You know the most raw shit I figured out recently? The ability to turn that depression into something beautiful. The ability to understand the condition in more complex heights than others are what enabled me to form these thoughts. The source of my own difference that made me unique. The absurdity of the origin of the unease sadness that I never understand why I'm more sad than other people and the push towards myself to fabricate these lines of thoughts towards writing and create beautiful ideas that starts initially from the desire to understand my condition has become a medium that can also help others. To become proud that my very own depression has become the same thing that paves my way towards becoming a more useful human being. I am what I want to believe, standing among artists that have depression, much like Billy Corgan, has ripped The Absurdity of one’s indifference and turned it into meaning. In which meaning is not only subjectively perceived by me but also other people.
Those are lines of words that I sent to my friend over discord yesterday as a snippet from our discussion after he watched The Gap.
I'm reading Albert Camus, the myth of Sisyphus right now. I didn't read a lot of his works, I just know his general idea and his affection towards the word "Absurd" or "Absurdity". Can't help but to share the fact that me and Camus shared a similar meaning even if its coming from a different origin.
My origin is coming from my own experience with depression and sadness in where I happen to truly understand the importance of reasoning in where reasoning has served as the light that beams amidst the bleakness of my own depression. The act of writing as a symbolization of the act of reasoning has what helped me survived my depression at least measured by the intensity and occurence of my own suicidal tendencies. My desire to understand and to be listened and understood by others was placed on a great significance to the point that I long to be heard and to be understood whether I am still human to feel these feelings. The book that really saved me was actually George E Atwood, Abyss of madness, as I would like to quote myself from The Repressed:
Have you ever felt moments where you don’t feel like you’re quite like yourself? If you do, there’s nothing wrong with it, as much as I like to believe, because I feel it too, very often at times. Maybe it’s not that frequent but when the moment comes it sure is memorable. Recently, I’ve stumbled upon a great work or I could say the greatest that I’ve ever known which is the idea of the so called mental illness is or falling into madness or whichever many choose to label it it’s just a label for psychiatrist term based on a general psychosis episode but itself, the nature of the condition, is almost unique to its own bearer, a unique human reaction in a very human context. The moment I found that out I felt a great sense of relief, I felt in some sense understood.
I also want to confess that I feel for an incredibly long time, to be extremely lonely. Not that I don’t have many friends, I do have many around me. It’s just that I find it to be extremely difficult to share my shadow. One time in the past, someone has met my shadow and told me that it’s my own baggage to bear. It has been some time now. I also find it extremely difficult to explain even just the slightest acknowledgment of a “shadow” to others.
The feeling of lostness greatly resemblances me walking on the uncharted territory of depression. The sensations that came with it, the unfamiliarities, the want to escape out of the pit of despair in which the pit itself is only a mental state. There's literally nothing much new about the world, just the perspective of it. The act of waking up is always the same, eating breakfast and lunch is always the same, yet why am I so troubled, unmotivated, as my head gets inflated on how much shit everything is.
The push to be hyper critical out of the sheer amount of pain from depression. As suffering can come without needing a good reason. If anything, suffering as a state could come without needing to have a good reason. Reason is almost always hindsight. The conviction on how certain things happened as one has become able to see the good out of dire circumstances and justify the bad circumstances from happening is hindsight. When one is in a state of suffering, suffering can really seem meaningless. "Why must I suffer? Why am I the only one who suffers? Is this the consequences of being human?"
Things can happen without needing a good reason. People can choose to be malicious towards you without ever thinking about if they are placed as you. A bad thing could happen without considering if it'll be ultimately good for you. The people that you love and how much they mean to you can leave you without needing a good reason for you. Reason is entirely on your own to form not others. Your meaning of life as a belief can crumble out of your own actions or the actions of others without needing a good reason prior to it crumbling.
The whole theme between reasoning and ending one's life is a huge debate or rather problem that philosophers are trying to solve.
The bind between reasoning and ending one's life serves as a great foundation of understanding the essence of the human condition.
I would like to quote the great argument from Albert Camus from the Myth of Sisyphus that uses logic on how to solve this problem:
But if it is hard to fix the precise instant, the subtle step when the mind opted for death, it is easier to deduce from the act itself the consequences it implies. In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it. Let's not go too far in such analogies, however, but rather return to everyday words. It is merely confessing that that "is not worth the trouble." Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence, for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering. The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd.
...
In the face of such contradictions and obscurities must we conclude that there is no relationship between the opinion one has about life and the act one commits to leave it? Let us not exaggerate in this direction. In a man' s attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills in the world. The body' s judgement is as good as the mind's, and the body shrinks from annihilation. We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us toward death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.
End Quote
The line of "In the face of such contradictions and obscurities must we conclude that there is no relationship between the opinion one has about life and the act one commits to leave it?" practically concludes that there must be a relation between one's opinion about life and the act that one commits to leave it. But how could you form an opinion without any gesture of understanding?
The best part of understanding is that it is entirely on your own to form. Yeah other people can maybe help you form your understanding or opinion about life, until they are proven wrong. Maybe you will stop listening to the people who have told you to do X Y Z until X Y Z are proven to be wrong.
This is the same for me with religion. It's almost as if I have given up putting all faith in religion. There are times when I was on a brink of suicide and God didn't helped me doesn't matter how much I ask for meaning. It's almost as if I expect something outwardly to happen. I hope a miracle will materialise and only then I will understand everything and my depression will go away. Nothing happens! The depression is still there! I didn't bind my recovery out of the love of God and thus God no longer has any significance inside my head. Had I chosen to bind my recovery with the power of God, God's presence will ever be stronger inside my head.
