Banish Depression from Your System
We need to understand what depression is. What is a “low”? What happens within you when you feel down? You expected somebody or something to be your way, or the world or destiny to be your way, and it did not happen. You are simply against what’s happening. Maybe you are against a person; maybe you are against a whole situation; maybe you are against life itself. Accordingly, the depression will run deeper and deeper.
Why are you against something? Only because things didn’t go your way, isn’t it? Either you have no faith in the Creator or you have no acceptance, or both, and you have a hypersensitive ego; that’s why you get depressed.
Depression makes you cynical and is deeply self-damaging. Usually depressed people will not murder anybody; they will only hurt themselves more and more. It is a weapon. He’ll chop himself and make you feel miserable.
This man who goes out with the sword and chops off somebody, his ego is not as sensitive and it doesn’t need as much nurturing as this depressed man’s ego. The violent man can be very easily settled. Have you seen this on the streets, when people get into a fight, if there is one man with a little wisdom, if somebody just handles them right, those people who are trying to kill each other this moment, next moment, they will drop it and become friends and go off? But this is not so with the depressed person; he will carry this for life. Whether they do it consciously or not, these people go on sharpening their knife and cutting their own heart. Why will a person go on hurting himself? Generally it is to get sympathy. For a very depressed person, normal sympathy is not sufficient; somebody should bleed with him.
Depressed people are hurting because whatever that is happening is against theirego; that is all. What is there in you, which can get hurt? If I beat your body with a stick, the body will get hurt. Otherwise what is it that gets hurt within you? Just the ego, isn’t it? See, the mind can’t get hurt. Your inner nature can never get hurt. It is only the ego that gets hurt. So if you are saying, “I want to grow,” growth means going beyond this, trampling your ego and going ahead.
Now, one can make any emotion into a creative force in their life. Emotion is not negative force. There is no negativity in Existence. We think, this is negative, this is positive. The negative is also an equally important and constructive dimension. Now there are two wires, negative and positive, which makes this light burn, makes this microphone work. Negative is not something to be gotten rid of; it is as important as the positive.
If your sadness is reminding you that you are incomplete, it is good; make use of your sadness to grow. But, when you get sad, if you are going to get irritable, if you think that whole world is wrong, you are a fool. Are you making this sadness into anger or into love and compassion? It is very easy, when you are sad, to become compassionate. It’s already a dissolving kind of energy; you can use it for further dissolution which leads you to your ultimate well-being.
The unfortunate reality with people right now is that their humanity will function only when they are mauled by life. For most people, without knowing sadness maturity will not happen
If you have known sadness and pain, only then you are a mature person. Otherwise you’ll never understand what’s happening with you nor will you understand what’s happening with anybody else around you. You’ll never know compassion unless you know pain. Learning to use all your emotions creatively is very important. It’s not just happiness which is important.
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