Depression is the absence of dukkha

Once again going back to the days of my childhood as an anchor in time, I remember a world full of dukkha but empty of depression. This is what makes me wonder, whether depression is the way of the Shakti telling us that pain can never be completely eliminated from life, and when you remove physical, causal, and understandable pain from life, that is dukkha… then an unexplainable, uncaused and chronic pain sets in, which we now know as depression.

Yes, the world of my childhood was full of pain. I feel no shame or embarrassment in accepting it. It is quite too often that enthusiastic Hindu activists portray the pre-modern, pre-Islamic times as times of uniform and unmitigated bliss of every kind, spiritual and material. This is as untrue as an assertion that Islam brought equality in India.

The Hindu India was not a place without pain. There was much suffering, much pain in life even then too. But the pain was understood in its true context: that it is the result of our own past actions and that karmic cycle of pleasure and pain has to be broken by our efforts towards self-realization. The pain was causal. It was understandable, it was physical. And that is why it never became a mental disease, it never turned into depression.

I say that dukkha was causal because no one in my childhood used to blame their pain on the system, or the tradition. There was no amorphous institution or State entity or a concept like patriarchy or misogyny which could be blamed for every pain that one experienced. There were very specific causes of every kind of pain, both worldly and spiritual.

Thus, every woman blamed the Pandit who married her to her husband as the cause of her pain. If something bad happened to the child, it was the tona-totka of the jealous padosan. The mother-in-law was of course the ready object as the source of pain, so was the daughter-in-law in the older circles. No matter how greater the pain was it was always attributed to some very specific cause.

Jyotish often helped. I have all the respect for the Jyotish as a real discipline and a means of knowing, but we cannot deny that it also had a psychological effect on people. If something good had not happened till now, it was in store in future. If something very bad had happened, then it was karmic debt paid off.

The theory of karma also came to help. Every arbitrary evil, like an accident resulting in death, was the result of the previous karma. Every social exploitation was explained in the same way. Either the person who was suffering had exploited the exploiter in the previous birth, or he was going to in next birth. In one case there was the consolation of karmic debt paid off. In other case there was the pleasure of vengeance.

In any case, the balance would always come to zero. There was a sense of justice, running deeper than the reach of Law or the arms of the State. It was not even a religious sense of justice. It was greater than even faith in individual deities. It was directly connected to one’s own deeds, as karma and phala siddhanta. No matter how bad things got, Hindus were always encouraged to hold back from doing something evil, otherwise it will come back to bite them again in next birth.

And, as I said, there was no dearth of pain and suffering in the traditional society. There were pandemics, there were deaths in accidents, in illnesses as small as malaria. Poverty always haunted most of the population. Most people were just one week of illness away from falling into chronic debt. Almost everyone knew the pain of losing someone dear to one’s heart. What is unthinkable to most mothers now, the loss of a child, was the part and parcel of motherhood back then. You had many children, some lived, some died. It was as simple as that.

My Dadi lost 3 children out of 7. My Nani lost 7 out of 13.

And yet, everyone took that pain into stride. Yes, they had the consolation of karma. Yes, they had the support of faith. But even more than that, the sense that life was in equal parts pain and pleasure was common knowledge. That pain was an integral and inalienable part of life was firmly established in everyone’s psyche, even children. Suffering was routine, and that the routine took the edge off of it.

Gradually after the turn of the century, poverty was eliminated for a great section of society. Starvation no longer killed anyone. Wars no longer killed people directly, at least in India. Things no longer were so hard to attain. Pandemics seem to have become a thing of the past. Malaria no longer killed people. Children stopped dying as infant mortality dropped. The very sense of losing children gradually receded away into a painful memory.

This temporary moratorium on physical suffering, bought costly at a premium price in future, lulled all of us into a false sense that life is all about pleasure, that pain is an aberrance, that suffering is unnatural, that evil is human invention.

On one hand, when misfortune did strike in face of an accident, it was no longer bearable. Losing one’s children just destroyed the parents. With just one or two of them, there was no possibility of finding solace in other children. Temporarily eliminating physical pain did more harm than help. It made us lose the strength to fight and overcome pain.

On the other hand, as the physical suffering receded, and as atheism and rationalism also set in, life suddenly gave way to an unexplained, non-causal, chasm in life: known as depression. Everyone now had everything. A job, all the freedom in the world, no more patriarchy, no more misogyny, no more ‘imposition of religion’ or ‘meaningless and superstitious tradition’. Poverty was unknown to anyone. Everyone had articles. Everyone had tasted some kind of sweet. Everyone had travelled to some other part of the world. (I know in India there are still the other kind, but I am mainly speaking of those living the new life, and mostly in cities.)

With no physical reason of suffering, and with no spiritual discipline to accompany this alleviation of physical suffering, there set in depression. It was unexplainable. People started saying, they ‘just don’t feel good anymore’. Everything was so easily attainable and always available, including easy sex, nothing was exciting anymore. With no one telling them what to do, what to eat, and how to dress, freedom lost its charm in the absence of bondage. With all kind of boundaries disappearing, the very concept of freedom lost its meaning. With infectious diseases receding into the past, chronic diseases like diabetes set in, diseases which are causeless, just like depression.

In other words, we just exchanged one set of suffering for another.

The suffering in the old times was mostly physical. It almost always had cause, and if it didn’t, our tradition invented one for it. The new suffering was causeless, unexplainable. With nothing hard to get, nothing to excite them, and nothing to elevate them to spiritual planes either, people were just bored. As boredom became chronic, a sense of emptiness set in. With no cause of physical suffering, even the smallest of things bothered us. Some comment by our friend, some article missing from the shopping mall was enough to send us teetering down the den of depression.

In the traditional society, not ‘tolerating anyone’ was financially and socially impossible. In the new scheme of things, ‘tolerating someone’ was suddenly an option, an option that increasingly lesser number of people took. At first there was happiness, and a sense of freedom, but they soon realized that along with the obnoxious they also threw the charming out of the window. They realized that along with banishing ‘intrusion in personal life’ they also banished lovely companionship.

And thus we see the spectacle of teenagers committing suicide just because someone calls them fat, and to think that just a few decades ago, women could lost 7 out of 13 children and yet live to a ripe age of 95, and not a sad life at that.

That is why I say, depression, is the absence of dukkha.

When the physical pain is eliminated by artificial means, the mental pain sets in. When the periodical pain is eliminated, the chronic pain sets in. When the causal, explainable pain is eliminated, the uncaused, unexplainable pain sets in.

Pain is there to stay. We need to wrap our minds around it. Pain cannot be eliminated but only transcended and for that our tradition of Sanatana Dharma had millions of ways, one of which was meditation.