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In response to a recent Substack post (‘Bad Mood’) describing the impact of aware presence on a negative mid-state, a reader mentioned that dealing with despondency has been a lifelong problem. Or at least, that’s what I took their comment to mean. The reader’s comment prompted another look at the relationship of meditative inquiry to our mental/emotional well-being.

Feeling down, ‘The Blues’, bad mood, pissed off at everything & everyone, stuck with yourself for another day? etc, etc. Oh yeah, ain’t it fun being a human being? Of the billions of us on planet earth at the moment, there is probably not anyone who has not experienced one variety or another of feeling sad, mad, or just plain hopeless. This comes with being human, right? For some, it’s a lifelong, chronic challenge. This writer is not unfamiliar with the dark side. Years ago, it was depression that drove me (long before therapy & prozac), in desperation, to a Zen center. I had no idea what I was doing there except that something about it seemed right. Since then, it has been discovered that the central problem with negative mind states is not the feelings themselves. Thoughts and feelings are transient and based on circumstance. Where we get stuck, however, is in our identification with them. With identification comes judgment and resistance to life. We buy into a constant state of wanting more, more love, more food, more money, more enlightenment. Our suffering lies in our (mostly unconscious) belief that our body-mind comprises our self-identity.

True meditation is the investigation of this assumption. From personal experience, I can vouch for the fact that it’s not easy to come face-to-face with our demons. We do everything we can to avoid that possibility, and in a perverse way, underneath, we love our demons. Watch closely and notice how sadness builds on sadness, anger builds on anger, as do all the emotions. Even what goes as happiness has its inevitable downside because it is so often based on circumstance. As lousy as it might make us feel, we live under the spell of our conditioned self. After all, our conditioning goes back to before we were born. We don’t know who or what we would be without it, and that possibility is seen as a kind of death, which we are programmed to avoid at all costs.

So, how do we break the spell? We meet it, face-to-face. How do we meet it face-to-face? We start by engaging in the most radical human act: shifting our attention from the content of the mind, which is completely based on past and future content, to awareness of the present moment. Waking up starts with the discovery that our thoughts and feelings are witnessed by something beyond thoughts and feelings, an aspect of consciousness that is beyond time, beyond the notion of a personal self.

It takes courage, patience, and having a sense of humor helps, but with earnest application, we may discover that beyond our conditioned self is a spacious, indestructible presence that holds all and everything. The dark clouds may return, but they no longer have an imagined host to attach to. They come and go, like clouds in the sky, and we are free to return to a naturally occurring, effortless presence and happiness in just being alive.