When people don’t get what they desire, they sometimes become angry and sometimes depressed – are anger and depression twins

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Question? So, I said desire leads to anger, but many times when people don’t get what they desire, that leads to depression, so, are anger and depression twins? Not exactly twins, depression, is anger, directed at oneself, anger directed towards others, is aggression, anger directed towards oneself, is depression, what that means is, why am I not good enough? Why is my life not good enough? Generally, it’s not just anger directed towards oneself, it’s also one’s own life, why is it like this, why is it like this, but usually, there’s a difference between depression and resentment, resentment is when that same anger is directed towards the situation, and it’s also accompanied with some helpless feeling, but depression is, when we, feel that we are not good enough, we can be in a, we can be in a reasonably good situation, but the mind can speak three words, which can make even a comfortable situation miserable, those three words are NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Not good enough. Not good enough, our relationships are not good enough, our health is not good enough, our figures are not good enough, our speech is not good enough, our income is not good enough, our this is not good enough, you can also say your spiritual life is not good enough, knowledge is not good enough, NOT GOOD ENOUGH.
And that can make us depressed, So, there are, this is an important question, so I’ll answer it a little bit more, that see there are, some people are so proud, are so arrogant, that they don’t accept their weaknesses at all. I did a seminar, I mentioned earlier, I did a seminar on burn anger before anger burns you in Australia. So there was one particular person who had a lot of anger issues, everybody around them were complaining about it, about him.
So, I talked with this person, I don’t need any anger management lessons, other people just need to learn not to make me angry. So basically, they are outsourcing responsibility. So sometimes we have weaknesses and it requires a certain amount of courage to accept our weaknesses.
And I could say, but there is another kind of courage, that is required to accept ourselves with our weaknesses. I have this deficiency, I have this deficiency, but I need to accept myself. If we don’t accept ourselves, then who else do we have? We are our only resource, our most fundamental resource is we ourselves.
Even if you want to take shelter of Krishna, it is we who have to take shelter of Krishna, nobody else can take shelter of Krishna for us. So we are our most fundamental resource and we need to accept ourselves. So depression is actually anger directed towards oneself, why am I like this? Why can’t I do this? Why can’t I do that? Why couldn’t I achieve it? Why did I make that mistake? Why, why, why? So the anger directed inward becomes depression.
And to some extent, depression is a very complex phenomena, but broadly speaking, we don’t hear so many people in the past getting depressed. Why is that happening more now? Again, many reasons, but one broad understanding is that we all have unrealistic expectations. The world around us is arranged in such a way that everybody believes, is made to believe that we can be controllers, we can be achievers, we are meant to be controllers, we are meant to be achievers.
But we are, there are many things which are not in our control. So failure is something that can happen to us, sometimes even despite our best efforts. Because only our endeavours are in our control, our results are not in our control.
That’s the whole idea of karmanye vadhika arasthi maapaleshi vadhachana, Krishna says, do your duty, but don’t be attached to the results. What he means is that we alone don’t determine the results. But what has happened in today’s world is that the society has removed the idea, the culture has removed the idea that there are some higher factors governing the results.
I have a whole talk on this, what is the relationship between action and results, you could call it as the 4D formula, duty plus destiny plus duration leads to desired result. In Sanskrit you can put karma, daiva and kala leads to falla. Duty, that’s karma, daiva is destiny, kala is duration and then that leads to falla.
So all three have to come together. It’s like say, if a couple get married and they want to have a child, now they may unite, but that alone is not enough, conception has to happen. That’s not in our control, there’s a destiny over there.
If somebody wants to grow a crop, they may plough the field and sow the land, but rains have to come. So their part is duty, but rains coming is destiny. Then after that, even if that happens, even if conception happens, even if rains come, but still, it’s not the next day the crops are going to come, duration, time has to come.
And then there will be the desired result. So what has happened in today’s world, the world view is such that if you do your part, we think the other two don’t matter at all. If I have done my duty, you will get the result.
