Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
BRIAN ADLER: Yes, it was my undergraduate thesis at Naropa in
Boulder.
TRIP: You wrote, and I think this is worth reading, you wrote,
"When I've admitted defeat in my every cell, given up fighting,
being who and where I am, I have not found only collapse and
misery, as I have feared, rather I've experienced peace deeper and
more boundless than I ever knew through having life go my way.
My heart-felt conviction is the true freedom resembles more a
surrender to death that a victory over life".
BRIAN ADLER: Yes, that sounds pretty good. [Laughs]
TRIP: That's pretty good for an 18-year-old whippersnapper.
Where those just words then, or did you actually…
BRIAN ADLER: No, no, that all was born out of… I don't really
experience it so much anymore. I'm open to it, it's been a while,
but I used to experience a lot of depression. And I would say
though the one thing, the one effort I made consistently was I
wanted to understand not only what I believed but also what the
consequence of what I believed was. And I just over time started
to become more sensitive that the consequence of believing I
should be having a different experience was unhappiness, and the
heart of depression.
It's interesting, because depression is a little bit wisdom, and
wisdom mixed with like a self-absorbed twist. The wisdom of
depression is that circumstances don't ultimately fulfill us, they
don't, everything changes, we get sick, we die, people come and
they go. And so the insight of depression is that it's all like sand
castles dissolving in front of us, but the twist that makes
depression hell is thinking that that's a personal failure, that it's
not supposed to be that way, and in fact that it's not that way for
other people. I think a lot of depression lies in thinking life is very
different for all those happy people out there.
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