But your right, in that light its murder. But murder of who? — Brett

Sorry it seems like I swung to the other extreme. It isn't murder per se. What I meant was suicide has an external cause and to focus only on the self-induced nature of death misses the point.

On face value I surmise that this makes sense. But, the issue is that suicide, even in a deterministic universe is still self-harm. You can't really get around this fact.

It can be cause by a loss of identity, or not seeing and accepting oneself and flaws.
This relates to suicide committed by teenagers who only see themselves as one thing and are unable to view themselves as more than that. For example, intelligence is the only thing some people see themselves as and nothing more.
For adults, I would say it due to societal pressure of being perfect and having a perfect life or not being in the position you want to be in; seeing yourself as a failure and unaccomplished.

On face value I surmise that this makes sense. But, the issue is that suicide, even in a deterministic universe is still self-harm. You can't really get around this fact — Wallows

I don't know how to explain this but all cases of suicide are a last resort i.e. people who take their own lives are left with no choice. If everyone was asked to make a list of things they'd like to do then suicide would be the last on that list.

How do we use a list. We prefer the first on the list and when that isn't available we move to the next item on the list. It's a process of elimination and suicide is when no item on our list is feasible or desirable. In other words it's a forced ''choice'' or to make matters plain it isn't a choice. Actually the situation is very similar to our mistaken impression that suicide is self-harm. It isn't.

I don't know how to explain this but all cases of suicide are a last resort i.e. people who take their own lives are left with no choice. — TheMadFool

Not true, drugs, prostitutes, the "low-life" is always an option.

Not true, drugs, prostitutes, the "low-life" is always an option. — Wallows

These aren't last on a to-do list. To be fair though I think people differ from each other quite significantly so that no two to-do lists will ever match item for item. So, yes, some people have different items on their list but the point is the last item on any list isn't a choice at all.

These aren't last on a to-do list. To be fair though I think people differ from each other quite significantly so that no two to-do lists will ever match item for item. So, yes, some people have different items on their list but the point is the last item on any list isn't a choice at all. — TheMadFool

Would you ever consider suicide?

Would you ever consider suicide? — Wallows

:razz:

But, you understand the issue?

But, you understand the issue? — Wallows

May be :smile:

We don't know what becomes of our consciousness when we die. Zilch knowledge. Lots of faith and belief, but knowledge? None.

A person who suffers in this life therefore weighs his or her options: I don't know what happens in the afterlife. This life is pretty miserable. Am I better off dead, or better off going on living?

The question answered decides the further course of action. If the person decides that his or her perception of afterlife is better than going on living, s/he will kill him/herself.

Notwithstanding the above, there is a greater hurdle to pass for all suicides: the actual act, and the actual process. That in and by itself is scary, and most attempts don't end up in death, because the person recoils from the act. Again, it is the amount of suffering (and a bit of fortune / misfortue) that decides whether one can pass through this higher bar, the actual act.

Not true, drugs, prostitutes, the "low-life" is always an option. — Wallows

Those are not a solution to most people's pain. Let's say you think the world is never going to provide you the love you want, you're heart has been broken a number of times (and perhaps this mirrors what happened in childhood some way), then someone suggesting 'take drugs' is not solving the problem and the yearning of the depressed person. A drug user might take the drug to find a respite from a similar longing, but they haven't given up yet and they are hooked.

If I felt like a loser doomed to be outside and unhappy and unsuccessful, for exmaple,

there's not way becoming a prostitute will seem to be bringing me closer to what I need.

young newbie here

what it comes down to is the person asking himself, "is this life really worth living?" different people have different struggles and different tolerance to life's garbage. in the moment there's a rush of adrenaline, a high that cuts through all the apathy. his own life is in his hands. he could've planned it for a month but head still feel that rush. no faithful person is absolutely certain about what goes down after he makes the decision. it's life vs unknown territory. in that moment, whether premeditated or on impulse, he is chosing the unknown.

I'm very close to a survivor of a suicide attempt. In her case, the motive seemed to be what I would characterize as existential ennui. Her life wasn't horribly painful, she had a roof over her head and a steady job and all the basic amenities of life, but it was her parents' roof and a boring job with no prestige or hope of advancement, and she had little particularly worth living for, like romantic love or passion projects or anything. From what I gather it seemed to her that life was just a tedious chore with little to no reward, a job she was obliged to do and not something she wanted to do for its own sake, so at some point she just tried to quit. Even today, when she's not like that anymore, she vehemently doesn't want to live forever, even though she's got a lot more good in her life to live for now; she seems to be just trying to make the best of this obligation to live until she is naturally dismissed from it, and the prospect of being stuck in it forever having to fill infinite time with something that feels worthwhile seems to horrify her.

