Human spiritual development is a long process; This is a journey through wonderful countries, rich not only in amazing events, but also in obstacles and dangers. It is associated with processes of deep moral purification, complete transformation, the awakening of many previously unused abilities, the growth of consciousness to a previously unimaginable level, and its expansion into new internal spaces.
It is therefore not surprising that such important changes undergo various critical stages, which are often associated with nervous, emotional and mental disorders. During routine clinical observation, they are easily confused with disorders arising from completely different causes. Meanwhile, the disorders we are talking about have a very special meaning; they require a different assessment and treatment.
These days, these disorders caused by spiritual reasons are becoming more common. There are more and more people who consciously or unconsciously experience internal spiritual stress. Moreover, the spiritual development of modern man, due to his greater versatility, and especially due to the resistance caused by his critical mind, has become a more difficult and complex internal process than in former times. Therefore, it is advisable to give an overview of nervous and mental disorders that can arise at various stages of spiritual development, and show the most effective methods of overcoming them.
On the path to achieving full spiritual consciousness, a person may pass through five critical stages: crises that precede spiritual awakening; crises caused by spiritual awakening; recessions following spiritual awakening; crises at the stage of spiritual awakening and, finally, the “dark night of the soul.” Let's look at them in order.
Crises that precede spiritual awakening. In order to correctly assess the meaning of strange inner experiences that act as harbingers of spiritual awakening, we will say a few words about the psyche of the average person. He seems to be carried along by the flow of life. He accepts life as it comes, without asking questions about its meaning, value and purpose.
For a person with a low level of spiritual development, everything comes down to the fulfillment of personal desires, for example, he strives for wealth, satisfaction of his desires and ambitions. A person whose spiritual level is somewhat higher subordinates his personal inclinations to the fulfillment of those family and civic duties, respect for which is embedded in him by upbringing. At the same time, he does not think about where these responsibilities came from, how they relate to each other, etc. He may consider himself a believer, but his religiosity will be superficial and stereotypical. To live with a clear conscience, it is enough for him to formally follow the instructions of his church and participate in established rituals. In short, the ordinary person relies, without thinking, on the unconditional reality of everyday life. He holds tightly to earthly goods that have positive value for him. Thus, earthly existence is practically an end in itself for him. Even if he believes in a future paradise, his faith is purely theoretical and academic. And he will strive to get to this “paradise” as late as possible.
Nevertheless, it can happen, and from time to time it does happen, that this “ordinary” person undergoes a sudden transformation in his mental life that takes him by surprise and frightens him. Sometimes this transformation occurs as a result of many disappointments, and often strong emotional shock, for example, due to the loss of a loved one. However, sometimes it occurs without external reasons: amid complete well-being and good fortune, vague anxiety, a feeling of dissatisfaction and inner emptiness arise.
A person suffers from the absence of something indefinite, something that he himself cannot name or describe. Gradually a feeling of unreality and the vanity of everyday life comes. Personal interests, which until now occupied a person and completely filled him, seem to fade and lose their importance and value. New questions come to the fore: a person begins to think about the meaning of life, about the causes of phenomena that were previously taken for granted - he thinks about the sources of his own and others' suffering, about the justification of human inequality, about the origin and purpose of human existence.
Misconceptions are common at this stage. Many, not understanding the meaning of this new state of soul, consider it as a heap of whims and painful fantasies, since it is very painful, and try in every possible way to suppress it. Afraid of “going crazy,” they do everything possible to re-immerse themselves in a concrete reality that, as it seems to them, threatens to elude them. During this struggle, some throw themselves into the whirlpool of life with redoubled zeal and eagerly seek new activities, excitement and sensations.
Sometimes in this way they manage to muffle their anxiety, but almost never manage to get rid of it completely. It, this anxiety, wanders in the depths of their being, dissolves the foundations of everyday life and after some time, sometimes even after several years, breaks out to the surface of consciousness with renewed vigor. Now this anxiety becomes even more painful, the inner emptiness even more unbearable. A person feels destroyed, everything that his previous life consisted of seems like a dream, falls away like an empty shell. At the same time, a new meaning has not yet appeared, and sometimes a person not only knows nothing about it, but is not even aware of the possibility of its existence.
Often a moral crisis is added to this suffering, ethical consciousness awakens and deepens, and a person is tormented by a grave feeling of guilt and remorse for his past deeds. He judges himself harshly and becomes completely despondent.
Naturally, in this state thoughts of suicide easily occur; the cessation of one’s physical existence seems to be a logical solution to internal collapse.
Let us note that this is only a general diagram of the course of such experiences. In reality, various individual characteristics are possible here: some do not experience the acute stage at all; others find themselves in it completely suddenly, without preliminary stages; for others, obsessive philosophical doubts dominate; for others, a moral crisis plays the main role.
These manifestations of a spiritual turning point are very similar to certain symptoms of neurasthenia or psychasthenia. In particular, one of the symptoms of psychasthenia is nothing more than loss of functioning in reality, another is depersonalization. The similarity of a spiritual crisis with these diseases is further enhanced by the fact that it causes the same physical symptoms: exhaustion, nervous tension, insomnia, digestive and circulatory disorders.
Crises caused by spiritual awakening. The establishment of a connection between the personality and the soul, the accompanying streams of light, joy and active force bring a wonderful state of liberation. Inner struggles, suffering, neuroses and physical shocks can suddenly disappear and often with such amazing speed that it becomes obvious that they do not arise from material causes, but from mental suffering. In such cases, spiritual awakening is healing in the full sense of the word.
However, awakening is not always so simple and harmonious. It can itself cause difficulties, frustrations and deviations. This applies to those people whose mind is not completely balanced, whose emotional life is overly exalted, whose nervous system is too delicate or sensitive to safely withstand a sharp increase in spiritual energies.
When the mind is too weak or unprepared to bear spiritual light, or when one is prone to arrogance and self-centeredness, inner events may be misunderstood. A so-called shift of levels occurs, a transfer of the relative to the absolute, the sphere of the personal to the spiritual world. Thus, spiritual power can lead to an inflated personal self. Several years ago I had the opportunity to observe a typical extreme case of this kind in the Vancona mental hospital. One of its inhabitants, a handsome old man, calmly and stubbornly asserted that he was the Lord God. Around this conviction he wove a fabric of fantastic ideas about the heavenly armies over which he commanded, about the great deeds he accomplished, and so on. In all other respects, he was a wonderful and kind person, always ready to serve doctors and patients. His mind was very clear and attentive. He was so conscientious that he was made an assistant pharmacist.
The pharmacist entrusted him with the key to the pharmacy and the preparation of medicines, and this did not cause the slightest trouble, except for the disappearance of sugar, which he removed from supplies to please some patients. From an ordinary medical point of view, our patient should have been diagnosed as a simple case of megalomania, a paranoid illness. But in reality, all these formulations are only descriptive, introducing some kind of clinical framework. We do not learn anything definite from them about the nature, about the true causes of this disorder. And it is important for us to know whether there are deeper psychological motives behind the patient’s ideas.
We know that the perception of the reality of the spirit and its internal unity with the human soul causes in the person who experiences this a feeling of inner greatness, growth, and involvement in the Divine nature. In religious teachings of all times we find numerous evidence of this. The Bible says briefly and clearly: “Do you know that you are gods?” St. Augustine says: “When a person’s soul loves, it becomes like that which it loves.” When she loves earthly things, she becomes earthly, but when she loves God, does she not become God?
The complete identity of man - the spirit in its pure being - with the highest spirit is expressed most strongly in the philosophy of Vedanta. No matter how we perceive this relationship between the individual and the universal - as complete identity in essence or as similarity, as participation or as unity - both in theory and in practice we must be clearly aware of the immeasurable distance between the spirit in its pure being and the ordinary personality.
The first is the basis, or the center, or………..(individuality?), the second is our little “I”, our everyday consciousness. Neglecting this distinction leads to absurd and dangerous consequences. This is precisely what makes it possible to understand the mental disorder of the patient described above and other, not so extreme forms of self-exaltation and self-deification. The painful delusion of those who fall prey to such illusions is that they attribute to their transitory self the qualities and abilities of a higher spirit.
We are talking about a mixture of relative and absolute reality, personal and metaphysical levels. Such an understanding of certain cases of megalomania can provide valuable guidance for their treatment. Namely: it is completely useless to prove to the patient that he is wrong, that he is mistaken, to ridicule him. This can only irritate and excite him.
Another line of behavior is preferable: to recognize the reality contained in his ideas, and then, with all patience, try to explain to the patient his delusions.
In other cases, the awakening of the soul and the sudden inner enlightenment that accompanies it can cause emotional overload, which will manifest itself violently and chaotically, in the form of screams, crying, singing and agitated actions.
Some strong natures, as a result of the upliftment caused by spiritual awakening, may declare themselves prophets or reformers. They lead movements, found sects, characterized by fanaticism and the desire to convert everyone to their faith.
Some people of high level, but too strong, as a result of experiencing the revelation of the transcendental and divine side of their own spirit, there arises a claim to complete and literal identity with their spiritual part. In fact, such identity can only be achieved as a result of a long and difficult path of transformation and rebirth of the personality. Therefore, their claim cannot be satisfied - hence the depressive states up to despair and impulses to self-destruction.
For some suitably predisposed people, inner awakening may be accompanied by various paranormal phenomena. They have visions of higher angelic beings, hear voices, or experience an automatic urge to write. The meaning of such messages may vary. In each case, a sober check and analysis is needed without deliberate rejection, but also without preliminary reverence, which may inspire the unusualness of the source of their information.
Particular care should be taken in messages that contain direct orders and demand blind obedience, as well as those in which the recipient of information is glorified - true spiritual teachers never resort to such means.
It should be noted that no matter how true and significant such messages are, they are always harmful to health, for they can greatly disturb the balance of the senses and mind.
The downturns that follow a spiritual awakening. Some time after a spiritual awakening, there is usually a decline. We have already said that the harmonious process of spiritual awakening causes a feeling of joy, enlightenment of the mind, awareness of the meaning and purpose of existence. Many doubts are dispelled and many issues are resolved, and a feeling of inner confidence appears. All this is accompanied by the experience of unity, beauty and holiness of life: the awakened soul pours out a stream of love for all people and for every creature.
