The TAO in Anything and Everything

<b>The TAO in Anything and Everything</b>
Get the TAO wisdom to live in reality with balance and harmony in every aspect of life.

Thursday, June 23, 2022

Depression and the Mind


“It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man’s insecurity before himself and nature.” Albert Einstein
             
Depression is all about the mind—the "thinking" mind; more specifically, how the mind functions. The human mind plays a pivotal role in depression: it could be the underlying “cause” of many problems related to depression; on the other hand, it could also be the "antidote" of depression. That is to say, the human mind is a double-edged sword: it could create many “problems” for depression, as well as provide many “solutions” to depression. 
The thinking mind plays several major roles in your life, especially in relation to depression.
Life is about experiences, which are composed of thoughts of those experiences by the human mind. According to James Allen, the author of As A Man Thinketh, men are “makers of themselves” and the human mind is the “master-weaver, by both of the inner garment of character and the outer garment of circumstance.” Accordingly, you may have become who you and what you are by way of your thinking mind over the years; in short, you are the sum of your own thoughts. Therefore, your thinking mind plays a pivotal role in your life.
First and foremost, you must fully understand the major roles of your mind in your everyday life and living, and how it may work for you or against you with respect to your depression.

Perceptions and Realities

“Everything you perceive, externally, is the manifestation of some internal part of you. If it was not, it would not be present in your perceived reality.” Tony Warrick

Your mind perceives all your life experiences through your five senses: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. To most people, seeing is the most important perception; however, what they see may not be the absolute reality, because their visual perceptions may be conditioned by what they see, and distorted by many other factors during the processing of their perceptions. Remember, it is the intuition of your soul that really perceives your reality. The wise have known for a long time that what we know through our eyes are not the same as the intuition of the soul. If that is the case, sadly, most people rely on what they see, thinking that "seeing is believing," and thus lose themselves in external things.
As an illustration, in 1997, Richard Alexander from Indiana was convicted as a serial rapist because one of the victims and her fiancĂ© insisted that he was the perpetrator based on what they saw with their own eyes. However, the convicted man was exonerated and released in 2001 based on new DNA science and other forensic evidence. Experts explained that a traumatic emotional experience, such as a rape, could “distort” the perception of an individual.
The truth is that your brain is composed of grey matters and neurons or nerve cells that transmit information and messages; they are the building blocks of your brain for the processing of all your perceptions. Neurons are responsible for all your behaviors in the form of perceptions, which trigger a mental process that results in an action or an emotion.
If the process becomes instinctive or habitual, then the output in the form of an action or emotion is also automatic and predictable. That is how attitudes and habits are formed, including the fight-or-flight response to any dangerous situation. This automatic or spontaneous mental processing is often not “by choice.” The fact of the matter is that this “learned” mental processing is responsible for the way you think and act, for your beliefs and emotions, for you attitudes and prejudices, as well as for your decisions or indecisions—in other words, every aspect of your life experiences.
Gradually and accumulatively, all your life experiences with their own respective messages—the pleasant as well as the unpleasant, the positive as well as the negative—are all stored at the back of your subconscious mind in the form of data and memories. Over the long haul, millions and billions of such experiences and messages have become the raw materials with which you subconsciously weave the fabrics of your life, making you who and what you have now become—or so you think. In other words, they have now become your so-called “realities.”
Unfortunately, these so-called “realities” may also make you become depressed.
Copyright© by Stephen Lau