I’d Rather Jump Into The Water
Question: What is the connection between depression and our nature?
Answer: Depression is a sensation of emptiness in desire. There are desires but no fulfillment. It is the most vivid manifestation of our nature. After all, the Creator created desire, and this desire yearns to be fulfilled. This is our essence.
The collective desire where we all reside or every individual, little desire it is comprised of requires fulfillment. When desire lacks inner fulfillment, the question is where the fulfillment is. If it is somewhere near and the desire feels that it is close but not inside, then depression occurs.
If this fulfillment never existed in the first place, there would be no depression. Who knows what kind of emptiness I feel? How does some African peasant know that he lacks a laptop or a washing machine? But if future fulfillment, which could be but isn’t in you yet, appears in your vision, your sensation, it gives rise to depression.
Thus, depression characterizes not a primitive person, but rather someone advanced. And the farther we move forth, the more depression there will be since desires mature and so does the awareness of the lack of their fulfillment.
It is evident how for the last forty years depression has been getting more wide-spread in humanity. Today it is one of the top problems. Moreover, it has also become an illness. It will keep growing, and there will be no way to stop it.
In the nearest future, they will have to legalize and sell drugs to anyone who wants them. Basically, we will be glad to take anything to not feel this depression. But we won’t be able to overcome it anyway. It will come to the point where a person will see the “fix” before him or her but won’t be able to use the drug. Why? Because they will feel that it is not the answer to their question, not the “fix” to their internal void.
Therefore, the battle with depression is the major battle of man with his emptiness that is precisely what pushes him forth. Hence, by the number of those who are depressed, we can judge how close humanity is to becoming aware of its evil.
Nothing will help a person except a decisive, firm, and dynamic engagement in the correct society. Only there will he be able to suppress his or her depression, and very intensively at that: by switching themselves off, by turning off their feelings, and thrusting themselves into the environment as if flinging themselves into the water. There is no other medicine but the influence of the environment. And as a result, fulfillment will come and immediately eliminate one’s depression.
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From the 2nd lesson at the Berlin Convention on 1/28/11
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Thank you Rav, so much for your answer about depression here. However, my question regarding depression is this:
How can a Woman bring herself out of depression when she does not engage in the Wisdom of Kabbalah in the same way as the Men do? When she is not as expected as the Men to study or to take the lessons… how will she even know *what* work to do, in order to find fulfillment & to make sense of the depression that she’s currently in??
Thank you so much again & G-d bless,
Mrs. Sherry Apfel
Kennewick, Wa
Dear Rav, due to my bipolar depression I was sent to 12 Step groups – where I learned that the 12 Step was founded by C G Jung who studied the Zohar in the 1950s (and had acqaintences who knew Rav Ashlag) and there (in Anonymous 12Steps anti-addiction /anti-depression groups the basic tenet is that we are powerless over our life (our ego, our symptoms) and we must try to build up a concept on the Higher (Giving) Power thru building connections to others in the group by serving the group and sharing.
I know that if I wd ask about any religious group you wd say, it is nice folklore, I can conztinue to go, but the main thing is to learn Kabbalah and Zohar and learn with you and the group.
But in 12Step groups they say the very same things that we learn in the Kabbalah group – I wonder if these people (mostly ex addicts) could not somehow be considered a parallel path – clearly they follow a spiritual path very similar to ours. But they do not learn the inner mechanism (Shperes, PArzufim). They only are told to try to serve others instead of self-centeredness. With some of them I shared privately about the source of Jung’s wisdom by sending them to your sites and (not like normal outside people on the street who are dismissive) surprisingly they were all willing to start to learn and asked me to send you your blog. There are millions of people in 12step groups. Should I discontinue to try to do hafatza with them?
“Nothing will help a person except a decisive, firm, and dynamic engagement in the correct society. Only there will he be able to suppress his or her depression, and very intensively at that: by switching themselves off, by turning off their feelings, and thrusting themselves into the environment as if flinging themselves into the water.”
I tried to cut my emotions off in the group setting but failed when the heavier desires revealed. What is the trick when the really heavy emotions are there and a person can’t even see the rope the group is extending to him? How can one, when the heaviness of the desire turns him into an raging, panicking animal, not end up a spiritually aborted fetus? Has the Creator sent me way because I was harmful to the group this whole time?