And indeed, there is nothing more joyful to the heart and more comforting than contact with an awakened one who is in such a state of grace. It seems that his former personality with its sharp corners and unpleasant sides has disappeared, and a new person smiles at us, full of sympathy, the desire to bring joy and be useful to others, to share with them the received spiritual treasures that he cannot grasp alone.
This state of joy may continue for more or less a long time, but of course it comes to an end. The everyday personality with its deep foundation only temporarily disappeared from the surface; it seemed to fall asleep, but it did not disappear and was not completely transformed. Moreover, the flow of spiritual light and love, like everything else in the world, is rhythmic and cyclical. Consequently, sooner or later the tide will follow the ebb.
The experience of the departure of grace is very painful, and in some cases it entails severe decline and serious disorders. Base desires awaken again and assert themselves with renewed vigor. All the “garbage” absorbed by the flow floats to the surface again.
Meanwhile, the process of awakening has already refined ethical consciousness, intensified the desire for perfection, a person judges himself more strictly, more ruthlessly, it may seem to him that he has fallen deeper than before. This misconception is reinforced by the fact that previously deeply hidden inclinations and drives come to the surface: high spiritual aspirations, as if presenting a challenge to these forces, awakened them and extracted them from the unconscious.
The decline can go so far that the person begins to deny the spiritual significance of his inner experience. Doubt and self-abasement reign in his inner world, he succumbs to the temptation to consider everything that happened to him an illusion, fantasy, sentimental “fairy tales.” He may become bitter and sarcastic, cynically ridicule himself and others, and renounce his ideals and aspirations. But despite all his efforts, he is no longer free to return to his previous state. The beauty and wonder of what he experienced remains with him and is not forgotten. He can no longer simply live a petty, everyday life; he is tormented and haunted by divine melancholy. In general, the reaction is extremely painful, with attacks of despair and thoughts of suicide.
Such overreactions are overcome by a clear understanding of what is happening, and thereby awareness of the only way to overcome difficulties. This is where a person needs outside help.
He must be helped to realize that the state of grace cannot last forever and that the subsequent reaction is natural and inevitable. The wonderful state he experienced was like taking off to sunlit peaks, from which the whole picture of the world is visible. But every flight sooner or later comes to an end. We return to the plain again and then slowly, step by step, climb the steep climb leading to the top. And the awareness that the experience of descent or “fall” is a natural process through which we all must go, comforts and encourages the wanderer, helping to gather strength to begin a confident ascent.
Crises at the stage of spiritual transformation. The said ascent actually consists of a complete transformation and rebirth of the personality. This is a long and complex process that includes various phases: a phase of active sensation in order to remove obstacles to the flow of spiritual forces; phases of development of internal abilities, previously hidden or weakly expressed; phases during which the person must silently and meekly allow the spirit to work with him, courageously and patiently enduring the inevitable suffering.
This is a time full of change, when light and darkness, joy and pain replace each other. Often a person’s strength at this stage is so absorbed by difficult and sometimes painful internal events that he does not cope well with the various demands of external personal life. An outside observer, assessing such a person from the point of view of his normality and practical effectiveness, will most likely come to the conclusion that he has become “worse” and is “worth” less than before.
Thus, the internal problems of a spiritually developing person are aggravated by misunderstanding and unfair assessments of family, friends and even doctors. More than once he hears disapproving remarks about the harmful effects of spiritual aspirations and ideals that deprive a person of his merits in practical life. Such judgments often cause deep depression, mental confusion and despondency.
This test, like others, must be overcome. It teaches you how to deal with personal sensitivity and helps you develop firmness and independent judgment. Therefore, one should not resist such a test, but patiently accept it. If loved ones understand the person’s condition in this situation, they can provide him with important help and save him from unnecessary suffering.
We are talking only about a certain transitional period when a person left his previous state, but has not yet achieved a new one. Thus, a caterpillar that turns into a butterfly must go through the pupa stage, a stage of helplessness and unconsciousness.
Unlike the caterpillar, a person is deprived of the security and silence in which the butterfly undergoes its metamorphosis. He must, especially in our time, remain in his place and, to the best of his ability, fulfill his duty to family and society, professional duties - as if nothing special was happening in his inner world. The task ahead of him is very difficult. You can compare it with the problem facing English engineers who had to rebuild the London station building without interrupting train traffic for a single hour.
It is not surprising that such a complex task sometimes causes nervous and mental disorders such as exhaustion, insomnia, depression, irritability, which in turn, due to the close interaction of spirit and body, can lead to various physical symptoms. To help in such a situation, it is necessary first of all to recognize the true cause of the disease and provide the patient with the correct psychotherapeutic assistance, otherwise purely physical treatment and medication will only alleviate the problem, but will not have any effect on the mental and spiritual roots of the disease.
Sometimes these disorders occur from overload - from excessive efforts aimed at accelerating spiritual development. The consequence of such efforts is not transformation, but the displacement of lower components, an intensification of the internal struggle with the corresponding nervous and mental overstrain. Those who strive too zealously for perfection must constantly remember that the work of their internal rebirth is carried out by the spirit and spiritual energies.
Their personal task is to call upon these forces through inner selflessness, meditation and the correct state of mind, to strive to eliminate what may interfere with the free influence of the spirit. In addition, they can only wait with patience and trust for the unfolding of spiritual action in the soul.
Another, in a sense opposite, difficulty is to cope with a particularly powerful flow of spiritual force. This precious energy can easily be wasted in excess of feelings and excessive hectic activity. In some cases, this energy, on the contrary, is too restrained, accumulates, and is not sufficiently realized in activity, so that ultimately its pressure also gives rise to internal disorders.
Thus, a strong electric current melts the conductor, causing a short circuit. Thus, one should learn to intelligently control the flow of spiritual energies; without wasting, use them in fruitful internal and external activities.
Dark Night of the Soul.
When the process of transformation reaches its highest point, the decisive, final stage is often accompanied by intense suffering and inner darkness. Christian mystics called this state the “dark night of the soul.” Outwardly, it resembles a disease that psychiatrists call depressive psychosis or melancholia.
Its signs: a state of severe depression to the point of despair; a pronounced sense of self-unworthiness; acute self-condemnation - completely hopeless and damned; a depressing feeling of mental paralysis, loss of willpower and self-control, resistance and inhibition in relation to any actions. Some of these symptoms may appear in a less pronounced form and in earlier stages, without, however, reaching the intensity of the “dark night of the soul.”
This unique and fruitful experience, whatever it may seem, is not generated by a purely painful condition. It has spiritual reasons and deep spiritual meaning.
Following this so-called “mystical crucifixion” or “mystical death” comes the victorious resurrection, and with it the end of suffering and illness. It brings complete recovery and rewards for everything experienced.
The chosen topic forced us to deal almost exclusively with the negative and unusual aspects of internal development. This does not mean that people who follow the path of spiritual growth experience nervous disorders more often than others. Let us note the following. Firstly, for many, spiritual development proceeds more harmoniously than in the cases described, internal difficulties are overcome, and a person moves from stage to stage without nervous reactions and without any special physical ailments.
Secondly, nervous and mental disorders in ordinary people are often more severe and less treatable than those that have spiritual causes. The disorders of ordinary people are often associated with strong conflicts of passions among themselves, or conflicts of unconscious drives with the conscious personality, or they are generated by someone's opposition to their own egoistic demands or desires. Ordinary people may be more difficult to treat because their higher aspects are so underdeveloped and there is little that can be done to persuade them to submit to the self-discipline that will restore inner harmony and health.
Thirdly, the suffering and illness of those who follow the path of spiritual growth, no matter how severe the forms they sometimes take, are in reality only temporary reactions, as if “waste” of the organic process of growth leading to internal rebirth. Therefore, they often disappear on their own when the crisis that caused them passes, or are relatively easily eliminated with proper treatment. Fourth.
The suffering caused by the ebb of the spiritual wave is more than compensated not only by periods of ebb and inner uplift, but also by faith in a significant and high purpose for the sake of which the inner journey takes place. The anticipation of victory is a very great motivating force and consolation, an inexhaustible source of courage. We must arouse this image in ourselves as brightly and often as possible and help our companions in this.
Because this is perhaps the best help we can provide. We must strive to imagine as expressively as possible the goodness of the victorious and liberated soul, which consciously partakes of the wisdom, power and love of the Divine life, to see with our inner gaze the realization on earth of the Kingdom of God in His glory, the perfection that is the picture of liberated humanity - the newborn creation, full of divine rejoicing. Such visions allowed the great mystics and saints to endure internal suffering and physical torment with a smile; they inspired the words of St. Francis of Assisi: “In anticipation of bliss, any torment is a pleasure...”
Let us now descend from these heights for a while into the valley, where people “work by the sweat of their brow.” If you look at the problem from the point of view of medicine and psychology, you should understand one important issue. We have already said that although the disorders accompanying crises of spiritual development resemble some diseases, and are sometimes even indistinguishable from them, in fact their causes and meaning are completely different and in a certain sense even opposite.
Accordingly, their treatment should be different. The nervous symptoms of ordinary patients are, as a rule, regressive in nature, since these patients are incapable of the internal and external adaptation that normal personality development requires. Thus, some fail to free themselves from emotional dependence on their parents, and they remain in this state of childhood dependence on their parents or those who represent them, at least symbolically. Sometimes patients do not have enough of their own good will to cope with the difficulties of ordinary family or social life. Without realizing it, they seek release from their responsibilities by escaping into illness. In other cases, the illness is caused by emotional trauma, such as disappointment or loss; being unable to accept the situation, a person reacts to it with illness.
In all the above cases, we are talking about a conflict between the conscious personality and lower impulses, which, working in the sphere of the unconscious, begin to partially dominate the forces of consciousness. Suffering caused by the course of spiritual development, on the contrary, is of a distinctly progressive nature. This is a consequence of the tension associated with growth or struggle between the personality and the energies coming from above.
