A lot of people have been pretty upset about Robin Williams’s suicide. Many reasons for their unhappiness are given. Ultimately, I think it boils down to this: If someone like Robin Williams – a man who ostensibly ‘has it all’ – finds life unworthy of the effort, what chance do the rest of us have?
Be brutally honest with yourself here. What drives you? Family, love, money, security, acclaim, a good life.
Williams had them all. And he hung himself.
So all the frightened or confused minds trot out the usual suspects, the big one being that Williams suffered from “the disease of depression.”
Stop. Please.
Life, as we know it, is the disease. Life as we know it.
Scoot back up a few paragraphs and revisit the ways you measure the value of your life. Chances are very, very good that all of them are measured externally. Happy kids. Comfortable home. Health. Wealth. Happiness. Good times.
The Big Problem with all of this is that the good stuff necessarily requires the bad stuff. The more good stuff you jam into your life, the more bad stuff that must come with it. Cause and effect. Duality.
This is not woo-woo, it’s obvious. It’s akin to saying “I only want to exist in a world of warmth.” Well guess what? Warmth does not – cannot – exist without cold. You want to be warm? Go for it. You can have it. But be prepared for an equal amount of cold.
You want wealth? Well, be prepared for poverty. It may not be material poverty, but there will be a poverty. Which is why many of the world’s least happy people are also its richest, most attractive, most successful, etc.
“It must come to every single one of us that there is something more to life than being healthy and having abundance,” wrote Joel Goldsmith. “There is something more to life than just walking around this earth enjoying ourselves. There is something more to life, and that is Life. Life is eternal, a Life that knows no grave, a Life that knows no infirmity, a Life that knows no sin, no poverty, no war, no lack.”
The mystics tell us that Life – that ‘kingdom of heaven,’ that ‘peace that surpasses all understanding’ – exists within, beyond this idea of a me, beyond the conditioned mind, beyond all that we have been told to be true.
I have not yet found that kingdom. But I have, in earlier years and on multiple occasions, experienced suicidal depression. I know of that gray-bleak gravity that makes even a single footstep an impossibility, of that crippling weight that quite literally ‘depresses’ us to our knees.
And I also know that the journey within over these past many years has done more to eliminate all those years of anxiety and angst and depression than all the psychotherapy and self-help and feel-good aphorisms and medication in the world. There simply is no comparison.
If you are counting on the outside world to make you happy, it will. And then it won’t. That which was known as ‘Robin Williams’ made us happy. And now he has made us unhappy.