What The Thunder Said

...of course, when I get the message all my being becomes demagnetized and back in sync somehow.

In case you're wondering the last few posts have been about a depressive state that, with 20–20 hindsight, has been going on for about the last 72 hours. It has now evaporated. It was disturbingly intense. It reminded me that for quite some time my whole life seemed saturated with feelings like that.

It's a bit scary how it creeps up on you. You find yourself in it. So much so that it's only later that you can really figure out what was going on. In part this is due to the serious cognitive impairment that's happening (see my previous posts).

In the last post I said that I was tuning in to some kind of information that the depression seems to want to tell me from the future. That's how I think of moods: they are frozen information. In particular depression seems to have a lot of wisdom frozen inside it, like something trapped in glass. A message in a bottle from the future.

It's hard to describe the kind of call that seems to be frozen inside the depression; unless you've experienced it yourself you may not have a good grasp of it. Nevertheless, thanks in no small measure to the kind messages I've been receiving (thank you again), I was able to tune it in somehow.

In essence the message was a kind of summons to do some specific Buddhist practice, but more generally it was sort of what Heidegger describes in terms of the call of conscience. Just a couple of days ago I was thinking of myself in a very limited way; I think I had gotten stuck in my “social I,” my idea of the other's idea of me. Somehow the depression was the hard, frozen end of a lifeline that pulled me out of that.

On realizing this the depression dissolved into that more open, formless state—gosh I don't really even know what you call it. I was re-tuned to Da-sein? I don't know. I played the tune above. It somewhat well evokes the feeling of relief.