What
Is Depression And
How
To Heal It?
By
Kim Katami
This
short article views depression and ways of healing it from yogic or
meditational, as well as existential perspective.
What
Is Depression?
Depression,
like all other forms of mental illness, is a vicious impediment and
many in the modern societies suffer from it. Western psychology and
modern medicine offers aids in the healing of it as do various methods of yogic meditation.
Depression
is a state of mind that causes partial or complete paralysis of one's
mental and emotional functions. Severe depression makes one unable to
exercise one's own will power. In cases of lesser depression, one is
still capable of momentary exercise of will which makes the healing
of the illness quicker.
To
someone depressed, distraction due to great volume of thoughts or out
of proportion emotions are not a problem. In fact, a depressed person
has few thoughts and emotions. Depressed person is not
restless.
According
to yogic psychology, depression is caused by something called
substrate consciousness or simply, subconscious mind. Typical
for this aspect of the human mind is emotional flatness and dullness
from lesser to greater degree. Normal functions of thinking, feeling,
enthusiasm and happiness are clouded by grey veils of the
subconscious mind. These mind-fogs put the concerned person into a
state of paralysis and meaninglessness.
The
psychological anatomy of man can be categorized in the following
way(*):
1.
Subject-self. Me, I.
2.
Object-selves. Thoughts and emotions.
3.
Substrate consciousness. The basis of all phenomena.
4.
Awareness. Buddha-nature.
Before
discussing ways of healing depression, I'd like to consider the cause
of depression from the existential perspective.
Why
Am I Here? Life Without Deeper Meaning
”People
who don't have enough order in their life tend to get overwhelmed. If
someone comes to see me and says they're depressed, I always ask them
a standard set of questions. Do you have a job? If you don't have a
job you are really in trouble in our society. First of all, your
biological rhythms tend to go off the rail because there is no reason
to go to bed at any particular time and there is no reason to get
up... They also don't have a purpose. People aren't good without a
purpose... We absolutely understand the circuitry that underlies
positive emotion, we know how it works. Almost all the positive
emotions that any of you are likely to experience in your life will
not be a consequence of attaining things. It will be a consequence to
see that things are working, as you proceed towards a goal you value.
That's completely different and you need to know this because people
are often stunned... So if you don't have a job, you don't have
structure. That's not good, plus you tend not to have a point, so you
are overwhelmed by chaotic lack of structure and you don't have any
positive emotion... Sometimes you see people who are depressed who
have no job, no friends, no intimate relationships, they have an
additional health problem and they have an alcohol-drug problem. My
experience has been that if you have three of those problems, it's
almost impossible to help you. You're so deeply mired in chaos that
you can't get out... One of the things I tell people who are
depressed is to get a job. You need a job, find some friends, get out
in the dating circuit, see if you can establish an intimate
relationship. Put together some foundational pillars that your life
rests on. That's the practical thing to do.”
Dr.
Peterson also mentions the helpfulness of anti-depressants for those
severely depressed.
What
I would like to add to this rather typical, and I am sure often
helpful set of practical advice, is to consider whether the depressed
person is miserable due to existential reasons.
Personally,
I suffered from depression for many years in my youth. It wasn't
diagnosed, and therefore not correctly understood by people around
me, which is why I often got the same advice as Dr. Peterson offers
above: just get a job, get friends, just do this, just do that and if
you can't do that, start taking drugs and then do it. By this
statement I do not mean to misinterpret Dr. Peterson who I greatly
admire. I am simply formulating the way depression is
typically viewed.
Problem
with this advice is this.
What
if the person in question finds no value in getting up in the morning
to get to a meaningless job? What if she or he finds no value in
pursuing the common options of education, career or intimate
relationships, that others do? What if these things mean nothing to
her? What if her problem is more foundational than that?
Having
been a professional meditation teacher for over 10 years, I have met
hundreds of people who, like me, suffered of depression, had no
meaning in life and were existentially lost. If this is the cause of depression, then the only way to become healed of it, is to recognise
oneself not as the human storyline with its successes and failures,
but as boundless freedom, devoid of the sense of me-ness.
It is deeply unfulfilling and unsatisfactory to only know oneself as
an entity tied into one's physical body and whatever culture and
people we are surrounded with. This existential crisis cannot be
fixed with common worldly solutions, for the only way to solve it is
to go beyond time, place and the personal storyline, and access the
ground of being that is nameless, ageless, timeless and groundless,
ever fresh, brimming with liveliness and common to all living beings.
