Depressed Person: “Everything is infinitely pointless, nobody cares how you feel, especially not the utterly cold and indifferent clockwork that drives our nightmare universe, and you will die alone and be erased forever. There is one all-consuming problem that makes any progress impossible, which is the existential prison of flesh that I’m entombed in. Until I can escape that, there is no progress, only more meat. And meat is just a countdown to eternal oblivion.
Any time I try to make progress on any of my smaller goals, I get a bit of work done, and then the existential futility of being washes over me and none of it means anything, and it’s all just waiting for the Sword of Damocles to fall.
James: All due respect, but you have it backwards, sad to say. The meaty prison is IN YOU, not the other way around. You’re already free of it. Here’s why. See if this isn’t true. You are never what you see, which means that you, the conscious subject, is always apart from the objects it perceives. The body, which is just meat, does’t see you, which it would if what you say is true. You see it. It can’t see anything because it is insentient, just a material blob. It is always an object; you never are. If you were, there would be two observers, one watching the other, but that’s not how it is for anybody. We all only experience one self experiencing many objects i.e. thoughts/experiences.
This is not an argument. If you think about it a while you will see that it’s true and that horrible feeling of despair will dissolve. No doubt about it. The Sword of Damocles never falls. It is always only about to fall like all conspiracy theories, which rarely become actualities. It is fear incarnated in a lie. Why believe that feeling when you can believe the liberating thought, “I am immortal fearless existence shining as whole and complete awareness?” You can only think one thought at a time, so when you are thinking you’re pure and perfect, you can’t be impure and imperfect.
Feelings are only evidence of themselves. They have no referents. All thoughts and feelings unwittingly prove the existence of unborn existence shining as whole and complete consciousness.
