Taking the First Step

So imagine your life isn't everything it could be. That's generally not that hard to imagine. But then also imagine that there's some variation; you know, week to week, is that maybe you're pretty damn miserable, but sometime you're unbelievably miserable, and sometime you're just sort of miserable. And that's not great, but at least there's some variability.

One of the things you might do as a clinician, or as a friend, or as a partner, is say, "Well, exactly what are you doing when you're less miserable, and what are you doing when you're more miserable?" Don't think about it; watch like you're watching someone you don't know. This often happens with depressed people. So one of the problems with depression is it's a positive feedback loop. Hey, because you get depressed, and then you stop seeing your friends. And even if you're introverted, there are friends you want to see at least one-on-one, at least now and then. So now you start to isolate yourself, and then you get more depressed, and then you isolate yourself more, then you get more depressed. It's a downhill spiral, you know? It's not good. A lot of forms of mental illness are positive feedback loops that spiral out of control.

So one of the things you might do with a depressed person, they come to see you if you're a therapist, you might say, "Look, just for the next week, or two weeks or so, I want you to just keep a mood record. You know, maybe check in with yourself every hour on a scale from 1 to 10. Just write down how depressed you are, with 10 being suicidal and 1 being as good as you get, let's say, or maybe even life is worth living." And maybe the depressed person never gets, you know, below six or something, but six is way better than 10.

And then they come back, and you look, and you think, "Oh look, every time you were at 6 instead of 10, you were with this particular person or this set of people, or maybe you're working in your garden, who knows right?" Or maybe if you're artistic, you were doing something artistic, despite the fact that you're paralyzed by your depression, but notice your mood improved some. And then, look, 10 out of 10 depressed, you're alone in your room in bed. It's like not... it's like 11:00 in the morning. It's like, "Okay, so how about this next week? Don't be alone in your bed at 11:00 in the morning and spend like 20% more time, or 10%, or 2% with your friends or doing something that seems to improve not your mood, but your state of being."

And then play with that and see, you know, can you tilt yourself gradually and incrementally, comparing yourself to who you were yesterday? Can you tilt yourself in the right direction? And then, well, that's for depressed people. You might say, "Well, could you do that in your life?" And the answer is yes.

So the Egyptians worshipped this god, Horus. H-O-R-U-S. And Horus, you know, Horus... weirdly enough, everyone knows that famous Egyptian eye, you know, with the arched eyebrow. And, you know, on the back of an American dollar bill, you have an eye that's separated from the pyramid. That's Horus as well. Interestingly enough, that's the gold cap on a pyramid; it's the aluminum cap on the Washington Monument. Aluminum was more precious than gold when they built the Washington Monument. The top of a pyramid is the gold cap, and the gold cap is the eye.

And what's the eye? The eye is the thing that pays attention. And so Horus was the eye, and he was the eye that could see evil and rectify it, by the way. And he was also a falcon. And the reason he was a falcon is because a falcon is a bird of prey that flies above everything and that can see. Birds of prey, they can see better than us. We're very visual animals; we have the second-best visual systems of any animal. Birds of prey see better than we do. They can see clearer and farther.

If a falcon was on top of the Empire State Building, he could see a dime on the pavement below. They're unbelievably sharp-eyed, and ancient people knew this. They hunted with birds of prey, and they watched them. They knew they had spectacular vision, and so they used the falcon as an image of redeeming vision. And they associated redeeming vision with the sun setting and rising because the sun shines when you can see, and so that's a solar god. That's the hero that fights the dragon at night and that comes up victorious in the morning — a very old idea that's all associated with vision.

And vision pays attention. Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't. That doesn't mean everything you don't, and that might mean hardly anything at all, but maybe you could glean something. And because you're clueless and confused, anything you glean might be useful. And so it's useful to attend in a manner that's infused with humility. Why humility? Because you need to know that what you don't know is more important than what you do know.

That's a hard thing to learn because you want to fortify what you know, man, because it feels protective. And it's very threatening to move on the periphery of what you know. But there's a lot of what you don't know — a lot. And you need to know it. And what attitude do you need to bring to bear on what you don't know? It's like pay attention; there might be something there for you.

And so then you attend to yourself, and that ties us back up to the first rule, which is treat yourself like you're someone who you might be responsible for helping. Well, what does that mean? Like you don't know who you are because you don't, as if you're someone made in the image of God, let's say — someone, despite your flaws, of divine intrinsic value; who could hypothetically be a light on the hill? Hard as that is to believe. And then watch and see when you're where you should be. And maybe you're only a bit of the way there; you know, and your life is hell to purgatory.

That's it; there's very little glimpse of paradise. But purgatory beats the hell out of hell. And so maybe you can move from hell into purgatory. That would be something. And maybe when you're there now and then, you're getting a little bit beyond that; you think, "You know, right at this moment, for whatever reason, I'm not doing something so terrible that I'm in hell. What is going on? What's the circumstance? What did I allow to happen that made this possible?"

It's a form of awakening in the most profound sense to notice when that happens. Then you think, "Could I be there more often? 1% more often?" That compounds very quickly, you know. If it's 1% a week for a year, you're going to be there like twice as long in a year as you were before you started. And God only knows how good you could get at that.

If you didn't do anything other than that, let's say, if you really committed to that, God only knows what your life could be like in five years or ten years. Maybe you could be in that state all the time, and who knows what effect you'd have on you and your family and the people around you if you were in that state. And that's something worth thinking about too.

And maybe that's a good thing to close, you know? We have this notion, developed not least in your great country, that people have intrinsic worth; that we're sovereign citizens; that we're all possessed of a voice that redeems the state. That's why we have an inalienable right to free speech, let's say, because we're a necessary corrective to the blindness and archaic nature of the state. We're the living eyes of the dead king.

And maybe that's really true. Then you think, "Well, if the world isn't everything you want it to be, set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world." If the world isn't everything that you want it to be, maybe you're not acting the way you should, you know? Because there's some — in our deepest ideas — that the weight of the world rests on your shoulders.

Now that's a terrible thing to think, but maybe it's true. And it's an open question how much of the mess that you see around you would vanish if the mess that you could put straight was set straight. And you know this too, to some degree, because to the degree that you haven't become entirely embittered and cynical and hopeless, you know perfectly well that if you put your mind to it and you make the proper sacrifices, there are things you can set straight.

And that if you do that diligently, things actually improve. And so because otherwise, if you didn't believe that, you wouldn't act at all. Like, well, maybe you'd just turn to completely catastrophic short-term impulsive pleasure or something like that. You have to believe that your action has some redemptive possibility because why would you do it otherwise?

And you might say, "Well, I kind of believe that." It's like, "Well, that's not good enough." You know, you kind of got to throw yourself all into it. And what's the cost anyways? You know, it's not like you're going to get out of this alive. So you're pretty much all in, whether you want to be or not. And maybe if you were voluntarily all in, things would be a lot better than they are, and that's an exciting thing to try to find out.

Know if you allowed yourself to be guided by the intimation of meaning, and I mean defined on your terms, in some real sense, if you swore that you'd do your best not to use deceit and instrumental manipulation, if you decided that you were going to put things straight, what do you think might happen?