This year, as I've been suffering my own existential crisis, I've had some experience of that same kind of feeling, but also coupled with a terrifying fear of death, even a ridiculously distant death (for the first six months of so of this crisis, I was fixated on figuring out some potential way for life in general to continue forever, rather than being doomed by the heat death of the universe in trillions of years or something). I've since come to the conclusion that there is a non-rational feeling of meaningfulness or meaninglessness that people can have, what I call ontophilia or ontophobia (love or fear of being), and if you are full of that feeling of meaningfulness, you neither fear death nor feel like living is an obligation that you have to fill with distractions because you're just grateful to exist right now and that can go on for as long as it does; while if you're full of that feeling of meaninglessness, you either (or both simultaneously) fear the prospect of ever dying, and feel like having to exist is an oppressive tedium that you have to distract yourself from by filling time with something.

A lot of people think that suicide is about wanting to die, but I feel that it is more about trying to get rid of the pain that one feels. Suicidal people are in a lot of mental agony, and I think that if you are in a paroxysm of depression, you feel like the pain will never go away.

Even though death is not a favorable alternative, it sure is better than suffering everyday.

Since this topic got a bump, I would like to share some thoughts.

Suicide can be mitigated by becoming more aware of other people or thoughts. There's an element of insanity about suicide. The insanity of suicide seems to manifest in perceiving one's future as completely enveloped by depression or some mood.

I think the best way to avoid suicidal thoughts is to first take some antidepressant, and engage in therapy or some constructive endeavor if one has enough motivation to do so.

I think the best way to avoid suicidal thoughts is to first take some antidepressant, and engage in therapy or some constructive endeavor if one has enough motivation to do so. — Wallows

Should you avoid suicidal thoughts in the first place? Wouldn't it be better to face them? What if someone uses suicidal thoughts for some sort of catharsis, like roleplaying, rather than as premeditation for an act? The role suicidal thoughts play in the genisis of a suicide is interesting and not necessarily as straightforward as "I have suicidal thoghts therefor I want to die."

Some suicidal thoughts never lead to an actual suicide. But even suicidal thoughts that are not connected to an intention to kill oneself can lay the groundwork for a future suicide - as you familiarise yourself with the thought patterns. An example would be: "having a favourite hypothetical method" --> "being comfortable with the method, thus removing one psychological disincentive."

I was a suicidal teen. I'm now nearly fifty and don't consider myself suicidal anymore, but I do still have the thought habits. I can tell a difference in the quality; I'm not serious. (They're more over-the-top, exaggerated; a bit like I'm parodying my younger self.) Btw, I don't have a hypothecical favourite method. All methods suck. I think that's one of the major reason's I'm still alive. Too afraid of the system shock that comes with dying (painful methods), and of waking up after an unsucessful attempt and having to deal with the fallout (unreliable methods). As a formerly suicidal person I can tell you that fear of dying and fear of death are not the same thing. I have the former but not the latter.

Talking about my non-serious suicidal thoughts is difficult, because of the taboo that surrounds the topic. I can be pretty casual about it, and people often don't know how to react to that. I usually have to explain that, no, I don't intend to kill myself, and, no, I don't intend to make fun of the topic (even though it sometimes sounds like it). I've just learned to live through my suicidal phase, and now suicidal thoughts are some sort of cathartic tool (and that sometimes includes black humour).

As a result, talk about suicide entirely in terms of prevention feels isolating. It did back when I was suicidal (it felt like people were more interested in preventing a suicide than in trying to understand), and it does now (because of the disconnect). When it comes to fiction I react best to stuff that depicts emotional difficulty without taking sides (e.g. the film 'night, Mother with Sissy Spacek and Anne Bancroft), or with absurd comedy set-ups (e.g. the suicide arc in the anime Welcome to the NHK). I react worst to shows that idealise a single solution.

In terms of this thread, I don't think it's helpful to seek a single solution to the problem. I mean, suicides range from the guy who walks in on his family to demonstratively shoot himself, to the guy who kills himself and leaves behind a binder explaining himself, a lot of articles about dealing with loss, as well as a list of therapists and help-lines. Suicide is really just a single puzzle piece in a person's life and you won't understand that single suicide without understanding how it fits in. You can abstract, but that would involve multiple non-exclusive categories, I think.

