WillSpirit!

Recent posts have alluded to the ‘awakening’ I experienced during the middle part of January. Perhaps you have noticed that details have been slow in coming. The episode had such impact, and seemed so special, that I’ve wanted to savor and assimilate it before taking the risk of describing it badly. How could I possibly do it justice? If it is not entirely beyond words, it will certainly be reduced by them. So please forgive the hesitance with which I am spelling it out.

Not only do I have trouble describing what happened, I can’t even categorize it properly. In terms of emotional impact, it had much in common with the ‘psychosis’ that overwhelmed my mind in 2000. At that time, my universe came alive with divine forces and holy beings. Afterwards, everyone around me suffered through long descriptions of what I called ‘my religious visions’. Because the amazing sights, sounds, and feelings had seemed to be the handiwork of supernatural agencies, I believed them ‘spiritual’ in every sense of the word. What happened this January had the same emotional impact, but the causes seemed different. Whereas before I heard holy voices and met divine spirits, this time nothing supernatural seemed to be at play. I felt a profound connection with my surroundings, and enjoyed a penetrating clarity about my true condition as a human being. But I did not hear, feel, or see any gods or angels. My thinking did not go in that direction at all.

So was this experience ‘spiritual’, or not? Consider that it: 1) made me exquisitely aware of the profuse (and unarguable) connections between all life forms; 2) showed me my insignificance in the face of a vast and mysterious cosmos; 3) helped me recognize that the universe is perfect in its own way; and 4) reminded me of what a privilege it is to be a witness. Because I felt both humbled and absorbed by the cosmos, and because the universe struck me as exactly ‘right’, the episode counts as an awakening. And yet everything that I saw and felt, or that comforted me, came from either scientific knowledge or day-to-day experience. Whatever happened cannot be labelled ‘secular’, because it felt so numinous. But it did not seem supernatural, either. Can it be called ‘spiritual’ if it did not involve ‘spirits’?

My awakening can be described as a ‘sacred’ experience, even if it was not a strictly spiritual one. Although dictionary definitions of ‘sacred’ mostly relate to ‘God or gods’, there is also the meaning: ‘highly valued or important’. In that sense, I found myself recognizing how we inhabit a sacred universe, where every particle holds tremendous significance. Which, if you think about it, is not much of a stretch. For the simplest example, isn’t it spectacular that protons exist? And that they comprise even smaller particles called quarks, which evidently contain even smaller things of some sort (strings?). With my awakened state of mind, these momentous truths almost overwhelmed me. I was awestruck by the enormity of my surroundings, and yet I felt both absorbed and supported by them. The universe was not somehow separate from ‘me’, and I could find no objective boundary between the outside world and my inner mind. I also had absolute confidence that there are no flaws in the cosmos. Everything is as it must be. Although the reality of tragedy remained quite clear, I saw that in the larger scheme of things, it is unavoidable. Hardship is inseparable from life. In short, I knew the universe to be profound, one with me, and perfect.

Later, as the impact of this experience hit home, I found an entirely new attitude toward life. No longer obsessed with my small inner concerns, I now have much more appreciation of the larger, outer world. My depression and anxiety have lightened to the point where they hardly deserve those names any longer. Not that I feel giddy or supremely ‘happy’. An undertone of sorrow can still be heard anytime I slow down and listen. But it is a special kind of sadness, with an almost inexpressible, sorrowful majesty. Everything in this universe, including my depression, holds beauty of one kind or another.

Not only was my experience ‘sacred’, therefore, it was also transformative. After years of very slow and incremental change, I found myself leaping over barriers that had seemed insurmountable and permanent just a week earlier. My mental health jumped to a new plateau. There is room for a great deal more growth and maturity, of course, but I made more progress in January than in the entire decade between 2000 and 2010.

Having been granted a sacred, transformative awakening that followed specific actions and contemplations, I suspect that something in my experience might assist others. My first obligation, and the one way I might be able to help, is to write.

