The Lazy Yogi

theguineafowlpath asked: a friend of mine has lost all passion for life. he says he is just walking nowhere, just surviving pointlessly with friends and music. he says he feels dead. I have felt like this and i know that really nothing helps, and at the time it feels like there is never gonna be hope again. I tried to share my positive outlook on life with him, but of course it didn't work. Is there any advice you would give him (or me) to overcome this depression? thank you!

Eckhart Tolle tells this story about a beggar who sits on a box and pleads with passerby’s for spare change. The beggar was discontent because he felt his needs were not being met. Then one day a man passed by and the beggar asked for money. The man asked the beggar what was in the box he was sitting on all this time. The beggar said he didn’t know and upon opening it discovered that it was filled with gold all along. 

The kind of discontent you and your friend share comes from looking to the world to give you something that you can only find within. 

A positive outlook on life is unsustainable because positivity brings with it the shadow negativity. We only know what positivity is because there exists also negativity. 

But both positivity and negativity are illusions. Both put unrealistic spins on the way we understand and experience Existence. The truth is far more difficult and beautiful. 

You and your friend do not need to replace depression with joy. Rather, you need to make friends with whatever emotion that enters your field of perception without letting that emotion put a spin on your reality. 

When you can feel sadness without believing the world to be a sad place, when you can feel joy without thinking all of existence to be joyous, when you can feel hate without thinking all of existence to be worthy of your anger, then you will know peace. 

When emotions can come and go within you, freely, then a peace will take over that is larger than your emotions. It isn’t an emotion at all but rather a grace, a kind of acceptance of all that is. 

The aimlessness you two feel arises because of looking outwardly for things you can only find inwardly. How can you be content in this world when you don’t know what it is you truly are? When you have not discovered the pile of goal you have been sitting on, the peace of Existence itself?

Go inward, meditate, become present in the moment, dwell in mindfulness, and it wont matter what you are doing, you will find blessings. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle or Tantra: The Supreme Understanding by Osho are worth reading.

Namaste, friend. Much love :)