About Mind, Education, & Contemporary Life

Sunday, February 06, 2005

Here is the second installment of my article, "Aesthetic Realism: The Answer to Depression."

When I told my consultants how isolated I felt and what had happened to me the year before, they asked:

If a person wants to be isolated, what would that say about how they see everything else--"All that is friendly" or not so friendly?

SR: Not so friendly.

They explained,

Two things can deeply distress a person: feeling nothing in the world has met us fairly, and feeling that we have not dealt fairly with the world.

I said I had seen people and things as against me, not dealing fairly with me. But I also told them, "I have these dialogues inside myself--I mock what people say, or I turn things around." What my consultants explained next, every person, every mental practitioner needs to know:

Cons: Aesthetic Realism says, in every person is an ethical unconscious…. If you choose to see the world in an unfair way, your own ethical unconscious is critical of you and you are against yourself. This is where Aesthetic Realism differs from other ways of seeing self, which say we feel bad because there are standards imposed on us by the outside world which we don't meet…. You were ashamed because you weren't meeting your own demands.

As I left that consultation, I felt free! I saw for the first time that there was something I could really respect myself for--a demand coming from myself that I be fair to the world. And I began to see that the world had so much in it I could get enor­mous pleasure from: objects, trees, music, the biology I now love to teach, the feelings of people--and so much more! I knew I had found what I was looking for. That consultation was 32 years ago; and since that time, I have never been depressed again.

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