I know this is going to hit a chord with some of you out there. So many people talk about experiencing deep and oppressive depression, either just prior to or after a spiritual awakening. I’ve come across many accounts of spiritual awakening over the past decade, and noticed a common thread of severe depression, even to the point of being suicidal. People have often asked me about the potential connection between depression and sudden spiritual awakening.
Existential Depression
If you suddenly fall off the treadmill of so-called normal life, people may label you as depressed. There are so many cracks in this flimsy, false reality that it’s easy to fall through one if you’re not careful. Suddenly you can’t find meaning or value in the life you’ve created for yourself. It may be that the life you’re living truly sucks, but you can just as easily have everything you ever wanted and find that it has absolutely no meaning. You may feel tidal waves of sadness, emptiness, meaninglessness, alienation, and terror. You might look around and wonder what you’re doing here. You suddenly don’t feel a connection to anything. Nothing gives you pleasure. There is nothing to strive for, nothing you can get or experience to fix it. The pointlessness of it all is crushing, inescapable.
People spend a great deal of effort maintaining the illusion of their lives. They work very hard to make it as solid as possible and never venture too close to the rough edges. Otherwise, they would fall right through one of those gaping holes and find themselves looking into the illusion from the outside.
Everyone around you will work very hard to pull you back into investing in the illusion. They will get you counseling, feed you medications, take you to the movies, whisk you away on an exciting holiday, and take you shopping. Everyone will do all they can to help you return to being well-adjusted.
As you know, in an insane world of people sleepwalking through an illusory life, being well-adjusted means you have to be insane. You have to go back to being hypnotized. This is a really painful and confusing place to be. What happens if you don’t patch it up? What happens if you can’t return to normal programming? What happens is that you wake up and you adjust ... You come out of the woods into a new world, one that makes sense to you because you can now well and truly “see”.
ii-wy em Hotep - Patrick Gaffiero
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