LIBERTY' FROM  DEPRESSION 

In my life often I came upon  people that suffer from depression. Naturally they try to resolve their own problems with chemical drugs, recommended by  doctors and I don't doubt that in a serious situation these medicines have a necessity. But there will be no guarantees of not-relapse. Rather, really the use of these medicines provokes badly a sense of no-responsability in comparison to their own state. "Give me a pill, so I will not have to fight the causes." 
In these days (I write in middle-October , with the days that are becoming short quickly) I particularly felt  a sense of loneliness that, while I was making some works in the fields,  pushed me to a reflection: My life turns toward the sunset as this day. This solitary life that I do... " (and mentally I have recollected here my loneliness in the middle of the impassive nature,) I don't know well if I can consider it like an irresponsible person choice, a heroic choice or simply as the drifting of a being thrown by the life-sea  to strand on some shoal". I have concluded that perhaps all three things were contemporarily valid  but while, respect to the third one, I felt particularly a surge of self-pity rise, my attention, always vigilant,  gathered the sense of interpretation that I was giving to a true-reality that came, at that time darkened by the constructions of the mind. 
A note : I tell this episode as others, not because I want to  boast  of it (I feel rather a certain embarrassment) but because it can be of help for all those people who are found to reflect on their own existence. Also the solution that I introduce doesn't have anything of mine (there is not after all any reality of mine) but it originates from an impersonal reality, the Dharma, the vision of the things as they are and the consequent appeasement of our own mental predispositions. 
Returning to the moment in which I have realized the rising of self-pity and  the work of mental construction that I had done, I have acknowledged the job of "substantialization" / reification that I superbly  (the sense is ironic) completed. You can notice the third solution: "... the drifting of a being thrown by the life-sea  to strand on some shoal"". Here an impersonal entity has been created ("the life-sea ") that  would have made me run  into this situation of loneliness..., mutatis mutandis a metaphysical entity (as the Fate, God etc.) that it would be responsible of everything (> from which the to rise of self-pity and resentment: there is something else that is responsible of my situation and I complain  against this something else). Simply this conception blinds, it removes  the personal responsibility in what we are, the karma that ourselves create. This  appeared  clear to my mind: I am as I created myself, there is not any other person responsible of this, if I am in this situation it is because my tendencies turned towards  this direction. 
Understanding this, my predispositions  suddenly calmed. There was acceptance of that it is. There is nobody against  whom to be able  to complain. End. Quiet, calm. 
This is revealing about the fact that the reality-analytical meditation  (Vipassanaa)  can help to defeat the suffering and this is not only worth for this case but  for others too. Some years agom I  had a short episode of depression. I remained amazed of it. I passed  to the analysis of the phenomenon and I realized: causes were the obsessions, for how much "spiritual" they could be. End. End of the depression, at the moment. I was very stricken from the speed of the "recovery". I had simply gathered the existence of some obsessions. Reality didn't correspond to these obsessions and this created the depression. Therefore every time that we feel  in us this sense of sadness, of melancholy, of dissatisfaction, let's look inside us. We don't look for elsewhere, let's look us: we could see how much of I-my there is at work at that time, I-mine that doesn't want to flow with the things as they are ; or also, simply, as the self feels himself inadequate (always in base to its desires) in the comparison with the reality. If we succeed in accepting our inadequacy, to see us as we are... end. But we have to do this soon, not to wait that this process goes on (also provoking chemical-biological breakdowns in us). For this it is so important the attitude to the insight that cannot  be developed with a superficial observation. For this it needs "to sit and  meditate". It's simply necessary. 

Therefore, and here I return to the premise, it is necessary to stop to delegate  to others   our mental health. For these "others" we only are some cases, abstract people, not real, that provide them with bread and food. Not all of them will be so, sure, but this is the tendency. And it  happened to a person that I know, sick seriously; while more there was need, the doctor that took care of her went on vacation. Nothing of badly in this... but if this doctor had been the daughter of the ill one madam, would he have gone on holydays? 
Therefore health is in our hands. The path of  Meditation is a path to  Liberation, to Happiness ... but it doesn't postpone it to one X-day ("to love Him and to serve Him in this life and to enjoy then Him in the other life  in Heaven" it was said in the catechism when I was a child). This same Reality is the destination... all it needs is to change our viewpoint. 
Certainly it is not so easy as to say it. But meanwhile we enjoy some mental health and more and more often of the joy that gives us this dry and thin practice (no altars, no incenses, a religiousness without religion - as adult and free people). And it is the ego that hurts us , is our auto-importance, the importance that we give to the concept of "self", to this forgery, it is the dualism that we create among "us" and the world. If we succeed in seeing this and to accept what is, to accept us as we are also in the optics of the change, there will be no motive to fall into  depression.

