Tag: Despair

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The feeling of living in a well

I feel like I’ve fallen into a well,
And it is so much effort to shout and reach out to anyone or even anything,
And no one bothers to even peep in,
Nor are they even remotely interested in knowing where I am.

Like I’m ostracized, exiled, banished, outcast.
Like I’m dying, receding, fading, falling off the radar, falling off the map, falling off everything that is known.
Hope is wilting and dying, as I fall further into the well with every passing day.
More and more contact with the outside is relinquished because of the phenomenal effort it takes to maintain it from 200 ft under.
I have to scream at the top of my voice to be faintly heard outside, and the beings outside only hear my words, not me, so I am basically abjectly alone.
Never will be seen, never will be fully heard.
There is the crushing weight of despair, but hope pushes me to reach out with great resistance, only to get a few bread crumbs of outside engagement (obtained with disproportionate effort), and then I fall back into the darkness again.

There seems no way out of this well,
and I only fall deeper and deeper into it,
moving farther and farther away from contact with the land.

My whole life has been this way.
I could never achieve anything more than a superficial fleeting intermittent connection with the world/outside.
I have always lived in a well, in the cave of wonders, in the interior castles, in the dungeons of my subconscious, in the underside of the iceberg of humanity.
Except for occasional short bursts of outer engagement which have exponentially reduced with age.
I am in the unknown, in the mystery, living it everyday,
While every other I see appears to be far far away.
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Depression seen from a deeper place

fathermothershadow

When we are young, the conditions of love are told to us.
Even if they are not explicitly told, we can easily intuit it.
We look at the environment around us with the question:
“What must I be? What must I do? What must I become?” to get the love I desire?

Love is first for survival, because if nobody loves you, you will not survive.
Even if you were unwanted and parents took care of you just as a duty, that is still because they love to be morally right/socially right etc.
So love is required to survive when you are dependent esp.

After the survival stage is passed, love is still needed for enrichment, growth, expansion, flourishing, prosperity, real wealth, and so on.

So coming back to the topic, depression is from the loss of hope, that you can ever be/become/do something that will get you love.
Thereafter the person just lives hand to mouth existentially.
Some force in him keeps living mechanically like clockwork in cycles, but he loses all hope and falls into grief.
All his mental energies fall like a dead weight on him, like a cross which he carries and walks in despair, in the endless desert.
He becomes totally apathetic, and wishes for deep sleep to carry him away to non-existence permanently.
His daily life with this cross on his back then resembles the ‘Sisyphus myth’ i.e. rolling a rock up the hill only to watch it roll down again and repeat.

What I have described is only the surface. Let’s dive further in.
From the archetypal perspective, the world is your projection.
Everything including love shines forth from you, from the source.
If you give all of your projections away to impossible ideals, depression is inevitable.
How does this happen?
It could be a combination of your own innate tendency to do that (hyper-ambition) coupled with being born in a family (which you might have attracted from a tendency match).
So in such a case, usually the family i.e. parents, siblings etc. feel they are profoundly unworthy and undeserving, and each of them have an impossible ideal which receives their light.
As a result of that, they are always in the dark shadow of undeservingness, poverty, desperation, grief, unworthiness, and deep-ambivalence of hope.
So now when you are born, you osmotically pick up the ideals from them which may go unconscious in you by the time you grow up.
But it is those ideals that are getting your light, which are unconscious to you.
In your conscious experience, you may only see meaninglessness, darkness, apathy, disinterest, futility, despair, dim view about the future etc.
But the far away faint ideal receives all of your light.
It is like how when we have a full solar eclipse, that shadow blocks off a large portion of the earth.
In this case, the ideal that you have given away your love to, casts a huge shadow on you, turning you into its prisoner in deprivation.
This is the abstract description of the situation of depression.

I’ll give an example.
Say you look at magazine images of male and female models, and compare yourself to them.
If you project all of your love on them, and believe only they deserve love, and if you are far from that image, then to that extent you will fall in the shadow of hate.
You see them 100 times more clearly than you see yourself because they have received all of your light, like the other side of the moon in the eclipse.
Loving others more than loving yourself, or co-dependence is likely, because the other has been projected as lovely, which means in relativity to that, you will definitely fall in the shadow of hate.
Hate is darkness, which means literally, you will be mostly unconscious to yourself.
Now many different actions are possible from this condition:
* You can try to become like them, give all of your energies to that, depending on the level of shame you feel and the level of idealization you have projected on them. This will not give you depression, but will make you pursue the ideal like your life depends on it.
* If you realize it is impossible for you to be like them, then you lose hope of ever becoming something worthy of love, and fall into hopelessness, despair, unworthiness, and the smoke of grief we call depression.
For some people these ideals are more literal = like money, body, possessions, achievement etc.
But often, these ideals are more obscure, elusive, and contradict each other.
The contradiction is what makes the depression impossible to overcome on its terms.
Like what if the one who is loved has to be:
“Extraordinary enough to be admired, adored, worshipped.
But ordinary enough to be loved, included, and belong.”
So the 2 conditions above are contradictory almost.
So you could have tons of such impossible ideals.
Then they will definitely paralyze you, take away all of your light, and leave you with nothing, in the shadow.
I see this as one of the chief deeper causes of depression.
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Are you sure you want to be healed/cured/healthy?

