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Depression has been described as a modern epidemic. An army of highly trained theoreticians have postulated all sorts of approaches and created a vast enterprise pushing pills to cure this disease of our modern, so-called 'civilized', society. This is not going to be a discussion of psychology and trite self-help materials from ignorant people whimsically pontificating from their ivory towers.

Today, we're going to go down into the trenches to cut through all of the BS and investigate the incidence and role of depression from an existential, non-materialist perspective. In doing so, we might just discover the 'meaning of life'.

Some depression has a clear cause and effect relationship, an abusive family, job loss etc. This type of depression forces us to look at issues in our own lives that should be relatively straight forward if we can step out of ourselves for a moment and consider rational solutions to the stressors. It should, therefore, not be long lived, and should pass as soon as the immediate problem is solved. This is not the type of depression that we're concerned with here, however.

The depression that I'm interested in is the kind that drags on and on, the kind that costs the victim much couch time at the therapist's office and puts them on a medical treadmill, often for life. The kind of depression I'm talking about is the type that drives people to suicide, often multiple times over long periods of their lives. It sucks the soul out of you because it convinces you that the world is a completely nihilistic place. There is no purpose, no hope, no future, and no one understands. There is only a cold unfeeling world whose culture is at best superficial, and at worst outright psychopathic. There is a nothingness inside of you that grows and grows and grows.

How and why do relatively well-adjusted people with normal lives come to carry this monster inside of them, this feeling of a shattered soul that refuses to be cured with drugs or the latest counseling theories? I think the answer to that question is that the being of such people has, at some level of awareness, been forced to realize that the world "out there" is not right in some fundamental way; that it has in fact become a playground for nihilistic personalities who have no plan whatsoever other than to gorge on their own thirst for darkness and destruction.

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There is, in fact, no hope for a world run in this way, because the logical result of a world run by an 'elite' who possess nothing but a hunger for darkness is complete entropy. This runs counter to any and all reason why people should be alive and what the meaning of human life might actually be. You would have to be truly twisted to believe that the goal of the universe and all of its creative diversity around you is nothingness; that the reason for everything is nothing. Normal people do not have brains that are wired this way, and when faced with the reality that the self-proclaimed 'reality creators' are creating, normal people react with sheer terror. However, the people who can actually stare down the beast and attempt to do something about this state of affairs are relatively rare, and most of those attempt to sweep the painful truth under the rug and just get on with their lives.

Most of humanity is rather fickle and will go along with the program as long as they can continue to get a piece of the pie and find someone else to deal with their problems and someone else to blame. Those with more feeling natures get the distinct impression that it is wrong to feel, since nobody else cares, and the media keeps parading the desirability of happiness obtained from the most superficial and vapid of things; conflating 'happiness' with true fulfillment. Since feeling is 'wrong', they become disillusioned and fold into themselves because they can't see any purpose in a world that is so antithetical to their inner nature. I think disillusionment is a more appropriate term for this deep depression.

So what is to be done? Why are so many people subjected to this horrible emotional state? Before we answer that question, let us take a detour for a moment and explore some scientific principles which will provide us with some context.

The Human-Cosmic Connection

Materialists claim that everything obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That energy devolves and complex structures decay until the system reaches a state of complete disorder and stillness. They claim that the entire universe will someday go dark, because the energy from the 'big bang' is finite and it is expanding into nothingness and will one day be completely dissipated. In the natural world, we see that things seem to proceed from a state of order to a state of disorder. The chemical bonds in the fuel for your car are broken, releasing energy and converting the fuel to a relatively inert gas. A wall crumbles into dust. Iron rusts and decays.

But there is a major exception to this law: Life. Life takes the disordered material existing in the environment and incorporates it into organized forms. In addition, life has a tendency to evolve into more complex forms and create complex ecosystems which tend to counteract the effects of the Second Law. Farther on down the line, life gains sentience and the capability to choose how it applies this ordering principle. All of this is in violation of the Second Law, which states that things should always proceed to a greater degree of entropy. Materialists claim that life is a fluke, something that arose out of some ridiculously small random chance, and that entropy will win out in the end. They have never been able to produce any real evidence to back up this claim other than guesses about how it might work. In fact, I think the evidence actually supports the opposite conclusion.

It has long been known in quantum physics that the act of observing a system can change the state of a system. The Schrodinger's cat thought experiment was used as an example of collapsing the wave function of a system that existed in a superposition of possible states into a singular defined state. Reality could go on as if the cat was still alive or dead, but wouldn't ever settle into an objective state until someone chooses to open the box. All of this implied that thoughts, or consciousness, could affect the manifestation of reality. Psychic experiments have been performed to develop this idea further. Dean Radin in his book Entangled Minds, details a number of these experiments. The most commonly cited are the effects of intent on random number generators, but there are also dice tosses and attempts to communicate pictures through telepathy as well as many other things.
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After millions of trials, these experiments have demonstrated that intention consistently affects the outcome of the experiments, but the effect is very small. Using the dice toss experiments as an example, one would expect that a die would roll a low number (1-3) and a high number (4-6). 50% of the time. When participants attempted to influence how the dice turned, the dice rolled in the desired direction about 51.2% of the time. While this may seem negligible at first glance, considering that this was the meta effect observed from 2.6 million dice throws from 148 different experiments by 52 different investigators, it's significant. Additional experiments have shown that the effect increases when multiple people attempt to create the effect, especially if they know each other.

