Re: It's not working....

Re: It's not working.... ----- From: mzet - Date: 19 Dec 1997

I don't know your exact background, and I am not saying that my experience is a model, or that your depression is not to be treated clinically, and I am not a therapist, only someone who wants to share his experiences, however strange.

someone said in one of the posts that aloness hurts. i want to turn that around, because that idea tends to convey the notion that we therefore have to run away from aloness and silence by looking for companionship.

I have found that it is precisely when we encounter silence that the possibility of looking at our true self comes out. It is terrifying and sometimes painful, particularly in times when our belief systems have shattered or when our circumstances have given us a big blow. But those are THE great opportunities for growth, and if we simply plunge into other relationships because "aloness hurts", or worse, drugs or alcohol, we simply intensify the pain, eventually, because the pain doesn't go away until we care for it, lovingly.

you say that all you feel is silence, although you know that only god can help. THAT IS THE FIRST STEP: silence!!!! i don't know how to express it, but my experience is that god does not speak but in very very faint whispers. her voice needs silence to be heard , and you need silence to listen.

sometimes the only way that silence is created is thorugh a general shut down, wherein all that is left functioning is our most basic systems, and that is painful, but not negative or bad or evil or to be avoided.

my own experience is that the periods of my life that I believed were plunged in total darkness were not really created by a void or nothingness or emptyness, but by a light so bright that it blinded me. It's as if my physical body was not ready for so much, so I felt there was nothingness instead being.

inside all of that dark light there is a way out, but i was not able to find it by myself. i had to hold on to someone else's hand. it was a huge and almost humiliating leap for me, because i was an atheist, but i did it rather than continue to fantasize about suicide. i guess i felt i had nothing to lose. imagine this grown up man, atheist, rationalist, with a good carrer, in control of everything for so many years, having to admit that he had really, no control any more, not even over his own self, and having to hold someone elses hand....pathetic...

my experience, again, is that the process of recognizing that the emptiness is really a dark light and finding that hand to hold takes some time, but the important thing is that it happens in silence and inside of you, not with a lot of outside noise and distractions.

my first step in finding god was wanting to find her. it seems to me that you want to. that is 80% of the work. or at least it was for me. the second step for me was to purposefully spend time, alone, in silence. once or twice a day, for 10 or 20 minutes, just in silence, trying to take ALL thoughts out of my mind, and lovingly offering the time to god. that was it. it was like saying: i don't know if you are there, or if you are going to take me out of this darkness, or even if you exists, but this time and this pain is my gift to you, because i love you.

i know, i know, it sounds so pathetic, but i am telling you, i finally felt movement in what had become of my life, which i felt was not much, and whatever was there, was a waste anyway.

i hope i don't sound like a religious fanatic, because i am not. all i know is that spirituality is not about mythical religion, one that gives confort and an answer for everything, where all fits into the right box. spirituality is about paradoxes and parables and shaking your beliefs systems and feeling uncomfortable and reversals. it is about leaving everything once you find the one treasure inside of you that you know is sufficient to sustain you.

and i think that once we find ourselves in that process, then we can find others outside our selves, then we can love and celebrate and be alive, really alive, rather than sucking life from others to mask our pain. then we can become truly human.

i'm rambling.....hope it helps. take care of your silence.