So many of life’s experiences are right in front of us, known by all, but often ignored. Robin Williams has with his passing chosen to bring into the light the experience of clinical depression. Most importantly none of us who are not afflicted with the condition can relate to it in any way. Even those with family or acquaintances in depression cannot really know what the stricken knows. Our ignorance is our shield and our attempts to relate can at best be hollow shells of understanding.

 

Our Spiritual Truth is love expressing. Harmony, creativity, love and prosperity are our birthright and the general norm for all human expressions of Spirit. Growth and evolution of our souls is the natural direction.

 

Depression is movement away from our natural state, but as a human condition continues to be part of our Spiritual whole. Whether caused by chemical imbalance, a physical trauma, or social conditioning the effect on the patient is real to them and rips at the very fabric of their soul.

 

For most of us the challenges we endure gift us with the discovery of strength and spiritual growth. Those among us who know depression are somehow blocking the process within themselves that allows most of us to evolve beyond the challenge. Many of us never grow tall enough to play professional basketball and most of us live well in spite of that deficiency. If one is determined to be a professional basketball player and simply cannot because of their size; an unhealthy condition may ensue. We may not understand the obsession, but it exist all the same and we can attempt to corral it, but if the subject is not equipped to adjust their thinking, we can only continue to love them as they are.

 

So it is with the depressed among us. We may never know the cause of their behavior or even that they are afflicted with this additional challenge. We can only relate to them as we would any other. They are Spiritual beings having a human experience. They are us, part of the whole.

 

Robin Williams blessed us with laughter and tears. His talents in retrospect may clearly have been masking deeper issues even from him. His drive may have been his sanity running as fast as it could attempting to stay ahead of the fears that haunted him. Robin’s gifts of observation and exposure of human folly, dramatic enactments of human interactions, and playful expressions of unconditional love are recorded for posterity; his final gift, the heart wrenching premature extinction of his life opened our eyes to an uncomfortable all too common condition.

 

It seems easy to say we are never alone and help is just a call away, but is it? When our individual mind is convinced it is alone, or persecuted or insufficient in some way, how can we penetrate the defenses it builds up?

 

We experience a form of survivor’s guilt when too late we learn of a loved one’s surrender to their depression. We think there should have seen a clue or should have acted on a clue we now recognize. I do not think Robin intended for us to suffer for him. I think in his own reasoning there was nothing left for him to do.

 

Robin’s influence on our collective experience is undeniable. Perhaps in his thinking he was being expected to repeat past successes over and over, and mostly to enrich others. Perhaps his Spiritual self could not stay at the same level doing the same things and because of his depression mind set saw no other way to grow. Ernest Holmes writes in the Science of Mind textbook, “. . . we will constantly expand and increase in knowledge and understanding, thereby continuously growing in our ability to make use of the Law (creative force of Spirit). In time, we shall be made free through It.”(271.3) [For more about Science of Mind see CSL.org or CSLFTL.org]

 

The entertainment industry loves a winner, and a sequel to a winner, and a something that resembles a winner, but on a smaller budget, so Robin may have felt stuck and unable to continue expanding in his human world. He may have looked at all the wonderful things he has done and wondered why nothing seems to have changed.

 

In his own life Robin was able to move mountains, but on the larger scale the mountains buried him. He gave and he gave and the world seemed unchanged. Were his sights set too high? Did he think it was his failure that left the world seemingly no better off that he found it?

 

We are not alone and as Spiritual beings we are continuously interconnected. Our human selves are better equipped when we remember, when we remind others with every interaction that they too are expressions of the One. No one of us can move evolution alone but through his talents Robin enlisted millions and we have evolved.

 

We are better for his having passed our way and the world continues to evolve as each of us shares the gifts Robin has given us. His final gift of awakening us to a human tragedy may simply have been a way of passing the baton as if saying, “I have shown you the way; enjoy the journey, my road ends here.” And we love him for it. We accept the gift and take the next step more aware, better able to love unconditionally, with the courage to evolve out into the unknown.