Faith: An Answer to Depression (minus annoying spaces)

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When I was depressed, I would experience certain intense emotions. These

emotions would paint a somber, tragic picture of my life. They would tell me

that at my core I was weak, needy, pathetic, inferior, alone, unlike everyone

else, and that in my many life mistakes, I had permanently ruined any hope for

happiness that I had ever had. In the rational parts of my mind, I knew that

these emotions were not true. But they felt true. Because they felt true, they

would break me down.

I tried to reason with the emotions— " C'mon, you have no reason to believe these

things about yourself! " —but that didn't work. The emotions felt too true not to

believe. Ironically, my contracted effort to argue them away, to make them not

feel true, would backfire. They would become more entrenched and more intense.

I would end up in an exhausting and counterproductive fight with my own mind.

One day at work, after a particularly unpleasant episode of insomnia, the

following realization dawned upon me:

" I know, in the calmer parts of my mind, where things are more rational, that

these emotions are lies, unconnected with reality. The neurochemicals in my

brain are firing them off not because they have any legitimacy, but because my

depression is acting up. I'm stressed out, and I got no sleep last night. "

" The problem is that even though I know this, I can't seem to make the emotions

stop feeling so true. I try to reason with them, I beg them not to paint such

dire and depressing pictures, but they refuse. No matter how hard I try to

escape from their persuasiveness and believability, I can't. They have me

hooked, sold, convinced. "

At that point, I said to myself:

" I can't change the way that these emotions feel. It's impossible. So I'm not

going to try. I'm going to let them feel however they feel. I'm going to let

them be alluring, believable, persuasive, convincing, whatever they are. At the

same time, as a starting point, I am going to dismiss what they are saying,

categorically, unequivocally. Rather than buy into them, I'm going to put faith

and trust in what I know to be true on a rational level, that they are nothing

but empty, unreliable illusions arising from a broken part of my mind. I'm

going to choose not to believe in them, and I'm going to make that choice even

as they feel believable to me. Period, end of discussion. "

I then let go of the struggle and moved on. Surprisingly, the emotions faded.

Normally, when we believe something, we believe it because our feelings tell us

it is true. We consult our our feelings, we contact them, we follow them. But

sometimes, our feelings are distorted by the many variants of delusion. In

those circumstances, when we try to " fix " them, by arguing with them, pleading

with them, suppressing them, we agitate them and make them worse. What we need

to do is bypass them, short-circuit them, take them out of the process through

which they drive and determine our beliefs. They are, after all, broken aspects

of our mental machinery.

The way to take them out of the process of belief is through faith. Faith means

believing something as an unquestioned starting point. It means acceding to

something, choosing to trust something, without being fully convinced of it,

without having your emotions back it and confirm it. When " under the influence "

of delusion, we want to use faith to embrace the things that we know to be true

in the more rational parts of our minds, and that we would have no trouble

believing or accepting if we were not " under the influence. "

If you've ever had depression, or its close cousin infatuation, then you know

what a grand delusion it can be. The brain creates all kinds of extreme,

irrational, chemically-driven emotions. Everything becomes judgmental,

guilt-ridden, intense, passionate, persecutional, tragic. Of course, when

you're inside the depression, it doesn't feel like a delusion. But when it

passes, you see it clearly for what it is. You think to yourself, " what the

hell was that all about? " No different from when you wake up from a drunken

stupor, or come out of a drug-induced trip.

When the emotions of depression take hold and begin to persecute you, the answer

is to put faith in the things that you already know to be true on a rational

level, and that you knew to be true before the delusion took hold. You need to

put faith in the prior insight, wisdom, and experience that you have, and gently

dismiss the deluded feelings that are trying to contradict it. In terms of what

the depression is saying, you know that it's bullshit. You are not good, you

are not bad, you are not weak, you are not strong, you are not a success, you

are not a failure. You are just an individual playing out the causes underneath

you, traveling down the path that nature has placed you on, doing what anyone in

your shoes would do. The judgment and persecution that gets attached to this

process is a meaningless projection of your mind.

