Depression & Metaphysics: What Helps? What Hurts?

By Mitch Horowitz

Many of us embark on the spiritual search seeking relief from depression and anxiety.
In this revealing and deeply meaningful book, Mitch makes a frank and responsible survey of how the spiritual path can aid or impede you in this journey.

As Mitch reveals from his many years as a writer, publisher, and seeker, the spiritual culture does not always respond wisely to the needs of people seeking emotional health. Nor can spiritual progress and emotional health necessarily be equated.
Mitch lays out a new paradigm for how you can combine traditional, alternative, and self-designed approaches to find the right path forward in your search for the higher and need for emotional wellbeing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: G&D Media
• Release date: Jan 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781722526313

Mitch Horowitz

A widely known voice of esoteric ideas, Mitch Horowitz is a writer-in-residence at the New York Public Library, lecturer-in-residence at the University of Philosophical Research in Los Angeles, and the PEN Award-winning author of books including Occult America; One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life; and The Miracle Club: How Thoughts Become Reality. Mitch introduces and edits G&D Media’s line of Condensed Classics and is the author of the Napoleon Hill Success Course series, including The Miracle of a Definite Chief Aim, The Power of the Master Mind, and Secrets of Self-Mastery. Visit him at MitchHorowitz.com. Mitch resides in New York.

Book preview

1

IDEAS MAKE THINGS HAPPEN

This is our fifth and final book in the Master Class Series. It has been a wonderful series. We have explored many different ideas in mind metaphysics. Practical ideas, ideas that can be applied to life, I think, almost immediately. And larger ideas—ideas that have to do with the question of why the mind seems to have causative abilities.

Is there a relationship between events in our life and our thoughts? I feel strongly that there is. And I think there’s support for that feeling from a very wide range of testimony of individual seekers, and all kinds of things that are happening today in the sciences. We’ve talked about quantum theory, neuroplasticity, the remarkable advances being made in the placebo response, psychical research.

And, of course, the experience of individual seekers, which forms an extraordinary testimony. A testimony that I think we’ve contributed to this week and will continue to contribute to.

This book is very special. It’s on depression and metaphysics. And it’s special to me for a variety of reasons. One is, I’ve never spoken on this topic before. But I wrote an article on the theme of depression and metaphysics, asking: What helps and what hurts? This article appeared at the website Medium.com, which has become a wonderful resource for me to explore all kinds of different practical issues in metaphysics. And, to my surprise, it became far and away the most popular thing I ever wrote for Medium. There was this enormous outpouring of interest in the piece.

I think part of the reason for that is that many of us come to the spiritual path, particularly as adults, because we are experiencing issues of anxiety or depression in our own lives. Sometimes people follow in the footsteps of whatever their family tradition is. But it’s very often the case in New Thought, Unity, and various fields of modern metaphysics—including A Course in Miracles, the various branches of the recovery movement, other esoteric and alternative spiritual expressions—that people come to these places in adulthood because they’re looking for something very, very specific. And it’s not uncommon that people are experiencing either a sense of a dead end in their life, or struggling with an addiction. Or experiencing depression, or some kind of anxiety.

Now, depression has never been my particular struggle. I don’t think I’ve had more than a depressed afternoon. But I have struggled with anxiety almost all my life. And I’ve written in my book, One Simple Idea, and elsewhere that one of the reasons I came to positive-mind metaphysics is that I do not have an optimistic temperament by nature. It is not something that comes naturally to me.

Now in some regards, suffering from anxiety and being a worry wart, so to speak, can also be very lucky. You’re always thinking several steps ahead and you’re trying to anticipate where turns and curves and bumps in the road are coming. But it can also be very depleting, as well, and cause you to waste and expend a great deal of energy on phantom fears. And of