Recent posts have, hopefully, demonstrated big changes in my mindset and emotional stability. A profound awakening has lifted me out of my rut and set me on a new path. But where is this new road headed?

For the past thirty years I’ve worked to overcome chronic depression, and other emotional challenges. There have been some successes, and some excited moments, but low moods have remained stubbornly clamped over my heart. Twenty years ago, attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings convinced me to look for a ‘spiritual’ solution. I toyed with Buddhism, but ended up in the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, which had been the spiritual heritage of my maternal ancestors. Since it demands few doctrinal beliefs, it fit me well. But although I attended countless Meetings for Worship, and many weekend retreats, my so-called spirituality remained an intellectual exercise. I liked the idea of deeper forces in the cosmos, but I never felt connected with anything more than curiosity.

Ten years ago I enjoyed my first set of spiritual breakthroughs, during a diagnosed ‘psychotic episode’. Some of them had a Christian theme, which prompted my conversion to Roman Catholicism. After five years or so, my glowing convictions about Christ faded back into the atheism of my upbringing. Once again, I found myself in need of a spiritual home, only now it seemed clear that lasting belief in supernatural concepts was beyond me. Even with another try, Buddhism remained a poor fit for my personality and philosophy. Tenets about reincarnation would have been easy to sidestep as a Western Buddhist, but the emphasis on reason, although laudable, reminded me too much of science. Rigid scientific thinking seemed to be part of my problem.

Two weeks ago I had my second series of spiritual breakthroughs. During them, ideas that had been building in my mind for many years coalesced into an empirically based worldview, but one that did not rely on scientific reasoning. It came to me by wordlessly, without resistance, embracing known facts about what it means to be a human. After the epiphany blossomed, I pulled out the book, 365 Tao by Deng Ming-Dao and read a few random pages. To my amazement, the texts articulated a worldview nearly identical to the one that had flooded me after years of struggle. The book had been buried in my little home library the entire time, but I had never opened it before. (Although I had often meditated on the shorter and more cryptic Tao Tse Tung.) There were minor differences in perspective, but in essence the end result of all my grappling had been on my bookshelf the entire time. Taoism seems to have roots deep in a receptive awareness of nature. I reached my similar frame of mind through opening myself, without resistance and with as little ‘thought’ as possible, to the awesome sweep of proven biology and physics (it’s no coincidence that I have a Master’s degree in biophysics).

Taoism is based on an abstract idea (The Tao) that stands for an all-encompassing, endlessly mysterious, and deeply consistent animating principle. There is little if anything blatantly supernatural, at least not in the little Taoism I’ve read so far. My experience remains hard to articulate, but it came from taking all my knowledge of our physical and biological nature, and allowing it to sweep through my heart. Doing so prompted a soul-saturating awareness of the ‘rightness’ and ‘interconnectedness’ of creation.

It needs to be emphasized that I don’t rule out the possibility of overtly supernatural phenomena such as ‘God’ or reincarnation. However, I learned that such beliefs are not needed to support a spiritual awakening every bit as profound as my one of ten years earlier, at which time the idea of God had been central.

When I began my spiritual journey, it would have been impossible to predict that it would end like this. All I could do was stumble blindly until the pieces fell in place. Possibly, I could have picked up 365 Tao a decade ago, and been spared the struggle. But it is more likely that the words would have remained veiled until a designated and unpredictable moment when my eyes were opened.

It is hard to overstate the value of the awareness that has come to me. It has melted away my petty, egoistic concerns. It has given me faith that the universe is benign, and that despite the inevitable traumas of life, I will be safe. It has prompted me heart to literally ache with the desire to help others find peace. It has swept away decades of depression and cynicism. And it only invokes truths that most rational and educated people would accept.

So what is my next obligation? Where do I go from here?