Thus, these two types of disease should be treated in very realistic ways. For ailments of the first kind, the doctor must help the patient return to the state of a normal person. To do this, he needs to free the patient from repressions and prohibitions, feelings of fear and dependence, excessive egocentrism and false assessments, and a distorted view of reality. Its task is to lead a person to an objective and reasonable vision of normal life, to a full awareness of his own responsibilities and the rights of other people. Immature and conflicting factors must be developed and brought into harmony, thus successful personal psychosynthesis is realized.
As for the second group of ailments, the task of internal harmonization - treatment - is that new spiritual energies have been assimilated by an already established normal personality, that is, we are talking about spiritual psychosynthesis around a higher internal center.
It is obvious that treatment methods suitable for patients of the first group are unsuitable and even sometimes harmful for patients of the second type. A doctor who does not understand the problems of the latter, who does not even know about the possibilities of spiritual development or denies it, can increase rather than alleviate difficulties.
Such a doctor is able to devalue or ridicule the patient’s still uncertain spiritual aspirations, viewing them as empty fantasies or, at best, as pure sublimation. With its help, the patient will come to the conclusion that the best thing for him is to tighten his personal defenses and completely ignore the voice of the soul. But this will only worsen his condition, the struggle will intensify, and his liberation will slow down.
On the contrary, a doctor who is himself on the path of spiritual development, or at least aware of spiritual reality, can be of great help to our patient. At a time when a person is still in the stage of dissatisfaction, anxiety, unconscious aspirations, having lost interest in everyday life, but having no idea about the higher reality, while he is looking for relief in the wrong place where it is possible, and is lost in dead ends, in this time, revealing the true cause of his suffering can help find the right way out in the awakening of the soul. And this will be the essence of the treatment.
It is very important for a person who is at the second stage of the spiritual path, feeling happy in the spiritual light, in an atmosphere of blissful flights in unconscious heights, to reveal the nature and purpose of his experiences, to warn about their temporary nature, about the vicissitudes of his future wanderings. Then our wanderer will not be taken by surprise by the state of decline, will not be disappointed, and will not be at the mercy of the doubts and despondency that accompany the decline. If such a warning does not arrive in time and a person needs treatment during a period of depressive reaction, then it is important to convince him that his condition is temporary, and he will definitely get out of it.
At the fourth stage, when a person falls into a “hole” on the path of ascension, the work of helping is especially difficult. In general, it is divided into the following tasks. First, explain to the patient the meaning of his internal experience and how to behave in this situation; secondly, to show how a person can control deep-seated drives without displacing them into the sphere of the unconscious; thirdly, to help in the transformation and use of one’s own mental energies; fourthly, to teach how to master the flow of spiritual energies entering his consciousness and use it; fifthly, to provide guidance and cooperation in reconstructing the patient’s personality, that is, during one’s own psychosynthesis.
During the period of the “dark night of the soul,” help is especially difficult due to the fact that a person seems to be in a dense fog, he is immersed in his suffering, and the light of the spirit does not reach his consciousness. The only thing that can be done is to tirelessly repeat that his condition is only temporary and not permanent, since it is precisely the confidence in the latter that plunges the patient into deep despair. We also recommend persistently instilling in him that these torments, no matter how severe they may be, have such spiritual value, contain in themselves the germ of such high happiness, that the time will come when he will bless them. In this way we will help the patient to endure suffering with humility and humility.
It should be noted that the described psychological and spiritual remedies in no way exclude physical treatment, as long as it alleviates suffering. Particularly valuable are those that support the healing powers of nature: healthy nutrition, relaxation exercises, contact with natural elements, a suitable rhythm of various types of physical and mental activities.
In some cases, treatment is complicated by the fact that the patient experiences a shift between progressive and regressive disorders. These are cases of uneven and disharmonious internal development. Such people can achieve a high spiritual level with one part of their personality, while with the other they remain slaves to childhood addiction or unconscious “complexes.”
However, it can be said that upon careful analysis, problems of a regressive kind are found in the majority of those following the spiritual path and in almost all so-called “normal” people. However, usually regressive or progressive manifestations of the disease decisively predominate. At the same time, one must always take into account the possibility that the disease combines symptoms of both groups; each individual disorder must be examined and interpreted in order to understand its true cause and find a suitable treatment.
From the above, it is obvious that for effective help with nervous and mental disorders that arise during spiritual development, knowledge and experience of two levels are needed: a doctor who specializes in nervous diseases and psychotherapy, and a serious researcher of spiritual paths, or even better, a wanderer on these ways. Nowadays, one or another experience is rarely combined in one person. But as more and more people are in need of such healers, people who are capable of such work must prepare themselves for it.
The treatment could be greatly advanced thanks to the appropriate training of personnel capable of carrying out all the details of the treatment. Finally, it is important that the public, the general public, is at least generally aware of the basic relationships between neuropsychiatric and spiritual crises. Then the family could help the patient and the doctor, and not create additional difficulties with their ignorance, prejudice and resistance. If we could provide such training for doctors, staff, and the public, it would eliminate a lot of unnecessary suffering, and many wanderers on the path of the spirit would more easily achieve their high goal: connection with the Divine.
7
Jan
“Dark Night of the Soul” is an age-old term used to describe the loss of meaning in life... the intrusion of a deep sense of meaninglessness into your life. In this case, the internal state is similar to depression. Nothing makes sense anymore, nothing to strive for anymore. Often this condition is caused by an external event, such as some kind of disaster on the internal level. This condition can cause the death of a loved one, especially premature; for example, the death of your child. Or if everything you give meaning to in your life suddenly falls apart.
It can also happen when something happens for which you cannot explain, and which makes all the meaning you gave to life wrong. In this case, the whole basis of your concept of life collapses, and you find yourself in darkness. But when people find themselves in this situation, they have the opportunity to get out of it by moving to another level of consciousness. If this works out, then life regains its meaning, but now this meaning is difficult to formulate in words, since we are getting rid of the speculative perception of reality.
People wake up to something deeper that has no conceptual basis. A deeper sense of meaning and connection to a higher life that is not dependent on explanations or anything conceptual at all. It's a kind of rebirth. “The dark night of the soul is a kind of death that you experience. But only your ego dies. Of course, death is always difficult, but in this case, nothing real actually dies - only illusions. Therefore, people who have gone through such a transformation understand that it was necessary for spiritual awakening. This can be called the death of the old self and the birth of the true self.
There are practices of consciously entering the “dark night of the soul” with the goal of further spiritual awakening.
Nothing in this room makes sense. You look around the room and say to yourself, “Nothing here makes sense,” “Nothing here is important.” In this way, you recreate the situation of the “dark night of the soul”, depriving your world of meaning, created by your mind. This is a self-renunciation of the meaning that your mind has created. Then you keep telling yourself, “I don’t know what this means,” “this doesn’t mean anything.” This way you erase everything that was written on your board. The Dark Night of the Soul destroys everything your mind has created.
You have arrived at a point of conceptual meaninglessness. Or, to put it another way, into a state of ignorance where things lose the meaning you previously gave them; this, in turn, has always been conditioned by something, be it culture, living conditions, etc. Then you look at the world without imposing your own semantic template on it. It seems like you don't understand anything now. It looks very scary when it happens involuntarily. But you do it intentionally: you discover the universe as it is, without forced interpretations. You look at events, people, etc. with a keen sense of reality. You experience pure reality through your deep sense of reality, but you no longer try to reconcile your experience with speculative patterns.
The shadow of death, suffering and the torment of hell is felt especially acutely, and this comes from the feeling that you have been abandoned by God... and a terrible premonition arises in your soul that it will always be this way...
The soul sees itself in the very center of the most varied forms of evil, among pathetic imperfection, devastated, thirsting for understanding and thrown into darkness.
San Juan de la Cruz, "Dark Night of the Soul"
The following pages will describe some of the most common critical and challenging types of experiences that come to the surface from the complex and confusing inner world of the individual during the process of transformation and which we are familiar with both from our own experience and from the reports of others. We hope that we will not discourage the reader by starting now to understand these difficult experiences. The dark night of the soul is only one aspect of the spiritual journey, and there are many others that are much more enjoyable.
The purpose of our study of this topic is, first, to express the unusual sequence of states during the process of transformation. Although there are many exceptions, most people who experience a spiritual crisis still have to plunge into dark areas and pass through them before they reach a state of freedom, light and peace. For those who undertake this journey, the positive feelings often seem more meaningful and intense in contrast to the difficult experiences they had previously encountered. Just as the sunrise feels especially bright and hopeful after a long winter night, so joy seems especially strong after pain.
With this in mind, the next question can be asked: What are the dark areas that a person may have to pass through? What are they like? And what kind of conflicts might arise there?
For some people in spiritual crisis—both dramatic and milder forms—the challenge of getting through another day, the challenge of maintaining the ability to function normally, can be a major challenge. Normal, seemingly simple activities that are part of daily life can suddenly become difficult or depressing. Often individuals in crisis are filled with internal experiences that are so saturated with emotions, power and energetic force that it can be difficult to separate vivid and vivid images of the inner world from events in external reality. In such situations it is often difficult to maintain concentration and this can be very difficult for people experiencing a crisis. Panic can also be caused by rapid, frequent changes in states of consciousness. Unable to function in their normal ways, people in this situation feel powerless, ineffective, and guilty.
One woman described her problems this way:
“I could see and understand that there were things that needed to be done around the house, but I had the feeling that there was some kind of wall between me and these things that I used to do without any effort. I remembered that I needed to go out to do some gardening and knew that this activity could be useful. However, I had a feeling that if I went that far, I might explode. All those artistic and creative projects that I was so excited about before were too hard to focus on now. And even playing with my children seemed too much of a challenge. The only thing I could do at this time was to somehow take care of myself.”
Some of the most distressing and distressing conditions that a person experiencing a spiritual crisis typically encounters include feelings of fear, a sense of madness, and preoccupation with death. Although these states are often inevitable, necessary and central parts of the healing process, they can become frightening and overwhelming, especially when there is a lack of support from others.
From the opening gates of the unconscious, a wide variety of repressed emotions and memories come to the surface. When a person encounters specific memories or experiences from personal or transpersonal, transpersonal areas, he may have experiences associated with fear, loneliness, madness and death. The person may have revived memories of serious illnesses, life-threatening events, or other disturbing events from infancy and childhood. Biological birth can also be re-experienced with all its complex, chaotic and dynamic manifestations.
