The thing that man does most in his life is: Learn and Teach. This process is one’s greatest activity because even when he sees something new is learned or the previous learned is confirmed or denied. The same goes for listening. Thus, every activity of one’s awareness continues to be a cause of learning and teaching.
Even this process of learning and teaching continues unconsciously. The difference of opinion between human beings is in fact the exchange of one’s learning with others. It is also an educational activity when he seeks or gives advice to someone. Man seeks advice only in cases where his own learning is unreliable due to incompleteness in his own eyes.
Man learns from two great sources. One is education and the other is personal practice and observation which is called experience. Then there are the two major differences between the two sources. Man can live without education, not without experience.
We see innumerable human beings who have no education at all but are living a comfortable life. On the contrary, if you leave a person in the jungle at a very young age, and bring him into human society, living for him will become a torture. Because the individual will not have any experience of social life and the experience is gained by human beings only through interaction.
The second difference is that man forgets the lessons from the books very easily. We meet a lot of engineers or doctors who says their education is definitely relevant but they don’t “practice” and what they have learned is long overdue. On the contrary, man remembers everything he has learned from experience.
This introduction is bound to share a very important experience with you. I have been suffering from depression for some years now, which became increasingly significant. One and a half years ago, someone referred me to a very authoritative neurologist. The doctor said after examination that there are some chemicals in the brain which have an imbalance.
He said the treatment will take a long time. At the same time, he said that no disorder would be cured in this treatment. Just the chemical that is lacking will be fulfilled. I took the medicine for about a year and a half and took it with complete restraint. From the third month onwards, I began to notice a difference in my nature, which gradually improved. I was so happy to recover from a ‘trauma’.
But things went awry when, three weeks after the treatment was over, the depression returned. The first thought was that allopathy failed. Now try homeopathy. But then came another thought that changed the situation. The idea was that every human being must have an average knowledge of his basic needs. For example, if we need clothes, then we must have enough knowledge about clothes to distinguish between good and bad clothes.
The same goes for food and other commodities. So we keep seeing that even people who neither grow vegetables nor cook have a lot of knowledge about the benefits and side effects of vegetables or pulses. They just eat vegetables. And since they have a vital need, they must know as much as they need to be part of the diet.
Just like, there are three major needs that are important for a civilized Muslim man but the one does not even have an average knowledge of them. The first thing is the knowledge of religion. The second thing is knowledge of constitution and law while the third is knowledge of health.
We do not have enough knowledge of religion to distinguish between lawful and unlawful in our daily routine. Nor do we know enough about the law to know our rights. Nor do we have any basic health information to live a healthy life. In all three areas, we have left ourselves at the mercy of relevant experts. And rest assured, most of them are just exploiting us.
When we go to Maulvi Sahib for a minor religious issue, he immediately suggests charity, warning us of a possible “heavenly calamity”. And this suggestion is very insistent. Now this spectacle is happening because the common man does not even know that in Islam the wealth of a rich husband does not make the wife rich. If the wife is not stable – as per Islam – then she can take Zakat.
This is the situation we face at the hands of the police. Even in the slightest controversy, the policeman starts threatening citizens by such provisions which are not even in the law books. The same happens with our basic information about the health sector. So when we go to a specialist doctor, he takes advantage of it and first bombs us with some thick medical terms. Those terms are so thick that it crushes our whole psyche.
So with that in mind, before I could get any further treatment for depression, I decided that I would get some basic information about the disease so that I cannot take useless drugs for another year and a half. This is the age of social media, so I searched for lectures by authoritative experts on YouTube. A lot was found during this search but also a very important lecture by Dr. Michael D. Yapko.
The bottom line is that depression is not the result of a lack of brain chemicals. This is a purely psychological issue that can happen to anyone who has all the brain chemicals. Dr. Yapko’s lecture was especially important in this regard. He challenged that in his 50 years of working life, he had never seen a single case of depression that had been cured by medication.
“So the question is, what causes depression?” What is the main reason why depression has suddenly become an epidemic all over the world since 2010? Answering this question, he took a smartphone out of his pocket and waved in front of the people sitting in the auditorium and said: This is the reason why depression has become epidemic since 2010.
(To be continued)