Laura Knight-Jadczyk and Pierre Lescaurdon applied this research to the macro scale when they proposed the Human Cosmic Connection. By analyzing the historical record, they realized that periods of natural disasters were coincident with the existence of destructive, psychopathic empires where there was staggering inequality and repression of human creativity (read mass depression). While it may seem self-evident that natural disasters cause societies to collapse, the research suggests that the oppressive regimes were in place before the disasters began to ravage the country. In their book, Earth Changes and the Human Cosmic Connection, this is a pattern which pops up again and again. An oppressive regime rises to power with the intention of enslaving humanity, there is mass suffering and depression of the populace, the natural environment starts to become unstable, causing the regime to get more oppressive. This process continues in a positive feedback loop until the whole thing collapses. This suggests not only that the instability in the environment causes social oppression/depression, but that it is a dynamic process where each individual in a suffering, depressed society sends out their 1.2% influence on the dice roll, as it were, and en masse and unconsciously bring about changes in the reality which will cause that society's demise.

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This dynamic was most culturally accessible during the ancient Chinese civilization which believed in the 'Mandate of Heaven'. They believed that an Emperor could only rule as long as he treated his people like a dutiful parent, always looking out for their well-being. If he did not, the cosmos would introduce all sorts of bad luck/acts of god type events that would weaken his grip and eventually lead to social chaos and his overthrow.

As for the mechanism which makes this possible, it appears that the fundamental unit of reality is information - which is organized by consciousness - and this unit informs matter to create structures. Rupert Sheldrake in his book The Science Delusion speaks of 'morphogenic fields' which shape the material world and transmit ideas. This effect is best summarized by the much publicized '100th monkey' syndrome, where once a critical mass of creatures learns a certain skill, it becomes much easier for others to learn that skill and it can be transmitted, apparently 'psychically', to an unrelated tribe of similar creatures in a distant place. Sheldrake also introduces examples such as the synthesis of crystals, where once crystals have been synthesized in one place, they spontaneously become easier and easier to synthesize under the same conditions elsewhere in the world. He calls this phenomenon 'morphic resonance', whereby a certain structure is introduced to the 'information field', and the more energy and frequency that is put into trying to access that particular form, the more powerful the information field becomes and the easier it manifests into material reality everywhere. My contention is that disillusionment exists as a 'morphogenic field', appears in relationship to other such fields, and serves a specific purpose.

I now want to go off in a more spiritual direction that gets us back to the question of why people are depressed and what is to be done about it.

Being Vs Non-Being

Ancient esoteric traditions publicized in the last century by Georges Gurdjieff and Boris Mouravieff speak of humanity being put on Earth for a certain period of time to accomplish a certain degree of evolution and move into a higher degree of consciousness that is closer to the 'Absolute' (Creator or Godhead). This idea is summarized into something called the 'Ray of Creation', and various levels of beings exist at different points on the various 'Rays' as part of the infinite forms of expression of the universe. The Tradition says that these beings are either moving on an ascending staircase and evolving into spirit towards the 'Absolute' or on a descending staircase, devolving into matter. Sometimes, these archetypal ideas are referred to as Being and Non-Being. A detailed look into the UFO phenomenon and various paranormal encounters will reveal that there are entities farther along this staircase than we are, and some seem to be moving toward Being and others toward Non-being. This duality can also be expressed in various, more or less specific, forms, such as good vs. evil, God vs. Satan, light vs. dark.

According to the Tradition, the default nature of the universe is for beings to rise and strive for the light, to rise, and align themselves with the thought center of Being. However, it also speaks of beings who oppose this process of evolution, sometimes even succeeding temporarily. In our everyday reality, this duality can be expressed as the alignment with the Second Law of Thermodynamics as propagated by the Materialists, or Laws of Life, as described by people like Rupert Sheldrake. It is obvious that our society has taken the Second Law of Thermodynamics - a principle that applies to a specific tendency of matter to dissipate heat until it reaches an equilibrium state - and elevated it to a level of spiritual gospel. By doing so, it has chosen the thought center of Non-being, and is devolving into matter. Since everything ultimately decays into chaos, and nothing has meaning, everything just randomly arose as part of some sick joke, and you better enjoy it while it lasts because when you die, that's it. The symptoms of this are apparent everywhere from the sexual commoditization of humanity, to predatory banking systems, to religions that specialize in genital mutilation, to heinous pollution of air, water, land, and even DNA. Generally no one cares about anyone or anything but themselves. This is not a natural state of affairs for a being that wishes to evolve towards the light and is extremely depressing.

