Tears to Triumph

by Marianne Williamson

  Yes, we have an epidemic of depression in our society today. But truthfully, how could anyone today on some level not be sad? The gap between how beautiful life can be and the way it too often is is heartbreaking. Anyone who is not on some level grieving the state of the world is perhaps not looking very deeply.

  Sometimes the source of our personal despair is actually a proxy for a more collective upset. What causes our pain might be personal, but the pain itself is universal. Just as for millennia Greeks and Romans and European explorers did not know the source of the Nile River, no one today can quite name the specific source of the free-floating despair so prevalent among us. Depression is caused by trauma that separates spirit from personality, yet the trauma is not always triggered by a particular event.

  None of our lives can be fully understood outside the context of the general state of humanity any more than a child’s life can be fully understood outside the context of that child’s family system. Human beheadings blaring at us from video screens bring horror to our doorsteps whether we live in Iraq or in Illinois. It can’t honestly be said about anyone anymore, “Well, what have you got to be sad about?” Much of the world is crying out in a pain that most all of us feel on some level.

  We’re depressed because life today is off. We’re depressed because too often we have no sense of our place in the universe, our relationship to the source of our existence, a deeper sense of purpose in our relationships with other human beings, or any sense of reverence toward any aspect of life at all. Our entire civilization is ruled more by fear than by love.

  We are experiencing an unsustainable breach between the knowledge of the heart and the experience of being human. This throws us into the quiet hysteria of existential crisis, and it is that crisis—not just its symptoms—that needs to be seriously addressed.

  The crisis of modern society is that human beings too often feel spiritually homeless within it. And how could it be otherwise? How could the soul feel at home on our planet, given the soullessness of our civilization? With a barrage of discordant information bombarding us constantly—ranging from the utterly meaningless to the hideously violent—where is the heart to seek comfort? The issue is not only that Sheila is depressed, or Robert is depressed; the issue is that our culture itself is in too many ways depressing.

  A society that exalts the accumulation of wealth but diminishes the relevance of wisdom, that exalts the power of force but diminishes the power of love, is a society that has lost touch with its soul. And living within that society, we can too easily lose touch with ours.

  This collective depression is so huge, so all-pervasive that few people even recognize how strange it is. It is like a toxic gas that almost everyone is inhaling. Most people, if they were to describe their depression, would speak of a feeling that almost everyone has known at one time or another. The vast majority of people who when asked “How are you?” respond by saying “Fine,” are lying.

  The organizational principles that rule our civilization are inherently pathological, constantly pitting us against ourselves, and against each other, in ways both large and small.

  First, we’re told that value lies outside ourselves, in material things rather than in who we are. This is a direct contradiction of the spiritual value inherent in every creation of God.

  Second, we’re taught to think that promoting ourselves at the expense of others is natural and even good. This puts us at odds with our deeper selves, because the spirit cannot help but care deeply about the suffering of others.

  Third, we’re trained by a dominant worldview not so much to relate to other people as to merely transact with them—even then, not for the sake of genuine communion, but for the purpose of getting what we think we want from them.

  Psychically, these twisted perceptions are tearing us apart.

  An all-pervasive disregard for the reality of the inner self is a setup for despair. Our societal perspective desensitizes us to both our own deeper needs and the needs of others. And the two together form a toxic brew now threatening the fabric of our civilization. The fact that this brew is causing havoc in your life, or in mine, is almost secondary to the fact that it’s causing havoc for the human race.

  PERSONAL AND COLLECTIVE DEPRESSION

  Just as enlightenment is the antidote to individual despair, it is the antidote to our collective despair as well. The spiritual journey is not limited to the path of the individual. We’re challenged not just as individuals, but as nations, as groups, and ultimately as a species to become the embodiment of our more loving selves.

  All of us, in order to be fully conscious, are now asked to address larger issues regarding not only who we are as individuals, but also who we are as a civilization. We are asked to meet the challenge of an evolutionary crisis now facing the entire species. For our collective challenges will affect all of us in time.

  It’s tempting to focus on an individual’s experience of depression, while avoiding larger factors that make their despair more probable. The incidence of domestic violence, for instance, increases with the presence of poverty. The incidence of street crime is increased by high unemployment. The extreme financial stress that so many experience is largely due to a rigged financial system. Certain health issues derive from an inadequate healthcare system and a recklessness toward our environment. Millions of young people lose opportunities for higher education and economic advancement for no other reason than that we put the economic good of banks before the economic potential of our young.

  Many of our personal woes derive from social policies that are spiritually diseased—diseased in that they fail to reflect an awareness of our oneness. The disease in the policy then infects the individual, whose emotional disease is then called depression. But the larger epidemic of individual fatigue, weariness, and lack of vitality will not be adequately assuaged until we address the larger problems in our society. Behind every newly depressed person will be another, until all of us wake up and realize that this problem should be more than a goldmine for drug manufacturers.