Basically, you can't understand a person's suicide without understanding that person's life. A life can have problems. Suicide doesn't solve those problems, but it does end them (and also prevent solution, though that's moot by then). Focussing on the suicide ("you shouldn't kill yourself, because...") can come across as priviledging the topic over the underlying problems (as in "It's fine if you suffer, as long as you don't inconvenience me with your corpse"). Not all suicides are problem-centred, though. My own phase was more akin to what Pfhorrest describes in his post above. Problems, here, are more nuisances - life's a struggle and there's no reward. Depression is actually welcome, because it's more comfortable than the anxiety of what sort of contradictory demands will come your way next. It's not big deal, really, you can push through that as you always have. But you become increasingly exhausted. People notice this, so they try to be nice to you, and through this process the things you enjoy turn into
obligations, too, and eventually you just forget how to want things, even though you're an expert in how to not want things. Eventually you just feel empty. That's fine during a depression, since you don't feel any sort of vigour anyway. During bouts of depression it's easy to dismiss life. You're not going to kill yourself; it's not worth the bother. But as it recedes? Or if you feel it coming? That's when there's an inner tension that's nearly unbearable; it's a sort of unspecified can't-do-anything-but-have-to anxiety. During that phase you're not likely to make any preparations, though. Half-hearted attempts would be the most likely (though that was never my style). You prepare while your fairly calm and even cheerful. In my case it ended with research, since I never found a method I liked. (I also wondered whether I really was suicidal, or if that was just my inner drama queen. Now that I'm definitely not suicidal, I think I was.)

Basically, I didn't want to kill myself because of a specific problem, but because I was just gradually losing my grip on life.

Suicide can be mitigated by becoming more aware of other people or thoughts. — Wallows

This definitely helped during bouts of what I call the brooding spiral. Re-focusing helped by itself, and as a bonus I tended to find out that I was asking way more of myself than nearly anyone else (though that was a lesson that usually didn't stick).

In Japan, the act is seen as sometimes a noble death. — Wallows

In very specific circumstances... it is better to die at your own hands than to die at the hands of the enemy.

So there is no such thing as suicide construed differently from other forms of death. — TheMadFool

We construe them all with language use.

:brow:

Not everyone dies at their own hands or at a time of their own choosing.

Taking one's own life - by whatever intentional means - at a time of one's own choosing is a case of suicide. From self-sacrifice for the good of others, through self-pity and loathing, whenever ones takes their own life, it is a case of suicide because it is not the same as other ways of dying...

Accidental deaths are not suicide. Homicides are not suicide.

I've since come to the conclusion that there is a non-rational feeling of meaningfulness or meaninglessness that people can have, what I call ontophilia or ontophobia (love or fear of being), and if you are full of that feeling of meaningfulness, you neither fear death nor feel like living is an obligation that you have to fill with distractions because you're just grateful to exist right now and that can go on for as long as it does; while if you're full of that feeling of meaninglessness, you either (or both simultaneously) fear the prospect of ever dying, and feel like having to exist is an oppressive tedium that you have to distract yourself from by filling time with something. — Pfhorrest

Ontophilia seems to me an adaptation to - distraction from, as you've put it - ontophobia. Isn't it, after all, the business of culture (i.e. cultus), even moreso civilization (i.e. syphilization), to busy us enough with pain pleasure & boredom to avert our gazes from the abyss in order to keep us from noticing the abyss gazing back?

A suicide maxim: The switch doesn't flip itself On or Off.

Dealt a hand by nature-nurture, choosing is always ex post facto - to be or not to be - manifest in how one chooses to play that hand. Suicide (long) precedes the act; circumstances, it seems, postpone or delay or, yes, facilitate the outcome.

Btw, I prefer meontopathy (my coinage) because it more explicitly suggests the absurdity (or horror) of being human.

Should you avoid suicidal thoughts in the first place? Wouldn't it be better to face them? — Dawnstorm

I really don't know what you mean by "facing suicide". Usually (in my case), there's a lot of anxiety when those thoughts appear.

What if someone uses suicidal thoughts for some sort of catharsis, like roleplaying, rather than as premeditation for an act? — Dawnstorm

That's pretty dark, man.

Some suicidal thoughts never lead to an actual suicide. But even suicidal thoughts that are not connected to an intention to kill oneself can lay the groundwork for a future suicide - as you familiarise yourself with the thought patterns. An example would be: "having a favourite hypothetical method" --> "being comfortable with the method, thus removing one psychological disincentive." — Dawnstorm

What do you mean by "psychological disincentive"?