In light of my recent awakening the mystical seems thoroughly mixed with the mundane. Even ‘secular’ mental health topics now lead me beneath the paving stones of structured thought. It has become obvious that everything ordinary is a bit magical, and everything magical is a bit ordinary. There is something beyond understanding in the simple fall of a raindrop, while the prosaic rhythm of our hearts paces the most profound religious moments.

‘Magic’, as used here, refers to things the logical mind discounts. These include connections that can’t be proven, wisdom without worldly value, and love as a guiding principle. It helps to embrace such things if we seek faith, but we do not need to invoke blatantly supernatural forces. My awakening demonstrated that spiritual connection does not require belief in phenomena that violate the normal patterns of events. And for the record, ‘spiritual connection’ can be coarsely described as awareness that the self is small, and that the universe is meaningful and alive with interdependence.

There are countless paths that lead to openness. Many find faith in a supreme deity, but those without such beliefs can still experience deep and universal connections. (Note that faith is available without theistic convictions, but this by no means rules out a creative, omniscient God.) Traditional Buddhism relies on the expectation of reincarnation; commitment to escaping the cycle of rebirth motivates the entire practice. But meaningful peace can be achieved without these tenets, whether reincarnation occurs or not. In fact, no specific set of beliefs is essential to feeling supported by the currents of mystery.

My uncompleted series of spiritual essays were put forward to counter (seemingly) rational obstructions to feeling connected with deep forces. Fervent materialists, for instance, base their views on narrow interpretations of scientific findings. A broader look at established facts can undermine such arguments. The series’ goal was to counteract resistance caused by rigid and false reasoning.

After writing out ideas that had been accumulating for years, I awakened to some simple but profound truths. If our egos did not keep us in blinders, I realized, we would better appreciate the magic of life. We would know that we live in the midst of a blossoming miracle. We would feel how matter, energy, and consciousness evolve and intertwine all around us. At first, this direct experience made me think my rational arguments had been superfluous and unnecessary. Why even bother with the ego’s petty objections, when the truth is so elegant and apparent?

Then my transcendent awareness receded. Although vivid memories remain, direct experience is elusive. This proves what spiritual pilgrims have always found: discrete ecstatic moments, while valuable, are not enough. One must make ongoing efforts to remain open. In Achieving Enlightenment the Dalai Lama talks of two types of meditation. In the ‘analytical’ kind, one uses reason to explore truth, which then informs meditations that set thought aside. So using the mind to investigate the validity, source and meanings of faith might actually be a useful practice. Combined with quiet sitting and altruistic efforts, it might help a person (like me) stay spiritually centered. So why not continue the series?

A new motivation to proceed with my spiritual project is also apparent. After my recent awakening, depression that had tormented me for decades lost power. My heart remains at peace, even though I continue to feel bodily sadness, ancient grief, and shadows of trauma. Moods still ebb and flow, and dark clouds still roll across my mental landscape, but my core feels safe because of faith. In essence, by breaking down my ego, and embracing deeper realities, my soul attained abiding serenity.

Importantly, my soul-shaking experience arose without belief in anything blatantly supernatural. No supreme deity, no reincarnation, no disembodied spirits. (Again, I am not saying any religious principles are wrong; only that they are unnecessary to effective faith.) Rational ideas about creation, and looking at my situation with clarity and perspective, opened me to a wordless experience of cosmic unity.

The significance cannot be overstated. Faith that arose alongside a strict belief in science led to mental health. Psychotherapy (including CBT and ACT), 12-step programs, and self-help books helped get me ready to change. But experiential faith, based on logically supportable thought provided wings that lifted me away from the gravity of my suffering. Since others might find peace along this path, my story must be told.

Growth might have been easier within an established religion. But an atheist upbringing and years of scientific training blocked me from becoming a convinced Christian, Buddhist, or anything else. Those traditions and others informed me, but left me short of my goal. Do many besides me desire faith, but feel blocked by rational objections? It’s hard to say. And whether my ideas will help is also unknown. But the same feeling of connection that shook me awake prompts me to resume the series.

