(5-minute Read) – Ice cold isolation visits from time to time and steals away the warmth of connections. We may feel a sense of separateness or of not belonging. We may be wracked by a sense of loss with profound sadness in our hardest times.
This experience may be existential depression if it lasts or worsens over time.
Can meditation help with existential depression?
What is existential depression?
In a state of existential depression, dark fearful presences impinge upon our consciousness or sneak around our sub-conscious.
Darkness asks, “What meaning does life have?”
It taunts, “You are just an insignificant little organism, alone in an arbitrary world. Scary! Your life has no impact. There is no meaning. And then you die. That is all there is to it.”
The dark fear can be devastating. It leads to catatonia in the worst cases of existential depression.
Many people never experience this depressing scenario of isolation and resultant dark fear. They never feel existential depression. Maybe it’s because they have a more durable constitution. Or maybe it’s because they manage to ignore the occasional emergence of the darkness from the recesses of their subconscious.
Or perhaps some people just don’t have that dark presence lurking within them. “They’re not cursed,” some might say.
They’re not blessed either.
Curse or blessing?
We can get philosophical relief from the fear of meaninglessness by imagining how the world could be. We can allow ourselves to imagine we are loved and connected. These imaginings are not childish fantasies. They ring true. They are just as ingrained in our subconscious as the darkness.
Jung called our universal experiences of dark and light the archetypes of the collective unconscious. The concept originated in ancient Greece. Mystics call them spiritual experiences.
Without darkness, we would not hear the trumpet beckoning from our sub-conscious towards the light. Without contrast there is no light. It takes darkness to appreciate light. It takes a journey through isolation to experience eternal love where isolation is gone and belonging rules. Our curse is our blessing.
Archetypes or spiritual experiences, or whatever we call the deepest realms of ourselves, convince us that space and time – and the ever-lurking threat of isolation that comes with space and time – are illusory.
The illusion that binds us
It is imaginable that space and time are only temporal excitations of infinite and eternal energy. Particles of matter in space and time emerge and either evolve or disappear. There are infinite and eternal universe-loads of matter emerging and either evolving or disappearing.
Matter that ‘survives’ and evolves over millennia in a particular space and time becomes conscious. This consciousness is self-conscious because it is of a discrete ensemble of matter in a particular space and time.
Billions of infants in our space and time become billions of self-conscious egos. These self-conscious egos, by virtue of their discreteness, are prone to a sense of isolation.
Ego emerges from the moment of conception. This ego grows in self-consciousness, it starts to feel the fear of being isolated – isolated from its mother and isolated from the home it left.
The degree of isolation depends on the matter the child inherited, and the early circumstances of that child’s life.
Fear emerges quite naturally from the sense of being isolated and being up against billions of other egos.
Natural imperfections like greed, anger, pride, lust and envy stem from fear. Imperfections of human society emerge from these states of human being. These imperfections infect every part of material life in space and time. They infect nature, politics, economics and religion. They lead to crime, war, famine and destruction of the natural world and every aspect of matter.
The reality that frees us
But there are no particles, space or time in the infinite and eternal energy that underlies them. There is no consciousness of self. No ego. There is only unity in diversity – a mysterious remnant in the subconscious of our origin and destiny. A reality that can only be quasi-known, never understood or explained like evolved sets of neurons wish.
This infinite and eternal is experienced as benevolent and nurturing to our deepest selves. So we call it love in our human attempts to know it. It manifests as various archetypes, mythological stories and spiritual deities throughout history and across cultures. But it is one underlying reality.
We can sense this so-called love as distant as it may seem at times. The imperfect world seems perfect because of it. The fear of isolation is relieved by it. Letting go and letting it closer is the most effective antidote to existential depression.
Meditation: from illusion to reality
But how do we do this? The answer has become so trite in post-modern western society we can hardly believe it. But it is a true. The answer is meditation.
It should be noted that meditation alone might not be enough. Sometimes a multi-pronged approach is required to overcome the pain of existential depression, including medication. However, the goal of healing is to break through the illusion to reality. In the long-term, as a lifestyle practice, there is no better path to this breakthrough than meditation.
A daily practice of meditation brings this thing we call love closer because it switches off all the preoccupations of discrete self and so opens space for infinite and eternal energy to be experienced.
Meditation leads gently, over time, to the experience of belonging, to the experience of being loved by some benevolent other. It taps into the archetypal lover ingrained in our sub-conscious. Each day we find the darkness of isolation brightened slightly by this love. Each day the illusory pain is battled back by the reality of love. We find the imperfections of our egos balanced by the seven aspects of love.
Existential depression is real and painful. But it is the path to the most wonderful light. We should not deny it, ignore it or avoid it. Nor should we hold onto it. We should experience it as it is or as it isn’t. We must travel through our darkness and let it pass again and again with commitment and trust. It is a more arduous journey for some than for others. Regardless though, a daily practice of meditation is the best therapy on this arduous journey.
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