As a formerly suicidal person I can tell you that fear of dying and fear of death are not the same thing. I have the former but not the latter. — Dawnstorm

Please elaborate. I seem to be encompassed by fear lately.

I've just learned to live through my suicidal phase, and now suicidal thoughts are some sort of cathartic tool (and that sometimes includes black humour). — Dawnstorm

Yeah, I'm the guy who stays in the kitty pool instead of jumping off the deep end. Did time or your age help you see the whole issue as some childish desire or fantasy?

Depression is actually welcome, because it's more comfortable than the anxiety of what sort of contradictory demands will come your way next. — Dawnstorm

Yeah, I agree with this. I prefer depression instead of anxiety.

I've noticed a pattern in pessimistic literature where any immediate feeling of meaning and contentment can only be read as a retreat from horror. The Abyss - and the existential confrontation with it - is elevated (sacred.) Anything outside that confrontation is considered profane. There is an implicit judgment attending words like 'pain', 'pleasure' and 'boredom'.

This sacred/profane distinction runs deep. Cioran talks about the Heights of despair, for example.

I once met a childhood trauma specialist who had become an alcoholic and sex addict. He didn't make the connection for a while. Traumatized in childhood, obsessed with trauma. It didn't click. But he was fucked up and he knew that. He wasn't just a sex addict. He had a specific fetish -married women. What got him going was knowing they were drawn to him (avatar of the abyss) in favor of their beau. There's a thesis to be written on the relation between violation and pessimism.

I wonder to what extent something like this subtends the whole pessimistic approach.

I don't see why experiencing meaningful existence isn't just experiencing meaningful existence. But when you add resentment to the mix, you can see how it might warp.

Melville treated the theme of 'retreat' very well. Jonah, furtive, getting as far away from an internalized judgment as humanly possible.

Well we all have our white whales and we all have our Babels-in-reaction-to-the-Flood. Mortared tightly and seeking to kill the one thing we cannot let live.

I often think about that guy and how he ended his relationships with the women whose lives he ruptured and how he made sense of that. David Foster Wallace did a story on this in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men - maybe the presence of the destroying force was necessary to educate the destroyed. Who knows?

I would say suicide is what happens when one suffers more than one can handle. Depression, anxiety and hopelessness are all forms of suffering.

There are many things that can help, but what really helps depends on the situation. For some people it will be to feel loved. For some people it will be to feel that their life serves a meaningful purpose. For some people it will be to understand things that they didn’t understand, to identify a false belief they had. For some people it will be to take some medication. Or a combination of those.

I said it before and I’ll say it again, maybe the best tool to help with depression is psilocybin. It has worked for many people for which nothing else worked, studies have shown that. The thing is that it can help you feel loved, help you feel that your life has a purpose, and help you understand things you didn’t understand, all at once. That’s why it works so well. But obviously do it in a safe place, and don’t do things like driving after taking it, but that’s also true of other medications.

My feeling about suicide is that it's a response to an emergency that can be handled in various ways, but the person experiencing the emergency can't access any of those ways but one. I think the defining feature of a suicidal emergency is that it can't be understood and dealt with by outside sources. It's a breach in the space of reasons, if you like. I've noticed you've talked recently about how stoicism and many other approaches can't help. That sounds like the edge of a suicidal crisis - not fun.

I've spent a lot of time with the idea of suicide and feel very close to it. I've always lived with a shade of that idea, but there was a bad point where for a month it became pressing and unavoidable. I 'handled' it like so :

I went to the same bar every night. I got as drunk as I could and walked home. I would wake up and smoke cigarettes all day (2 packs or so). I checked myself into mental hospitals and then, checked-in, tried to find ways to get out, because it wasn't helping, and I needed to commit suicide.

I couldn't do it because I was too disorganized. and too fearful. I couldn't jump off the high places. I spent two weeks going to the high place every night. I could not live another minute, and I also could not jump. Maybe that's cowardice. But I couldn't do it. I couldn't think straight this whole time.

I was very much aware of the thing of 'it gets better' and I had nothing but contempt for it, but....

What happens before the crisis is you have certain ideas about how and why to live. The crisis burns them all away. Whatever is left after is what's valuable. The only thing that helps in my opinion is that it's necessary, and that it passes. You can't know why it's necessary or what it's doing until after, so no peptalk and positive talk will help. But it does pass. If it's really really really impossibly bad, you're getting close to the release, and you have to just hold on.

