If you’re not ready to accept what’s in this post, that’s OK; read it anyway, put it in the background, and ignore it as long as you need to.
What you don’t like about someone else is what you don’t like about yourself. (This is a subset of “you can’t love someone else until you learn to love yourself,” a lovely piece of kitch I’m still evaluating.)
The way I see it, depression–at least, my depression–lives in three places: thoughts, feelings, and chemicals. These three both cause and are caused by each other, so depression has this tendency to feed back on itself. If you are or have been depressed, or have watched someone be depressed, you know what I’m talking about.
It’s worth pointing out that this is one interpretation of my experience, among many valid, understandable, logical interpretations.
I make no apologies for the length of this post: it is intended to be comprehensive.
To be clear: It’s not that I believe there is no god, I just don’t believe there is a god. I don’t know if it can be known, and I don’t care. To the question, “God?,” there are three possible answers: “yes,” “no,” and “I don’t know.” I do not respond with any of these answers. I just don’t answer the question.
This is a longer post than I like writing. I’m sorry. The length is necessary in order to be sufficiently clear and precise.
Last month I asserted that, in the presence of enough “integrity,” emergencies couldn’t exist. This assertion came out of a complaint I had that everyone around me was constantly having emergencies, and it was interfering with my plans. Meanwhile, I (whose farts don’t stink) do not have emergencies. I have enough “integrity” that “unforeseen circumstances” do not become “emergencies.”
For about a week, my meditations were not helpful. I could not quiet my mind. I have invented a remedy, at least for the specific problem I’ve been having.