Regardless of one’s beliefs about the existence of transcendent realms, human beings need something akin to spirituality to counteract ego dominance. Religious systems encourage humility in order to bring practitioners out of self, and into appreciation of a larger reality. People argue about ‘God’, and obsess about whether we live in a purely material world versus one with mystical foundations. But debates about the nature of the cosmos, while fascinating and important, could be sidestepped if there were an easy way to escape the ego’s tyrrany.

Although I know only a little about philosophy, my understanding of evolution is a bit more sophisticated. Recently, I read the textbook Animal Behavior, by John Alcock, which looks at the subject from an evolutionary perspective. It rounded out ideas that first came my way through Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Despite the rudimentary abilities of certain apes, only humans employ verbal, rational, and linear thought. Predictive skills and long-range strategizing appear to have evolved only recently. Other animals have minds of some sort, but they must work differently from ours. Anyone with a dog knows it has desires, and abilities to communicate them. A dog is good at getting humans to provide what it wants. But one of the wonderful things about canine pets is their lack of guile. They don’t plan, manipulate, deceive, or ‘think’ long term. Those are uniquely human qualities. Although animals have very complicated, and even flexible, behaviors, they do not have complex thinking. Such cognition is a new development on earth.

ACT starts with the premise that we suffer from overactivity in the ‘newer’ parts of the brain, which generate complex and abstract thinking. Adept at describing, comparing, predicting, and judging, the human thought apparatus has proven its strengths in developing technology. From stone tools to agriculture to industrialization to the internet, our cognition has created the sophisticated and tangled culture we see today. For all our mastery of nature, however, we have lost control of our selves. Unless we deliberately nurture other mental abilities, we remain locked in rational thought. Even when we face no immediate dilemma, we fail to revert to the wise and ancient modes that served our animal ancestors for eons. We persist in judging and predicting even when there is little need. Many of us get trapped in obsessions, overwhelmed by anxiety, or crushed by regret. When these conditions become chronic, we start diagnosing mental illness. Although it sometimes destroys us, we cannot easily turn off what ACT calls the ‘thought machine’.

When a person quiets the ceaseless patter of thought, and experiences a bit of silent presence, peace arises. As older and wiser parts of the mind come to the fore, problems seem less complicated and less pressing. With practice, one can combine mindfulness with acceptance, and begin to align with the mind’s nonrational forces. During the past year an ACT therapist helped me make progress in those directions. But by itself this failed to displace my ego from its throne; although life became a bit easier, my judgments remained rapid and harsh. At best I enjoyed a few seconds of serenity, before the machine of criticism stormed back into control. For some people, exercises in meditation, tolerance, and value-seeking will suffice to attain lasting peace of mind. But for me, with my habit of pessimism and negativity, something more was required.

Enter spirituality. Whereas Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) teaches how to think less negatively, and ACT persuades the judging mind to relax its grip, religion works by appealing to deeper regions of the brain. By helping us feel the presence of forces larger than humanity, they give the older parts of the mind enough strength to reassert their rightful place in the human psyche. In the West, this has been accomplished by appeal to a unified God. In the East, there has been more emphasis on awakening the heart to the vast scale and depth of creation. The spiritual awakening alluded to in the last post arose from a more Eastern than Western way of seeing things. Regardless of its philosophical heritage, the awakening of my deeper spirit has forced my ego to share the stage. Although the cloud of depression remains, it no longer colors my entire world view. I can feel the low moods percolating, and yet remain open to the beauty of life. The improvement results from a newfound ability to see my ego’s judging stance from a broader perspective. I understand there are other ways of understanding the world, and that I can live without weighing and evaluating everything. An atmosphere of equality has replaced the scales of judgment.

