Meditation vs Depression
The Great Darkness: Meditation vs Depression
People don’t talk about this much, but depression and enlightenment feel almost the same.
The difference is: one happens when life crushes you. The other happens when you step into it — consciously. With awareness. With dhyan.
The experience itself — the emptiness, the dissolving of everything you thought you were — is the same. Both feel like madness. Both drag you into what I can only call the great darkness.
A solid black.
In depression, you’re thrown into that darkness without warning. Against your will. It’s terrifying because you don’t understand it — you fight it, you suffocate in it, you feel it’s trying to destroy you. You didn’t ask for it, and it feels like punishment.
But in meditation — in what some call enlightenment — you walk into the same solid black darkness with your eyes open. You do it with awareness, with dhyan. You watch yourself disappear into it.
And when you enter it consciously, the darkness changes.
It’s still dark, yes. Still silent. Still nothingness. But you realize it’s not your enemy. You see it for what it really is: a kind of freedom. A kind of bliss.
It’s like standing in fire. Depression is being shoved into the flames, screaming and helpless. Meditation is walking into the fire yourself — fully awake — and letting it burn away everything you’re not.
Both strip you bare. Both take you to the same place. But when you choose it, with dhyan, you see: the great darkness isn’t here to hurt you.
It’s here to set you free.
Not everyone understands this. Not everyone has felt both. But I have — thrown into it by life, and later walking into it with awareness.
Same fire. Same void. Same solid black. But with dhyan, with consciousness — the darkness becomes your teacher.
This isn’t from any book or teacher. This is just what I’ve lived. And what the darkness showed me.