So what is to be done about disillusionment/depression? Why are so many people subjected to this horrible emotional state? I believe that this type of depression is the voice of the soul crying out against the entropic principles that dominate on our planet, and yearning to live in a manner that is more in accordance with life's principles. The morphogenic field of Non-being has enveloped the planet and by trying to ignore it or suppress it, we are in fact aligning ourselves with that field, which may be against our very nature to strive for the light to rise, to grow. The continuous deep, gnawing disillusionment with all that is going on 'out there' is an alarm clock telling us something is very, very wrong and we need to wake up and reaffirm our choice to the universe or get dragged along with it. We don't have to passively accept this disintegration, we can choose otherwise. We can choose to invest our energy in a way which strengthens the morphogenic field representing Being.

It's all about choice

Let's look at some practical ways which this might be done. Suppose you are involved in a traffic accident where you missed a red light and will T-bone a car at 60MPH, careening through the driver's door killing him instantly. By the time you see the car, it is literally right in front of your face and there is no time to react. For that infinitesimal moment of time you experience a sort of a choice. You can swerve and reach for the brake praying that the car will somehow stop, even though you know it is too late to make any difference, or for the last split second you can close your eyes and pretend that none of it is happening. In this latter scenario, you effectively shut-off your consciousness and everything proceeds the way materialistic science says it should. You crash through the door, killing the driver instantly. You can then extend this timeline out to include some future events as a result of this, the wife goes into a suicidal depression and turns to alcohol, neglecting the young children who end up in some form of state custody. They wind up on the street and eventually die in a bad drug deal. The entropy of the system increases, and it was all pre-destined, right?

What if, however, instead of trying to disappear into a subjective illusion, you actively send out an intent to stop the car, even though the situation appears essentially hopeless? You invoke that mysterious effect which was demonstrated in the PK experiments and the collision happens .03 seconds later than it should have, allowing the car to travel another couple of feet. This amount of time is essentially imperceptible to anyone, and it appears on the surface to be the same accident. In this case, the majority of the force of the collision is concentrated behind the driver and he survives. He is airlifted to the hospital in serious condition where he has to undergo some surgery, but eventually he recovers and an alternate timeline is created where he is still able to be a father to his children. One of the children becomes a local artist who inspires people through his work and provides a creative outlet for some people in the community. As a result, the drug deal that kills him in timeline A, never even occurs in timeline B. Of course this is a very simplified example, one could see that the possible timelines created from a singular event rapidly trends towards infinity over a period of time, but the point is, we have average people dealing with ordinary problems which can make huge differences in personal realities thanks to the compounding ripple effects emanating from a seemingly inconsequential choice.

A Network and an Aim
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Getting back to the big picture, what can be done about the nightmarish reality that hangs around like a dark, leaden cloak that results in depression? In practice, your minuscule influence is too insignificant to have any noticeable effect on a system the size of a planet. This is where the concept of aim and networks come in. If you want to change your reality, you need to identify what it is you want to accomplish, and what influences and features of your reality will take you closer to that aim, and which will take you further from that aim. The influences that take your further from your aim need to be eliminated. The next step is finding a group of people who share your aim. More people in a collinear relationship with you add constructive interference to your efforts and increase the magnitude of those efforts. They also give you perspectives when making decisions (which should always be made according to how they advance your aim) which, taken in aggregate, represent a fairly objective assessment of whether the idea is realistic, beneficial, etc.

A network that strives toward an objective understanding of reality can make informed decisions based on knowledge which are likely to lead to the greatest possible manifestation of the aim. Through this process, you gain the ability to make conscious choices informed by knowledge and gain the ability to choose how you interface with reality in large part. A network solves the 4 big problems of depression, it gives you hope, purpose, people to talk to and possibly a future too if you can get past the initial challenge of finding the right people and getting yourself involved.

Gurdjieff was apt to say in his teachings that 200 conscious beings sharing an aim could change the world. It makes one wonder if the ripple effects from such a network are what the psychopathic elite of the planet really fear and why they are trying so feverishly to create a reality that is so dark that it coerces us to forfeit our will, our power to choose. With the alarm clock of disillusionment ringing so loudly, the only way they can maintain power is to numb us with their nihilistic cacophony. The ability to choose is the greatest superpower of all and should not be forgotten. Even though it appears that Earth is 'forsaken', a study of esoteric science strongly suggests that a way back is provided for those who choose to align themselves with Being and have faith in the process. If there ever was a mission, a cause, a great battle to be enjoined, or a defining purpose for humanity in a time of transition, this has to be it. It's really the only chance you've got. Take it.