Whatever works. Some will rationally understand the value of escaping the ego’s web, and with that knowledge, break free. Others require an omnipotent deity to shake them loose. Still others will find release by meditating on the subterannean connections between the mind and the cosmos. Using the term loosely, all represent forms of spirituality, in that they release the human spirit from the prison of the human mind.

‘Spiritual’ experiences span a range of possibilities. The chirping birds and fertile scents of a rain-soaked meadow can transform the receptive person. Such scenes fill the mind with a soft awareness of nature’s magic, bringing one to a grace that lies at the subtle end of the spectrum. At the other end lies the ego-shattering breakthrough, where God’s immanence saturates the heart and mind, until one nearly weeps from feelings of unity with creation. A week ago my soul was blessed with an opening to transcendence somewhere in the middle. After reverently taking leave of my companions, I entered a grove of old-growth redwoods for a five-hour solitary ‘Spirit Walk’. The trees are so wide and tall that it becomes easy to recognize one’s smallness in the face of creation. The first branches don’t jut from the trunks until a hundred feet or so above the cathedral-like spaces that underlie the canopy. The ground is wet from the ceaseless dripping of the boughs above, and it is soft to the step, with inches of decomposing vegetation underfoot. For one hour, I meditated beneath a tree that was probably close to two thousand years old, and as wide as a typical bedroom.

For at least twenty years I’ve pondered how to reconcile my knowledge of biology and physics with my sense of spiritual presence on earth. While sitting beneath that tree, my tentative answers coalesced into a heartbreaking awareness of Truth. On a very deep level, I perceived the evanescence and formlessness of the human mind, the interplay between humans and nature, and how everything intertwines in the awesome depths of creation. The way the human spirit dwells amidst vast spreads of time, space, and scale became clear to me in ways that surpass words. After my meditation, I walked for miles through the woods, while deeper and deeper layers of creation seemed to open to my understanding. In future months I will make the effort to articulate the realizations that blossomed that day, though in short form they were essentially Taoist in character. But at the time words were superfluous; a pervasive and convinced knowing filled me: heart, body, mind, and soul.

In the week since, I’ve held off writing anything specific about my experience. I’ve toyed with peripheral insights. Some I’ve already posted, and some will be placed on the blog in future weeks. All are vital to my growth, and convincing in light of my new understanding, so they need to be addressed. But the heart of the matter is so profound I am allowing it to mature. I want to avoid the ecstatic and grandiose writing that has sometimes found its way onto this site after my moments of inspiration. This experience was so profound and meaningful that it requires gentle treatment, like a fragile and sacred egg. It brought me to what seems like a broad and penetrating understanding of the human condition, and our relationship to nature. The scope of this new perspective crushes into triviality many of my prior concerns, including my imperative to rationally justify the existence of a ‘universal consciousness’. My plan of using linear thought to support faith now looks hopelessly naive. Although the intense mental effort that preceded this breakthrough probably opened the door, I now see that logic is not a reliable path to transcendence. The gates only open easily for those who surrender, abandon ego, and awaken to wonder.

In truth, the answers are as simple as they are profound. But even now I am skirting the core of the matter. I am warming up to writing about the week that started me on a new life, and I want to go slowly. I want to be sure my words are as free of ‘self’ as possible. The truths are universal. I did not earn them, and I do not want to despoil them by taking any credit, or by getting inflated with grandiosity. I have never felt so drawn to write about anything, or so cautious.

I wrote an essay about acceptance that was kindly placed on one of the blogs at PsychCentral by Tom Wootton of Bipolar Advantage. It drew an interesting comment there, and between that reader’s remarks and my response, some important aspects of acceptance were highlighted. Here is the comment:

What about a seriously debilitating mood problem, like suicidal depression? Acceptance of that could lead to suicide. Or a mania which causes a person to think s/he is being called to break into the White House to deliver a message from God? These are extremes but they do exist within the parameters of manic-depression/bipolar disorder. Acceptance is good if your disorder only takes you from “normal” levels of depression to non-extreme manias. But we need to be aware that medication can help people whose moods sway wildly.

