Depression is a Doorway

We live in a curious world. It's a world where you're not supposed to be depressed about anything, apparently, even if your chihuahua was just flattened by a cement mixer on your way to your best friends funeral, two days after you were diagnosed with a rare form of cancer that will result in your testicles exploding in three weeks.   

The solution to this is drugs or God, both of which prey upon the same chemical endorphins in our mind to "save" us from feeling so low, until we become hooked like junkies. There's all kinds of God junkies running around, of course, they're just applauded for it. Like so many drugs today, the Bible or ideas of "God" and eternal paradise, are all things we use to cheer us up about just how miserable the world really is, and how much we really believe death sucks. 

Sure, we've all contributed in one way or another to making the world the steamy pile of shih tzu droppings we have to eat for breakfast every morning, but it's so much easier to believe that the wine and wafers we down every week is the body and blood of some dude who walked out his grave three days after he was brutally tortured and murdered by all of us, and solely for our own benefit of course, than to have to admit we're all part of the problem. 

We cathartically believe we are all responsible for the murder of a God named Jesus, in other words, because it's a heluva lot easier than thinking we're in anyway responsible for the world we've created. And rather than ever have to admit the latter, we nail our minds to the cross of an idea called "religion" in the hopes that the God we tortured and murdered will one day save us all from ourselves.

But whether we are using the drug of God or the drugs from the pharmacy at our local grocery store, we are quite convinced that God wants us to be happy either way, even though we murdered him (but again, solely for our own selfish benefit, of course).

In truth, however, depression is no more the problem with us than pain is to an injury. In the same way that pain is how our body communicates to our brain the presence of an injury, so depression is feedback from both an environment and a state of mind. Our state of mind, after all, is largely the result of the ideas we are exposed to in our environment, and how we interact with those ideas. Religion, in this respect, becomes a kind of security blanket, which we wrap around ourselves to protect agaisnt all we fear, especially those things we fear in ourselves. 

In an environment that serves only as an incubator for insecurity of every degree and kind, we become willing participants of our own slavery by buying into any idea that promises us to "deliver us from (the) evil" of our own mind, plagued with doubts and fears as it is. But when those doubts and fears become too great to overcome with one drug or another, or one addiction or another, we fall into a depression.

That depression comes with many moving parts, of course, from feelings of inadequacy to insecurity about employment, to loneliness and poverty and so much more. But while the Christian would have you believe these 'pains' are God's "gentle caresses" as Padre Pio once remarked (what a sick sadistic thing to say, by the way), they are actually signs, not that something is necessarily wrong with the person, but that there is something seriously wrong with the world that person lives in every day. 

If you find growing numbers of  fish with cancer, for example, it is only natural to assume there is something in the water. But when we find increasing numbers of people with depression, everyone rushes off to blame depression itself as the problem. This is like claiming there's nothing wrong with the water, it's the fish. This is also true of addiction, which is everywhere lamented as a "disease," even though it is more of a social problem than anything else. (Oh, how we love to believe whatever we are told to believe!)

In short, depression is a doorway that no one wants to open, because what lays on the other side of that door is the monster that we alone created, staring back at us.