Lets really dive deep into this matter.
Everyone assumes that their desire is always for a greater, better, and nicer life filled with health, vitality, exuberance, joy, prosperity, and riches.
That is the collective assumption each person holds about their innermost motivations.
But really? Are you sure? Have you ever REALLY looked inside and asked yourself if that is what you really want?
Maybe you want to be sick? Maybe you want to be seriously sick? Maybe you want to punish yourself to death? Maybe you want to end this entire life, that is commit suicide (suicide as an attitude, not the act per say)? Do you want to live a ‘living death’?
Is your innermost motivation to die? and facilitate dying in every possible way by constantly attracting severe and hostile circumstances to your life?
This may sound morbid, but the truth can be quite eye-opening if this is really examined without ASSUMING stuff just because it sounds normal or good.
Do you really want to get alright? OR Is there much more going on than just simply believing that?

Lets consider the 2 basic orientations:
Life drive ——————- Death drive
Life drive moves towards enhancing life while fearing death.
Death drive moves towards enhancing death while fearing life.
In a way both are orientations based on fear of the opposite.

I’ll speak about a few cases here.
In childhood, were you the spoilt child or the lost child?
Spoilt child —————- Neglected child
The spoilt child lets say becomes a narcissist, which means there is great love for the ‘self’ (whatever structure it has formed), and there is a desire to enhance the self at all costs even if it means sacrificing and destroying others.
The child then endlessly looks for ways of self-aggrandizement, glorification, beautification, and better survival OR he may become a fire-starter, notorious, attract negative attention etc.
Why? Because they value that structure of self so much.
This is actually an internalization of the “positive or negative parent attention” that was received.
Even if his life circumstance becomes terrible, he may wish for the destruction of the world and other people, create justified rage for everything(rage = anger, and anger cannot be there, unless there is desire, and desire cannot be there unless there is love(in this case for the self)).
However, he would still work towards preserving and enhancing himself to the hilt from the love of the self-image.

The profoundly neglected child on the other hand receives no parental attention at all.
It tends to develops a self that acts more like a martyr and also operates in a primary mood of despair.
The despair of having to put in a bunch of efforts to constantly survive in order to protect a worthless self anyway.
The profoundly neglected child may get burnt out later from all his martyrdom, and then retreat more and more into hermetic isolation with profound hatred/detachment towards everyone and everything.
The deeper truth about this is that, the parental rejection of him/her in childhood has been internalized as the self (phantom critic self) which then subjects the ‘real self’ to the same neglect and hostile attitude(of endless deprivation, slow poisoning, condemnation and punishment).
The message internalized is “We dont want you, nobody needs you here, you are a waste, you don’t deserve to exist, why don’t you just die and relieve us of the burden of having you around?”

Let’s talk more about the latter case.
Because narcissistic personalities abound in society and have been studied quite a bit.
But what has not received attention in my opinion are the silent people on the periphery living on the boundary between life and death – the profoundly neglected folk.

It does not matter how smart or erudite they may seem.
In fact more often than not, they are extremely knowledgable and intelligent too.
They become so, from all their efforts to overcome their own impossible inner critic.
The death drive(internalized phantom self critic), drives them to the height of accomplishment, but no amount of accomplishment is remotely enough for the death drive to be released.
That is why they are just assaulted from every direction with a sense of hopelessness, abandonment, isolation, despair, futility, pain no matter what they do, all of which only serves as distractions from avoiding the true harshness of their underlying condition.
It may lead to:
– compulsive isolation (because that is the only thing that feels safe), daydreaming, fantasy
– OR compulsive busyness
– OR martyrdom in the form of service for others
– OR belief in some kind of myth like “knowledge will free me” or “perfection in obeying laws is the answer” etc.
– OR may become a pleasure seeker.
There are different ways of coping with this condition, but the underlying cause is from “internalization of the rejecting neglecting other (parental figures or caregivers etc.)”
Nothing can redeem the ‘fallen self’ from the eyes of this ‘critical phantom self’. This phantom self is ruthlessly punishing and tormenting – so much, that the only real wish of the living self is for death which sets up the death drive.

So, if your condition is of the ‘neglected rejected self’ and if your ‘internalized myths’ are similar, then “failure = success”.
Changing your diet, lifestyle, doing yogic practices, exercise, herbs etc. whatever you do may not really REMOVE this shape shifting tyrannical monster that torments you from within.
Because the origin of the condition is from the MYTHIC level of consciousness.
Find out the root of your self-rejection.
It takes immense courage to face up to it, because all the other stuff actually is more of a distraction and patch-work compared to the true work of understanding the matrix of your own innermost intentions.