The Ontological War

Someone brought up the subject of depression on one of the lists I’m on, and this is my reply:

To me, there are two main reason for depression, both of which come from our misunderstanding of ourselves and our self.

We all like to believe that we are living life fully as ourselves in reality. But once a person starts to explore who he or she truly is—to increase his or her degree of being—this belief changes considerably. We also like to think that good, normal people have only good qualities within them, and so if a person sees bad qualities within himself or herself, then that person is in fact bad and abnormal. But when a person actually goes in toward his or her innermost self—as compared to standing on the perimeter and only looking in—the person sees many bad qualities. To make matters even worse, the more the person looks the more bad qualities that appear. Additionally, the person may also see a lack of good qualities, which amounts to the same thing. As might be expected, this overall realization is very depressing because one is experiencing it as one’s realself and not as one’s socialself, which cranks up the intensity of the experience considerably.

The main mistake here is that if a person is able to keep going forward, eventually that person will see that ALL bad qualities are within each of us, but they are only potentials and not who we truly are. Some will say, “Everyone knows that,” but there is a huge difference between experiencing all of this as one’s realself and thinking about it as one’s socialself.

The second reason that increasing one’s degree of being is depressing is that the socialself world—the ontological world we are all living in now (since we are all being our socialselves to one degree or another)—does not want anyone being his or her realself in it. Every so often someone will say, “I’m being who I truly am, and if others don’t like that it’s tough.” The people who say this like to think they are being who they truly are, but in fact what they have done is fool themselves into believing that the self the socialself world wants them to be is the same self they want to be.

It should be pointed out that one needs to be fully aware of the differences between what might loosely be called social changes and ontological changes. A famous basketball player can wear a wedding dress in public, and that might at first seem as if it is going outside the boundaries of the socialself world. But if he remains his socialself while doing this, then he is still living in the heart of the socialself world. On the other hand, a quiet 20-year-old college student might get a sense of what a being-to-being relationship is, and she then wants to develop that kind of relationship with someone in one of her classes. But every time she thinks about approaching him in this way she freezes up completely. She feels that she is doing something terribly wrong, when in fact she would be making one of the best acts we as humans can make.

When I was going through all of this the one thing I knew, above all else, was that I always had to keep up intellectually with what I was experiencing ontologically. Many parts of this journey are depressing, but by keeping up with it intellectually I never considered the experience depression. About half the time I thought, and still do think, it was the best time in my life.