Many memories contain an element of fear. People whose parents were alcohol dependent can experience the horror that their drunken mother experienced when she was abused. In others, the fear that a person once experienced when falling from a tree or when he had whooping cough as a child may come to life.
The individual may suddenly feel a purely childish feeling of loneliness, which has nothing to do with his current situation. These irrational feelings may be related to childhood experiences such as abandonment by parents or lack of connection with the mother at the time of birth. Such feelings may be caused by isolation from peers at school or painful experiences of divorce. Often, when memories of life-threatening events arise, some individuals may experience feelings of madness. They may suddenly remember a sequence of events from their personal history, such as a near-fatal car accident or a drowning incident while swimming, or incidents of some extreme physical or sexual abuse. When people have memories of such incidents, their feelings are so strong that they begin to believe that they have lost touch with reality.
Such situations can lead a person to experience death. In addition, experiences related to death may be related to the circumstances of birth. A person always experiences some form of essential contact with death, when memories relating to his birth come to life with the accompanying feeling of suffocation and threat to life. If, during prenatal existence, the individual was exposed to the threat of abortion or miscarriage, he or she may experience a very convincing crisis of fetal survival, which is again vividly remembered after a long time.
A person may also encounter experiences of fear, loneliness, madness or death during transpersonal states arising from the collective unconscious or even from areas of universal scope.
Transpersonal areas contain both light and dark elements; fear can be caused by both, “positive” and “negative”. Someone may be fighting a monstrous mythological demon or reliving a battle from another era - feelings of anxiety and fear in such situations are inevitable. The fact that the feeling of fear sometimes arises even when an individual moves into the realm of light and beauty can be puzzling. In the next chapter we will discuss the challenge of "positive" realities.
The individual may experience feelings of loneliness during a realistic identification with a soldier separated from his lover during war, or with an African mother who is grieving the loss of her child to starvation. One woman experienced real madness during our workshops when, during a session of deep experiential work, she felt like she was crazy in a medieval mental asylum. An hour later, when her experiences were over, she returned to her usual rational state.
Facing death on a transpersonal level can take many forms. In experiences reminiscent of past life memories, the feelings of a killed soldier, a slave, a martyr, or a mother grieving the loss of her children during war can be vividly relived. A person can experience a confrontation with death in mythological worlds sometimes through his identification with the figure of Christ crucified on the cross or with Osiris dismembered into pieces.
An individual can identify with the universal human experience of dying, becoming every woman who dies in childbirth and every man who has been killed in battle throughout human history. Someone can experience their identification with the most archetypal figure of Death, feeling the full enormity of this universal force. The following striking example comes from the memoirs of a woman whose spiritual crisis included many realistic experiences of death:
“I saw everything around me spinning in a whirlwind of death: gravestones, crosses, laughing skulls and crossed bones. I saw many bloody battles, concentration camps, hospital wards - there were scenes of death everywhere. It seemed to me that I was at the same time observing and taking part in all the deaths at the same time. Then my experiences suddenly changed, and I felt as if I, whoever I was, was responsible for all this; I became Death itself in its traditional gloomy image with a scythe reaping human lives; an apocalyptic rider on a pale horse - and all this was me myself, calling all people to leave life.”
It is easy to make the mistake of associating the emotions and sensations caused by the sudden manifestation of repressed memories with the life situation existing in the person at the moment. For example, someone who has relived the threat of death that loomed over them at the time of their birth may develop a deep preoccupation with the problem of death or an unusually strong reaction to films or television programs showing scenes of death. He may feel constantly threatened by potential danger in the world around him and may often worry about physical safety. Without realizing it, he may panic in confined spaces, get scared in an elevator or when crowded in the subway.
Some may develop thanatophobia, an excessive fear of death that causes a person to become obsessed with the belief that they are at risk of a heart attack. When the experience of birth is fully realized with all its wide range of emotions and physical sensations, the person comes to realize that this is the source of his fears, and these fears dissipate.
——————————
MEETING FACE TO FACE WITH FEAR
Fear is a natural part of the diverse mosaic of changing states of consciousness.
Some form of fear usually accompanies a spiritual crisis, both in the mild form associated with upcoming participation in everyday events, and in the form of a huge, overwhelming horror that seems to be unrelated to any real aspects of the person's life. Sometimes anxiety and worry can be associated with the situation in which a person is: when not only many of his beliefs are destroyed, but the person himself becomes extremely emotional in such a situation. There is a general feeling of weakness in the body, new physical stress and disturbing pain appear. Most of the fears seem completely inexplicable and unreasonable, although, of course, in essence, these fears cannot cause any real harm to the person who experiences them. Sometimes an individual involved in a crisis copes with fears with relative ease, but there are times when the feeling of fear seems to expand so much that it turns into completely uncontrollable panic.
Most people experience many forms of fear in their lives, from the most gross and obvious, such as fear of physical injury or death, to more subtle forms, such as the anxiety experienced when asking something of a stranger. Despite their fears, most people are able to function reasonably well in everyday life without being completely overwhelmed by their fears. During many spiritual crises, everyday fears intensify and escalate, often becoming uncontrollable. They can take the form of a spontaneous general anxiety or crystallize into separate, more common types of fear.
FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN.
To a certain extent, it is common for many people. When life begins to take us in an unfamiliar direction, we often respond by becoming anxious and resisting.
Some people rush into the unknown relatively fearlessly, showing enviable courage. But many others, when forced to move into unexplored areas, do so against their will or, at best, very cautiously.
For those who are in spiritual crisis, the fear of the unknown can increase to enormous proportions. Their internal states often change so quickly that they become filled with fear from not knowing what state will be next. Such people are constantly immersed in immeasurable inner spaces, in new forms of awareness, in undiscovered possibilities. Thus, a woman who is completely materialistic may experience spontaneous out-of-body states and may imagine that she is something more than just the physical body with which she usually identifies herself. Or a person may suddenly experience a sequence of emotional and physical states that seem to come from some other place and time. This experience may lead a person to think about reincarnation - an idea that was previously completely alien to him.
Sudden events of this type can be quite frightening for those people who are not prepared for them. They may feel unsure about where they are going and how they should respond to everything that is happening; Such rapid and dramatic changes may lead to fears that they are losing control of their lives. These changes may be too long for the old, familiar and safe way of being, the calmer and less demanding existence, even if not entirely happy, that they had before.
FEAR OF LOSS OF CONTROL.
A man who has spent many years working hard for the well-being of a successful family life can imagine his future as something quite clear and feel significance in the daily stresses with which his existence is filled. When his wife suddenly develops a fatal illness, his life suddenly takes a completely different direction than the one he had planned. His dreams are shattered, and the emotional stress caused by this event can be the beginning of a transformational process. With difficulty, painfully, this person realizes that he has no control over the forces of life and death and that he is affected by something beyond his control.
Many people spend years with the feeling that their familiar world is well organized and that they have complete control over their lives. When they discover that they are not completely in control of the trajectory of their existence, they can experience a feeling of extreme freedom. But it happens that people are afraid of this, especially if they completely identify themselves with their busy lifestyle. They will ask themselves: “If I don’t control my life, then who will? And is he, she or it - the one that controls my life - completely trustworthy? Can I give myself to some unknown power and know that this power will take care of me?
When faced with the fear of losing control, the mind and ego become very sophisticated in their efforts to cling to something; people in such situations can create complex systems of denial, convincing themselves that the way they live is completely wonderful and that there is no need for any change, or that the changes they perceive are simply illusory . These people may try to intellectually interpret the states of mind they experience, creating elaborate theories to explain them. Or they may simply try to avoid these conditions altogether. Sometimes the feeling of worry itself becomes a defense: when a person clings to his feeling of fear, it can quite successfully protect him from growing too quickly.
There is another form of loss of control, much less gradual and more dramatic. When in a spiritual crisis, a person may feel overwhelmed by powerful episodes of experience during which he completely loses control over his behavior. In such situations, the individual may explode in anger, burst into tears, tremble violently, or scream shrilly - in a way that he has never done before. This unfettered release of emotions can be extremely liberating, but before it occurs, the person may experience extreme fear of and resistance to the strength of their feelings. After such an outburst, the individual feels frightened and ashamed of having allowed his expression to manifest itself with such force.
OTHER TYPES OF FEAR.
In some forms of spiritual crises, physical sensations or reactions are sometimes interpreted as fear. People may feel strange flashes of energy within themselves, sometimes of extreme force. They experience pulsating electrical charges, uncontrollable body tremors, or the presence of some unknown force flowing through their nervous system. Their pulse quickens and their body temperature rises.
What happens when this happens? Such manifestations often become a natural physiological accompaniment of sudden changes occurring in consciousness; these sensations may also be specific characteristics of certain forms of spiritual crisis - such as Kundalini awakening.
People who are unprepared for or unfamiliar with such phenomena can become very frightened when such manifestations become part of their daily lives. Since they have certain criteria for the normality of bodily sensations, they usually experience anxiety during attacks of such strange new sensations and can easily mistake these sensations for manifestations of fear itself. One woman, immersed in an intense meditation practice, recalled her experience this way:
“I went to my spiritual teacher and told him about the strange feeling of anxiety that had now become a part of my life. I felt this especially at night or when I tried to meditate: my heart began to beat faster, my body began to tremble, and I felt myself sweating with fear. When my teacher heard about this, he laughed and said that these were simply manifestations of Kundalini Shakti. He said, “Remember that when you experience things like this. It’s not fear that attacks you, it’s God moving through you.” Then I thought about his words many times, and it finally gave me great support.”
A person may also face fear of insanity, fear of death and fear of universal annihilation.
We will look at this in more detail later.
Stanislav Grof
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Rudiger Dahlke, Margit Dahlke
"Dark Night" of the Soul. Healing from depression
Ruediger Dahlke, Margit Dahlke Depression.
Wege aus der dunklen Nacht der Seele
* * *
Acknowledgments
For criticism and proofreading, I thank the staff of the homeopathic center, Christa Maleri, Anna Schönfus, Hildegunde Kerkovich, Fred Jeske, Josef Giena and Gerald Mizer.
