By SADHGURU, Isha Foundation
Sadhguru: Somewhere in a past quote, I said ‘If things are going wrong with your life, it is bad enough. If you get depressed, you are only multiplying the problem.’ Let me explain that.
Depression means you are unable to maintain the exuberance of life in you. It happens even in your body. If you are depressed, even the physical body flops. Life within you is not exuberant – it has just gone down and lost its exuberance because you are not doing the right thing with it. Unless you are pathologically ill, which is just a small number people, depression is mostly self-created.
There are some people who are pathologically ill. Depression gets them in spite of themselves. If they go without medication for periods of time, they may not be able to come out at all. Some of them will never come out – that is a different matter. But I am not talking about those who are pathologically ill. We are talking about the fringe kind of madness which all of us have. If something goes wrong, I can also drive myself into depression. Everyone is capable of driving themselves into depression.
Suppose you get very angry, what is the expression you use? ‘I am mad at you!’ Consciously, willingly, you are getting mad because you get some results in society. But the line between sanity and insanity is so thin, if you keep trying to push it, one day you will cross.
There are many, many people in the world who need not be ill, both physically and mentally. For example, in the last fifty years, some millions of cardiac surgeries have been done. Today, surgeons are clearly telling you that if you go off red meat, if you eat the right food, if you exercise, then you will not come to the surgery table.
Similarly, many people push themselves into depressive states at certain times in their life, and the same people also come out in a determined way. Most of them come out of it without anyone’s help, or maybe with the help of a friend, or someone who mentored them a little bit. So this possibility is open, and everybody need not end up with chemicals.
A Time for Consciousness, Not Chemicals For the previous generation or the ones before, heaven was a way of managing humanity. If you were miserable, they would solace you saying, ‘Do not worry, when you go there, everything will be okay.’ It is a psychological tool. But today, heavens are collapsing in people’s minds, though they are still not articulating it. I am sure not many people are thinking, ‘One day when I go to heaven, everything will be fantastic.’
People are trying to have alternatives right here by getting drunk and drugged. There has been such an increase in consumption of alcohol and drugs on the planet. At this point in time, if we do not raise human consciousness in a big way, if we do not teach people how to sit here absolutely blissed out by their own nature, then believe me, in another fifty to seventy years’ time, at least ninety percent of the human population will be on some kind of chemical. They will need chemicals for everything: to be healthy, to be peaceful, to be joyful. Almost sixty percent of the US population is already on prescription medication.
Every day I am meeting thousands of people. Not everybody is perfectly sane – a lot of them go off, and they need the doctor’s help. We are not discounting that, but if you do not bring the fundamental responsibility in every human being from an early age that their physical and mental health is their business, then you will see a lot more people will go off.
In yoga, depression is handled at the level of the body, mind and the energies. If the necessary balance and vibrancy is brought about in the physical, mental and energy bodies, to be blissful is very natural. In a blissful being, depression can never exist.
Ranked amongst the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and a New York Times bestselling author. Sadhguru
has been conferred the Padma Vibhushan by the Government of India in 2017, the second- highest annual civilian award, accorded for exceptional and distinguished service.