And then if the result doesn’t come, we start thinking that something must be intrinsically wrong with me. That’s why I don’t get the result. So yes, sometimes we go through a bad patch in life.
Destiny can sometimes be unfavorable, wherein we go through a dark patch, we do things and no results come. I do one thing, this doesn’t work. I do another thing, it doesn’t work.
I do a third thing, it doesn’t work. We start thinking, my life is this. My life is doomed.
It’s not like that. If we are honest, and we look at the times when we have been successful in life, we’ll see that there are so many things which worked out right beyond our own efforts. Of course, we worked hard and we did our best, but so many other things worked out like that.
That’s how the results came about. So to the extent we claim credit for the results that we get, to that extent, we also have to accept blame for the results when we don’t get the results. So if we have this bigger understanding of life, that the results don’t just depend on me, then we can accept sometimes when bad things happen to us, when results don’t come.
We understand right now I’m going through a bad phase, so failure is an event in my life. Failure is not the defining event of my life, and failure is not what defines me. People are not failures.
In events, people meet failures sometimes. So when we start taking life’s events too personally, that’s when we start going into depression. So if we get this broader philosophical understanding that right now I’m going through a dark phase, it’ll be there for some time, but it’ll get over.
So when the dark phase is going, what happens, especially when we get depressed, we take a small event and ascribe the biggest meaning to it. What do I mean by the biggest meaning? One of my friends is a suicide intervention counselor. That means if somebody is about to commit suicide, they’re depressed, they call up, and then they try to speak some encouraging words.
So he told me one story about a girl who called up after committing suicide. Not that her ghost called up, but rather she took poison pills, and she said, I don’t want to die, and she called up. And when she called up like that, it’s interesting that there is a difference between male-female psychology with respect to anger also.
See, men are generally more violent physically than women. So with respect to suicide, women attempt suicide more, men commit suicide more. So what happens is that men are more physically violent, so if they decide to do it, they’ll do it.
Women, they’re not that physically violent. Their violence may come out more in the form of verbal violence, gossip, in-windows, character assassination. But the point here is that she took the poison pills, and she said, no, I don’t want to commit suicide.
So fortunately there was an ambulance which came nearby, and they saved her. And this friend of mine was asking, what prompted you to commit suicide? So she said that, actually, I was in a relationship with a boy, and I called him, and he didn’t pick up my phone. Now, is that a reason to commit suicide? What had happened was that she took that, okay, he didn’t pick up my phone.
What does that mean? What it means is that he doesn’t care for me. Maybe he’s left me. Maybe he’s already with someone else.
I’ll not come back to him. Maybe whoever I form a relationship with, they’ll all hate me. Maybe there’s something wrong with me because of no one along.
All my friends in future will be in happy, long-term relationships, and I’ll be all alone, and they’ll all have pity on me. What a pitiable life. Better to die than to have such a pitiable life.
And she committed suicide. So what happens when we take one incident and extrapolate too much from it? That is when depression becomes overwhelming. So, this understanding that keep small things small.
Yes, this particular thing has happened, but sometimes things happen because of factors beyond our control. So, our mind doesn’t have a sense of perspective. Okay, how important is this? How important is that? When the mind is in control and the intelligence is not at all in control, then certain things just expand.
And when we take one small thing, another small thing, another small thing, and we expand it to a big. So, this went wrong, this went wrong, this didn’t work, this didn’t work. Oh, probably something is wrong with my life.
I just want to end my life. In fact, there’s one devotee who told me that he was counseling someone, and he said that sometimes the mind can work in such a crazy way. He said somebody was going to attempt suicide, he had to deter them.
He says, you know, this life is not working. Since I am the soul, I will try in the next life. Oh, this is ridiculous.
Yes, it’s not that life is not working. We go through some phase in our life. So, if you understand the principles of karma and destiny, you understand it.
I am right now with a dark phase. But the dark phase is not a dungeon in which I am trapped. It’s a tunnel through which I can walk through.
As I keep walking through, I will come to light. Thank you.