For participation and criticism, I thank Dorothea Neumayer and Robert Stargall, for information about my personal experience, I thank Mr. Muntaner-Ribas, Bruce Werber and Gerty Stepan.
I thank Christina Stecher for putting my books in order and for freeing me from a deep dive into the new rules of German grammar.
I thank Gerhard Riemann, my long-time friend and companion in the world of books, not only for giving me the final, decisive impulse to write this book, but also for his significant critical comments.
I thank Sabina and Dominica for giving me the external framework for writing the book.
I thank Vera for the caring atmosphere that allowed me to come as close to depression as I could, and for the intense and wonderful time I spent in Bali, where this book was written.
Preface
I almost fell into despair,
I thought I wouldn’t have enough strength;
But I passed the test.
How - don't ask.Heinrich Heine
I’ll start with an excerpt from Gibran Kahlil Gibran’s book “The Wanderer”:
The oyster turned to her neighbor with the words: “I carry pain within me, this pain is feminine and round, I am in trouble.”
The other oyster replied smugly, “Thank heaven and sea, I am not in pain. My affairs are in perfect order, both inside and outside.”
At that moment, a crayfish crawled past and heard their conversation. Cancer said to that oyster, which was healthy both inside and out: “Yes, your deeds are wonderful; but the pain that your neighbor carries within herself is a pearl of unique beauty.”
“Depression is painful to write about, and the process of writing brings sadness, loneliness and a lot of stress,” says Andrew Solomon, who suffers from depression and wrote a book about this phenomenon 1
Andrew Solomon. Midday Demon. Anatomy of depression. – Note here and below. auto
This is probably why I resisted writing about depression for a long time. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that in our time this topic is increasingly coming to the surface. In addition, there are many opportunities hidden in depression, it provides the opportunity for growth for the human soul, if you get through it, survive this nightmare in the light of day. Psychotherapy has accumulated vast experience, shared by patients who, after recovering from depression, not only return to life, but also become noticeably more mature and happy. It would be very good if people could increasingly achieve such progress, since depression is relentlessly rolling over our modern society, like a huge wave.
I wrote this book during a special journey - during Lent; fasting gave me some experience and allowed me to get very close to the topic of depression. Having returned from this journey, I can say that without such research, empathy and putting my experience on paper, it would not have been possible to gain the richness that lies in the very depths of depression. The wealth given to the world by many great masters, expressed in paintings, poetry and prose. Thus, this book, together with the CD of the same name, is a homeopathic attempt to subdue and even overcome depression through works created by writers and poets who have lived with this disease. By overcoming it is meant that depression must be understood as a necessary stage of life's journey, the meaning of which is to learn to flow with life - and to do this on a completely new level.
As for myself, I can say that immersion in the art of masters who suffered from depression and the associated process of writing this book was a most wonderful time for me. Why shouldn't art be a guide from depression to the light of life? In the end, a huge number of artists, writers and poets have passed this path, not only preserving their lives, but making it worthy and truly valuable, leaving us with a legacy of the results of hard mental work - eternal works of art.
Rudiger Dahlke
Seminyak, Bali, January 2006
Introduction. About the difficulties of dealing with depression
The number of people suffering from depression has increased over the past decades, and events are developing more and more threateningly. Despite the fact that depression is the most painful of all diseases and even a potentially fatal disease, it is still widely taboo. This happens, on the one hand, because depression belongs to the field of psychiatry, with which the vast majority of people prefer to have less to do with than with other branches of medicine. On the other hand, tabooization occurs because depression is strongly connected to ourselves, our culture and our internal problems.
Now in Germany, the primary care physician sends every hundredth patient to a psychiatrist. Moreover, every second depression remains unrecognized by doctors.
But the trouble continues, and when the patient sees a psychiatrist, or often even a neurologist who has nothing to do with depression, both of these specialists often hesitate to make the decision to send the patient to the clinic. Despite all the prejudices and fears regarding psychiatry, there are patients who, to no avail, wish to be admitted for treatment to a psychiatric clinic; they fail only because the attending physician does not refer them there, and independent referral in Germany is impossible in any case.
Today, there are different reports about the rate of spread of depression, but they are all united in the fact that the numbers are becoming more and more alarming. Depression ranks second among major diseases in industrialized countries. In poor third world countries it ranks fourth. Of all other possible diseases, depression causes the greatest financial costs.
According to a survey conducted in Germany, every second person when asked “Have you or members of your family suffered from depression?” answers in the affirmative. Of those who answered yes, twenty percent suffered from depression themselves; in thirty percent of cases it was family members.
According to the World Health Organization, every fifth woman and every tenth man will suffer from depression at least once in their lifetime.
In fifteen percent of cases, the depressive state acquired a chronic form. This does not take into account the “black” numbers characteristic of this type of statistics. In addition, it is unknown whether women are really more susceptible to depression than men, as the survey shows, since men often tend to overplay depression with work, sports or shopping, and often the disease cannot be noticed from the outside, that is, diagnosed.
“We are faced with the problem of an epidemic spread of depressive illnesses,” says professor of psychology and depression researcher Hans-Ulrich Wittchen (works at the University of Dresden and at the Max Planck Department of Psychology in Munich). There are nineteen million people with depression in America, including two million children. In this country, over the past ten years, that is, within one generation, the age of onset of this disease has dropped to twenty-six years.
In Germany, the number of depressed young people in their twenties has increased by a third over the past ten years.
In Europe, this problem has not spared even the youngest residents: often even children as young as three years old suffer from depression. Research confirms that depression is often hidden behind childhood hyperactivity, insufficient ability to concentrate, inattention, appetite disorders and other behavioral deviations.
Experts generally agree that the number of depressions that can be explained is on the rise, rather than those that were previously called “endogenous”, that is, of unknown origin. According to Wittchen's research, these are, first of all, so-called secondary or comorbid depressions, which are occurring more and more often and are associated with symptoms such as fear, sleep disturbance, obsessive-compulsive disorder, chronic pain and even alcoholism. The share of such depressions is 70%.
The practice of doctors prescribing antidepressants can shed light on the state of affairs in this area. According to Stern magazine, between 1993 and 2002, the number of antidepressant prescriptions more than doubled compared to the previous decade. It is worth thinking about the fact that such a drug as Prozac 2
Prozac (also known as fluoxetine)– an antidepressant, an inhibitor of serotonin reuptake by nerve endings. – Note lane.
(in Germany: Fluctin), has recently become used as a drug. This drug belongs to the group of antidepressants and is a suppressor of the serotonin reuptake mechanism by brain neurons, providing a constant supply of serotonin produced by the body. Serotonin works as a screen that protects the brain from negative emotions. There were no side effects from taking the drug, except for suspicions of increased suicide, and so Prozac became a kind of almost official drug that improves the mood of a well-fed but frustrated modern individual. The drug has thus become a legal substitute for MDMA, or ecstasy, an amphetamine that also increases the amount of serotonin in the brain and serves a similar but strictly prohibited purpose in young people. In the tendency to do something at every opportunity to combat a bad mood, one can easily recognize that depression is perceived by the public consciousness as a completely harmless phenomenon. Those who are comfortable flirting with their depression, calling it “deprie” or saying that “I just want to unwind”, are talking about a completely different story than someone who is immersed in unprecedented, nameless sadness, doubt and insensitivity. .
This is how one scientist who suffers from depression describes this condition: “Ordinary melancholy and sadness have as much in common with depression as the growth of healthy cells has in common with oncology.”
A study of the lives of people who committed suicide shows that most of them were led to such an end by depression. Psychiatric illnesses are hidden behind 90% of suicides. As a result, depression should be considered a life-threatening illness. According to statistics, depression among forty-year-olds is in second place in terms of mortality, giving first place to road traffic accidents. According to Spiegel, suicide is already the number one cause of death among twenty-five year olds. Ten times more people attempt unsuccessful suicide, and many remain permanently disabled.
Twelve thousand people commit suicide every year in Germany, and most of them suffer from depression.
In old age, depression is the most common of all mental illnesses, and it is often behind dementia (senile dementia). The author Solomon quoted above believes that depression is undoubtedly the most dangerous, expensive to treat and fatal disease.
Art and Myth – An Introduction to the World of Depression
The poetic world of melancholy
Most creative people, artists, writers and poets of the past and present are more or less susceptible to depression. We are grateful to them not only for the wonderful works they left us, but also for the expressive evidence of the actual picture of the disease itself. The relevance of this topic is proven by the fact that the exhibition “Melancholy - genius and madness in art,” held in Paris in 2005, attracted about three hundred thousand visitors before moving to Berlin. In the German capital, the exhibition was celebrated from the very beginning as a huge cultural event, with critics singing its hymns. As art critic Eva Karcher wrote in Vogue Culture magazine, the exhibition shows the beauty hidden in despondency, and further: “This painful state of contradiction in the awareness of the finitude of human existence and the last futile attempts to escape it, make melancholy the center, the source of art.”
If possible, I would include many illustrations in the book. In first place among the works of world art, of course, is Dürer’s painting “Melancholy”, painted in 1514; art critics consider it key in all European art up to the present day. Eva Karcher presents this picture as follows: “On the stone steps there is a seated massive figure of a woman with wings, resting her head on her hand. Imprisoned in the shackles of crude self-reflection, she is tormented by sadness about the finitude of existence and at the same time burns with a passionate desire for liberation.” Perhaps, with his wings, Dürer wanted to emphasize that this woman can, like an angel, rise above the deprivation of earthly existence. This corresponds to the heroic journey, which can be traced from the myths of antiquity to Carl Gustav Jung, and, as we will see later, manifested itself in the life of the writer Hermann Hesse and many of his spiritual followers.
To fly away, to rise on the wings of one’s own dreams above earthly suffering - young Hesse dreamed of this, but many depressed patients also dreamed of this. The Austrian poet Ludwig Hirsch dreams about the same thing in his song “Fly, Black Bird.” This song is an invitation to death, which on its wings will take a person away from a life filled with melancholy and suffering; it was written more by a melancholic person than by a depressive person, since in the song one can feel not only a passionate desire for the coming of death, but also some enthusiasm:
Big black bird!