Against The Depression (2),To free from the Roles 


I have had to carry out a duty and after I carried it out, returning home, the thought went to the fact that I was finally free from that weight. I  felt the sense of satisfaction, the lightness of the liberty that came to me by the remotion of that weight. The analogy has struck then me with what is the Liberation:  to be removed by  a weight, the weight of  suffering, of  anguish and of  fear, the  space free from every fear. And then it also come  to the mind the ancient texts that speak of it. I don't  remember the precise words obviously, neither in this moment I am able to track down them, but  the sense was that of "to have allowed to let go a burden", "to have freed from a debt" or also of " to jump out of a pit of ardent coals". What could we feel in these cases? A great relief surely, especially in the last case (that symbolizes the ardent coals of life). Be certain of it. If you only want  to imagine the taste of the total liberty of the awakening with an approximation, alas for defect, you bring to your mind the last time that you have drawn a sigh of relief to be freed  by a weight , from a debt or from some ugly situation. 
As I said above, it will be only for defect, but it will perhaps give you a push to continue on the path of the meditative practice as a road to reach this state of comfort. 
While so I reflected, a connection is created with the preceding number of this newsletter, entitled "Liberty from the depression". This because I  had  a discussion on this matter in which the other part sustained that the depression is anything but a chemical fact , that is a lack of certain substances that then it would also provoke the mental suffering. Without willing to be absolutist and therefore also admitting exceptions, I sustained the contrary one. According to my view the depression it is mainly a psychological fact that instigates also  some  biochemical change. And it is clear that, if allowed to go, if not seen in time in its mental aspect, it increases the lack of certain substances, lack  that once more goes to worsen the mental states and so on, in a continuous feedback. 
In the cases that I know, the depressed person bumped himself against a reality that or it was not as  desired, (and here importance is seen to recognize the desire) or it crushed the person in some  crystallized role that in the beginning  had perhaps been happy but that with the passing of the time and with the relative changes,  became oppressive. It also come to my mind the solutions that have historically appeared among the people: the  "possessed-ones", "madness" etc., these were almost always astute (even if often unaware) ways of escape, we could tell of liberation when family or social reality become extremely oppressive. The people literally " went crazy" and  went out of the schemes:  suddenly they realized more awarely the spaces of liberty that opened in front of them: in this new condition it was allowed them to do unthinkable things , to upset their own situation of frustration and to escape the social oppression of the forced job or the compulsory relationships. The passage to this new state of freedom certainly needed a great courage but since this courage consciously they didn't succeed in having it, the great mental stress that accompanied this strong desire of liberation was expressed as mental illness ( so to say) that  could produce however in turn great suffering (above all when it bumped  against an extremely rigid environment) or state of grace (it is the case of the artist, the  person freed from the schemes and submitted on one side to the social blame and from the other to a secret envy). 
I have known people this way: an elderly woman for instance, she always lived in a dark muteness and at service of  others in family. Suddenly,maybe due to an ischemic  attack , discovered the freedom from the roles,  became pleasant and amusing, saying amazing things for her... but then she was "treated" and  returned in the norm of the sad muteness and enslaved to its role. Not by chance in some archaic societies the crazy persons were classified as carriers of flashes of divinity and some outcasts and some respected: it was  recognized in them that ability to freedom that was denied to  others. 
The suffering of the depression often comes out of this sticking to the roles: father, mother, married, wife, worker...., as it is difficult to be free! When more than fifteen years ago I started to go out of one of the roles in wich I was, what a  labor and what a  fear! The fear to break the schemes, not to be more approved, not to be anymore "recognized"... 
This brings us to one of the "usual"things of my writings: instead of flowing with the things and with the change, we create a  substantial self, something that should anchor us and to hold locks and sure against the destructive flow of life but really this ghost-construction , taking substance,  creates opposition to flow with life and with change, it prevents us from recognizing us in the change, it produces attrition and suffering. 
Without vision we are not able  to recognize these processes. Why do  we suffer from things that to the beginning  made we be good, as the marriage, the relationship, our role in the job and so on? 
We  created something static, a thing that there really is not but to which we attach  with all our strength. We continually create people as we would like them, situations as we would like them, worlds as  we would like. But really this creative activity of the mind produces attrition suffering. Simply those things don't exist, not as we conceive them. Rather, really in the world they don't exist at all "Things" Or Entities' of any type: PROCESSES  EXIST ONLY. 
To know how to recognize the feelings as feelings and the ideas as ideas, that is simply as a  thinking, whose content it is necessarily  neither valid neither sure, it is the base of the awareness and the vision of the things as they are. 
That's why the Liberation has so much to do  with the destruction of the idea of substantiality (a thing that not many people understand). 
The roles are imaginary substance that take us imprisoned: to go out of them, to free ourselves from them, to recognize ourselves and them as unreal in an absolute sense (and real in a relative sense) it has to do with  a shiny madness that makes however happy. The fool of the village and the freed one are at the same time extremely distant and extremely near.