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DEPRESSION by Tom Geiger

Often people have vivid and grand expectations of achievement. Then they encounter failure, and travel into despair, misery, and suffering. Self-doubt, creeping in at this point, can easily increase this painful journey into a state of depression. This is when some people will tend to withdraw, thinking that is the best way to escape from the pain. The last thing most people want to do is to study their pain. The typical knee-jerk response under these circumstances only makes things worse. They spend their entire lives running these painful scenarios through their minds, hoping for the right solution and/or different outcome. They are caught by reality and go directly back to relive and re-experience the suffering. The tormenting movies run over and over and over in the mind. And many people like nothing better than to share the misery, telling their bad luck stories to anyone who will listen.
     In the Mystic Path to Cosmic Power Vernon Howard writes in chapter 7, entitled “How To Stop Heartache and Suffering,” “We don’t want temporary relief. We want to end it once and for all.” He further says, “The false self throws up an imaginary picture of how it insists things should be. And every time this should be clashes with what actually happens, we react painfully.”
    In his booklet, Conquer Anxiety and Frustration, Vernon explains that the blockage of unnecessary desires is the basic cause of human frustration. And when human frustration is indulged in for too long, it’s inevitably followed by a state of discontent and depression. This is one of my favorite booklets, in part because his classification of desires into necessary ones and unnecessary ones is so explanatory and enlightening. Necessary desires include the need for food, shelter, rest, recreation. Unnecessary desires are hoping for the promotion, for more money or the date with a beautiful woman, longing to win the lottery, or the argument. It is your task to watch “these desperate cravings of the false self as they start to arise” and to separate from them by realizing you are not your false self. There is no reason to be depressed, because there is no true entity inside to be depressed!
I recently read a biography of Jesse Livermore, a famous American stock trader. He lost everything: THREE TIMES! He was engulfed by severe depression each time, coming out of this torture by rationalizing that it was just part of his education. His was literally a rags to riches story, running away from home at 14, and promptly finding a job on Wall Street. He had two million dollars in his account by the time he was 20 years old and at the pinnacle of his career was one of the wealthiest men in the world. He made it to this level by shorting the stock market right before the 1929 market crash. But in the end, his depression got the best of him.
It didn’t need to. These teachings put everything in the right perspective and prepare you for any kind of what is typically called a ‘loss.’ You can learn how to change every failure into genuine success by using the experience to grow spiritually. There is a way out!