I was very much aware of the thing of 'it gets better' and I had nothing but contempt for it, but.... — csalisbury

*Are we there yet, are we there yet, are we there yet?*
:lol:

I went to the same bar every night. I got as drunk as I could and walked home. I would wake up and smoke cigarettes all day (2 packs or so). I checked myself into mental hospitals and then, checked-in, tried to find ways to get out, because it wasn't helping, and I needed to commit suicide. — csalisbury

Yeah, at some point in my life, out of utter desperation, I turned to drugs to help me cope with suicidal thoughts. Stimulant medications really helped me a lot in terms of creating a sense of "motivation: to keep on-going. But, that can only last so long as it's artificial.

For me, when feeling ontophobic, trying not to does feel like some kind of cowardly retreat from rationally confronting the only meaningful problem in existence. But when feeling ontophilic, such concerns seem like obviously irrational obsession with an entirely illusory non-problem. For people stuck indefinitely in absurd despair and deprived from periods of awe and serenity, I can understand why they would see trying to break out of that as cowardly even though being like that hurts themselves. It’s like an addiction to something you hate: doing it brings you no pleasure, it may even bring you pain, but you just feel like you have to and it would be wrong of you not to. But once you’re out of it, it seems completely different, and looking back on yourself when you were in that space, or at others still stuck it it, it just seems pitiably irrational and self-destructive to be in that space.

For me, when feeling ontophobic, trying not to does feel like some kind of cowardly retreat from rationally confronting the only meaningful problem in existence. But when feeling ontophilic, such concerns seem like obviously irrational obsession with an entirely illusory non-problem. For people stuck indefinitely in absurd despair and deprived from periods of awe and serenity, I can understand why they would see trying to break out of that as cowardly even though being like that hurts themselves. It’s like an addiction to something you hate: doing it brings you no pleasure, it may even bring you pain, but you just feel like you have to and it would be wrong of you not to. But once you’re out of it, it seems completely different, and looking back on yourself when you were in that space, or at others still stuck it it, it just seems pitiably irrational and self-destructive to be in that space. — Pfhorrest

Yes, that's it exactly! The difficulty is that, in ontophobia, you can't access the quality, for lack of a better word, of ontophilic space. You can only see it conceptually as something opposed to the ontophobic. So it has no fullness, or reality of its own. It seems to just be [non-ontophobia], a conceptual void defined in terms of its opposite.

I think, for those of us prone to severe mood swings, there's an art to figuring out how to leave conceptual 'anchors' that let us stay connected when you can't access that ok-ness. I find that I can 'know' that there is a kind of 'full' memory I can't access,that is presently barred from me. Knowing it's real, but for some reason barred, helps me realize that a limited depressive state is not as comprehensive as it pretends to be. That probably wouldn't have worked when I was younger but seems to work now that I've seen the depressive state run its course enough times.

*Are we there yet, are we there yet, are we there yet?*
:lol: — Wallows

It'll arrive. One of these days. Probably right when you forget to ask

I really don't know what you mean by "facing suicide". Usually (in my case), there's a lot of anxiety when those thoughts appear. — Wallows

Not so much facing suicide, as facing the suicidal thoughts and the emotions that come with them - that anxiety, for example. What that means for you in praxis I don't really know. I'm not even saying that medication is a bad idea. Just make sure not to enter into an unhealthy co-dependt relationship with the pharma industry, maybe? I don't know.

I'll probably be addressing what "facing suicidal thoughts" meant for me with some of your other questions.

That's pretty dark, man. — Wallows

Not really darker than the underlying suffering, though. If it works it works, and if it doesn't it doesn't. There's probably no solution that works for everyone. Not even chocolate.

What do you mean by "psychological disincentive"? — Wallows

When you think of doing something, some aspects draw you towards the action (incentives), and some push you away from it (disincentives). I call them psychological, because unlike real-life policy (such as, say, taxes), these (dis)incentives are just part of how you react to the world. Their basically your bundle of values.

Please elaborate. I seem to be encompassed by fear lately. — Wallows

The difference between fear of dying and fear of death is actually a pretty good opportunity to demonstrate psychological incentives and disincentives:

So I have these unpleasant emotions: anxiety, disgust with myself and parts of the world, exhaustion... I don't want to feel them. The way I imagine death is this: no feelings at all. Those are gone, too. That's an incentive.

Now, logically I'd also get rid of good feelings. But back then that didn't function as a psychological disincentive. Rather than something I wanted to keep, that felt like an acceptable price to pay.

