A Matrix of Minds

Blogging on a Friday afternoon is a great feeling:  it means that I am not working today and I already had the leisure of going for a slow breakfast this morning and the opportunity to run some errands. Now I'm just relaxing with my thoughts here in my abode of books.

The sad news yesterday was the untimely death of popular singer Coco Lee, aged 48, apparently from suicide. It is reported that she has been suffering from depression for a long time. Depression is a topic I've often written about, even though (thankfully) I do not have any first-hand experience. 

What I've perhaps had are glimpses of paths that could have led me to depression--or at least that was my guess then. I cannot be sure. I know that sometimes our minds plunge into a rut of negativity and darkness which is difficult to pull ourselves out from. This is like a psychological black hole, which if one crosses the event horizon, one sinks inexorable into a very dark place.

People with bipolar disorder swing wildly between the dark and bright. It is strange how our brain chemistry works. There's a delicate balance of chemicals in our brain and nervous system which determines the fluctuations of our mood and mental state. This balance could be lost, leading us to mania or depression. When we lose our balance or fall, we need a helping hand to pull us up again.

Sometimes therapy could help. Sometimes a dose of the right chemicals could restore that balance too. Life in essence is a constant quest to maintain this balance. But it is so difficult to be balanced when the world demands us to go our our extremes, driven by the amplification effects of social media.

All machines need to be stopped and calibrated every now and then so that they operate within their expected range of tolerances. Our bodies and minds are the same. That is why we need sleep and breaks. But that alone is not sufficient. Sometimes our natural sense of balance is lost. That is why proactive maintenance is required to restore that balance.

Meditation is a means of maintaining one's mental balance. By simply observing the mind and the thoughts that arise, one learns to know one's current mental state and 'balancing thoughts' can be introduced, which would restore its equilibrium. All the meditation techniques that are in existence today, use some object of concentration, like the breath, a sound or a feeling (lovingkindness) to help us reduce the agitations of the mind so that it operates in a streamlined mode. When all perturbations are quelled, interesting qualities of the mind emerge.

A healthy mind always knows its datum or base of equilibrium. Whenever experience veers it out of its equilibrium, balancing mechanisms kick in to restore it to its equilibrium state. The mind trained in meditation acquires the habit of doing so. Meditation or mindfulness is one of the many ways of handling depression.

Meditation is a deliberate act of calibration which, helps to maintain the mind on a steady course. The challenge of meditation is that it requires an act of will on the part of the practitioner. This willpower does not come easy when one's mind is already in a state of turmoil.

When a single mind loses course, the community of minds--friends, family and mental health professionals--have to assist to restore order. We live in a matrix of minds which could either support or obliterate us. Let us strengthen the bonds that hold the matrix together. And that's the least that we could do.