“It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the
human mind it has overcome man’s insecurity before himself and nature.” Albert Einstein
Depression
is all about the mind—the "thinking" mind; more specifically, how
the mind functions. The human mind plays a pivotal role in depression: it
could be the underlying “cause” of many problems related to depression; on the
other hand, it could also be the "antidote" of depression. That is to
say, the human mind is a double-edged sword: it could create many “problems”
for depression, as well as provide many “solutions” to depression.
The thinking
mind plays several major roles in your life, especially in relation to
depression.
Life is about experiences, which are composed of thoughts of those experiences by the
human mind. According to James Allen,
the author of As A Man Thinketh, men are “makers of themselves” and the
human mind is the “master-weaver, by both of the inner garment of character and
the outer garment of circumstance.” Accordingly, you may have become who you
and what you are by way of your thinking mind over the years; in short, you are
the sum of your own thoughts. Therefore, your thinking mind plays a pivotal
role in your life.
First and foremost, you must fully understand the major roles of
your mind in your everyday life and living, and how it may work for you
or against you with respect to your depression.
Perceptions and Realities
“Everything
you perceive, externally, is the manifestation of some internal part of you. If
it was not, it would not be present in your perceived reality.” Tony
Warrick
Your mind perceives all your life experiences through your five
senses: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. To most people,
seeing is the most important perception; however, what they see may not be the absolute reality, because their visual perceptions may be
conditioned by what they see, and distorted by many other factors during the
processing of their perceptions. Remember, it is the intuition of your soul that really perceives your reality. The wise
have known for a long time that what we know through our eyes are not the same
as the intuition of the soul. If that is the case, sadly, most people rely on
what they see, thinking that "seeing is believing," and thus lose
themselves in external things.
As an illustration, in 1997, Richard
Alexander from Indiana
The truth is that your brain is composed of grey matters and
neurons or nerve cells that transmit information and messages; they are the
building blocks of your brain for the processing of all your perceptions.
Neurons are responsible for all your behaviors in the form of perceptions,
which trigger a mental process that results in an action or an emotion.
If the process becomes instinctive or habitual, then the output in
the form of an action or emotion is also automatic and predictable. That is how
attitudes and habits are formed, including the fight-or-flight response to any
dangerous situation. This automatic or spontaneous mental processing is often
not “by choice.” The fact of the matter is that this “learned” mental
processing is responsible for the way you think and act, for your beliefs and
emotions, for you attitudes and prejudices, as well as for your decisions or
indecisions—in other words, every aspect of your life experiences.
Gradually and accumulatively, all your life experiences with their
own respective messages—the pleasant as well as the unpleasant, the positive as
well as the negative—are all stored at the back of your subconscious mind in
the form of data and memories. Over the long haul, millions and billions of
such experiences and messages have become the raw materials with which you
subconsciously weave the fabrics of your life, making you who and what you have now
become—or so you think. In other
words, they have now become your so-called “realities.”
Unfortunately, these so-called “realities” may also make you
become depressed.
Copyright© by
Stephen Lau
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