  Even when we’re depressed about specific problems—related to money, relationships, illness, and so forth—such causes often emerge from a larger matrix of societal dysfunction. While it’s important to take personal responsibility for our own lives, it’s also important to be alert to societal factors that increase or decrease the probability of personal hardship. The two in fact cannot be meaningfully separated. Our tendency over the past century to separate the experience of the individual from the experience of the collective has created blind spots in our view of both.

  Dividing personal from collective anxiety—categorizing them as two distinctly separate issues—is an inadequate way to address what is deeply wrong in the world today. The more we understand a larger social context for our problems, the more empowered we can be in addressing them. This is where modern psychotherapy, with its emphasis on the individual sufferer, has exacerbated as much as helped to heal the problem. The last thing we need to be, when depressed, is focused only on ourselves. First of all, it’s in reaching out to others that we summon the love that creates miracles. And second, how is it relevant how my parents behaved when I was a child but not relevant how larger pressures weighed upon them and stressed them to the breaking point? Understanding deeper emotional realities can and should give us deeper insight into societal issues, and vice versa. If I understand, for instance, that my mother ignored me emotionally after the birth of my younger sibling, it’s important to realize the stress that she was under. If it had to do with her having limited time at home, then I can understand more deeply why laws such as paid maternity leave matter. By becoming an advocate for paid maternity leave, I’m helping to save other mothers and children from the stress that my mother and I went through many years before. Most importantly, doing what I can do to generate new hope, not only for myself, but also for other people—reaching out to others, participating in creating larger societal solutions—helps me move beyond my own suffering
. Hope is born of participation in hopeful solutions. One of the most dysfunctional attitudes we have toward emotional suffering today is that the sufferer is always alone in their suffering. We are not alone—we are all recipients of psychologically poisonous messages about who we are and why we are here. Our pain is shared by others whose lives are similarly ripped apart by the inevitable dysfunctions of a spiritually ambivalent civilization. The highest spiritual law is to love thy neighbor as thyself. The world is divided today as never before between two major groups: those who think we should, and those who think we shouldn’t.

  It’s very important, when we are deeply sad, to take a stand against the part of the mind that says, “This is only about you.” Nothing is ever “only about you” for you yourself are not only about you. All of us are part of a larger whole, a larger humanity, and all miracles derive from knowing that. The subconscious mind does not recognize us as separate from each other—because we’re not. We heal the wounds of the past through healing in the present, and we heal our own broken hearts by reaching out to the hearts of others. The moment I become part of a larger solution, and a larger world, my own healing begins. We should make time to be alone and cry, yes, but we should also make time to put on a courageous smile for those whose problems are as big or even bigger than ours. There are a lot of hours in every day.

  Years ago, I led support groups for people dealing with AIDS. One day a young man said to me, “I won’t be coming to the group today because I don’t need support. I had a good week this week.”

  I responded, “Well maybe this week it’s your turn to be there and support someone who didn’t.” I saw on his face that my comment didn’t bother him; it empowered him. Throughout the AIDS crisis I saw the miraculous effects of a community filled with individual sufferers, which yet came together with so much love among its members that even an experience of the deepest darkness contained moments of inexpressible light.

  THE PASSION CURE

  How often I’ve heard a variation on this theme: “I used to believe in God, but I can’t now. How could a loving God let children starve?” The answer, of course, is that God doesn’t let children starve; we do. The biggest problems in the world today are not of God’s making, but of ours. And we keep making them.

  ~A world in which young people are subjected to violent images on video screens almost all day long is a world in which they are more apt to become depressed.

  ~A world in which young people grow up pressured to learn at school in a specified manner regardless of whether their brains function that way is a world in which they are more apt to become depressed.

  ~A world in which young people are more likely than not to experience a home life dominated by their parents’ economic stresses is a world in which they are more apt to become depressed.

  ~A world in which young people are aware that environmental destructiveness, permanent war machinery, an unjust economic system, and an increasingly unjust criminal justice system undergird our social and political systems is a world in which they are more apt to become depressed.

  ~A world in which young people see exorbitant costs of higher education and lack of economic opportunity looming large in their futures is a world in which they are more apt to become depressed.

  When ten-year-olds are becoming depressed, we have a problem that goes way beyond that household. Such children are reflecting Mommy and Daddy’s stress, which is reflecting relationship issues or economic issues or other factors that reflect humanity’s having mislaid its soul.

  The suffering of our children should be an arrow that pierces the shield of our denial and alerts us to what is happening in the world. The depressed among us are like dead canaries in a coal mine, revealing a terrible toxin that will kill us all if we go down the shaft.

  Yet we continue to go down, rarely questioning the toxicity of the mine. Why? Because an insane order of things tells us that there is nothing wrong with the mine; there’s simply something wrong with the canaries!