Here’s my answer:

You make a good point, but I think you are talking about acquiescence rather than acceptance. It’s a fine distinction, but an important one. Acceptance, as I am using the word, means embracing reality. People become suicidal because they believe their mood to be intolerable. They literally can’t live with it; suicide is the opposite of acceptance. People often say, “I feel like killing myself.” In this case, acceptance means acknowledging that one is having suicidal urges, and then living with them. To kill oneself would be to reject everything and acquiesce to self-destructive tendencies.

The same is true of delusions. It is possible for people with psychosis to recognize the ungrounded nature of their urges, and resist them. In order to do so, however, they have to be willing to accept the unreality of their thinking. To act on a psychotic impulse would be to deny the existence of delusion, and acquiesce to (ultimately) self-destructive tendencies.

For the record, Bipolar Advantage does not rule out the use of medications, nor do I. However, it is pretty clear that they are over-promoted and over-used. Especially in the short term, they can help settle severe distress. On the other hand, acceptance of sadness is preferable to lifetime use of antidepressants. Furthermore, when one quits fighting depression, it often lightens a little. Mania and delusions need to be monitored closely. No one advocates allowing them to run unchecked, until a life lies in ruins. But hitting every bit of elevated feeling with a drug leads to over-sedation and other side effects. Plus, much of life’s texture gets lost.

It is important to be responsible at all times. That means making sure people remain safe, but it also means avoiding costly and damaging over-medication. Thank you for your comment, which helped me clarify my position on acceptance.

The hardest thing, sometimes, is admitting error. That it should be such a challenge is a bit mystifying. Why can’t we look truth in the face, see the mistakes in our previous thinking or behavior, and tell the world we had it wrong?

Honor is an ego prize. Honesty is of the heart. In this world, ego values dominate. So we insist on the accuracy of our opinions, and on the rightness of our actions. A great deal of marital discord would evaporate if spouses learned to admit error. Since political parties, nations, and religions are just as willful as individuals, the world is rife with gridlock in congress, imperialist invasions, and wars between religions.

Not only is rigidity bad for society, it keeps us locked in behaviors and attitudes that promote suffering. Case in point: I spent most of my adult life fighting for my own unhappiness. Even as I began to learn ways to shuck my depression, I resisted out of psychic stubbornness.

Not that I couldn’t justify my misery. Many posts on this blog have explained the ways my childhood sucked. Divorce, maternal suicide, child abuse, paternal alcoholism, and sibling psychosis were the staples of my upbringing. In the same vein, there is little doubt that I had a run of bad luck in adulthood: severe neck problems, career loss, psychiatric hospitalizations, permanent medication side effects, and multiple failures plagued me during the past decade. Fate has given me plenty of ammunition to shoot my mood to hell.

And yet, in recent years the suspicion grew that my attitude could change. Just as there were awful things in my family home, there were delightful things outside of it. My grandparents took custody of me one month a year, and lavished me with attention. In order to keep me out of my stepmother’s hair, my father had me spend half of every summer at camp. And although it was awkward being the only kid in residence longer than two weeks, I had lots of fun. My adulthood has brought me good times as well as bad. My prolonged education fascinated me every step of the way. For a brief time, I had a rewarding career. Financial concerns, while present, are not severe. My health is pretty good, and my wife loves me. Ever since I first worked with CBT in 2006, it has been clear to me that my biggest problem was a severe tendency to focus on the negative.

As readers have learned in previous posts, my opinion of my worth was very low until a week ago. Now, I can see how my deep feelings, perseverance, kindness, and insight make me a valuable person. That my outlook reversed in such a short time is telling. I believe the recognition of my good qualities has been secretly building inside me for years. But I resisted it. Why? Because I did not want to admit error.

How would it look if unhappy Will, who always had something discouraging to talk about, suddenly started acting joyful? Wouldn’t that prove that he could have changed long ago? Wouldn’t that negate all his complaints? Perhaps.

