Faith: An Answer to Depression (comments welcome)

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Comments welcome...*******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.