As you embrace this realization, you don't want to bring with you the

expectation that the persecutional feelings will suddenly change, or start

cooperating, or go away. Since they are driven by chemical reactions in your

brain, they probably won't do that, at least not immediately. Instead, you want

to have a mentality that understands that it doesn't matter whether they change,

start cooperating, or go away. You've rightly gone around them, disqualified

them their vote, rendered them irrelevant. You've chalked them up to what they

are: delusions. To hell with them. With that insight, you can relax on them,

let them be however they want to be, feel however they want to feel. They will

calm down and you can move on.

Two Conditions

Faith works particularly well as a tool to escape from the mind's deluded

oppression when the following two conditions are met:

(1) Basis - the faith needs to have a basis in something. Ideally, it will

have a basis in prior wisdom, insight, and experience. To use the example of

depression, you've been through it before, you've seen it and been fooled by it

many many times. For that reason, when the depression tries to fool you again,

it works to appeal to faith, to trust that the picture that it paints is not the

true picture, even though right now it seems convincing and compelling. You

know why it seems convincing and compelling: because your are caught in a

delusion that you've experienced many times before. With that knowledge, you

are more able to chalk it up and dismiss it.

If you put faith in things that you do not have any prior basis for

believing—hype, bullshit, nonsense—the faith will not flow in a genuine way.

Your mind will not be fooled by it, and doubts and insecurities will creep in.

Fortunately, if you suffer from depression, you will have had many many

opportunities in your life to see its deception after the fact, after it has

calmed down and your mind has cleared up. You will therefore have a solid basis

in experience for dismissing its hurtful judgments.

(2) Subjective with No Real-World Impact – the faith will ideally be applied to

something that is subjective and that has no real-world impact. To again use

the example of depression, the claims that the depression makes—that you are

pathetic, inferior, worthless, hopeless—are subjective value judgments. They

are opinions, not facts, and therefore they cannot be true or false in the

proper sense. Whether they are taken to be true or false has no impact on any

aspect of reality. The only thing that is impacted is how you feel. It's a

purely verbal affair.

Faith works best with things that are subjective and that lack a real-world

impact because the mind doesn't have as much of a justification for doubting

them and worry about them. If you apply faith to a medical theory, you could be

wrong. Your mind will recognize this, and is going to express doubts. If you

are wrong, it will matter, and so your mind will be especially critical and

vigilant. But if you are working with something about which you can't be wrong,

something that is subjective, opinion-based, and that doesn't impact anything,

your mind has no reason to worry. You can set aside the worries, let them go;

they have no way to come back and haunt you.

Contemporary, watered-down religious belief works very well as an object of

faith precisely for this reason. Generally speaking, it is kept out of science,

medicine, business, or any other field in which it could have a harmful effect.

As a result, the believer has no reason to worry about whether it is misguided.

If I go to a person of strong Christian faith, whose life is going very well,

and I say " Hey dude, I have news for you. Your beliefs are totally wrong, there

is no God, only Nature " , he has no reason to be afraid as a believer. If I am

right, and yet he continues to believe, what will he lose? Nothing. For this

reason, his belief doesn't generate worrisome doubts, and he is more able to

support it through an act of faith.

Likewise, if I go to him and I tell him, " Hey man, you're way off, Wonder Woman

is a much better character than Batman " , he has no reason to be afraid in taking

the other side. Like opinionated value judgments about who is " good " and who is

" bad " , comparisons between superheros are pure gibberish. They have no right

answer.

Depression, and its close cousin infatuation, where a person gets caught up in

grand negative delusions about himself, or grand positive delusions about other

people (the romantic object), meet these conditions perfectly. That is why

faith works very well as a way to transcend them.

Summary

To summarize, if you are suffering from a form of delusion—in particular,

depression, or its close cousin infatuation—and you are experiencing the

associated feelings of shame, inferiority, and persecution, try this. As a

starting point, see if you can take a leap of faith, and gently trust what the

wiser part of you already knows, that these feelings are just feelings,

irrational neurochemical results of the depression itself, rather than truths to

be trusted. When you take this leap, see if you can relax on the feelings, let

them be present, noticed, felt, without buying into them. You may not be able

to, in which case other approaches will be necessary. But if you are able to,

you may find that the feelings become harmless side-matter, and lose their

ability to oppress you.