  We do all this to avoid the pain of looking at our pain. An overly externalized worldview doesn’t know how to treat internal pain except through external means—seeking to eradicate or suppress symptoms, but not necessarily dealing with their cause. The cause, however, will be suppressed for only so long before morphing into another kind of symptom.

  Psychic pain, like physical pain, is there for a reason. It is not an illness; it is a messenger—a messenger we too often choose to ignore. A Course in Miracles says it is not up to us what we learn but only whether we learn through joy or pain. This applies to a civilization as much as to an individual. If something is happening, it’s happening whether or not we’re choosing to reflect upon its meaning. But we will reflect upon the meaning of so much unnecessary suffering in the world today, or we will pay a very, very heavy price in the form of more suffering.

  This is not a time in history for any of us to be numb. One of the reasons it’s so important that we become awake to our pain and to the pain of others is because in the absence of people whose concern is aroused by the problems of the world, those problems will only get much worse, not better. We can’t afford to be numb to our own suffering or to the suffering of others.

  Once, while browsing on the Internet, I saw the story of a bomb that had gone off that day at the end of an amateur soccer match in Iraq. Thirty-four people died in the ISIL bombing, seventeen of whom were between the ages of ten and sixteen. The article was accompanied by a heartbreaking picture of a young man comforting what appeared to be a teenage boy, the boy’s face so shattered by the incident that had occurred at the closing of what has to be one of the few joys left to young people in his war-torn country.

  I thought about the horror of that incident, and the horror of that war. Most horrible of all was the realization that none of it had to happen; that the chaos in Iraq today is the consequence of a terrible act perpetrated by the government of my own country. I was reminded of the bitter words spoken to me by a Baghdadi woman on a radio show I hosted a few years ago: “Before Saddam Hussein was killed, we knew we had three devils: him and his two sons. And we spent all our time planning what we would do when they died. But what your country has done, there are so many devils now that we cannot possibly deal with them all.”

  As awful as it felt for me to think about this—as depressing as it was—I would not wish to have been buffered from my pain that day. As Gandhi said, there is soul force in bearing witness to the agony of others. The least I can do is not buffer myself from my pain, when that young boy cannot buffer himself from his.

  Numbing our sensitivity to the problems of the world not only diminishes our humanity, but also decreases our motivation to fix those problems before they overwhelm us. We don’t need to avoid our suffering as much as we need to heed its message. The fabric of our civilization is dangerously frayed, and the people who understand that—who are genuinely and appropriately upset about it—are the passion-bearers needed to re-create the world.

  Yet there is subtle disdain for such passion-bearers today. Some seem to think they’re too cool to care. After a recent Hollywood Oscars ceremony, a popular television and movie actress expressed scorn for Oscar winners who used their platform to talk about the environment or corporate greed—the issues about which they were passionate. She said she was happy she lives in New York, where apparently such “Hollywood bullshit” does not occur! It was just too much for her. “Guys,” she said, “pick a lane!” Later that week, I saw her starring in a television commercial for American Express. Yep! She picked her lane.

  But those who are awake to what’s happening on the planet today aren’t looking for approval. They’re looking for a better world, and without apology. Author Paul Hawken has coined the phrase “blessed unrest” to describe a general sense of unease that many people feel. If anything should be worrisome, it’s how many people are not horrified by so much unnecessary suffering in the world today. Sometimes neurosis is best measured not by the things that
make us sad, but by the things that do not make us sad.

  Grief over the grievous state of the world is healthy; where would we be if abolitionists had not been upset about slavery, or suffragettes had not been upset that women could not vote? Such upset is an early warning inside our guts, saying, “The world is going in the wrong direction.” People are depressed today because the world is devolving. We are not wrong to feel this way. Rather, we should be listening to the voice in all of us that’s saying: “Something is wrong here. Something is wrong.” Then we are awakened to the urgent call of history: that we must make it right.

  Every problem emerges originally from a mindset, and every solution emerges from a mindset as well. The problem is not just that we have so many problems; the problem is that too many people feel numb to them, or powerless to fix them, or hopeless, or disillusioned. Disillusionment, however, can be a good thing when it motivates us to mature. Becoming stripped of the illusion that “someone else” will fix our problems, we become aware that we ourselves must do it. Once we’re out there trying to make a difference, we start to feel that something different is possible.

  The correct question is not, “Why do starvation, or genocide, or deep poverty exist?” The question is, “Why do we allow such things to exist?” The people who repudiate and stop such things share a common characteristic: they refuse to shut up. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

  When I was young, there were specific issues we could rail against—the Vietnam War, lack of civil rights, gender inequality—and we did. The problem today is that there is more than just one war over here or one oppressive institution over there; those, we could fix. Our problem now is vaguely all-encompassing, less limited to a particular effect and more an underlying blanket of cause. That overriding cause is the effective yet soulless mindset that’s the child of the new corporatized order, threatening to marginalize anyone who doesn’t play along with an increasingly destructive way of looking at the world.