However, to get to the desired state of death I have to die, and dying is messy. I can't help but think of it as pain. The least painful method is probably overdosing on barbiturates of some sort, but - apart from being unreliable - I was imagining messing up and feeling really quesy or maybe having convulsions. None of this was based on research. I just had this association of dying with pain (or just undergoing an otherwise unpleasant process as queasiness).

So basically the state of death worked as an incentive, while the process of dying worked as a disincentive. It's not a cost/benefit calculation. Nothing that rational; it's a felt attraction existing alongside a felt repulsion.

To this day I'm not afraid of death. If I look forward a milennium, I realise I'll no longer be around. That doesn't affect me in any way, really. If I knew I had a fatal, incurable illness, I'd adapt pretty quickly to the new deadline. However, the illness itself? The process of dying? It sort of depends on the particulars, but in general this sounds like a rather unpleasant stretch of life. (Note that I don't have a shred of believe in any afterlife. Things might be different, if I thought death was just life v2.0.)

Did time or your age help you see the whole issue as some childish desire or fantasy? — Wallows

Not really, no. You see, I always, even back then, thought I was being childish. It didn't help. If anything it just added a layer to my self-loathing. If anything, I'm less judgemental about my younger self now than I was back then.

Remember how I said near the start of this post that I'd adress the question of what "facing suicidal thoughts" meant for me with another question? Well, it fits here. As I said, I was pretty hard on myself for having suicidal thoughts. Why I can't I deal with life? Other people can live just fine, and I can't? What's with all those petty inner tantrums? Those anxieties of mine are so stupid! And so on.

Facing my suicidal thoughts for me meant suspending that sort of judgement. It wasn't easy, but it was easier than to - for example - just stop being anxious. So instead of berating myself, I just thought I'd dry indulging myself. To varying results. On bad days, that would lead to inner hysterics that were even harder to bear. But on good days?

I have the mind of a story teller. I dramatise everything. That's just how I work. But not all stories are realistic. On good days, allowing myself all those petty, nonsensical, negative feelings turned into a sort of game. If I'm going to be rediculous, I'm going to be really ridiculous. That's a hard-to-explain process. They way I'm writing about this now sounds a lot more deliberate than I was. It was a sort of emotional escalation. The self-judgemental part of me didn't go away, but it sort of transformed from judge to fiction audience. In a sense the process gradually estranged me from my suffering, until it felt like some absurd spectacle. It's a way to non-jeeringly laugh at myself, by ramping up the drama and making it less and less belivable.

It's not something I tried to do. I think the bad days that ended in hysteria would have put me off that methodology, if it wasn't something that... just happened. And I'm saying all of this now, looking back, so a lot of it will look neater in memory than it actually was while living through it. But that's roughly how I remember it playing out. I've been trying to think of an illustrative example, but I can't seem to get it right anymore. Maybe I should be thankful for that.

Yes, that's it exactly! The difficulty is that, in ontophobia, you can't access the quality, for lack of a better word, of ontophilic space. You can only see it conceptually as something opposed to the ontophobic. So it has no fullness, or reality of its own. It seems to just be [non-ontophobia], a conceptual void defined in terms of its opposite.

I think, for those of us prone to severe mood swings, there's an art to figuring out how to leave conceptual 'anchors' that let us stay connected when you can't access that ok-ness. I find that I can 'know' that there is a kind of 'full' memory I can't access,that is presently barred from me. Knowing it's real, but for some reason barred, helps me realize that a limited depressive state is not as comprehensive as it pretends to be. That probably wouldn't have worked when I was younger but seems to work now that I've seen the depressive state run its course enough times. — csalisbury

I like how you put it, it has interesting parallels with something else.

You talk of two distinct spaces that are opposed. In one space there is difficulty, suffering, things are not as comprehensive as they pretend to be, and you can’t access the quality of the other space, it is barred from you. In the other space this suffering isn’t there, you are OK, you see more clearly. In one space you feel disconnected from the ok-ness, in the other space you feel connected to it.

In order to remember that this other space exists, you say you need to figure out how to leave anchors so that you remain slightly connected to that space even when you aren’t in it.

Many people think like you, but they use different names to describe it. What you call ok-ness, they call love or light. What you call anchors, they call faith. What you call ‘full’ memory, they call truth.

You’re rediscovering what so many others have discovered, people that modern society tends to dismiss as believers of fairy tales, as irrational people, but they talk of profound things, not mere fantasy.