Maybe I could have let go of my sour attitude decades back. Former lovers and friends might have remained in my life. Years of sorrow might have been avoided. But would those be reasons to keep on in the same mode? One of my favorite sayings is, “cut your losses”. Last week, it finally came time to do just that.

It is not surprising that it took a long time to recover from such a traumatic childhood. And a period of mourning after my career ended was probably unavoidable. The problem was, my grief stretched on too long.

It is time to admit longstanding awareness of my attachment to sorrow. In essence, my unhappiness hardened into a habit. Although the word is overused, I’m tempted to call my pessimism an ‘addiction’. After all, it became a repetitive behavior (of thought) that ruined my life for many years.

Like any bad habit, the best way to break free is to recognize the problem, resolve to change, and then take concrete steps to improve. Although I could see my insistence on pessimism, and had pretty good resolve to change, I resisted releasing my negativity. The fact is, I feared that if improvement appeared suddenly, it would imply that I could have ended my depression at any time. It would indicate a big mistake.

Finally, using recovery jargon, I ‘hit bottom’. The constant misery became too much, and contentment became more essential than being right.

Why did it take me so long to see the big picture?

A court ordered my first visit to a therapist at age sixteen. Since then I’ve been in and out of counseling many times. Since 1987 I’ve been a regular attendee at 12-step groups. I became a spiritual seeker. I’ve read innumerable books about psychology, self-help, recovery, and spiritual growth.

But until a few weeks ago, I could not give myself a break. Although I made progress, negativity, fear and regret continued to plague me. I felt little love for myself, and often yearned for death. Those unfamiliar with depression may be shocked by these words. But they won’t surprise many who have experienced mood crises.

Between the ages of sixteen and fifty-one, I engaged in a pitched battle against my demons. In just the past week I’ve experienced an opening. I ask again, why did it take so long?

Having just finished a book entitled “The Five Stages of the Soul”, by Harry Moody, I understand that my path was not unique. Moody charts the typical road to enlightenment as composed of: The Call; The Search; The Struggle; The Breakthrough; and The Return. Note that “struggle” sits right in the middle. To achieve understanding, apparently, one must suffer.

It is hard to imagine anyone having a more sorrowful, pessimistic attitude toward life than I sported until a short time ago. Coming from a catastrophic upbringing, and with many family members afflicted with psychiatric issues, I entered adulthood with both environmental and genetic reasons for major depression. Not that many months ago, I consciously resigned myself to permanent grief, and started working to build a satisfying life in spite of it.

Sadness has not departed. Having lost my mother to depression at age six, my personality may forever feel rooted in bereavement. To my surprise, on the other hand, I now see that my heart retains more capacity for joy than I ever guessed. Despite decades of depression, discouragement, and despair, my resilient human spirit has generated something I never expected: true love of life.

This is not the giddy high that psychiatrists label ‘hypomania’. I am familiar with unbalanced feelings of grandiosity, churning excitement, and unrealistic expectations. They are pleasurable, but short-lived and not particularly wise. My current frame is one of clarity and acceptance. From this new plateau, I see the entire spectrum of my history. For one thing, I recognize that there has been pleasure in addition to pain. Before now, I’ve resisted cherishing even the happy epochs in my saga. But today I can say it: my life has been wonderful in its own way.

This all seems so obvious now, that it is a mystery why I could not see it before. But no matter how long it took, I am glad to be open at last. It grants me an eagerness to help others embrace their lives. Let me start with a guarantee: peace is possible, even for stubborn pessimists.

We choose our world. Plato suggested humans select a life prior to birth, then live it in a state of amnesia. Perhaps that’s true, but that’s not the point of this essay. For the moment, consider the inner experience. When you think about it, doesn’t what happens inside our brains have a bigger influence on our contentment than what happens outside? And aren’t the two more separate than we appreciate in day-to-day life? Even though the environment constantly touches our senses, and so shapes our minds, it is not hard to make a distinction between the inner world and the outer one. And it is the inside that makes us happy, or drives us insane.