Different main streams or vehicles (skt. yana) of buddhism look at
this task from their own perspectives but common to all of them is to
offer ways to quench this fundamental existential hunger. This is
what dharma is for, to give experiential answers to existential
questions.
How
To Heal Depression?
Substrate
consciousness, that part of the human psychology that causes
depression, is not at all foreign to yogis, professionals and masters
of meditation. It has been discussed by adepts and practitioners for
many hundreds of years and therefore yogic traditions have ways of
dealing with it, in other words, they have ways of dealing with the
part of mind that causes depression.
Here,
I would like to present one and very effective way for healing
depression by recognition of the natural state, one's natural innate
stress-free condition. It is called Dynamic Concentration, which is an uncommon
form of concentration practice.
Concentration
practices are commonly taught with low intensity. For example, when
mindfulness of the movement of the breath (p. anapanasati, skt. prana
apana smriti) is taught, the student is instructed to keep his
attention gently on the breath and return the attention back to the
object when distracted. In a similar way, when mantras are recited,
they are always recited with gentle concentration, never with high
intensity, with stronger or even explosive focus.
This
light or gentle focus can be compared to a volume knob of a stereo
system. In this example light focus is analoguous to low level which
produces low but still audible volume of music. This would equal
perhaps 5-10% of the total volume output. However, the volume knob
can be turned higher. It goes up to 30%, 60%, 90% and with each level
we hear a corresponding change in the volume. Turning the volume high
has an immediate effect. In this analogy, zero would equal not having
concentration at all, yet not being distracted either, i.e. the
natural state. 90% would already be very loud and not very enjoyable
for an extended period of time. However we all have times in our
lives when for a moment we want to turn up the music. And how
wonderful it is! The neighbours maybe don't like it but it is fun
nevertheless.
Regardless
whether we follow the breath or chant mantras, the same can be done
in yogic practice. Dynamic focus greatly changes the effect of the
concentration practice. With light focus, as in commonly known
shamatha, with constant distractions it takes time to calm the monkey
mind. Whether an exercise of light focus ever cuts through the layers
of the subconscious and substrate minds is rightly questionable. It
takes years of long hours of daily training to build the muscle of
concentration to get the benefits of shamatha meditation (tib.
shine). This approach is followed by a large number of Buddhist
methods. I think that there are better and more effective ways of
doing the training, especially for householders whose daily time for
practice is limited.
Concentration
can be momentarily heigthened, like turning the volume knob high
suddenly to create a short (0.3-2 seconds) explosion-like, momentary
peak. This creates a quick punch of sorts, like an explosion that can
be controlled. This punch hits through all of samsaric mind and
reveals the natural state in a very short period of time. We are
discussing an exercise that indirectly has been used in Buddhism and
many other yoga and dharma teachings for centuries through
meditation, recitation, religious art and yogic exercise and yet very
few schools have realised the immense value of dynamic concentration
to give it a central place in their teachings...
Dynamic
concentration can be adapted to fit the view and practices of any
yogic approach... It is very easy for anyone to test whether dynamic
concentration really works. All you need is a few minutes of time and
a comfortable place to try it(*).
The
Effect of Dynamic Concentration In Pictures
From
these pictures you can observe what Dynamic Concentration, sharp use
of focus, actually does in one's mind and how the explosive power
disperses the greyness and foggyness of mind that the substrate
produces, to reveal the natural clarity of the normal state.
 |
| Bird
seen naturally, without depression or other forms of distraction. |
 |
| From
left to right: 1. Bird seen naturally. 2. Bird seen during mild
depression. 3. Bird seen during strong depression. 4. Bird seen during very strong depression. |
 |
| From
left to right: 1. Bird seen partially naturally after some Dynamic
Concentration practice. 2. Bird seen even more naturally after more
Dynamic Concentration practice. 3. Bird seen almost completely
naturally, without the grey layers of substrate mind, after a proper
and decisive use of Dynamic Concentration. |
Conclusion
I
guess all humans question their existence at some degree in some
stage of their lives. For some, it passes quickly and doesn't grow to
become a great issue or even the most important issue in one's whole life,
while it does for some. Whether one considers her- or himself to be on the spiritual path or not, one can have illnesses and
ailments, both physical and psychological, according
to one's karma and genetics.
In this short article I have tried to
convey the basic understanding of depression and the structure of the
human mind, and described a simple exercise how depression or many
other types of mental obscurations can be dealt with.
Thank
you for reading,
-Kim
Katami, 27.6.2019
Open
Heart Sangha,