I'm waiting for you at the window.
Sugar on the windowsill.
Take me away on your wings!Close my passionate eyes
With your big wings,
Take me up to the heavens
In a new time, to a new world.I will laugh, sing, shout:
“That can’t be true!”
In the blink of an eye I will comprehend
Unity of everything!Fly to me, I'm waiting for you.
Press your cold beak
To my wound and take it away
Me away from here.The nurse won't hear us,
The neighbors are fast asleep
Silently you will fly here
And you will carry me away.And here you are! Finally!
Silently you came!
Oh God, how beautiful you are
Hurry up, it's time to hit the road!Farewell, my relatives,
Beloved wife,
Goodbye both mom and sister!
And remember me!There is no reason for sadness!
I will sing, laugh and shout,
Having comprehended everything instantly,
I'll be happy again!Having comprehended everything instantly,
I'll be happy again!
I will sing, I will laugh,
I'll finally be happy!
In another poem, Hirsch describes the state of melancholy with some humor:
Many great artists, such as Francisco Goya, Vincent Van Gogh or Caspar David Friedrich, created their paintings while on the verge between melancholy and madness. Representatives of such movements as symbolism and surrealism also could not escape the attraction of death, decline and disease. Thus, visiting the world's famous museums can be equated to an unconscious confrontation with the topic of depression.
There is also plenty of material in the world of literature to study depression. Writer Maria Kaleko presents a depressive world with the following poetic pictures:
Colorless days
Like a gray wall, stone to stone
Pale days rise in the silence of the night.
The sadness of meaningless, empty hours
Trapped in the soul.Dreams float and flow away
Like night ghosts.
We try in vain to collect
Colored fragments in a frame.
And in the shadows of these colorless days we live,
Without dying.
A poem by the writer Thomas Brush, which he dedicated to his colleague Uwe Johnson and his deep depression, well expresses the deep bleakness of this condition. Johnson committed suicide at the age of forty-nine.
Half asleep
Like in dark corridors,
Confused in myself
Hanged on a rope -
My corpse is hanging in a noose.I'm rushing through the corridors
Its living prisons:
There he cries and grins -
He wants to leave quickly.And here are the last steps,
And now - the last battle.
The guard hears screams
Calls my cry with it.And I run through the eye-window
In the calm of the night;
There are two spirits waiting for me:
Trembling and laughter come from them.
Cover it with blanketsHe gives me my eyes
Now we sleep and hide:
The trouble is over.
Andre Heller, an Austrian poet familiar with the topic of depression from his own experience, finds the courage to describe in his song “System” a certain internal setting that forces depression, bowing, to give way to melancholy.
Cry again if that's what you want
Don't give up doubts
Allow yourself to be a coward
Sabotage the hero in you
Sometimes plunge into the smoke of fear -
You always missed the abyss.
What to lose? Only around
False sympathy.
and convenient.
not on anyone else.That's why I cry when I want to cry -
This confuses them.
In the era of working for results
I give myself time to think.
My clothes are woven from the smoke of fear.
The abysses are my solid support.
If someone today can't lie anymore,
This is considered a sin.This is a system that generates income.
She wants to have you, dependent
and convenient.
And the milk that we are fed with,
They don't skimp on you or me,
not on anyone else.
Famous people who suffered from depression included Queen Elisabeth of Austria. She was not one of the sweet, romantic people from operettas, she did not look like movie princesses; in her poems, this woman who suffered from severe depression left us impressive evidence of her suffering. Her life was the diametric opposite of popular films, and it is very significant that this anorexic lady, suffering from severe migraines and depression, remains an idol for many women of subsequent generations - right up to modern young girls. Appetite disorders and depression - the suffering of Queen Sisi - pose a huge danger to the younger generation in our time.
The characteristic thing is that she had two names. The Queen always wrote about herself as “Sissy”. Actress Romy Schneider became famous in Austria and then throughout the world after her role as the sweet girl Sissy. Perhaps she took a lot from the image of the real Sisi, if we remember the tragic end of the actress. Her unsuccessful attempts to escape the mold of the sweet Sissy that brought her success in the beginning of her career were increasingly felt in her personal life, she came very close to the state of the doubt-ridden real Queen Sisi-Elizabeth.
Queen Elizabeth, who, after a carefree childhood spent in Bavaria, was introduced into the royal court of Vienna, with its rigid, rigid ceremonies, in a poem called "Ramsgate" describes the resistance of her depressed soul to the feeling of love that arose, which was apparently the consequence of a secret palace flirtation. The lines tell us that she maintains a certain distance from her own feelings. In other poems, she prefers to mentally run away to dead heroes, for example, to the “beloved” Achilles from the Greek myths, or to the “master” Heinrich Heine - both of these people cannot cause her suffering because they are no longer in this world.
Met too late
On the thorny path of life.
We've gone too far
The unstoppable wheel of life.It's too late your bottomless eyes
They pulled me in like a magnet
And even under their warm rays
The icy heart did not melt.I'm overcome with sadness -
She's like an echo of ancient days,
Like an alarming, nameless nostalgia,
Like hopeless bitterness.I was once rich
My wealth seemed bottomless.
But frivolity squandered everything -
The heart has become an empty tomb.Oh let me go
Let me
Not to see your honest eyes.
Happiness no longer belongs only to me.
I don't want to look into your eyes!
The queen expresses even more simply and directly in her poem “Song Against the Feast” the refusal of all pleasures, which is very typical for people suffering from depression.
I don't need love
I don't need wine;
I'm so sick of love
The wine makes me vomit.Love poisons
Love is cruel;
The wine is fake, -
For shameful deeds
It moves us.Even more false than wine
It happens more often that our body:
People kiss fake
And they feel like thieves.I don't need love
I don't need wine;
I'm so sick of love
The wine makes me vomit.
The Austrian lyricist Georg Trakl, who never lived to see the age of thirty, left behind many literary monuments of melancholy. He expresses his melancholic state of mind in a letter to Karl Borromaeus Heller:
Dear friend!
...I would be very glad if you came to Salzburg in March; I'm having such a hard time at home, I'm in a state between fever and fainting in my sunny room, it's very cold here. Strange nightmares and transformations haunt me, my body cannot bear it, these faces of darkness... I reach a state of death; sometimes I am overwhelmed by ecstasy that drives me to petrify; and at night I have sad dreams. How dark is this decayed city, filled with churches and cemeteries...
Your devoted Georg Trakl
The following lines of his poem, called “In the Old Album of Poems,” sound like a poetic definition of melancholy.
Melancholy, you keep coming back
Oh, the meekness of a lonely soul...
The golden day has faded to the end.Humbly bows under pain
Patient sounding euphony of words
And soft madness.
Look! It's getting dark.Bowing under the autumn stars,
My head gets lower and lower over the years.
In his poem “The Hour of Sadness,” the poet very clearly expresses his melancholy and despondency.
Dark trail in the autumn garden
The shining moon leaves
Drowning in a freezing wall
Huge night.
Oh, terrible hour of sadness.Rooms flicker like silver in the twilight
Fires of loneliness.
He dies because his thoughts are black,
Drunk on wine and the euphony of the night,
He bows his petrified head over the past.
And the ear haunts me relentlessly
The gentle song of a thrush in the hazel tree.
The twilight hour of fingering the rosary.
Who are you, lonely flute,
Frozen, head bowed over the darkness of times.
Ingeborg Bachmann is one of the masters who throughout their lives expressed their own depressive states in their works. Her poems trace states from melancholy to severe depression. In the poem “Words of Darkness,” she pursues the mythical singer Orpheus in her fantasies. In the lines you can see how the poetess admires the beauty of darkness.
Like Orpheus, I play on the strings of life and death.
And in the beauty of the earth, in your eyes reflecting the sky,
I see only darkness.Don't forget that even you, suddenly,
Early in the morning, when your bed
It was still damp with dew and cloves
Slept on your heart
I saw a black river flowing past you.String of silence stretched
on the wave of the ocean of blood -
I captured the melody of your heart.
Your curl has been transformed
In the dark hair of the night,
Black snowflakes of darkness
They dusted your face.I don't belong to you anymore
And now we lament together.But, like Orpheus, I know
What is on the string of death is life.
And your forever closed eye turns blue for me.
Meaninglessness and decline in sensuality – we can trace these two central aspects of the depressive experience in Ingeborg Bachmann’s poem “Lost Way”, and also notice in the lines the hopelessness typical of depression.
I look at the trees and see no trees.
There are no leaves left on the trunks,
Not torn down by the wind.
Fruits are sweet, but there is no love in them.
They don't fill you up.
What will happen?
The forest runs away from my eyes,
The birds do not sing to my ears,
I can't lie down in the clearing.
I'm full and hungry at the same time.
What will happen?
There is a celebration in the city today, the lights will be lit.
Maybe I should go there and be with people?But I don’t find satisfaction in any way.
In her poem “Behind the Forest” we can feel a terrible longing for death.
I hang like snow from the branches
In the spring valley,
Like a cold stream
I'm moving in the wind.
I fall into the flowers like a drop
In which they rot,
Like in a swamp.
I am constantly thinking about death.I'm on a flight because I can't walk calmly
By buildings separated from the sky,
I throw arrows around me and build walls.
And at night I don’t sleep, making noise like the sound of the surf,
I enter the mouths of waterfalls,
And I push avalanches from the mountains.I am a child of worldly fear,
Hanging in peace and joy.
I'm like the sound of a bell
I am like a scythe on mature arable land.I constantly think about death.
But one of the most powerful, "poetic" descriptions of depression can be found in Hermann Hesse's story "Klein and Wagner." Nobel Prize winner, creator of such immortal works as “Siddhartha”, “Steppenwolf” and “The Glass Bead Game”, the most read author in Europe, he was loved not only by people of the old generation, but is also a cult figure for modern youth. Hesse suffered from depression throughout his life, and this suffering was reflected in his works. In the story "Klein and Wagner" he describes the symbolism of suicide and the general meaning of this act.
