The spiritual element

I made the comment that depression is a shortcut to enlightenment. A lot of people look at spiritual paths to find a way out of depression, spurred on by the promise of freedom. The trouble is that when you look for 'spiritual' answers you tend to get either Judaeo-Christian monotheism, New Age, or Zen/Dao and its variants. Monotheism puts off many people, at least here in the UK. Some have found home there, but the rest of us who think a lot about these things tend, quite reasonably, to resent being preached at, and there's the feeling of being sold something. New Age requires an apparently absurd-looking leap into a world of unseen energies. Some of it looks promising, and once the depression is gone it might be worth looking into, with an open mind. But you still need to get rid of the depression first. Zen and Dao are clean and beautiful, but they make it look so difficult! They make enlightenment look like something that will take a thousand lifetimes to 'attain' - in other words, an impossible goal. If getting out of bed in the morning seems wellnigh impossible, we can forget about satori.

Anyway, the upshot is that it seems to me that the whole spiritual thing, for most of us, boils down to a fading of the ego. The biggest surprise when the depression has finally disappeared, might be that the ego becomes a mere shadow of its former self. It's as if the self-esteem hasn't so much been raised, but rather become much less important.

The point about the shortcut to enlightnment I can illustrate like this: imagine that instead of breaking the feedback loop you'd systematically altered your BROH to a more flattering version? If you'd got yourself the kind of bulletproof ego you can fry eggs on, it would have been an awfully long way back to where you are now. Think Testosterone Man. He may well be brimming with energy and charisma, very good at getting what he wants, but if you look closely you'll probably find that he's riddled with self-deception because there's so much to protect.

The BROH trick brings about a shift in consciousness which is quite neutral about which spiritual tradition you happen to follow, if any. In the depression you were mired in the BROH; now you can look over the BROH with something akin to compassion. Compassion! Learning to love yourself, or rather, learning to love your BROH from a higher vantage point because the self, the bit that worries about its image, is disappearing. And then, of course, you can see the BROH in others too, and compassion radiates outwards. Meanwhile, the world out there is richer than you ever imagined. And then, amazingly, all the traditional spiritual teachings (including the monotheistic at a pinch) begin to make sense at last.

Enlightenment, in this sense, is the next stage on the journey rather than an absolute destination. This means that it's attainable in this life, and that it's much more commonplace than we had imagined. There are plenty of people out there with reduced egos. They don't stand out unless you know where to look, but they're the ones that twinkle.

And how about this for a wonderful thought? Perhaps we depressives are in the vanguard of a new spiritual shift in the world. There are more and more of us: five million in the UK alone at the last count. When we all unlock our gifts by detaching from the BROH, who knows what we can do?

Copyright © 2001
Vivien J. H. Heppel PhD