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Good Mood:
The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Chapter 19

cont.

The answer lies in the commonly-observed fact that, in addition to inner peace, along with Feeling X comes joy and a sense of awe at life and the universe. Even more, Feeling X tends to produce a cosmic sense of kinship with all people and all nature, which dissolves anger, envy, and greed. For this the term "purification of the heart" certainly fits.

The sequence, then, is not from purity to Experience X, but rather from the search for Experience X, to achieving Experience X, to purity of the heart. This process can remove the depression following loss of faith that an active God intervenes in the world to punish evil and reward virtue.

Only some fabled yogis can achieve Feeling X permanently. And few of us would want to.(5) But Buber stresses that, for the Psalmist, God says, "I am continually with thee." (Christians would say that grace is always being offered.) This means that the possibility of Feeling X is always there, to be achieved whenever a person diligently seeks after it, whenever a person directs and molds the mind in these ways that conduce to inner peace.

One may choose to think of the occurrence of Feeling X as purely natural, a product of one's mind (self-control and imagination) and of body (effects of breathing and posture on the nervous system). Or one may believe that a transcendent non- natural force, commonly called God, is responsible. But if one chooses the latter course, the God concept is not a God involved with the course of human affairs or reward and punishment, but rather a God of the creation of inner peace and purification of the heart, concerning which "there is nothing left of Heaven."6

Not all people can or are willing to follow Buber's way. It requires that a person not automatically reject such a spiritual way. It also requires that the person have a modicum of natural capacity for spiritual experience, just as enjoying music requires some natural capacity (though perhaps all persons are so endowed). For those who cannot follow Buber's way there is at least one other way, completely secular. This way also is appropriate for a loss-of-meaning crisis.

A Secular Response to Religious Despair

The secular way is to inquire into what a person considers important - which might be non-violence, happiness for one's children, a beautiful environment, or one's nation's success. Upon inquiry, most people will agree that they have a "taste" for their own values and believe these values to be important without having to justify them from a religious or world view.

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Values Therapy then asks the person simply to treat as important the values he says he believes are important - to recognize that he is asserting and affirming that there is meaning in these values and their associated situations. Bertrand Russell commented that no philosopher is in doubt about objective reality when holding a crying baby in the middle of the night. Similarly, secular Values Therapy asks a person to acknowledge that which is implicit in his values and behavior, to wit, that the person does find meaning in various aspects of life even while the person is ostensibly in doubt about meaning in general. This contradiction sometimes leads a person to abandon the general question about whether life has meaning, on the grounds that the question is a meaningless linguistic in the person's mind, and itself the source of the unnecessary and avoidable depression. (For others, of course, statements about the meaning of life can be unconfused and meaningful.)

Summary

Sometimes a person with a traditional Western belief in God loses that belief because events in the world do not square with the traditional belief in God the Father who rewards good and punishes evil. A related cause of depression is "loss of meaning." about one's life. There are two approaches to such crises - spiritual and secular. The chapter discusses both these approaches that are so intertwined with a person's most fundamental beliefs.

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