions

To all who wonder – I do not write those questions myself 🙂 they come to me via email. Here is a whole series: Hi Pausha, some questions have come to mind after rereading your post: I’ve been thinking about depression, what is it. You say the mind is the enemy of God, so if one calls the feeling they are experiencing “depressed” what exactly is going on? It would seem the mind is part of that naming process, a group of bodily experiences, we have as a group decided to call depression. If we decide that depression is just an illusion aren’t we in denial of the feelings? If there is no hole to fill, what makes us believe there is one? Circumstances are not bad in your scenario, pleasant Calf afternoon, spring or summer like. Not stuck in say Boston at 20 degrees, in three foot snow drifts and homeless, (Been there done that, no fun) So identify with God or as God, does depression just evaporate? Does one detach from the feeling, does it work like a novocain, you can tell the tooth is in pain but you’re not feeling it. What is the difference between just saying I am God, and grasping the idea intellectually and actualizing it, so that transformation takes place? Answer: It all comes down to whom we identify with, who we believe we are, so let’s start from the end. What is the difference between just saying “I am a dog” grasping the idea intellectually, and actualizing it, actually becoming a dog? The answer would be quite obvious, wouldn’t it? We can imagine how it is to be a dog, try to understand what dog’s experience of the reality must be like, try to figure out dog’s priorities, set of values, etc. Even if we get it exactly right, does it change our life in any way? Not really, maybe we’ll relate to dogs differently but other than that – what does it matter how dogs see reality? We are not dogs. Let’s say that we became a dog though, really and truly believed that we are a dog, as you say: “actualize it so that the transformation takes place”. All of a sudden reality would change, the whole work, carrier, money thing would be gone. Chewing on a toy would be our main occupation, smells reaching our nose would be the most important thing to be examined and considered. We would care nothing for how our house looks like, for what car we drive. The most important thing would be that our master likes us. We would not go into depression because we are broke, or just lost our job. We would not decide that no one likes us and we are worthless when other dogs bark at us. The whole of reality would be totally different simply because our perspective shifted. This is what happens when we realize that we are God. This is the difference between knowing intellectually that we are God, because the priest or teacher said so, and actually being God. The whole of reality changes. Notice the difference in these two sentences: “I am depressed, but sometimes I have an experience of God” and “I am God, but sometimes I have an experience of depression.” Can you see the difference? I didn’t say that mind is the enemy of God. I said that mind is a separation from God, denial of God. Mind is created when we cannot stay present to being God in a particular situation. It is too traumatic, too scary, too painful. When we get lost in pain, in fear, when we say: I am fear – we separate ourselves from God and become fully identified with our reaction. We forget that we are whole, complete, that we create our reality. In the moment of reaction the reality overwhelms and controls us and we fall into the realm of mind, where we are separated, subjected, controlled. Mind, being a separation, can never feel complete. Mind, having raised the protective barriers against reality, cannot possibly feel whole. Where there is no wholeness and completion there is emptiness and incompletion. Where there is no God – there is a hole. So let’s look at depression — depression is a very profound feeling of “not enough”: not good enough, failed, incomplete. When we identify with our mind this is a very real issue, it is not an illusion, it is a reality. Honestly I wonder, given the nature of mind, that we ever manage not to be depressed. What happens when we identify with God though? What happens when we make the switch and believe that we are God? Just as though we made the switch and realized that we are a dog from the example above — the whole reality changes. Things that were true and real before, now are only concepts. To our mind depression, fear, pain is all important, it is the reality. The mind’s job is to protect us from it. To God, however, there is no such thing as fear, pain or depression. God is full, complete, whole – the “not enough” can only exist inside of a separation, and there is no separation in God. Fear can exist only inside of a separation (there must be something outside that is scary), and there is no separation in God. All those issues that are so crucial to our mind simply don’t exist in God. Brooks says: don’t identify with what you are flushing down the toilet. We all have trauma, we all have pain. This trauma will come up, something will trigger it, it will probably never get wholly healed. As a mind we identify with the trauma, we say: I am this fear, I am this pain, I am this depression. As God we say: oh, there is trauma coming up. Oh, this is how it feels. Oh, it’s gone. There is nothing that needs to be done with the depression. We can simply recognize that we are not this depression. We can recognize it as a trauma clearing out of our body, stay present with it, let it open fully and completely — which means feeling it fully and completely while being present to who we are, and simply let it go.