Your soul chose to come to Earth. Isn’t that wild? You’re incarnated in human form here temporarily, and trust me, when you get to the other side at the end of this life, this will all seem like it went by in the blink of an eye. And there’s a purpose here. The purpose isn’t to wallow in sadness and self-pity. When you see everything from a higher perspective, it eliminates the worry, stress, and depression you often feel in life.
You’re essentially a soul experiencing human life, not a human who has a soul. This is just one segment of a larger soul journey, and it’s all for your evolution and the evolution of the universal soul. What does this have to do with spiritual depression? Well, it means that while you’re here, you have a persona that you’ve created. This persona is a new layer on top of your soul, which is the essential you. A lot of your sadness and hopelessness in this life is probably based on this persona — I will call it the ego.
The Ego’s Version of Depression
You have built up your identity based on your relationships, ancestry, community, possessions, status, and so on. Almost all of the things that you think make you a person are part of this temporary soul journey as a human being. If you could become completely conscious of how fleeting all of this really is, you would laugh about all the things you’ve ever worried about. The soul knows the true significance of life.
The difference between soul depression and ego depression is that when one is based on things “outside you” and the other is based on your soul journey, which is within you. If you are sad that you didn’t get a promotion or that your dog died, you are experiencing ego-level depression. Why? Because your job only defines your ego, and the money you get from it buys you material possessions that you can’t take with you when you die. None of it is really meaningful.
Your dog, on the other hand, is also a soul, so it’s only your ego that is sad about that. When humans and dogs die, it is just a transition to another segment of the greater journey. Your soul knows that you will reunite again because you’re both on a soul journey with lives that intermingle over and over.
Spiritual Depression Comes from the Soul Journey
There are so many ups and downs here, it’s like a rollercoaster of trauma and emotions. It is a valid emotion to feel sad that your soul made the choice to come here and experience this again. Sometimes, I have to wonder why we would ever elect to be here in the first place when life seems so cruel. Spiritual depression goes beyond “regular depression” because it stems from a feeling at the soul level instead of the ego level.
When you come to terms with your soul journey, there can either be great joy or great unhappiness. Spiritual awakenings can be dark. You may feel joy in the experience of one human moment, but you also may realize that everything has a beginning and an ending, and that makes living as a human being very sad and hard to endure.
Happiness can seem fleeting and pointless because it always fades. Worrying about the future does nothing to change it, but at least when you’re worrying, you still care about what happens in the future. In spiritual depression, you may find yourself letting go of the attachment to the outcome because everything is temporary anyway. This is what people refer to as ego death, which I discuss in the next part of this book.
Shifting Your Consciousness is the Answer
Only the ego attaches a sense of identity to the future and derives happiness from external situations. But the soul derives meaning from the soul’s journey. You have a far greater existence than this one lifetime.
I’ve found that when my ego’s hopes for the future subside, instead of feeling liberated, I have often started to think that there are no happy endings. I’m left with an endless abyss of hopelessness. It’s deeply sad. Why am I here?
This is just a sign that the ego is still hanging on. The only way to release the pain and sorrow is to rise above the current situation and see it all from the soul level.
I’ve been there — and it’s hard to do. Your consciousness needs to become something totally new. It’s one of the most difficult shifts you’ll ever make. But after a period of intense grief, I did manage to find my way back to the light. I shifted my consciousness so that I rarely allow the spiritual depression to affect me now. You can read about how I did that in my article about losing faith in the universe.
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