He walked calmly through the streets, getting wet in the rain. Not a soul, not even a dog to meet, everything died out. On the shore of the lake he walked from boat to boat, they were all lifted onto land and firmly secured with chains. Only just outside the city did he find one, loosely tied with a rope and easily untied. He untied her and inserted the oars into the oarlocks. Soon the shore disappeared, hid behind a gray haze, as if it never existed, only grayness, blackness and rain remained in the world, a gray lake, a wet lake, a gray sky, a wet sky, everything without end.
Far in the middle of the lake he put away his oars. The time had come, and he was pleased. Before, he always wanted, in moments when death seemed inevitable, to hesitate a little longer, to put this matter off until tomorrow, to try to move on with his life. There was no trace of anything like this now. His little boat - that was him, it was his small, limited, artificially supported life, and the gray distance all around - it was the world, it was space and God, it was not difficult to surrender to it, it was easy, it was joyful.
He sat on the side of the boat, feet facing out, into the water. He slowly leaned forward, leaning forward until the boat gently separated from behind him. He was in space.
In the few moments he lived then, he experienced much more than in the forty years during which he was still on the path to this goal.
It started like this: at that moment when he was falling, when for a lightning-fast split second he was hanging between the side and the water, he imagined that he was committing suicide, a boyish act, something not so bad, but funny and rather stupid. The pathos of the desire to die and the pathos of dying itself faded, nothing remained of it. His dying was no longer necessary, not anymore. It was desirable, it was beautiful and desired, but it was no longer necessary. From that moment, from that lightning split second, when with complete desire, with complete renunciation of all desires, with complete readiness, he decided to fall overboard, to fall into the womb of his mother, into the arms of God - from that moment, dying no longer mattered. After all, everything was so simple, because everything was so amazingly easy, there were no more abysses, no more difficulties. The whole point was to decide to fall! This flashed brightly in him as the result of his life - to decide to fall! You just had to do this, you just had to give in, surrender, surrender, you just had to give up all support, all solid ground under your feet, you just had to listen to the voice of your own heart - and everything was already won, everything was good, there was no more fear, no dangers.
This was achieved, this great thing, this only thing: he decided to fall! The fact that he decided to fall into the water and into death was not necessary; he could just as well have decided to fall into life. But little depended on this; it was not important. He would have been alive, he would have returned. But then he would no longer need suicide, or all these strange detours, or all these tedious and painful nonsense, for then he would overcome fear.
Wonderful thought: life without fear! Overcoming fear is bliss, this is deliverance. How he had suffered from fear all his life, and now, when death had already grabbed him by the throat, he felt neither fear nor horror, only a smile, only deliverance, only agreement with what was happening. He suddenly understood what fear was, realized that only those who knew it could overcome it. You were afraid of a thousand things, afraid of pain, judges, your own heart, afraid of sleep, awakening, loneliness, cold, madness, death - especially death. But all these were just masks, just appearances. In fact, only one thing scared you - to decide to fall, to take a step into the unknown, a small step through all existing precautions. And whoever, at least once, at least once, gave himself up, showed great trust, relied on fate, gained freedom. He no longer obeyed earthly laws, he fell into cosmic space and twirled in a circle dance of the luminaries. Here's how things stood. It was very simple, any child could understand it, could recognize it.
He didn’t think so with his mind, he lived it, he felt it, felt it by touch, taste and smell. I smelled and tasted, saw and understood what life was. He saw the creation of the world, saw the death of the world, they, like two armies, constantly moved towards each other, never ending, forever on the road. The world was continually born and died unceasingly. Every life was an exhalation of God. Every death was a breath of God. He who learned not to resist and decided to fall, died easily, was born easily. Those who resisted suffered from fear, died difficult, were born reluctantly.
In the gray shroud of rain over the night lake, the drowning man saw a reflected picture of the play of the universe. Suns and stars rose and set, hosts of people and animals, spirits and angels stood opposite each other, sang, were silent, shouted, lines of creatures stretched towards each other, and each was not aware of itself, hated itself, hated and persecuted itself in each other being. They all yearned for death, for peace; their goal was God, returning to God and remaining in God. This goal gave rise to fear because it was a delusion. There was no abiding in God in the world! There was no peace in the world! There were only eternal, eternal, magnificent, sacred exhalations and inhalations, creation and decay, birth and death, exodus and return, without interruption, without end. And therefore there was only one Art in the world, there was only one Science, only one Mystery: to decide to fall, not to resist the will of God, not to cling to anything, neither to good nor to evil. Then you are delivered, then you are free from suffering, free from fear, only then.
His life lay before him like a landscape with forests, valleys and villages, which one views from the crest of high mountains. Everything was good at first, simple and good, and all because of his fear, because of his obstinacy, turned into torment and complexity, into terrible clots and spasms of grief and misfortune! There is no woman in the world without whom you cannot live, and there is no woman with whom you cannot get along. There is not a single thing in the world that would not be as beautiful, as desirable, could make you as happy as its opposite! Bliss to live, bliss to die, once you hang alone in space. There is no peace outside, no peace in the cemetery, no peace in God, no magic will ever interrupt the eternal chain of births, the endless series of sighs of God. But there is another peace that you can find within yourself. His name is: dare to fall! Don't resist! Die with joy! Live with joy!
All the hypostases of his life were with him, all the faces of his love, all the modifications of his suffering. His wife was pure and innocent, like himself, Teresina smiled with a childish smile. The murderer Wagner, whose shadow fell so widely on Klein’s life, smiled thoughtfully at him, and this smile said that Wagner’s atrocity was also a path to deliverance, that it was a sigh, and it is a symbol that murder, blood, abomination is not truly existing things, but only assessments of our own, self-tormenting soul. He, Klein, lived with Wagner’s murder for years, rejecting and approving, condemning and admiring, hating and imitating; from this murder he created for himself endless chains of torment, fear, and grief. Hundreds of times he was present with fear at his own death, saw himself on the scaffold, felt how a razor cut his neck, how a bullet entered his temple - and now, when the feared death has really come, dying is so easy, so simple, it is a joy and celebration! There is nothing in the world to be afraid of, nothing is scary - only in madness do we torment ourselves with all these horrors, only in our own frightened soul do good and evil, value and insignificance, lust and illness arise.
The figure of Wagner disappeared somewhere in the distance. He is not Wagner, no longer, no Wagner exists, it was all a deception. So let Wagner die! He, Klein, will live.
Water poured into his mouth and he drank. From all sides, through all the senses, water poured into him, everything dissolved. They sucked it in, they breathed it into themselves. Next to him, close to him, united like drops in water, other people swam, Terezina swam, the old singer swam, him, Klein, his ex-wife swam, his father, mother, sister and thousands, thousands of other people swam, as well as houses and paintings, Titian's Venus and the Strasbourg Cathedral, everything floated away, closely united, in a monstrous stream, driven by necessity, faster and more furiously - and towards this monstrous, furious, huge stream of creations rushed another stream, monstrous, furious, a stream of faces, legs, bellies, animals, flowers, thoughts, murders, suicides, books written, tears shed, a thick, powerful stream, children's eyes, and black curls, and fish heads, a woman with a long frozen knife in her bloody stomach, a young man who looked like himself , with a face full of sacred passion, it was himself, twenty years old, the then missing Klein! How good it is that he had a chance to learn this too - that time does not exist! The only thing that stands between old age and youth, between Babylon and Berlin, between good and evil, between what you give and what you take away, the only thing that fills the world with differences, evaluations, suffering, disputes, wars, is the human mind , the young, furious and cruel human mind in a state of stormy youth, still far from knowledge, still far from God. He comes up with contradictions, he comes up with names. He calls some things beautiful, others ugly, some good, others bad. One part of life is called love, the other is called murder. That's how young, reckless, and funny this mind is. One of his inventions is time. A cunning invention, a subtle tool to torture yourself even more, to make the world diverse and difficult! From everything that a person craves, he is always separated only by time, only by this time, by this crazy invention! It is one of the supports, one of the bridges that must first of all be abolished if you want freedom.
The universal flow of forms, absorbed by God, and another, oncoming, exhaled, did not stop. Klein saw individuals who resisted the current, floundered desperately and brought upon themselves terrible torment: heroes, criminals, madmen, thinkers, lovers, believers. I saw others, easily and quickly, like himself, rushing with the flow in a voluptuous delight of readiness and dedication, blissful like him. From the singing of the blessed and from the endless cry of the unfortunate, a transparent vault was built above both streams, like a dome of sounds, a temple of music, in the middle of which, in the ever-boiling waves of the music of the universal choir, sat God, a bright, shining star invisible due to its brightness, the embodiment Sveta.
Heroes and thinkers emerged from the stream, prophets, heralds. “Here is the Lord God, and his path leads to peace,” one exclaimed, and many followed him. Another declared that the path of God leads to strife and war. One called him light, another - night, the third - father, the fourth - mother. One praised him as peace, the other as movement, as fire, as cold, as a judge, as a comforter, as a creator, as a subverter, as a giver of forgiveness, as an avenger. God himself did not call himself anything. He wanted to be called, to be loved, to be praised, cursed, hated, adored, for the music of the universal choir was his abode and his life - but he did not care with what words they praised him, whether he was loved or hated, whether they are looking for peace and sleep from him or dancing and fury. Everyone was free to search. Everyone was free to find.
Then Klein heard his own voice. He sang. He sang loudly in a new, strong, ringing, sonorous voice, loudly and sonorously sang the praise of God, magnified God. He sang, carried away by the furious current, among millions of creatures, prophet and oracle. His song rang loudly, the vault of sounds rose high, and in this vault God sat and shone. The streams, bubbling monstrously, rushed on. 3
Translation by S. Apt (http://www.hesse.ru/books/read/?book=klein). – Note lane
Excerpt from Adamus St. Germain channeled through Jeffrey Hoppe. .
... The student was lying in his bed, perhaps after the worst period of his life. He went through 21 days of ongoing illness, mental chaos, hopelessness and complete confusion about what to do and where he was. During these days he was completely alone, alone with himself, and most of the time he could not even eat himself - he was in such a state of chaos.
It all started when his physical body became sick. Possibly the flu or a cold, but neither symptom fit. There was complete confusion. He didn't want to go to a doctor because he knew from experience that very few doctors really understood what was happening to someone going through their enlightenment.