Somewhere ‘out there’ sits the cosmos. It consists of things we call ‘matter’ and ‘energy’. External to our minds, substances and forces move, fluctuate, and interact. We have good scientific descriptions of how this works, but we don’t experience it directly. All we have access to are the patterns of nerve signals that enter our brains by way of nerves. These nerve signals come from complex sense organs such as eyes and ears. They also arrive from scattered sensory cells (in our skin, organs, and tendons) that provide our sensations of touch, bodily condition, and movement.

It takes effort, but try for a moment to fully acknowledge these facts about the separation between the mind and the physical world. Scientists and philosophers debate about the nature of the ‘self’ that makes use of incoming data. But even without understanding the ‘self’, it is helpful to grasp that our minds depend on sense organs for contact with the universe. Sensory systems are the windows through which we view our lives.

These concepts can be used to improve mental comfort. As a personal example, the teeth in my upper jaw sometimes throb, probably because of jaw clenching. But for some reason, my lower teeth feel fine. So here’s where I get to choose my world: in my mind, I can either attend to the upper molars, or the lower ones. It used to seem like the aching was outside my control; it shouldered its way into my consciousness. Not that the pain was awful, life disrupting agony. The discomfort meant little more than annoyance. But whether I wanted to suffer with it or not seemed irrelevant.

A few days ago, I remembered something taught in chronic pain classes. Rather than paying attention to the upper teeth, I shifted my focus to the lower ones. Very quickly the toothache abated. Discomfort persisted, but without me centering on it, its intensity died. I’m not talking about pushing sensation away, only about shifting attention.

I hope this example makes clear how readily we can alter experience by attending to different sensory input, such as lower jaw versus upper. Or we could look at the flowers on the roadside rather than the litter. What’s more, we can use selective attention in other ways: we can turn toward pleasant memories, and create helpful thoughts. Recently, in the midst of one of my depressions, I listened to a friend’s advice to remember happy times when feeling sad. Naturally, it seemed like the facile suggestion of someone never tormented with true despair. But he did have a point. Just as we can choose which tooth to listen to, we can select which memories to replay in our heads. Similarly, we can decide whether to dwell on our fears, or imagine our dreams for the future.

Sound familiar? These days, most people treated for mood disorders learn about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). It’s been proven to help people who suffer from anxiety and depression. It teaches how to steer the mind away from troubling waters. The goal isn’t to live in denial or avoid problem-solving. But why dwell on situations we cannot change, or worry about stuff that we can’t prevent, and that hasn’t happened.?

Many religions promote mental discipline. Buddhism literally makes a science of it. But spirituality is not required to gain the benefit of self-guidance. There are many books that teach CBT, and the idea of ‘positive thinking’ has been written about for at least a hundred years. My goal in this note is to give the perspective that humans exist in biological structures of unthinkable complexity, and that consciousness (whatever it really is) can direct inner experience. Gentle tuning of attention and thought can aid our perpetual search for peace. Rather than succumbing to the dreaded ‘bipolar’ label, or suffering hopelessly with the onus of ‘depression’, we can begin to take charge of our interior worlds.

Obviously, these techniques by themselves will not resolve severe mood crises. Much can be written about how to gain the self-love necessary to embrace strategies that promote contentment. But recognizing the distinction between inner world and outer reality is a useful step on the path toward ease of mind.

During a spiritual retreat this weekend, much became clear to me. So many events and losses that have grieved me for years became softer, easier to embrace. My past ten years have been spent in a strenuous and confusing struggle to arrive at this place. Future posts will talk about these insights, but I want to announce the good news to all of you who have supported me these past months. A decade of hard, subterranean mining has started to yield its bullion of understanding. I’ve hit the motherlode of peace. More to follow.