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Originally Posted by David21  For a while now I have been depressed. Most recently I have been feeling it for a number of reasons. For one, I don't like living in a world where nothing can be known for sure, where reality is always up for debate. I dream of a world where things are known for sure. Two, I don't know where my life is going. I've spent the last four years working towards a degree in psychology and now I'm doing it, I'm no more happy than I've ever been. Every morning I wake up and I don't know why I'm here. I have no motivation to do work because it seems so senseless if nothing can really be known. |
First off - please hold out until you've tried everything. I was very much like you up until a year or two ago, and now I'm immensely happy - despite external conditions changing very little. I wish I could put it into words, but it just clicked for me.
I used to spend most of my time trying to figure out reality and my place on this earth. I needed to know "The Truth", whatever that meant. I didn't believe in a higher power so I tried science. And I found no answers. I still don't have that answer, but I was asking the wrong question. I was asking "How does the Universe operate?" when really I should have been asking "How do I operate the the Universe?". The first question is an unanswerable riddle (the question and answer come from the same source, are therefore interdependent and cancel out the absolutism of either, or so I'm told
). In the end I just had to give up, and the giving up turned out to be a letting go. Once I let go it all started to fall into place.
When I changed from asking the first question to the second, I was really saying Yes to life. If I were to keep talking I would only be imitating the greats, so I'm going to recommend some things that changed my life:
1. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (a short fiction book written from the perspective of one who says "Yes" to life).
2. Book Four by Aleister Crowley (try the meditations in part 1)
3. Sukhavati by Joseph Campbell (watch a low quality version for free on Google Video) and anything else you can find by him.
4. Meditations for Asiah from
An approach to learning the Tree of Life through Meditation about 3/4 of the way down the page. The page is a hermetic qabalah thing based on a spiritual system called the Tree of Life, but for those particular meditations on the page you don't need to know anything about that.
I hope this helps, it may not be your situation but I can only speak from my own experience, so it's the best I've got