So he lay for 21 days in his bed, not understanding whether it was a dream or reality, what was real and what was not.
It was a nightmarish experience to be faced with the darkest and worst version of himself imaginable, while his body was in a state of terrible pain. Often in sweat, often in such cold that no blanket or fire could ease his deep inner agony.
This was the worst of times. And there were moments when he wanted to get rid of, to free himself from the physical body. Moments when he berated and cursed the fact that he had ever even thought about waking up. Because now, during these 21 days of terrible physical and mental agony, no words he heard from teachers or read in books made sense and could not in any way correct the situation in which he found himself.
Patrick was lonely and unhappy.
see also
At the end of the 21 days, he began to emerge from this terrible darkness he was in, still unsure of who he was and what had happened. He was full of doubts. He was filled with uncertainty and still a lot of conflict. But he felt that some kind of shift had occurred in these three weeks. Something has changed.
Suddenly the Master appeared in front of him. Patrick, the student, thought irritably: “I don’t like this, the Master just appears suddenly. I didn't hear any steps. He didn’t knock on the door or announce his arrival, and in this state or position, I don’t even understand whether he’s physically present here or not.”
But another part of him was glad that the Master had come. There was a sort of return to what could be called a normal state, something he could recognize. And the fact that the Master was here could mean either that he had gone through this very difficult period, or that he was dead.
He asked loudly: “Dear Master, I think I have died. This is true?". The master took a deep breath, looked at the bed where Patrick was lying, and for a moment felt a little sad. Because he remembered his own very difficult and difficult times - in the same way he was torn apart in every sense, was lost and felt like he had been in his own hell.
The Master looked at Patrick and said: “No, my friend, you are not dead. You're very much alive. You could say that before this experience, before, you were truly dead. You lived in restrictions. You lived in a state of fear. You lived without realizing the true “I Am” - and this, for me, is a greater death than simply letting go of the physical body. But no, my dear friend Patrick, you made it through. And you are very, very alive."
Patrick took a deep breath and felt great relief to know that he was still alive. He endured this very difficult 21 days.
Patrick said to the Master, “Master, will this be the last time I experience this ongoing severe chaos in my body and mind?”
The master took a deep breath and replied: “No, Patrick, this is not the last time. Even Masters, even Ascended Masters will go through periods like this. This is cleansing. This is liberation.
Because as long as you are connected to the Earth, connected to the human body and to other people, you will always accumulate this fat, this tar, this dirt and vibrational state imbalances...
… So you're going to go through it. But the good news is that in the future you will be doing this as an observer. You won't be as deeply involved and wonder if you'll get through it. You will already know that you will pass.
Yes, the body can get sick, and yes, there can be times when the mind becomes confused. But as an observer, as a Master, you will understand that you have been through this before. There will be no question whether it will work or not. Yes, it worked once already. And it’s just a matter of allowing this very natural process to happen—this cleansing and renewal.”
Patrick said to the Master: “But can’t I do this in another reality or in another dimension? Why does it have to happen here in this dimension, and therefore have to be so difficult?”
And the Master answered Patrick: “Because you accumulate it here. You're going through an experience here. So you can't take it to another dimension to purify yourself. You have to do it from the inside.
But I repeat, remember, dear Patrick, that when you go through similar experiences again in the future, you will be an observer. You see, here, in these 21 days that you went through, you were not an observer. You were, so to speak, a victim. You were so deep in there that you couldn't see that you were already through it.
You were so deep in the experience of pain, doubt and fear that you could not see that this was actually a time of renewal and cleansing. Your doubts have clouded your true thoughts, your true knowledge and your “I Am” to the point that you have forgotten who you were and your “I Am”, Patrick. And this won’t happen again.”
Patrick took a deep breath, a breath of relief - knowing that he would never have to go through this level of doubt and suffering again.
see also
As he took a deep breath, he thought of his next question for the Master. And he asked: “So who am I now? What will I be now that I have gone through the deepest, most merciless and merciless transformation? Who will I be now?
And the Master thought for a moment, remembering his own time when he asked this same question - “What will happen next? Now that the old personality has been completely destroyed? Now that any ties to the "old self" have been completely severed, what happens next?
The Master smiled, remembering how long ago he asked the same thing to his Master. He took a deep breath and said, “Patrick, you tried so hard to hold on to your old self. Despite the fact that you said that you were on the spiritual path, despite the fact that you said that you were choosing enlightenment - every time enlightenment came to you or tried to come to you, every time true awareness stood straight in front of you, you continued to hold on to your old identity.
The old personality was limited. The old personality was not dormant or unawakened; it was simply very limited. You tried so hard to make this old person enlightened. You tried to make old Patrick an enlightened being, instead of allowing ALL of you, all of I Am, to be enlightened.
You called it a quest for enlightenment, but in reality you were just trying to make Patrick's life a little easier and a little better. You lived in the greatest duality that a person can live in - a duality where, on the one hand, you said that you wanted freedom, enlightenment and awareness, while, on the other hand, you did everything you could to hold on to your limitations, your old personality, your spirituality, your old self.
Isn't it amazing, Patrick, isn't it amazing that these past few years of your life have been painful in so many ways? Isn't it amazing that you felt like you weren't real with yourself in so many ways? Isn't it amazing that you've been constantly out of sync with yourself, as well as the rest of the world, these past couple of years?
Isn't it surprising that your energy level was low because your energy was being spent trying to protect the old self - protect it from the outside world, protect it from yourself, protect it even from your enlightenment. Your energy was spent on all the shields and walls around you, on games and pretending. That's why you were exhausted and confused.
For so many years you have lived in a state of great inner conflict, a great battle with yourself, trying to do the right things, trying to be spiritual, while at the same time, whether you realized it or not, just trying to embellish your old personality.
That's why you and many who came before you found yourself in a similar situation - twenty-one days, sometimes even longer, of intense, unrelenting, merciless... compassion.
From now on, there is no more Patrick until you want there to be Patrick. But now you are no longer limited to one expression or one personality. You are nothing. You don't exist anymore. You were destroyed and ripped out of existence. Nothing left. From now on you are nothing.
But nothing like silence. There is no silence in silence. Nothing is like EVERYTHING you want to be. There is no longer any attachment to being just Patrick. There is no attachment to simply creating a better life for yourself, and there is definitely no attachment to something called enlightenment or spirituality. This was very much part of Patrick's game to reinforce and embellish the old personality.
The beauty and greatness of it is that you have truly become enlightened. Eventually it came to you. In the end, after all the ruthlessness and all the destruction of the old personality, you really got it.
You become everything in this nothingness. You don't have to focus on Patrick anymore. You are no longer alone. You are no longer just alive or just dead. You become everything. You are no longer a man or a woman.
The beauty of this nothingness is that it frees you. Frees for the true action of consciousness. In other words, dear “ex” Patrick, from now on, whatever you choose, whatever consciousness you choose, this role can be played. You see, before, in this very limited state of Patrick, this was not a role. This was his reality. You didn't see yourself playing a role. You saw yourself simply living.
But when you finally allow your awareness, it’s like liberating your consciousness. And at this moment you can act, you can be whatever you want. You can be a wizard, a magician. You may be a simpleton. You can be them together at the same time.
You can be a Master incarnate and you can be one who is completely unaware that there is anything beyond his sight. And you can be both at the same time. You can be abundant and limited at the same time.
The beauty is that you have now freed yourself to act the way you want and be aware of it. You see, before you weren't really conscious. You didn't realize. Before, you were so isolated that you were unaware of anything other than Patrick's survival.
Now that you are free of this, you can do and be whatever you want. This is truly consciousness in action, awareness expressed however you want. This, my dear Patrick, is freedom.
Imagine for a moment that you are not locked into a single definition of yourself. Imagine for a moment that there is no longer this huge conflict with yourself, but instead there is freedom of action and application of consciousness to anything.
Patrick took a deep breath and said, “So am I now enlightened, dear Master? Am I enlightened?
The master took a deep breath, smiled and replied: “If you choose.”
... This ends my story, another story from my future, world-famous, popular book “Memoirs of a Master.” And this is your story. Whether you take it literally or figuratively, it's your story. A story about going through a great internal battle with yourself where you say you will do anything to awaken. But in reality you are just trying to awaken your “Patrick”, your individuality, your old personality.
The beauty of enlightenment is that it is natural. He cannot be controlled, not even by your “Patrick”. He cannot be controlled - not even by “Patrick” who is trying to make life a little better.
Your enlightenment is not here because you asked for it. Your enlightenment is here not because you prayed for it, or because you sincerely desire it. It's there because it's who you really are.
See Also
You cannot manipulate or control your enlightenment. But, my dear friends, it is merciless. It is merciless in its compassion. It will free you from your limitations. It gives you your freedom, no matter what it takes - how many painful nights, how many illnesses, how much suffering, bad relationships or anything else. It's here in compassion.
… In fact, this return to awareness of one’s true nature, one’s true I Am, which is not “Patrick” at all, which goes far beyond “Patrick,” will happen in any case, sooner or later, with every person on Earth…
Take a deep breath and relax into it. Allow him. You realize that even the dark days and nights, you realize that even this painful inner duality is here for a reason. Not as a lesson. Not to prove anything to your “Patrick”. They are here in the greatest compassion of enlightenment and realization. An implementation that, one might say, is already here. There is nothing new. It's all just a matter of permission.
…You can go through your own version of Patrick's experience. Terrible. Terrible. Feeling like you're being torn apart, not knowing if you'll survive. Well, I'll tell you now - you will survive. I will say now that you can take a deep breath and be an observer. Stop trying to pretend it's not happening. Stop trying to disguise and hide it. It's here for a reason.
Stop thinking that you are doing something wrong. No. No, not really. Not at all. This is purification, this is liberation that has come to you.
It helps you realize that it is not Patrick who is awakening. It is you.
… Let's take a deep breath and feel that if you just relax and allow, you will realize that all is well in all of Creation.
Thank you my dear friends. I am Adamus in such humble service to you. Thank you. Thank you.
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Original English text on the official website of the Scarlet Circle
Russian translation: SaLexx & SafIra
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