I had to admit the harsh truth that I don’t believe the death of the body brings an end to emotional pain. Emotional pain lives in the emotional body, which is finer, more subtle, and thus more enduring than the physical body. The unfortunate fact (as I believe it) is that consciousness survives physical death, so there’s no “way out”. So I’ve been searching out a way to put to “death” my attachment to the pain, or whatever is causing my pain. This has forced me to re-position myself in relationship to my personal “story”. Lets face it: we “depressives” love telling our miserable stories about how much life sucks, how unfortunate we are, how much we’d be better off dead, what shitty things we’ve done, and so on. Then someone on the ACT group pointed me toward Byron Katie’s “The Work”, which has been illuminating. It became clearer to me that it is not my problems causing me so much suffering, but rather the horribly relentless “story” I attach to the problems. It’s the way I batter myself with it, replaying memories, self judgments, and fantasies over and over in my head. It’s not that I am having a challenge finding the right job, or struggling to pay my bills right now. Instead, I tell myself that I am an “abject failure”. Its not that my marriage didn’t last or that I left it willingly, but that “no one will ever love me”. Not that I’m going through a hard time right now, but that my “entire life is a failure”. This story I have been telling myself gathers energy, like dust balls growing in the corners, and the more I focus on it the more elaborate it gets. Each day I find more reasons why I am a no good piece of shit who doesn’t deserve to live. My mind has been on the offense and gaining steam, digging up every person who might not like me, and every reason to justify why they wouldn’t like me, and why that will translate into never being able to be successful or happy. It is a hell-realm that feeds on itself. It’s my big, dramatic story that I am in love with, even though it’s like rolling around on broken shards of glass. I’ve always tended to love things that hurt me, (OK, that’s another part of my story. Anything I can say to embellish the story fits, building up my personal mythology about who I am.)
Actually, it occurs to me that if I kill myself while in the midst of this “hell realm” of consciousness, I very likely can get stuck in it for a long time without the benefit of a body and help from people in this realm. So, committing suicide is quite possibly the most devastating way to f—k oneself.
The light bulb went off when I realized that this story I’ve been listening to is just “spin”. It’s rhetoric that my ego spins like a press release, and I buy into it like its some kind of divine truth. I watched a video of the awesome Eckhart Tolle where he was talking about the way we make our story so “special”. Yes, I am so “special” that my problems don’t just hurt, but I suffer. Not only do I suffer, but I suffer better than anyone else. I don’t just suffer, I plan my own death, and not only do I plan my own death but I do it online in a public forum. Then, to add to my “uniqueness”, I use rhetoric about how to do it in a “dignified and graceful” way. Yes, indeed, my story makes me so special, even while exerting energy toward destroying this creation of my life. And all of this is just my ego’s way of making sure I exist, that I have value in life, that I am “somebody.” So if I buy into this story, I will die just to prove that I exist. What a paradox!
The liberating feature in all of this is in the realization that I am not my “story”. My “story” is a collection of other people’s judgments, opinions, (many of them warped or false) , self perceptions which are influenced by moods, which are influenced by diet, sleep, exercise, weather, external events, physical health, and personal/familiar and cultural values. And that’s just the start of it. So my “story” is so subjective, so subject to change, that its completely unreliable.
Many people who endure depressions like me struggle to climb out of the hole by finding someone (a therapist or spiritual counselor) who helps re-frame the story so that it is more congenial. But this is not trust-worthy either, because in truth, the reality is that all personal story is myth. “I am valuable and lovable” feels better than “I am a failure”, but neither statement is “true” if it’s based on some subjective concept of “good” versus “bad”.
Perhaps the truest statement is “I AM”. Simple. Just as God said to Moses: Tell them I AM. Simply being, without the big dramatic “story” of how “special” I am. I think I can live with that.
I AM.