I didn't appreciate how the experience of suffering lacks meaning when I experience it. All I realise is that coming out of it and what it took to lift myself up out of it was sheer amount of effort towards understanding myself. Forging ideas that helped me alleviate my depression. Reading books written by philosophers that explore the "nature" of the human condition. Making myself feel that I am still human to experience the feelings of depression. Other people have helped even if it's not in their intention to help me but their line of words has unintentionally helped me. God never do shit. It's a concept. I hate it, it's personal. If he exists then how come He sits on his perfect chair on his perfect heaven and the fact 700,000 people comitted suicide out of the pain of each to its own failure to comprehend such heights of pain? Did he sit there while hearing the relentless prayers of fellow humans to seek meaning and choose to proceed with his observance until one finally slit their throat and throw that person to hell? What happens to "God created us because He loves us?" Even if Christianity wanted to debate that Jesus Christ once suffered and thus God knows the amount of your suffering and it is by most definite conviction that it is less than what Jesus Christ has suffered. Have they really claimed that they have an objective measurement of one's suffering? Have they never experienced being human before? Have they known with great certainty on how to measure each to its own suffering to the point it's comparable? As I would like to quote Emil Cioran regarding this issue of suffering:
Is there an objective criterion for evaluating suffering? Who can say with precision that my neighbour suffers more than I do or that Jesus suffered more than all of us? There is no objective standard because suffering cannot be measured according to the external stimulation or local irritation of the organism, but only as it is felt and reflected in consciousness. Alas, from this point of view, any hierarchy is out of the question. Each person remains with his own suffering, which he believes is absolute and unlimited. How much would we diminish our own personal suffering if we were to compare it to all the world's sufferings until now, to the most horrifying agonies and the most complicated tortures, the most cruel deaths and the most painful betrayals, all the lepers, all those burned alive or starved to death? Nobody is comforted in his sufferings by the thought that we are all mortals, nor does anybody who suffers really find comfort in the past or present suffering of others. Because in this organically insufficient and fragmentary world, the individual is set to live fully, wishing to make of his own existence an absolute. Each subjective existence is absolute to itself. For this reason each man lives as if he were the center of the universe or the center of history. Then how could his suffering fail to be absolute? I cannot understand another's suffering in order to diminish my own. Comparisons in such cases are irrelevant, because suffering is an interior state, in which nothing external can help.
End Quote.
In which I agree. Each subjective existence is absolute only to itself. Then if there's anyone who would want to confront me as I had been confronted before, in a daring way to compare my suffering to how the prophets of the past have suffered in greater significance, they are simply being ignorant. Ignoring my human feelings and my human emotions that gives essence to my own subjective suffering. People who dare to say otherwise are objectively putting themselves on a high horse, wearing a mask to inform everyone that they know everything when they don't.
If God is real and the words of God from the Holy Scripture is indeed the word of God. Then we must accept the condition that there is indeed an entity who says "I will not make you suffer more than you are capable of'' while many lives are spent slitting their throats, drowning themselves, throwing their bodies off a bridge, while the entity is most definitely aware of all of these things happening. Even He is the one who is responsible for our creation and He knows that those humans are incapable of such experience of suffering and thus killed themselves. Isn't that just made the whole "God created us because He loves us" to be futile and untrue?
If the words of the Holy Scripture is indeed true of the Word of God then the only sensible explanation why suicide proceeds to happen is either God was not aware that the words spoken from his own mouth when he says "I will not make you suffer more than you are capable of" is out of his false comprehension of suffering or He does not care that is deducted by his very own lack of response to prevent suicide from happening.
When oneself spent his suffering days searching for the meaning of his suffering through prayers to an external deity and got nothing in return. One begins to question if he is the only thing responsible for creating meaning out of his own suffering. He can attribute God and he also can attribute himself out his own capability to change his own opinion about life that is bleak and leaning towards the act of suicide to be something else that phrases his opinion about life to moving away from suicide.
He could avoid suicide out of the fear of hell or he could avoid suicide out of the sober realization that life is beautiful and its such a shame to waste it away with suicide.
Ultimately, one's opinion about life will greatly influence how one moves in life. The principles that one believes has value that led him to move and shape his perception on one's opinion about life.
I just happen to become the person that prefers to have control. I don't like to believe that everything is under control unless I know that I have verified it and believe to some degree of conviction that it is okay. I don't like to hear "Have faith that everything is going to be okay." I would still like to ask "Yeah but based on what?"
I don't like to believe there is an afterlife as how it's phrased in religion that the existence of afterlife greatly discounts the value of the current life. Saying it as if the current life is "Temporary", "Nothing more than a test", and "Something that needs to be overcome". I just don't like that. There's so many things that can come with our own capability of having emotions, the beauty of the world, the beauty of friendships and relationships. Life is as beautiful as you want it to be. You can say the world is shit but the mountain will still be a mountain. The sun is not going to go away just because you believe the world is shit. The trees will still give you oxygen to sustain your living. They don't care about your opinion on life. They will still remain there, ever so absurdly without needing any good inherent reason.
In a world where one formed an opinion that the origin of existence is absurd without God's presence, religion serves a digestible lore for one to sustain living as a means to reason his own meaning out of the absurdity of existing.
In a world where one formed an opinion that God contradicts himself between what He said and of what human nature reveals, religion serves as a distraction or rather a false answer to his own meaning of life.
It's just a difference in belief, doesn't mean that there need to be a conflict. If anything, the person who started the conflict out of difference in belief is the one who is more right to be antagonised. Why disturb my peace when I didn't disturb yours? What happened to "The Religion of Peace?"